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Conducting research in new socio-economic spaces can bring unexpected challenges. For two researchers in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo their identities as white foreigners impacted their relation to power and authority, with ignorance of local customs interacting with privileged access to money and networks.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas Tom and Pat, a research project’s white, expatriate managers, led a training workshop in Goma, overseen by Papy and Keith, its Congolese lead researchers. The ongoing, ambitious project employs social network research and financial diaries to unpick how families manage their social and material resources over a nine month period.

What happened on the margins of the workshop, however, was often as interesting as how the researchers responded to our slides and exercises. Indeed, they brought to light many of the issues the project hopes to unpack.

One of the issues the project seeks to understand is how people in an insecure and unstable context access basic social services and address daily challenges. We are interested in how ‘public authority’ – which can simply be understood as power and politics – is navigated by, and affects, people. We suspect to find that navigating public authority in Goma is more of a daily concern and occupies greater household resources than in other countries where similar methods have been used, such as South Africa or Bangladesh. Nonetheless, before the research had even begun, we had a glimpse of these issues simply by living and working in Goma.

The first way in which the importance of resource, or perhaps more accurately cash flow, management raised itself concerned the researchers attending our workshop and a local boxing coach who periodically helped us to unwind at the end of long days. Much to our surprise, all eight researchers and our coach, all Congolese and residents of Goma, asked us to safely store their cash payments until a decent sum had been accrued. We had assumed that irregularly employed researchers would require daily payments for travel in and around Goma, and that our coach would prefer to be paid at the end of each session to stay on top of the random number of people that turned up for his classes.

Admittedly, it was the run up to Christmas, so our researchers and coach were keen to amass lump sums. Yet, our enquiries also revealed that storing cash with us gave the savers a measure of ‘plausible deniability’ when those in their networks, including close family members, inevitably came asking for loans or loan repayments. For others, we were simply a safer place to keep money than the available, yet widely distrusted, alternatives such as banks or relatives.

The undeniable truth that we are both white also meant, therefore, we were assumed to have enough money to pay the savers back at short notice. Discussion of this common practice encouraged the researchers to ask Tom how much money he keeps hidden from his partner, to which the disbelieved answer was, of course, none.

Although this episode echoes research by others which has shown how households in developing countries often use ‘money guards’ to squirrel away resources for a rainy day, we were unprepared to fulfil this role for people we were only just getting to know. Furthermore, the aspect of not just guarding but also hiding money from one’s relatives or close friends raises an interesting challenge for our future research. Will it really be possible to get a good grasp of how households’ finances are managed if there is a level of subterfuge involved in cash flow management? This is why we have come to believe that our project will rise or fall on the trust researchers can build, and that there will likely be gaps or missing transactions in the financial diaries we collect.

The second episode more directly relates to how public authority operates in Goma to control access to services. It began when one of the Congolese men who lives in our accommodation, Daniel (a pseudonym), fell ill. While out in town one evening, Pat received a telephone call from Daniel’s friend informing us that Daniel was extremely sick and that we should return home. We found him in bed, clutching his stomach and unable to hold down water. He was feverish and afraid.

We decided to take Daniel to the closest hospital and arrived late, waking up the doctor on duty. It was promptly concluded that he had a bout of worms, requiring jabs and IV drips. Frightened, he clung to Pat, who assumed the role of carer and took a trip back to the house to pick up pillows and blankets and water for his overnight stay. In hindsight, and considering what was about to transpire, we probably looked like panic-stricken parents coddling our adopted son.

The next morning our colleague, Papy, thoroughly rebuked us. In his view, our presence at the hospital had likely made a complex situation worse. Daniel was subsequently hospitalised for four days, the last two simply because the bill – greatly inflated due to our presence – was contested by all parties. Instead, we should have asked Daniel’s Congolese friend to take him to the hospital, thereby securing the normally much lower charges for citizens. In short, we were learning the hard way that the costs of accessing services can depend on perceived wealth and socio-economic status. We were also discovering that such ‘hostage situations’ are a common tactic to secure payments for medical services in the DRC.

Addressing this situation required the intervention of our landlord – a local politician – who had previously donated a substantial sum to the hospital and was regularly treated there for ‘free’. After much wrangling behind the scenes and paying a still high but slightly reduced bill, Daniel was finally liberated from the hospital. Papy instructed us to never again make our own decisions and always call Congolese colleagues for advice.

Deeply humbled, we discussed what we had learned about living and working in Goma; most notably, power and authority are relative. Outsiders can run projects and training workshops and function as trusted ‘money guards’, but we still struggle to negotiate services in a city that is not ‘ours’. To be white is, as always, privilege. However, this privilege, combined with our greater access to money and ignorance of the way things work, affects those surrounding us in ways we struggle to imagine and control. This left us somewhat powerless to get Daniel released from hospital and, ultimately, reliant on the intervention of an elite with connections to the institution’s directors.

What does this mean for our project? Ironically enough, it means we are probably on the right track. ‘Getting things done’ in Goma is a combination of having, and drawing on, not just money but networks. Unpacking how both facilitate access to healthcare, water and other social services entails the type of rigorous social network and financial research that out project is aiming to grasp.

The outstanding question remains whether our Congolese colleagues can nurture enough trust with those they meet to gather quality data. We certainly hope they can, but perhaps without any more service-related hostage situations.

Pat Stys is a Research Officer in the Centre for Public Authority and International Development at LSE. Tom Kirk is a researcher and consultant based at LSE. His research interests include the provision of security and justice in conflict-affected regions, social accountability, civil society, local governance and public authority.

Thanks to Astrid Jamar for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.

This article first appeared on Africa @ LSE and it is part of the #PublicAuthority blog series with the Centre for Public Authority and International Development at LSE.

Photo credit: Pat Stys

Florence Crick, Kate Gannon and Estelle Rouhaud highlight the need to support private sector adaption in semi-arid lands or risk missing opportunities for development.

Around a billion people, including some of the world’s poorest and least food secure, live in semi-arid lands (SALs). Rainfall is already scarce and unreliable in these ‘climate hotspots’ and the frequency and severity of extreme weather events is projected to increase due to climate change. Combined with the high levels of poverty and lack of development in these regions, this means that the vulnerability of these populations is likely to get worse over the next decades.

Under the Paris Agreement national governments are already committed to supporting vulnerable populations to manage the impacts of climate change – impacts which will fall disproportionately on them. But supporting communities in semi-arid lands to adapt will not only buffer them against climate change impacts but also drive economic development in these regions and help achieve the ‘leave no one behind’ agenda, a key pledge of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

Small businesses dominate the private sector in Africa

In Africa small businesses dominate the private sector which generates two-thirds of the continent’s investment, 75 per cent of its economic output and 90 per cent of its formal and informal employment.

The ability of small businesses in semi-arid lands to adapt to climate change–and grow in spite of it–is therefore crucial for sustainable economic development. However, their potential can only be realized if adaptation and development are supported together.

Households, producers and businesses in semi-arid lands already manage their exposure to climate change by, for instance, diversifying their agricultural crops, their herds and supply chains, or migrating.

But some adaptation strategies are not sustainable or sufficient to buffer small businesses and households against current or future shocks and stresses. And some, such as the distress sale of assets at low prices to limit the risk of loss and damage, reduce their ability to cope with extreme climate events in the future.

Small businesses are vital to building climate-resilient development

The central role of businesses, including informally run businesses, in providing livelihoods and making adaptation decisions which have the potential to enhance resilience in their communities means they must be at the core of climate-resilient development in these regions. But research has shown that those that are hardest hit by climate impacts are often least able to absorb and recover from shocks and are more likely to implement unsustainable adaptation measures.

New research, published by the Pathways to Resilience in Semi-arid Economies (PRISE) research project,  argues that to meet the Paris Agreement and SDG goals to support adaptation in vulnerable communities and ‘leave no one behind’, governments and their development partners need to rapidly upscale support for private adaptation in SALs. 

But they cannot do this effectively alone.  To unlock their potential, businesses need supportive enabling conditions and policies that equip them with the necessary incentives, resources, knowledge and skills, new PRISE research shows.

Access to finance is a particular barrier to adaptation in SALs. Informal enterprises which dominate the private sector in SALs, and those with restricted access to land ownership–including women and producers using communally owned land–struggle to access credit. Even among formal enterprises, climate and business development finance is often not available for small and medium enterprises, which find it hard to access banks loans, but are not eligible for existing initiatives for micro sized businesses.

The importance of climate information, infrastructure and enabling policies

However, finance alone is not enough. Businesses also need access to climate information and early warning signals; access to climate resilient transport, water, and electricity and communication infrastructure; and policies which account for the flexible, mobile and informal nature of livelihoods in semi-arid lands.

What’s more this support must be inclusive. Informal enterprises, women’s groups and producers’ cooperatives include some of the most vulnerable businesses and livelihoods but have been largely excluded from government interventions and support services to date. For instance, small household-run businesses managed by women are particularly poorly supported. Their limited access to land, finance, educational opportunities and other assets means that women’s livelihoods are doubly vulnerable to climate risks. National governments and their development partners must implement policies which include support for these groups.

The twin goals of adaptation and development

Crucially, it is clear that to enable sustainable economic development in semi-arid lands policy-makers can no longer afford to treat adaptation and development separately. Currently national governments rarely address the adaptation needs of the private sector in plans for economic development and National Adaptation Plans rarely consider the types of businesses which provide employment in semi-arid lands.

A more joined up approach is needed between policy-makers planning for adaptation and those planning for development. There is an opportunity now to support businesses in driving climate resilient development among some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities. To miss this opportunity risks leaving these regions increasingly vulnerable to the risks of climate change.

Florence Crick and Kate Gannon are Research Officers at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, LSE and Estelle Rouhaud is Research Project Manager at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, LSE.

Follow the Grantham Research Institute on Twitter: @GRI_LSE.

The Pathways to Resilience in Semi-Arid Lands (PRISE) research project is a five-year research project that focuses on semi-arid regions in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Tanzania, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

This post is not released under a creative commons license. Please contact us for permission to republish.

Image credit: alisamii via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Ebola has gotten much of the attention in 2014, and it has killed about 8,000 people. Over the same period of time, however, about 4 million people died from AIDS, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria. Truth is that despite great progress in healthcare, much of the world is still blighted by preventable disease, with the poorest people suffering the most. The good news is that tackling these diseases turns out to be an extraordinary good investment.

Health is a big topic, and we’ve had the perspectives of five expert groups plus a number of commentaries. They make a strong case for tackling killer diseases. Take TB. Two billion people worldwide carry the bacterium that causes it, and 1 in 10 of them will go on to develop the disease. TB probably killed about 100 million people over the 20th century, and was one of the major killers before antibiotics became available. The success of this treatment has almost wiped out TB in rich countries, but it continues to be a disease of the poor and kills about 1.5 million each year. Unfortunately in Nigeria, the risk of TB dropped by only 5% since 1990, with 160,000 people dying from TB in 2013.

The global risk of dying from TB has been reduced by more than one-third over the past twenty years, and since 1995, the progress is estimated to have saved 37 million people from dying. Yet, further progress has been hampered by weak health systems, poverty and multi-resistant strains of TB. Despite the toll it takes, TB treatment receives just 4% of total development assistance spent on health, compared with 25% for HIV.

TB can be difficult to detect, particularly in countries with poor health systems, and the World Health Organization recommends a preventative course of drugs, costing just $21 per person, for high-risk populations. Treatment is highly effective and on average can give people a further 20 years of productive life, and each dollar spent this way will generate $43 worth of benefits.

Malaria is another killer disease. 90% of those it kills are in sub-Saharan Africa, and 77% are children under five. By far the most effective treatment is to use a drug called artemisinin and it's crucial to be used in combination with other malaria medicines to prevent parasites getting resistant to it. In total, this will likely cost about half a billion dollars but have benefits of twenty billion dollars, or about $36 worth of benefits for each dollar spent.

But what about HIV/AIDS? Treatment with anti-retroviral drugs has made an enormous difference to people with HIV infection, but it continues to cause large-scale human suffering in sub-Saharan Africa, where 70% of the global population of HIV positive people live. Globally, 35 million people live with HIV. The team studying this disease estimates that the current use of anti-retroviral drugs should be expanded – doubling the amount spent on it – to reach all those people with significantly weakened immune systems.

This is not a cheap option, needing another $10 billion annually, but reaching 90% of the target group of patients would save many lives and be cost-effective. Every dollar spent would give benefits (extra years of life) valued at $10. And this is not the only option. Male circumcision is a one-off treatment, which can reduce the transmission of HIV to men during intercourse by 60% and, with some delay, also reduce transmission to women. Although not as effective as widespread drug treatment, the cost would be about $30 million annually but each dollar spent would return $28 worth of benefits.

However, one of the economists working on this project has proposed a radically different approach. Her argument is that focusing on a handful of key diseases has created islands of excellence in a sea of dysfunction. Much better, she suggests, to build up strong health systems which can deal with all medical problems. The problem is that the cost is phenomenally higher and the efficiency per dollar likely much lower. However, it is worth remembering that there are bigger problems than the 4 million killed by AIDS, TB and malaria – take working-age injury and trauma, which kills almost 6 million each year.
In the health sector, we are spoilt for choice of good projects to spend money efficiently – and transform people’s lives. Now it’s up to the world’s governments to look at the evidence and make good choices on priorities for the next fifteen years.

You can read all of the reports at post2015consensus.com/health-infectious-diseases

Here, Copenhagen Consensus Center has released its latest research on Infectious Diseases targets for the post-2015 development agenda. Neha Raykar and Ramanan Laxminarayan, from the Public Health Foundation of India write the report on malaria. Anna Vassal, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, writes the main report on TB. Paul Geldsetzer and colleagues from the Harvard School of Public Health write the main report on HIV/AIDS. Additionally, Maria Wang and Regina Osih of the Clinton Health Access Initiative contribute a viewpoint paper on TB and Peter Ghys, Director a.i., Strategic Information and Evaluation and José-Antonio Izazola-Licea, Division Chief, Evaluation and Economics of UNAIDS contribute a viewpoint paper on HIV/AIDS.

For more on infectious diseases, please see Global Policy's recent ebook pulished in collaboration with the Observer Research Foundation; ‘Eradicating TB in India: Challenges, Perspectives and Solutions’, edited by Harsh Sethi.

One of the best things about the course I give on ‘Influencing for Senior Leaders: Analysis, Strategy, and Practice’, with Global Policy's Tom Kirk, is the anecdotes from the participants, who are working in the most difficult of circumstances and often achieve amazing results. So recently I started recording some for a series of ‘GELI Stories’ (GELI is the name of the overall programme – the Global Executive Leadership Initiative). We’ll be putting some of these up on the blog over the next couple of months. Here’s number one, with WFP’s Negar Garami.

Duncan: Welcome to GELI stories. I’m with Negar Gerami from the World Food Programme, who has been telling me an amazing story about some influencing she did in Iran. Negar, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about the background on what happened?

Negar: It must have been 2012 or 2013. At that time, we were still bringing food into the country as ‘in-kind contributions’ and I had around $2.5 to $3 million worth of food that had arrived to the port of Bandar Abbas, at the beginning of the summer. Usually the custom-clearance formalities were done by the government authority that was responsible for the refugee situation – the Ministry of the Interior. They had done this for many, many years and the assumption was that they would continue to do so. What we were not aware of was that legislation had passed through the Parliament taking away that authority from our counterpart, the Bureau for Aliens and Foreign Immigrant Affairs (BAFIA), giving it to the Iranian Red Crescent Society instead.

It usually takes 21 days to clear a cargo and we get it out of the port. But this time, a month passed, two months, and we still didn’t have the cargo cleared.

We did not have any relations with the Iranian Red Crescent Society so I had to find my way through the bureaucracy of the government. We went to the customs authorities, we said ‘this is humanitarian aid, this is meant for the refugees, this is of no commercial value whatsoever’. The customs officials said, ‘sorry, you need to have the Iranian Red Crescent Society do the clearance’. We went to the Red Crescent Society and they said ‘but if we give the clearance, you need to hand it over to us. It belongs to us at our discretion to give it to whoever needs it’ and that of course was a no-go for us because we are responsible to our people, to our donors and this was earmarked for Afghan refugees in 20 camps in Iran.

So it was a vicious cycle that I had to break through and talking to the head of customs, I asked, ‘well who has the authority to overrule this?’ And he very smugly said, ‘Only the president of the country’, and I was like, hmm, okay… you can never reach the president. I went back to the office and I was mulling it all over… I was thinking of the consequences, which were devastating for an operation that was around 3-4 million dollars a year. Half of our budget for the year, stuck at Bandar Abbas during the summer – 45 degrees plus with 90 percent humidity so food was on its way to rotting at the port.

It was the month of Ramadan and I received an invitation for an Iftar (the breaking of the fast) gathering hosted by the president. The invitation went to all the heads within the diplomatic community who are Muslims. I happen to be a Muslim, but not practicing. But I saw that as an opportunity to at least get an entry point to speak either to the President or his wife – the Iftar reception is usually hosted by the wife of the president. The first lady is the one who hosts the women within the diplomatic room. So I thought that I would use the opportunity to meet with the wife of the president and try and enlist her assistance to get to the President.

I told my personal assistant to confirm my participation and she was a bit surprised because I usually don’t go to these gatherings. Then I told my team to put a dossier together, a portfolio of what had happened, the background, the issue, what we do, so that I can go with a clear ask and have this portfolio to be handed over to the President by the first lady.

I go in; it’s a huge meeting hall, and we listen to a speech first, and then they break for prayer, and I was sort of standing around. I was, by the way, the only woman in that reception – all men! After dinner there was a line up and I realised that it was the President himself. So you go and shake hands and you thank the President, but as a woman in an Islamic country and quite a conservative country I would not be shaking hands, I would just nod my head, thank the President and move on.

So I queued up – I think there was 50, 60 of us. And when I get to the president, I introduce myself and I speak 10,000 words a minute explaining the situation. And the president was baffled, like he saw this one woman there who was speaking so quickly. He looked at me a little bit puzzled and then he said, ‘so what it is that you want?’ And I said, ‘this is something that only you can resolve and this is a humanitarian issue and I need to enlist your support’. So he looks to his right, and says, ‘this is my vice president for international affairs, and could you please speak with him?’ Because the queue was held up by me and the line needed to move on.

The VP had been standing and listening in and he looks at me and says ‘okay so I see you have an issue but I need to have the background’. So I grab my portfolio which was quite big and I hand it over to him and I say ‘it’s all in here and please can you have a look at it and let me know?’ Then he looks at the file and at me and says ‘OK, I’m going to call you tomorrow, 1pm’. I go home and my heart is racing! I’m thinking, OK, so I got the chance, probably I won’t be PNG’d (persona non grata) but I don’t know what is going to happen to me! All the other ambassadors were asking ‘What on earth were you talking about?’, and I said, ‘this is an issue I needed to discuss with the President’.

Next day, 1pm, I get a call! It’s from the officer to the vice president saying, ‘can you be here within a half hour?’ I race across town, get ushered in, and the guy says, ‘Have a seat, tell me about yourself. Who are you? Why are you doing this?’… It sort of grabbed his fancy, the audacity of this woman walking into a completely male dominated environment and coming with such a request. So I sit down and I explain the situation and all of this and then he hands me an envelope which has a seal of the President’s office and it’s a sealed envelope and he tells me, ‘Well, I spoke to the president and this is a letter from him… go and hand deliver it directly to the head of customs and you will get it sorted out’… and I just looked at that envelope and I was like, oh my God, I’ve won the lottery!

I walk out as if I’m on air and go directly to the customs office and get shown upstairs to the head of the customs and he’s like ‘So you’re back again?’ and I said yes, and here it is and he looks at me and you know I think a million thoughts went through his head…

Duncan: You must have really enjoyed that moment!

Negar: Oh I did, totally! And then I said ‘please open it’. I didn’t know what was in there, but it was a decree from the President himself saying that because of the humanitarian nature of this cargo, this needs to be done by the Iranian Red Crescent Society, and then handed over to WFP to deliver at its discretion to the people in need.

Duncan: GELI is a course for leaders in the aid business and around influencing and that obviously includes bravery, right? I mean, I’m just trying to imagine what it’s like for a relatively young woman in the Iranian context doing this. I mean…. what possessed you?

Negar: I didn’t even think what was going to happen. This was just what I had to do because I felt the burden of responsibility; I had food that was sitting and rotting, food that needed to be distributed to these people and I’d managed to grab the attention of the donors after a long, long time, and there was a lot of money that was invested and I was responsible… I just couldn’t give up on it. I guess it’s the audacity of going in, knowing exactly what you want, being prepared – I went into that situation prepared for anything. I had my facts, right? I had my ask and I knew that, you know, whoever was going to take a decision needed to have a background.

Duncan: But also you need a lot, I mean, you need a lot of face to hold up that whole queue of important people who are all hating on you…

Negar: I think that was the story within the diplomatic community for about a year. But I made it happen, you know – it yielded the result that I wanted.

Duncan: Well, Negar Gerami, thank you very much, that’s a great story!

The Influencing for Senior Leaders: Analysis, Strategy, and Practice’ course is hosted by The Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa (FLIA) at the London School of Economics and Political Science. 

This post first appeared on Duncan's blog From Poverty to Power. 

Harry T Dyer calls on all social media platforms to take more responsibility for the communities they foster, and the voices and discourses they emphasise and minimise online.

In the wake of the tragic death of the member of parliament for Southend West, David Amess, fellow MPs have been talking about how to best protect both politicians and the public from abuse and harm. This has included a strong focuson enacting laws designed to halt online abuse, even though police have not linked Amess’s killing to this issue directly.

There have been suggestions that such abuse can be attributed, at least in part, to online anonymity – that is, the fact many social media users set up their accounts using aliases, and without images that reveal who they are, in order to conceal their identity. Speaking on Sky News, Home Secretary Priti Patel indicated there was a need to address anonymous accounts. Asked if she would consider legislation to remove the right to anonymity on social media, Patel responded:

I want us to look at everything. And there is work taking place already […] But we can’t carry on like this. I spend too much time actually with communities who have been under attack basically, who have had all sorts of postings put online, and it’s a struggle to get those postings taken down. We want to make some big changes on that.

The idea has since gained traction, with other MPs calling for a ban on anonymous social media accounts as a way to mitigate online abuse.

Yet while it’s clear there is a need to address how we engage with and on social media, removing anonymity isn’t going to solve the problems of online abuse. In fact, removing the right to anonymity online could cause harm to many users, especially those from marginalised groups.

Anonymity as a form of protection

While there are many examples of people using anonymous social media accounts to abuse others online, it’s equally clear that anonymity can be a lifeline to many users and communities. Posting anonymously can allow people to protect themselves – to openly discuss and deal with complex topics safely. It can allow people to speak out about abuse, and seek information.

For example, social media users in LGBTQIA+ communities have spoken about the importance of online anonymity as a way to negotiate discussions of sexuality safely, where disclosing their name might put them at significant risk of abuse and harm online and offline. Some said anonymity allowed them to access valuable information online as they navigated their own identities.

In my own research for my 2020 book about social media design and identity, my participants talked about the many ways in which they felt anonymity helped them to develop a sense of community. One participant discussed how social relationships were formed via comment boards with others using pseudonyms: “I know some really personal stuff about all of them, apart from the fact that I don’t know their names.”

While respondents did talk about incidents of abuse online from anonymous users, it was clear that equally, anonymity provided pathways to building communities and support networks. An insistence on real names can present barriers and challenges to already marginalised communities and users for whom “real names” are a complex issue. These include gender non-conforming users, drag queens, Native Americans and survivors of abuse.

Many abusers are not anonymous

Anonymity can be used to abuse “othered” groups such as women, LGBTQIA+ people and Muslims. However, research shows that people using their real names perpetrate abuse and bullying too.

On social media we continue to see users willing to say abusive things and share dangerous content with their full names, job titles and information on display. Banning anonymous social media profiles therefore isn’t going to address the root of the hate we see online, be that directed at marginalised communities or at MPs.

Research shows Black and Asian female MPs face the most abuse aimed at female MPs online, suggesting the issue of anonymity is perhaps not the root cause of abuse, but a way for deeper social issues to manifest online. Katrin Tiidenberg and Emily van der Nagel write in their book Sex and Social Media:

Whether anonymous or not, people look at existing posts and comments for cues regarding what is allowed in a particular online space and behave accordingly. It’s not simply a matter of anonymous people being up to no good: platform design and moderation has a lot to do with what kinds of behaviours are allowed, and thrive, on social media.

I would agree with this, and call on platforms to take more responsibility for the communities they foster, and the voices and discourses they emphasise and minimise online. While it’s refreshing to see politicians’ desire to tackle online abuse, banning anonymity isn’t the answer. Anonymity can be a vital lifeline for already marginalised communities, and removing it could inadvertently harm the very communities MPs seek to protect.

Harry T Dyer, Lecturer in Education, University of East Anglia.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Photo by Magnus Mueller from Pexels

“What are the limits to the emerging orthodoxy of ‘going with the grain’, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected environments where the state may not be the primary authority? When, if at all, should development programmes work with those that have a dark side, that perpetuate patronage politics, exclude certain groups, suppress opponents, or worse?”

This was a subtext of one of the discussions during two days of workshops with researchers, practitioners and donors interested in the idea of social accountability. The sessions were under Chatham House Rules, so we can’t attribute the juiciest nuggets to individuals or programmes.

Going with the grain acknowledges that developmental change, whether within institutions, state-society relationships or social norms, will often require those advocating for it to make moral and material compromises. Indeed, the days of ‘development’ being understood as something done by developers tothose to be ‘developed’ are, thankfully, mostly over. Instead, it is now widely recognised that politically astute programmes involve working with reform-minded powerholders, political parties and social movements that are already getting things done or poised to do so. However, compromises will often have to be made when those working together do not exactly share all their ideals.

Brian Levy’s 2014 book, Working with the Grain: Integrating Government and Growth, discussed this approach within institutional reform programmes. He argued that going with the grain is about incrementalism, with desired reforms hopefully occurring in lock-step with economic growth. Yet, he warned that efforts to do one faster than the other, by clamping down on handing out of states jobs as patronage for example, can cause elites to respond by finding other, less transparent or more harmful ways to ensure they can reward their allies.

The compromise for programmes then, Levy argues, is to tacitly accept a certain amount of cronyism in top governmental jobs for as long as it takes to change the mindsets of, or build other opportunities for, the powerholders blocking further reforms. Compromises may also mean working on things that powerholders deem a priority and which may directly benefit them, either financially or in other ways, in order to create space for more desirable changes later. However, both of these become particularly difficult when donors can see how their funds enable bad practices or abuses of power to continue.

Compromises must also be made in programmes that work closer to the ground, within wider society. For example, social accountability programmes that aim to mobilise and support citizens to demand better services often find that they need to include those that are politically connected to get things done. In much of Africa and South Asia, this may include the informal brokers, ‘big men’, ‘political fixers’ or ‘social workers’ that have the ears of politicians in charge of state services. It is well known that such intermediaries sell communities’ votes in return for being that link. This risks programmes strengthening or entrenching undesirable modes of politics to ensure access.

In the case of programmes aimed at changing social norms, it is increasingly common to work with local authorities to help spread new messages or challenge prevalent attitudes. For the champions of such approaches, networks of community elders or religious leaders are often seen as locally legitimate change agents, able to reach those that will not usually attend workshops or listen to radio talk shows. For others, however, development programmes that work with them tacitly endorse their other dubious practices, which in the places conference attendees worked included child marriage and the seclusion of women.

Striking examples discussed at the workshop also included the less spoken about and somehow darker side of going with the grain in highly insecure environments. For example, programmes might have to compromise on where they work, share information and data with local security agencies, or potentially give money or resources to an armed group to ensure protection in a given geography. These are all very real, every-day, grain-related decisions which programme staff grapple with.

Attendees at the workshop both agreed and disagreed over what all this means. It was generally accepted that working with the grain is about getting a seat at the table, gaining access, and allowing outsiders and the insiders they ally with to begin conversations with powerholders or communities. For some, this extends as far as ‘buying’ a seat at the table. Indeed, it was argued that this is what some aid agencies are effectively doing when they make unconditional (and conditional) transfers to state institutions. Yet, there was also a palpable unease about such practices.

Turning to when compromises are justified, many attendees initially replied with the familiar refrain that programmes should ‘do no harm’. However, it was pointed out that all of the aforementioned compromises entail being comfortable with ‘doing some harm’ to someone. This led to debates about what constitutes acceptable harm and when do programmes bear responsibility for unacceptable harm? And how can we know who is being harmed?

For instance, when do programmes become responsible for aid transfers used to feather patronage networks and how do they weigh up whether that harm is worth the opportunities it gains reformers to have conversations with powerholders? Or how do programmes begin to measure and quantify the moral authority illiberal religious leaders may derive from being associated with them and to weigh this against the ability to communicate their messages to difficult-to-reach audiences?

Unsurprisingly, there are no easy answers to these conundrums. Moreover, those that were offered were heavily contingent. For example, many argued that decisions to compromise are made upon the identities of those implementing programmes, the latest fads within funding agencies or their domestic political environments, and the chance to seize once in a generation windows of opportunity. All were argued to be part of the day-by-day, context-specific calculations that feed into programmes’ decisions to ‘go with the grain’.

Inevitably, it was not long before someone raised the issue of whose grain or grains should programmes go with anyway? Many suggested that only through ongoing consultations and participatory methods can those managing programmes know when their compromises are overlooking marginalised communities or would clearly be considered by them to be a step too far. This requires listening to local programme staff with their ear to the ground and a large measure of what some termed ‘political smarts’. They were widely considered the lynchpins of efforts to go with the grain in fast-changing fragile, conflict and violence affected contexts, and they were said to usually be the root of successful programmes.

Nonetheless, there was also an objection to the entire enterprise of going with the grain. It centred around the argument that those funding development programmes would not make the same sorts of compromises in their own countries, so why do so in those they work in? Put another way, doesn’t this emerging orthodoxy just take us back to the old days of one rule for the developers and another for those supposedly to be developed?

Where does this diversity of opinion and experience leave us? On the one hand, it is unlikely that development practitioners will ever be able to successfully systematise or teach going with the grain (sorry Brian). Rather, it is clearly a context-, personality- and opportunity- dependent practice, that requires careful, constant monitoring, consultation, and programme adjustments, with the interests of those affected by programming driving decisions to compromise where possible. On the other, it is perhaps another reason why programmes should try to be more like social movements, with politically smart locals in the lead and buy-in from broad swathes of the population sought. Is this possible? The jury’s still out. Yet, there are number of ongoing programmes that will be providing us with evidence on some of the issues covered above over the next few years.

Tom Kirk is a  researcher and consultant based at LSE. His research interests include the provision of security and justice in conflict-affected regions, social accountability, civil society, local governance and public authority. Tom is also Global Policy's Online Editor.

Annette Fisher (@miniannette) is a freelance social accountability researcher and practitioner. Annette has been designing and managing complex governance and accountability interventions in conflict affected countries in Africa and South Asia for the past ten years.

This article is part of the #PublicAuthority blog series, part of the ESRC-funded Centre for Public Authority and International Development. It first appeared here.

Image credit: Photo Credit: geralt via pixabay

The Indian Government should step back from its move to ban commercial surrogacy for foreigners. The policy further restricts the choices of those in poverty and will have a damaging effect on the lives of the people it is designed to protect.

In recent weeks the Indian Government has indicated that it plans to ban commercial surrogacy for foreigners. The Ministry of Health has published a draft bill prohibiting foreigners employing Indian surrogates and issued letters to fertility clinics across the country requiring that they halt the practice. This move will no doubt be welcomed by many campaigners who view it as an unseemly and deeply exploitative practice. I think their view is profoundly mistaken; this legislation will hurt those it is designed to help and punish those it is designed to protect. The move to ban commercial surrogacy serves as another example of those in positions of privilege making decisions on behalf of the poor. We would do better to focus on trying to change the unjust conditions that make these kinds of choices necessary and on providing protection for the parties involved, rather than further restricting the options of those who find themselves in these dire circumstances.

Commercial surrogacy is big business in India. There is no completely reliable estimate of the worth of the so-called “rent-a-womb” industry; they range from $400m per year in one United Nations backed study to over $2bn dollars in another by the Indian Chamber of Commerce. What we can say with some certainly is that the practice has grown significantly in recent years, as India has benefitted from its status as one of the few countries in the world it is legal. In most developed countries commercial surrogacy is completely prohibited and even in countries where the practice is legal, such as Israel, Russia, the Ukraine and some states in the U.S, India provides a cheaper alternative. This makes India an attractive destination for this kind of medical tourism and in 2012 there were thought to be around 12,500 children born each year to Indian surrogates from Western parents.

As the practice has grown, it has attracted increasingly vocal criticism from commentators. It is held up to be symptomatic of the worst excesses of globalisation – a stark example of Western exploitation of the developing world. Critics claim that wealthy, predominantly Western, couples are exploiting the vulnerability of those in poverty to secure surrogacy on the cheap. A study by the The Centre for Social Research, a New Delhi based advocacy group, found that surrogates do tend to work in low skilled occupations and come from very poor backgrounds. However, there are two points to note about this argument. The first is that this change in law will only prohibit foreigners from employing Indian surrogates, so the participants will still be permitted to be surrogates for wealthy Indians. As medical tourism dries up the laws of economics will kick in: as demand falls surrogate mothers are likely to receive even less for their services from those who are still permitted to employ them. There is a second, more fundamental, point. While I object to the deeply unfair distribution of resources which forms the backdrop to this question, it strikes me as paternalistic, given that injustice, to then prevent people from making decisions which they think will improve their life. If before surrogates had to make a tragic choice between surrogacy and starvation, at least they had some kind of choice. I cannot see how forcibly taking that away can possibly make them better off.

There is another problem. The surrogates may not have access to sufficient information to make an informed decision. They may not be aware of the risks associated with surrogacy or fully understand the terms of their contract. The majority of surrogates in India have only minimal levels of education and there have been troubling reports of botched contracts, pressure from husbands, women undertaking multiple surrogacies and aggressive recruitment tactics from agencies. The solution to this is problem is regulation not prohibition. Gita Aravamudan, a freelance journalist who has written a book on commercial surrogacy, advocates precisely this position. She urges the Government to impose greater regulation on the industry and provide greater protection for surrogates rather than pursuing an outright ban. She emphasises that even if the practice is prohibited, it is likely that it would continue to flourish on the black market with less transparency and oversight. Given all of this, regulation seems a more credible solution to the problems surrounding commercial surrogacy in India than prohibition.

The challenges of this issue are firmly rooted in an even greater one – the continuing tragedy of poverty. It is the desperate circumstances facing those who are in these conditions - struggling to survive on low incomes and with little or no education – which makes this a difficult ethical question. I do not buy the philosophical arguments that the commercialisation of the body is somehow inherently wrong: Would we be worried if a millionaire was paid to be a surrogate? When the questions are framed by conditions of material wealth, the moral problems seem to me to fade away. The issue is driven by depravation and serves as a stark reminder of the near impossible choices facing those in poverty. We should pause to reflect as to whether it is desirable for the Indian Government to take one of their few remaining choices away.

 
George Robinson is a Thouron Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. Before moving to the United States he worked as a policy adviser for HM Treasury. He has an MPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford.

This blog reflects on the academic writing experiences of early career researchers in East Africa, building on discussions and writing diaries developed in the context of a British Academy-funded Writing Workshop in Nairobi (Kenya), in February 2024. The workshop encouraged participants to develop writing diaries, observing their writing practices, identifying achievements and challenges, and taking account of the affective atmospheres and emotions that accompany the practice of writing. 

Seven of the 15 participants have subsequently shared their diaries with the organisers who have started to engage in an iterative writing process with the participants. The blog is an outcome of our joint reflections on academic writing. We have created a main protagonist, an author named Gelizako Juwiva Chrinjalinya (Gelizako),[1] who will in the following share their experiences and thoughts. The creation of Gelizako ensures the anonymization of experiences but especially aims at de-individualizing academic writing. We discuss the motives for creating Gelizako and introduce them in the first section. The other sections engage with the embodied writing experiences of Gelizako, focusing on its affective, communicative, and institutional aspects. We conclude with a discussion on the vexation of academic writing. 

What Is an Author? It is an Gelizako Juwiva Chrinjalinya

When Foucault (1969) asked his famous question What is an Author, he explored the modern creation of authors as individual producers of texts. Accordingly, authors become unreflective of the heterogeneous nature of their individuality as they display a relation of externality to their finalized writing product. Ironically, due to prevailing academic norms, the very subjectivity of these authors is then buried in the academic product and disappears.

We created Gelizako as a countermove to this type of authorship. Gelizako, who prefers the pronoun they, is not a mere average of twelve individual authors but was created to emphasize the iterative process that went into writing this blog, and which is – as we discuss below – characteristic for academic (and other) writing. Writing itself is often experienced as a solitary activity, requiring a retreat and exclusion from social activities. Writing, as Gelizako emphasizes repeatedly, needs focus and concentration, which they can only find in solitude. Whenever they can, Gelizako ‘lock [themselves] in the office’[2], go to a quiet place in the library, or sit in a café where they feel undisturbed and are ‘able to concentrate.’

While discussing their writing practices and taking notes of them in the diary, however, Gelizako also realizes that ‘writing is a process of communication’ – composed of engagements not only with people, but also, as they will further elaborate below, with the wider, nonhuman environment, among them plants, animals, and other things. Like the writing of the diary, which Gelizako used to observe themselves – academic writing is at the same time personal, relational, and collaborative, crossing spatial and temporal barriers.

Writing as Embodied and Affective Engagement

Reading the diary, Gelizako finds that their writing is imbued in affects and gives rise to a multitude of emotions. They, for example, find inspiration from readings, but are also affected ‘in unexpected ways’ for example, by ‘listening to music’, ‘watching a documentary’, ‘walking the streets’, following ‘discussions and debates on Twitter’, or discussing ‘with friends.’  Gelizako, nonetheless, finds it quite difficult to start a paper. They noted in the diary that the sheer ‘magnitude of the work […]  can demotivate, […] it seems as though it is a very huge task which cannot be accomplished. For example, when [we] have an article or report that [we] must write, and it is like 15 pages […], at first […], it can be humongous and scary to embark on.’

Fear is a crucial part of Gelizako’s writing. Sitting in front of an empty paper is especially scary. After all, they aim at ‘expressing the deepest of [their] thoughts and the wealth of [their] intuition’ and they are expressing it ‘for others’. Thus, while Gelizako may write in solitude, the possible readers are already in their minds, and with them come all the feelings of self-doubt and fear.

Writing also comes with a feeling of responsibility, and Gelizako sometimes doubts that they give the right message. In a recent paper on Motherhood, for example, they question ‘What are we putting out there? Do we want legal frameworks to guide motherhood that is generating this Mamaism?’ They do not want to contribute to the stereotype of Mamaism that is prevalent in their society and Gelizako’s everyday life. Instead, they want to critique the ‘social and gender norms [that] are expecting women to be mothers’ constructing them as ‘humble, obedient, submissive, and accepting all forms of oppression.’ Will they achieve this, or will they rather sustain existing norms? After all, writing is not only a bodily and emotive experience, but we also write bodies into our work in different – gendered – ways.

Academic writing is structured and densely policed by institutional requirements and scientific norms, many of which feel like strait jackets, obligations one must fulfil. The norms provide the more experienced parts of Gelizako with security, as they have already learned how to incorporate them. They already have been disciplined in the academic writing process, but self-doubt comes up nonetheless. The less experienced sides in Gelizako are often looking anxiously at the big unknown of the writing journey, and doubt that they are up to the task and can manage it.

Uncertainties about their ability to write academically as well as doubts about the substance and effect of their writing are rampant. In this sense, ‘writing for academic purposes is both thrilling and frustrating, involving days or weeks in front of a laptop, playing with words, only to realize the result lacks fascination or publishable quality.’

But when Gelizako are confident about their topic, when the views of other authors are aligned to and support what Gelizako wants to write, and when the audience is expected to benefit from the writing, then Gelizako feels happy, and the writing flow eases. This points to the continuous communication and engagement with others that shape the seemingly solitary process of writing and produce many of its emotions.

Writing as a Communication

Writing involves an engagement with the writing of other authors – some living or writing about issues far away, others in different times or even epochs – a type of communication that defies linear temporalities and Cartesian spatial orders. The articles and books that are piling up on our desks, filled with our notes and scribbles (albeit this engagement increasingly takes a virtual form), attest to the multi-temporality and spatial messiness of our writing. Gaining access to these books and articles, is often an issue for Gelizako, as some of their universities cannot penetrate the paywall of the academic journals and books Gelizako desires to read. Difficulties with ‘obtaining the relevant scholarly information’ or accessing much-needed databases, discourage and demotivate Gelizako.

Gelizako also tries to share their work with others drawing them into a relationship with the reviewer. When their writings ‘resonate with the reader’ and when they ‘get positive compliments’, Gelizako ‘feel excited’ and ‘happy’. Critique can also cause initial frustration but does not necessarily discourage Gelizako as they know that it can improve their writing, facilitating self-awareness, learning and development.

However, the author-reviewer relationship is often asymmetrical and onerous, especially when institutional structures and societal and academic norms perpetuate inequality. Gelizako remembered one incident where they presented their proposal and a professor remarked ‘“you girl, stop confusing us’’. Oh, that was a destructor, not the message but the concept. [We] started thinking about why he couldn’t refer to [us] by [our] name, he knew all the names, he could have shortened the names at least if they were very long, and he could have called [us] student if the name escaped his mind.’ Gelizako is aware of the literature on the power differences and often gendered nature of feedback and peer review (Mandalaki 2024). The comments of the professor nonetheless hurt, as they deface and make them invisible. They make Gelizako feel unable and worthless.

Breaks and Self-Care

Writing also requires the author to recharge and regain motivation and energy. This involves a series of intervals, breaks, ruptures, procrastination, and planning. Sometimes Gelizko finds that ‘reading can be boring and draining especially when [we] do it late in the evening or when [we are] feeling exhausted, but if [we are] reading at the start of the day, [we are] more focused and [we] find reading interesting.’

This also entails recognising the body’s fragility and limits and caring for our bodies by prioritising rest and leisure. For Gelizako ‘rest is always another motivation […], especially when [we] get some thought blocks, and I cannot progress with the writing.’ At times, motivation and drive come from taking the time for ‘sports, travel, and literature.’ Turning the mind outwards to gaze and watch[3] – nature walks and Netflix – emphasises how writing is not necessarily an inward-oriented activity but draws from the world outside.

Institutional and Other Constraints

The worlds of authors are complex worlds of multiple identities and institutions. The latter can be both enabling and constraining. Gelizako’s academic institutions do not always incentivize research and writing, and many early career scholars have a high teaching load which together with administrative duties take ‘a big toll of [their] time and energy’. They do not always get a fixed salary, or sometimes their salary is not enough to accommodate the needs of their family, and they, therefore, also often take on paid consultancy work, not all of which they find interesting. Authors are of course more than researchers. Family commitments, especially for early career academics with young children, take a lot of planning and negotiation. Gelizako reflects in the diary: ‘we are a parent of 4 children who drives my children to school on a daily basis and collects them in the evening. So given that they are still young (oldest is 10 years) this is also quite tiring.’ Gelizako also mentions ‘distractions while writing that can come from family when someone delivers a message about a sick person, and you have to pause’. This has been a learning curve in that they  ‘have learnt to switch off the phone and be off social media.’

Conclusion: The vexation of academic writing

Gelizako’s diaries reveal how writing is simultaneously shaped by solitude and communication. It is emotive, influenced by uncertainties, and embedded in institutional norms and wider social relations. Writing links Gelizako to people in different places and times, and it links them to the objects, materials and subjects that surround them.

Various critiques of academic writing have highlighted the formalistic, constraining, and disembodied processes of knowledge production that continue to be the formally and informally acknowledged norms of scholarly writing. These limitations have been profoundly addressed in feminist scholarship, as well as through other aesthetic and affective modes of writing which prioritise the relational, ethical, and indeed, political dimensions of writing and knowledge production (Mandalaki 2024). Moreover, there have been numerous calls to write differently, especially in feminist work, which often means writing freely in a way that is unencumbered by the narrative structures of academic style, especially concerning the rigidity and demand for objective knowledge (Dide van Eck, Noortje van Amsterdam, and Marieke van den Brink 2019).

The above complexities and challenges that underpin academic writing, we suggest, can be conceptualised through the notion of vexation as elaborated in Judith Butler’s work on giving account of oneself. In her theory of subject formation, Butler (2005, 36) notes that narration – i.e., the act of giving account of oneself – ‘takes place within a structure of address’ in which the narrative authority is often shaped by certain entanglements, temporalities, and norms. The relationality that underlies this process and the exposure (i.e., vulnerabilities and uncertainties) it encompasses constitutes this idea of vexation. This conceptualisation allows us to explore the narrative structure, relationality and subject positions that shape knowledge production through writing and speaks to the embodied process Gelizako identified. Writing, so they tried to show, is relational, affective, and both enabled and constrained by institutional rules and societal norms that carry with them social inequalities and signs of domination.

These relationships of power can and are being challenged. By moving beyond the focus on the different approaches and ways of writing, decolonial interventions identify the Western epistemic groundings of knowledge production which shapes the nature and purpose of writing, as well as the agencies that animates these processes. For decolonial scholars, decolonising academic writing as such involves a ‘huge political, moral, ethical and epistemological shift’ (Trashar et. al 2019, 158). This involves acknowledging – and embracing – uncertainty, vulnerability, openness, and experimenting with new forms of writing and knowledge production. Along this line, academic writing entails writing differently from different epistemic registers, imaginings, and experiences including those from the Global South. Powerful critiques of Western stereotypes, including Dipo Faloyin’s Africa is Not a Country, ‘not only provide an engrossing adventure for the mind but also trigger deeper reflections.’ Gelizako’s reflections add to these registers, bringing vexation to the fore but also optimism and enjoyment. Gelizako ultimately finds the act of writing ‘interesting given the fact that you are expressing the deepest of your thoughts and the wealth of your intuition for others to have the same experience,’ a process ‘that is both thrilling and frustrating’.

The authors

Innocent Ayesiga, Jutta Bakonyi, Nyasha Samuel Chikowero, Kodili Chukwuma, Alice Finden, Elizabeth Katusiime, Jacqueline Nakaiza, Geoffrey Lugano, William Musamba, Eva Maria Nag, Christine Olukhanda, Sekito Zaid

Top photo by Suzy Hazelwood. Others photos, authors' own.

“The International Organization for Migration (IOM) and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, are calling for the immediate disembarkation of more than 400 rescued migrants and refugees currently on board three vessels in the Central Mediterranean […]. The humanitarian imperative of saving lives should not be penalized or stigmatized, especially in the absence of dedicated State-led efforts. The lack of agreement on a regional disembarkation mechanism, long called for by IOM and UNHCR, is not an excuse to deny vulnerable people a port of safety and the assistance they need, as required under international law […]. IOM and UNHCR are deeply concerned about the continued absence of dedicated EU-led search and rescue capacity in the Central Mediterranean.”

IOM and UNHCR call for urgent disembarkation of rescued migrants and refugees in Central Mediterranean Sea

Geneva, August 29, 2020

The initiatives Mediterranea, Salvamento Maritimo Humanitario and Sea-Eye, rescuing at sea migrants, joined Agora Europe* and its partners to shed light on the situation of persons in exile in the occasion of an event held in Hendaye, on August 29th, promoted by Agora Europe, in partnership with the Columbia University Committee on Forced Migration and Alliance Program, Studio Europa Maastricht, the Maritime Club of Hendaye Txingudi and Les Sauveteurs en Mer SNSM. The event, “Est-ce que l’eau est une frontière?” (“Is Water a Border”) was also an opportunity to highlight the departure of the new missions of Mare Jonio, also on August 29th, and Sea-Watch 4, as both ships were changing course to provide assistance to the Louise Michel after several emergency calls for help were ignored. It was also the occasion to remind that the boat Aita Mari is still blocked at Pasai Donibane port because of administrative constraints imposed by the Italian government.

Such initiatives are more than ever needed, since the governments of the “Fortress Europe”, among others, still perceives migrations as a threat. On the opposite, Agora Europe is convinced that migrations are an opportunity, in particular for the Euro-Med region. Freedom of movement is one of the European public goods promoted by Charta 2020. It constitutes part of a global right to mobility, which is a clear translation into practice of human dignity.

A community of nations and citizens never exists in history without a certain respect of itself, of which treating the foreigner and the refugee as a friend forms part. And yet, migration is too often reduced to a question of national security. Indeed, in response to the so-called refugee crisis, Europe produced the idea of a direct association between securing the existence of and closing borders, such that the relationship with the ‘others’ happens on the basis of fear and criminalization. Fear, far from being reduced, remains central on the emotional level, even while we witness a constant effort to reduce it on a, so to speak, physical level, that is to say, by building walls and turning back boats.

The Aquarius affair, and more broadly the criminalization of sea rescue, made clear that the European political space understands itself to be able to permit unrestricted freedom of movement within its internal borders—the Schengen area—only by denying movement across its external borders. Borders and, more precisely, the process of the externalization of EU borders, poses normative and political question to the determination of an integrated political space. The fact that refugee camps are becoming increasingly established on the borders of the European area—or even outside—is a concrete manifestation of the way Europe, by means of an externalization of its borders, has reshaped its imaginary geography.

At least since the 1990s the question of borders and their often-lethal operations against people in transit is at the centre of critical debates and activism in many parts of the world. In Europe, as well as for instance in Australia, the maritime border has become more and more prominent over the years. This is of course due to dramatic accidents and shipwrecks (for instance, the collision between the Katër I Radës, carrying migrants from Albania, and a ship of the Italian Navy in 1997, and the shipwreck of October 3, 2013 off the coast of Lampedusa), and more generally to the intolerable number of men, women, and children that lost their lives over the last decades in the attempt to cross the European maritime border.

As a notion and an institution, the border has an intimate link with the land at least since the ancient representation of a furrow traced in the earth through a plough. In modern Europe, the steady emergence of the new cartographic notion of a linear border was strictly associated with the formation of territorial states. While the European space was reorganized around that notion, the sea—as well as the colonial world—was subjected to different and shifting legal and political formations. The liquidity of the sea seems even today to resist the geometric accuracy of bordering, as the often-elusive intertwining of territorial waters, contiguous zones, exclusive economic zones, SAR zones, and international waters amply demonstrates. This makes the stakes of sea rescue even higher today.

In a time of pandemic, when crucially important decisions need to be taken in the fields of economic and social policies, the question of migration continues to be strategic both regarding the development of European citizenship and society and regarding Europe’s relations with its multiple outsides. In fact, we must address here citizenship. It is up to us, citizens of our regions and of our countries, European citizens, global citizens, to lead our States and our co citizens in this direction, proving that we can imagine another use of seas and borders, that this is possible and urgent. At the end of the day, these are the stakes sea rescue is confronted with in the Mediterranean.

The migrations’ causes and routes are diverse. They reflect the choice of individuals to leave a situation which constitutes a denial of their human dignity. Refugees are fleeing Syria because of the civil war, the lack of job opportunities and the human rights violations, transiting through Turkey and remaining stuck in exile in Lebanon, as well as in other neighbouring or transit countries. They are walking in the mountains, crossing borders at night, taking boats, risking their lives, looking for safe places where to live, in which their humanity is recognized as such.

The agreement with Turkey and the disembarkation of boats back at Libyan coasts pushes the edges out of the European space itself. Due to the dangerousness of the passage through Libya and following the closure of Italian ports—given the attempt to ‘import’ the Australian model of offshore processing and detention policies (Operation Sovereign Borders, known as the ‘Stop the Boats’ policy) to the EU, in particular in the case of Italy, and more specifically in recent responses of the Italian government to the refugee crisis and the control over external borders (Decreto Sicurezza Bis)—the Western route became the most frequently used route into Europe. Additionally, the Atlantic route to Europe, i.e. the perilous passage from West Africa to the Canary Islands that was once a major route for migrants, is being used more and more. It is the most dangerous. In this respect, it is paramount to addressing the difficulty of where to locate state borders in the liquid space of the Euro-Med region and the Atlantic, where borders dissolve and leave us with the subsequent problem of the indeterminacy of responsibility.

The current COVID-19 crisis makes it even more urgent for the EU to address current and future migration challenges. This Joint Statement on Sea Rescue is an attempt to open a path of solidarity and cooperation. This could not prescind from endorsing a more holistic approach, one that takes into account the perspective of countries of origin and transit, that is, Europe’s “other side” and outsides. Nor can it prescind from defining a more comprehensive method covering internal and external borders, as well as the Atlantic, Central, Eastern and Western Mediterranean migratory routes, and including a comparative analysis of migration policies.

Such is the purpose of this Joint Statement on Sea Rescue, aimed at reinforcing the universal principle of non-refoulement, in the conviction that the protection of lives at sea shall endure in our societies both among the current priorities of European action and as long-standing transnational common values, that forced disappearances shall be visible and avoidable, and deaths avoidable and accountable.

Agora Europe aims to inaugurate and promote a transnational debate—reaching across Europe and beyond—on the scale, scope, and substance of the European political space. The purpose of this debate is to encourage cooperation, promote inclusion, and develop connections across Euro-Mediterranean and Atlantic regions, questioning the meaning of citizenship and its limits in an age of mass migration and global interconnection. In order to facilitate this debate, Agora Europe functions as a permanent and itinerant agora, bringing together academics, politicians, activists, cultural actors and citizens. Agora Europe has been originally co-founded in 2018 by Etienne Balibar, Caterina Di Fazio, Nadia Urbinati and several other academics and activists, jointly at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and Columbia University. Since 2020, Agora Europe is a non-profit association registered at the Mairie d’Hendaye (Hendaye’s City Hall). It coordinated and presented at the European Parliament, jointly with Studio Europa Maastricht, Charta 2020, the first charter of European public goods.

To endorse the Statement on Sea Rescue, please write to agoraeurope.eu@gmail.com

Image: Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa via Flickr

Endorsement

Organizations

Amel FR

Baobab Experience IT

Collectif de soutien de l’EHESS aux sans-papiers et aux migrant-es (LDH) FR

Mediterranea IT

Migreurop EURO-AFRICAN

Salvamento Maritimo Humanitario ES

Sea-Eye DE

SOS Racismo ES

Name               Surname          Organization  

Caccia             Giuseppe         Mediterranea IT

Giannacopoulos Maria            Flinders University AU

Inerrarity         Daniel             Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea ES

Mijangos         Iñigo                Salvamento Maritimo Humanitario ES

Weidenhiller   Sophie             Sea-Eye DE

Morris             Rosalind          Columbia University US

Schulz             Miriam                        Columbia University US                               

Constantini     Gianluca         Fumettista IT                                     

Benhabib         Seyla               Yale University US                                        

Sala                 Roberta           Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele IT

Terraciano      Pasquale          INSR IT                                                         

Resta               Eligio              Università degli Studi Roma 3 IT      

Gianni             Alfonso           Fondazione Cercare Ancora IT         

Pullano            Teresa             University of Basel CH                     

Costa               Andrea            Baobab Experience IT                       

Boccia             Marialuisa       Università di Siena IT                        

Fiorillo            Michele           Civico FR                                           

Montanari       Tomaso           Università per Stranieri di Siena IT               

Visone             Tommaso        Sapienza-Università di Roma IT                   

Ben-Yehoyada            Naor                Columbia University US                               

Bessone           Magali             Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne FR      

De Lucas         Javier              Senador/Universitat de Valencia ES

Gundogdu       Ayten              Barnard College-Columbia University US

De Leonardis  Ota                  Università Milano-Bicocca IT

Calame            Claude             Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) FR

Garcès             Blanca             Barcelona Center for International Affairs ES

Wihtol de Wenden Catherine  CNRS SciencesPo FR

Palazzotto       Erasmo            MP IT

Canfora           Luciano           Università di Bari IT

Varotti             Carlo               Università di Parma IT

François          Arnaud            Université de Poitiers FR

Africa was barely mentioned in the US presidential debates. Mitt Romney mentioned Mali twice in the final debate in reference to terrorist groups and Obama mentioned Somalia only once in the same vein. That was it.

But something else caught my attention during the presidential debates, which I think offers some lessons for African policymakers —China.

In all three debates, China was discussed at length as an adversary not to be taken lightly. Both Obama and Romney charged that China is a currency manipulator and a violator of trade rules and property rights laws, and vowed to do whatever it takes to stop China’s dubious trade practices.

Yet, in Africa, China is seen in a completely different light—as a trusted and benevolent partner, especially in contrast to western powers. China enjoys unconditional support from African policymakers and scholars like Dambisa Moyo.

Of course, US’s and Africa’s issues with China are vastly different, but their situations are similar, centring on a common theme rooted in China’s economic prowess. Like the US, China is an important economic partner for Africa.

Moreover, the main issue of concern for both may be similar—China’s readiness to undermine international rules whether in terms of trade rules or human rights for its economic pursuits.

For a while, westerners, including the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have expressed their concern about China’s disregard for international human rights in Africa. The most blatant of which was in Sudan where China sold arms to the Sudanese government, even as it became clear that the regime was engaging in gross human rights violations.

In Zimbabwe, Chinese workers have been accused of mistreating their African subordinates, including administering harsh physical punishments reminiscent of Belgium’s conduct in Congo in the 1880s and apartheid South Africa.

Chinese workers in Africa have adopted a pseudo-colonial attitude that, to them, justifies the treatment of Africans as inferior. Thus, when Zimbabwean workers complain about mistreatment, their Chinese superiors simply retort, “you should appreciate we’ve come to assist you.” The Chinese have gone so far as to eat off plates and then offer their leftovers to Africans, according to one article by the Guardian newspaper.

Africa is desperate for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and China is the only economic power that is willing to take a gamble on this resource rich, yet unstable and neglected continent. Currently the biggest investor, China poured $150 billion last year into Africa and helped with building the infrastructure that has been largely lacking on the continent.

But whether China is a force for good will ultimately depend on what African elites do. Thus far, African elites have reaped huge rewards from their relationship with China, including the $200 million African Union headquarters recently donated by China to the continent.

Here, I must say that I’m not an expert on African affairs, but something seems very wrong with this picture — at least to me. This strategy, which focuses on appeasing those at the very top, is bound to fail. Successful developers, including China herself, have done so by putting ordinary people at the forefront of their development strategy.

Obama and Romney demonstrated further that elites have a responsibility to ensure that their economies and people are not exploited by an opportunist and self-serving emerging power. The question now is, whether African elites can do the same.

The post fist appeared on Africa at LSE.

Matt Haikin, an ICT for Development (ICT4D) practitioner, summarizes a new paper on digital development in East Africa reports, and the challenges for Oxfam and other international NGOs.

I’d been living in Nairobi for a couple of months, meeting all the interesting ‘tech for good’ types I could find (and there are a LOT for one city!), when an opportunity came up to conduct some research for Oxfam into… tech for good activity and opportunities in HECA (Horn, East and Central Africa), along with my colleague George Flatters). Result.

For the next few months we met, interviewed and held workshops with 50+ experts from NGOs, tech start-ups, government and civil society as well as donors and academics from across the region, and reached almost 300 more people with an online survey.

The research report and discussion paper was published last week. We think the findings are relevant for other organisations trying to improve their use of ICT or put the Digital Principles into practice and a few of these findings are highlighted below:

Build on what works: When it comes to ICT4D, we usually know what works and it rarely involves the newest technology.  Mostly the tools already exist or, where they don’t, an approach can be adapted from something that does. We recommend collaboration with other organisations, such as local technology partners, which will develop the capacity of the entire sector at the same time.

Why are we still bad at being adaptable and co-designing with users? In our survey, iterative and user-centred approaches to technology for development were nearly universally acknowledged as a good thing, no big surprise there.  However many reflected on the structural factors that seem to be preventing their more widespread adoption – skills gaps, incompatible funding models and the absence of nurturing ecosystems.

Avoiding survey fatigue as mobile technology proliferates. The combination of an increasing focus on M&E, with low costs of online / mobile surveys, risks over-exposing communities to questionnaire after questionnaire from multiple agencies. There is an appetite to collaborate more, across projects and across organisational boundaries, but it all depends on being able to change long-standing cultures to encourage organisations to share and open up much more data (while retaining a respect for privacy and sensitive information of course).

Don’t forget about connectivity: According to the 2016 World Development Report, ‘nearly 60% of the world’s people are still offline… only 31% of the population in developing countries had [internet] access in 2014 and women are less likely than men to use or own digital technologies.’ A lot of the discussion in the ICT4D space has moved beyond issues of connectivity, when in fact a lack of connectivity remains the biggest technology challenge for much of the world. In the rush to embrace new technologies, smartphone apps, mobile surveys, the Internet of Things etc., we must ensure we design for the significant numbers of the people who are not connected, and lobby to get them connected.

What role for NGOs?

We found that the tech community across Africa would be widely supportive of a move to NGOs to focus more on convening, collaborating and advocating, and away from direct delivery. All of these roles seemed to cut through the normal mixed-opinions about NGOs and the aid sector, all had 80/90% agreement amongst those surveyed, and all seem like a natural progression that aligns with the direction of travel already under way in Oxfam and many other international NGOs:

NGOs as ICT4D convenors: International NGOs can play a valuable role in convening partners from different sectors and helping develop the capacity of local actors – co-creating shared best practice guidance for technology development and product selection, supporting upskilling of local people and partners and, ultimately, facilitating the emergence of a bottom-up ICT4D agenda owned and led by African partners.

NGOs as ICT4D collaborators: NGOs could do more to work with each other to develop shared product requirements and reduce the waste and overlap in producing overly similar tools; and more importantly could do more to collaboratively with local partners (as equals not just as service providers) – helping develop their capacity, and enabling them to take the lead.

NGOs as advocates for ICT4D: NGOs are uniquely placed to exert pressure on donors, multi-lateral institutions and governments.  If they can adapt to become more collaborative and become a voice genuinely representative of their local partners – they could be a powerful voice in changing the way these bigger players work – to be more flexible, less top-down, more supportive of developing local capacity, more driven by those actually working with tech in development than those working in policy in London, DC, Brussels etc.

And just to recap, why is digital an opportunity NGOs should seize?

Right now, digital technology is the darling of the private and public sectors, this gives it (rightly or wrongly) a certain level of influence which more bottom-up, analogue demands for change struggle to create.

Digital technology is disruptive; it creates major change whether we like it or not –we can try to ignore it or we can use it as an opportunity to take drive significant and powerful changes that would be difficult at other, less turbulent times.

Digital technology is here to stay, NGOs need to adapt to it, it’s not going away. For now it is still bedding down as a system, which means it is malleable. Once it becomes fixed, the window of opportunity to influence it and use the disruption it causes to make change for the better will vanish.

Matt Haikin is an ICT4D practitioner, researcher and evaluator who has undertaken development/research work for DFID, the World Bank and the government of Nigeria.  He blogs intermittently and can be contacted via www.matthaikin.com This post first appeared on Duncan's Green Poverty to Power blog.

Photo credit: BeyondAccessInitiative via Foter.com / CC BY-SA

An Interview with Isabelle Moulin, CIR, Matsue-City, Shimane Prefecture, Japan.

As instructors, how can we better prepare the next generation of city, citizen, and public diplomacy practitioners? In particular, what skills are essential for those who wish to become Coordinators of International Relations (CIRs) in Japan?

An interview was conducted with Isabelle Moulin, Coordinator of International Relations (CIR) for Matsue-City, Japan, to understand what kind of skills students need to better succeed as CIRs and in other roles in public diplomacy.

The interviewer, Daniel Clausen, currently teaches at a university in Nagasaki and is responsible for study abroad classes in International Relations and International Cooperation. The interviewee, Isabelle Moulin, had previously taken study abroad classes in Nagasaki.

You may view a portion of the interview below:

Positions as CIRs throughout Japan are usually obtained through Japan’s JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) Programme. CIRs are assigned to city governments throughout Japan and undertake a variety of activities including assisting foreign residents, organizing cultural activities, community outreach, and tourism promotion. The program requires Japanese language abilities of JLPT (Japan Language Proficiency Test) Level 2 or above (Business Proficiency).  

How do you think study abroad classes can better develop skills in preparation to become a CIR?

In Nagasaki I remember having classes about Japanese language, history, culture, and society. When I went back to France, in my master’s degree, we had a lecture (that I personally think was the best of all) entitled “International Communication.” 

It was about Edward Hall’s iceberg model of culture and the concept of high and low context cultures. We learned the basics in a lecture and then we were confronted with case studies. We had to say what we would have done in such a situation. We also were invited to talk about our own experiences abroad. We had many exchange students, so that was an interesting way to reflect on our own culture and to develop empathy. Being able to relate to others is an essential skill when working in an international context.

What advice do you have for students who wish to become CIRs?

Practice your oral skills more than your writing skills. Be curious. About Japan, of course, but also about your own country. It may seem paradoxical, but usually we don’t really know much about our country. Though, the thing is that as CIRs we are considered ambassadors of our country. It’s one thing to present your country as you see it through your beliefs. It’s another thing to present it as a whole or as it is presented by the government. I learned so much about France while being in Japan.

In addition, learn how to use video editing software. The Office Suite used to be a must. Nowadays, design and photo/video editing software like Canva, Adobe, and DaVinci Resolve are as important as the Office Suite. In small companies/offices, nobody oversees design, so you will have to do it by yourself to promote your events.

How would you like to see diplomacy or even public diplomacy skills integrated into study abroad classrooms?

Diplomacy is all about managing international relations and dealing in a tactful way. As for me, it is a transversal skill that is useful even in everyday life because it’s about human relations. If you want to integrate it into study abroad classrooms, it could be through an “international communication class” or through current/historical diplomatic matters.

For example, it could be a case study: “in X year, Mr Y said something about Mr Z. It stopped the relations between the two countries. If you were Y, what would you have done? Do you understand the position of Z?” What is interesting in this kind of case study is to have the students talking with each other, knowing that there is no “right answer” in the field of diplomacy. For each answer, there are advantages and disadvantages.

Do you have any other advice for students who want to become CIRs?

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak about various themes such as environmental issues, women and work, and even France-Poland historical relations for associations and city-related organizations. While giving the point of view of France on these issues, I obviously had to remain objective, a quality you need as a CIR. Moreover, the requesters wanted to know France’s position on some issues that were outside of my major. However, I still had to give accurate information. I was grateful that I learned how to search for and efficiently gather the knowledge I needed. I honestly think that the research methodology classes I had at university were of help in preparing something relevant and accurate, in line with an official speech, in a short period of time.      

Daniel Clausen is a full-time lecturer at Nagasaki University of Foreign Studies. He is a graduate of Florida International University’s Ph.D. program in International Relations. His research has been published in Asian Politics & Policy, e-International Relations, The Diplomatic Courier and Global Policy, among other journals and magazines. 

Isabelle Moulin is a fifth-year Coordinator for International Relations at Matsue City Hall, Shimane Prefecture. She is a graduate of CY Cergy Paris University, in the Cultural Tourism & International Promotion of Territories Master’s Degree. She is currently working for the International Tourism Department and oversees tourism promotion targeting French people and enhancement of intercultural awareness mainly in primary schools and community centers.

Astha Kapoor explores Rohingya refugees' fight for their entitlements and the story of their digital identity in India.

The discussion of digital identity for refugees has been gathering pace in the last few years. This question has been central to human rights, and more recently, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aim to provide legal identity for all, including birth registration by 2030. Refugees need identification for registration on arrival, registration in camps, and service provision. The introduction of digital identification makes the process efficient and transparent. However, for refugees this is a complicated exercise as identification can be used as a tool of empowerment as well as for surveillance. This article explores the different facets of this issue, using the example of Rohingya refugees fleeing persecution in Myanmar to Bangladesh and India.

Since opening its doors to Zoroastrians – now a flourishing minority in India – in the 8th century, India has accepted refugees. Among those admitted in the last fifty years have been people from East Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan as well as refugees who have been the subject of contention, such as the Dalai Lama. Yet, India does not have a cohesive law or policy on refugees. Nor is it a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol on Refugees. As such, refugees do not have an official legal status or identity numbers and are marginalized, unable to access government benefits or services and living in destitution.

Rohingyas, the long-persecuted Muslim minority from Myanmar, are the most recent influx of people looking for refuge in India. While by some estimates there are over 40,000 Rohingya refugees in India, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has only been able to issue refugee cards to 17,500 due to uncertainty over whether they should be considered illegal immigrants or refugees.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of India is in the process of deciding whether or not Rohingyas can be deported to Bangladesh. This case is a key opportunity to lay down basic protections for and create precedence on the matter of refugees in India. A favorable judgement would grant not just Rohingyas, but also other refugees in India legal refugee status and therefore the leverage to demand basic amenities from the state.

At the same time, two refugees, Mohammad Salimullah and Mohammad Shaqir, recently petitioned India’s Supreme Court to uphold and realize the rights of refugees from Myanmar to health and education, on the same basis that has provided for similar services for Tamil refugees since the 1990s. Given that there are no laws pertaining to refugees in India, the decision to extend support is made on an ad hoc basis and some speculate that Rohingyas are not being treated hospitably because they are Muslim and face unfounded allegations of terrorism. In its response, the Indian government claims that refugees already have access to basic services. Lawyers acting for the Rohingyas argue that this cannot possibly be true, since the refugees are not assigned the all-important biometric identity number, Aadhaar, which is a prerequisite for such access as well as essential for opening bank accounts, procuring SIM cards and seeking work. As a result, refugees are systematically excluded and marginalized.

The Unique Identification Authority of India, which issues Aadhaar, maintains both that the biometric identity is simply a proof of residence and that it allows anyone living in India for more than 182 days to register for one. However, because of the lack of clarity about the status of Rohingya refugees, Aadhaar is not issued to them and even held from those who have registered with the government or UNHCR and are officially recognized as refugees. As such, and despite the fact that the Constitution of India guarantees the right to a dignified life to all residents of the country, Rohingya children are unable to go to school, women do not have access to reproductive health, and malnutrition is rampant in the squalid camps that have sprung up in the northern and eastern parts of the country. Aadhaar, envisioned as a tool for inclusion and empowerment by the Government of India, is being used to exclude Rohingyas.

The Rohingyas’ fight for their entitlements and the story of digital identity in India are intertwined with another Supreme Court case, which is likely to decide whether Aadhaar is mandatory for all residents to access government services. The Indian government, which is pushing the courts to rule for the deportation of Rohingya refugees, wants to identify all those in the country. In a county like India – with its large, undocumented population – Aadhaar would make this process much easier.

The UN believes digital identity part of realizing the “right to recognition,” and UNHCR is recording the biometric identities of refugees both to ensure that everyone is identified and to avoid a duplication and/or theft of identities. This right, however, may prove to be a double-edged sword. Rohingyas need the identity number to obtain any services within India, yet this identity number can also be misused, for example for surveillance and for identification of refugees for deportation. In Bangladesh, for instance, where Rohingya refugees have been given biometric identity numbers so that they can access benefits, this tool is also used to regulate their movement and ensure that they do not leave refugee camps. As Professor James C. Scott (Yale University) noted, the state is interested in making its subjects “legible,” or making a detailed map of its citizens to perhaps govern them efficiently. However, legibility or readability also appeals to the predatory nature of the state – digital identity is at the core of that tussle.

The risks of data collection among refugees must be mitigated through data minimization or collecting only the bare minimum in order to verify a person’s identity. This is critical to prevent surveillance that could lead to mass human rights abuses, as in the case of Rwanda, where ethnic group specification on personal ID cards aided those committing genocide. It is also imperative to have a distributed trust model through blockchain so that data is encrypted and stored in a decentralized manner and transactions are transparent. These mechanisms can reduce the risk of a data breach and related exploitation.

In the midst of these debates, India has a rare opportunity to frame the country’s approach to refugees and to biometric identity numbers, and to decide what kind of state it wants to become: one that does not provide refugees with basic amenities and deports them to a country where they are persecuted, a state that uses biometric identity to surveil refugees and control their movements while allowing them to stay within the borders of the country, or one that uses innovative technology for inclusive and empowering policies. It is high time for the Supreme Court of India to come to progressive judgements that use digital identity to empower and safeguard the well-being of all those residing within the borders of India, and to guarantee their right to privacy – a critical element of a dignified life.

Astha Kapoor is an independent consultant who works on the interface between technology and governance. She is also a GGF 2030 fellow. The view expressed here are her own.

Image credit: lastextremeanonymous via Flickr (CC0 1.0)

Solidarity must extend, not only to all people but also to animals, the earth, and the environment.

I’ve told this story before. It doesn’t have a happy ending—but at least this time it has a hopeful one.  

The day the men took Sasha away from her mother she was only three weeks old. A few months later they took her to the cage where she spent the rest of her life. This was ‘home:’ a prison of concrete and metal. No sunshine, no space to turn around, and nothing to do. Even though she had just hit puberty they forced her to get pregnant. It went on that way until the end, forced to give birth over and over until her body couldn’t take it anymore.

After years of confinement and abuse Sasha was packed into a pen with dozens of others in preparation for slaughter. No more boredom and no more pain, but the worst wasn’t over. One by one, they were pulled out until there was nobody left but Sasha. She ran back and forth, and then in circles, screaming. She struggled to lift the gate of the pen from its hinges but it was no use. She died because she was no longer useful. She died because she was born as a member of the wrong species, because she was a pig, and pigs don’t have rights.

But is that true, or even acceptable in an era when conceptions of rights are broadening? I’ve worked with many human rights organizations and admire their goals, but I’ve also felt a profound sense of despair, loneliness, and disappointment at how communities that are so deeply concerned with justice can so thoroughly fail to stand up for the rights of non-human animals.

When we see the horrors that human beings inflict on animals in slaughterhouses, fur farms, circuses and other settings, how, as decent people, can we not act? That was the question posed to me by a senior ACLU attorney when I sat down to talk with him about animal rights last fall. I had realized that something big was happening in the human rights world: after years of neglect and hostility the human rights movement was embracing animal rights in earnest.

A week after that meeting I learned that the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at New York University—one of the premier human rights programs in the world—was taking a stand for animal rights and committing to an all-vegetarian food policy, which was announced publicly in April of 2018. The policy makes clear that the fundamental values underlying human rights advocacy demand that we have “respect for animals.” And crucially, it recognizes that an institution committed to working towards “a more just and humane world” must take a stand for the animals who are victimized by industrial agriculture.

Even more importantly, the policy—which requires the Center to purchase only vegetarian foods for its events—is  grounded in an understanding of the interconnectedness of the struggles for human and animal rights—in “respect for animals and the humans impacted by the animal agriculture and processing industries, and out of concern for the environment on which we all depend.”

Margaret Satterthwaite, a renowned human rights law professor, attorney and a director of the Center, has recognized that this new policy is reflective of a profound and necessary shift in the human rights movement. As she told me in a recent email:

“The human rights community is beginning to recognize that our solidarity must extend to embrace not only all people, but also animals, the earth, and our environment. In moving to a vegetarian policy, CHRGJ is taking an important step to match our actions with our values.”

CHGRJ isn’t alone. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), another of the world’s leading human rights organizations, recently embraced a vegan/vegetarian policy as “a meaningful act of solidarity” with the animal rights movement. The CCR policy further recognizes that an “increasing number of CCR staff members see violence against animals as contrary to a fundamental commitment to justice.”

The progressive National Lawyers Guild  has adopted a similar position through an initiative spearheaded by women of color in the Guild's Animal Rights Activism Committee (now an independent project). In the wake of the steps taken by other human rights groups, the Guild’s President-Elect, Elena Cohen, told me that: “I am so proud that we have joined in the movement of progressive organizations in adopting a vegan food policy, to make clear that non-human animal oppression is integral to our anti-oppression work and vision for a more just world.” In addition, the Rebellious Lawyering Conference at Yale University—the largest student-run public interest conference in the United States—has been fully vegetarian for several years in a row.

Importantly, this support for animal rights is beginning to extend beyond internal food policy to the substantive work of human rights organizations. In April 2018, the CCR supported the Nonhuman Rights Project’s lawsuit to grant legal rights to chimpanzees by filing an “amicus brief” on their behalf in the Court of Appeals of New York. In another example, a recent statement from ACLU attorney Rita Bettis made clear that one of its recent ‘ag-gag’ cases which challenge laws that criminalize undercover investigations of factory farms is not just about promoting free speech, but about preventing “animal cruelty, unsafe food safety practices, environmental hazards, and inhumane working conditions.”

To be clear, this trend is not entirely new. Legendary human rights activists like Angela Davis, Cesar Chávez  and Dick Gregory have championed animal rights for decades, and prominent progressive law professors—including Cass Sunstein, Martha Nussbaum, Laurence Tribe, Michael Dorf, Kristin Stilt and Sherry Colb—have all been strong advocates. What is new is that major human rights organizations are taking a stance on this issue through a wave of change in their institutional policies and practices. Crucially, this isn’t just a random hodge-podge of radical organizations. The ACLU, CCR and others are widely-respected organizations in the vanguard of the human rights movement, and bellwethers for social justice advocacy as a whole.

The leadership of CHRGJ includes two high-level UN appointees and several world renowned international legal scholars; the Center for Constitutional Rights secured historic Supreme Court victories on behalf of Guantánamo detainees years before other organizations got involved; and the National Lawyers Guild was the first racially integrated national bar association. The fact that change is happening in such organizations is a strong indication of a much broader, movement-wide shift towards the embrace of animal rights.

Prominent members of other major human rights organizations are also becoming more vocal in their support. For example, Simon Cox, a Legal Officer at the Open Society Foundations (one of the world’s largest funders of human rights advocacy and also a donor to openDemocracy), wrote in a recent email that “the idea of human rights is grounded in the notion that sentient creatures deserve respect and that harms to them should only be permitted when justified.”  

William F. “Bill” Schultz, former executive director Amnesty International USA and Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, argues that animals deserve at least some legal rights. In October of 2017, he told me about an illuminating recent conversation about animal rights with his fellow board members in a leading US human rights organization:

“I say, ‘Screw ‘em,’” bellowed one board member. “Torture, genocide, people—they’re all more important.”  And maybe they are. But all the other board members were sympathetic to the notion of rights for animals, knowing that it behooves human rights activists to extend their circle of care and concern to complex creatures outside the narrow confines of convention. He went on to quote the anthropologist Loren Eiseley: “I love forms beyond my own and regret the borders between us.” The extension of rights to animals, he added, is one way to diminish that distance.

In fact, that distance is already diminishing, and quickly. I’m grateful to all the human rights organizations and advocates that are taking serious steps to fight the arbitrary discrimination that denies our moral and legal obligations to non-human animals. Thank you for showing me that our commitment to liberty and justice for all really does mean something for all victims of injustice, brutality, and discrimination—human and non-human alike.

Jay Shooster is an animal rights lawyer and a former Masiyiwa-Bernstein fellow with the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU Law. Follow him on Twitter @JayShooster.

This post first appeared on:

Image credit: Undercover Investigation at Manitoba Pork Factory Farm. Credit: Flickr/Mercy For Animals Canada. CC BY 2.0.

This is the final part of a wide-ranging interview with world-renowned public intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin.

In an increasingly unequal country, the stakes are high for debates over student debt and the prospect of free higher education. Driven by neoliberal politics, our current educational system is both a product of and a driver of deep social inequities. In this interview, world-renowned public intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin take on the question of who should pay for education -- and how a radical reshaping of our educational system could be undertaken in the US.

This is the third part of a wide-ranging interview series with world-renowned public intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin. Read part one here and part two here.

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, higher education in the US is a terribly expensive affair, and hundreds of billions are owed in student loans. First, do you think that a system of free higher education can coexist alongside tuition-charging universities? Secondly, what could and should be done about student debt?

Noam Chomsky: The educational system was a highly predictable victim of the neoliberal reaction, guided by the maxim of "private affluence and public squalor." Funding for public education has sharply declined. Tuition has exploded, leading to a plague of unpayable student debt. As higher education is driven to a business model in accord with neoliberal doctrine, administrative bureaucracy has sharply increased at the expense of faculty and students, developments reviewed well by sociologist Benjamin Ginsburg. Cost-cutting dictated by the revered market principles naturally leads to hyper-exploitation of the more vulnerable, creating a new precariat of graduate students and adjuncts surviving on a bare pittance, replacing tenured faculty. All of this happens to be a good disciplinary technique, for obvious reasons.

For those with eyes open, much of what has happened was anticipated by the early '70s, at the point of transition from regulated capitalism to incipient neoliberalism. At the time, there was mounting elite concern about the dangers posed by the democratizing and civilizing effects of 1960s activism, and particularly the role of young people during "the time of troubles." The concerns were forcefully expressed at both ends of the political spectrum.

At the right end of the spectrum, the "Powell memorandum" sent by corporate lobbyist (later Supreme Court Justice) Lewis Powell to the Chamber of Commerce called upon the business community to rise up to defend itself against the assault on freedom led by Ralph Nader, Herbert Marcuse and other miscreants who had taken over the universities, the media and the government. The picture was, of course, ludicrous but it did reflect the perceptions of Powell's audience, desperate about the slight diminution in their overwhelming power. The rhetoric is as interesting as the message, reminiscent of a spoiled three-year-old who has a piece of candy taken away. The memorandum was influential in circles that matter for policy formation.

At the other end of the spectrum, at about the same time, the liberal internationalists of the Trilateral Commission published their lament over "The Crisis of Democracy" that arose in the "terrible" '60s, when previously apathetic and marginalized parts of the population -- the great majority -- began to try to enter the political arena to pursue their interests. That posed an intolerable burden on the state. Accordingly, the Trilateral scholars called for more "moderation in democracy," a return to passivity and obedience. The American rapporteur, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, reminisced nostalgically about the time when "Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers," so that true democracy flourished.

A particular concern of the Trilateral scholars was the failure of the institutions responsible for "the indoctrination of the young," including the schools and universities. These had to be brought under control, along with the irresponsible media that were (occasionally) departing from subordination to "proper authority" -- a precursor of concerns of the far-right Republican Party today.

The right-liberal spectrum of concerns provided a good indication of what was to come.

The underfunding of public education, from K-12 through colleges and universities, has no plausible economic rationale, and in fact is harmful to the economy because of the losses that ensue. In other countries, rich and poor, education remains substantially free, with educational standards that rank high in global comparisons. Even in the US, higher education was almost free during the economically successful years before the neoliberal reaction -- and it was, of course, a much poorer country then. The GI bill provided free education to huge numbers of people -- white men overwhelmingly -- who would probably never have gone to college, a great benefit to them personally and to the whole society. Tuition at private colleges was far below today's exorbitant costs.

Student debt is structured to be a burden for life. The indebted cannot declare bankruptcy, unlike Trump. Current student debt is estimated to be over $1.45 trillion, [more than] $600 billion more than total credit card debt. Most is unpayable, and should be rescinded. There are ample resources for that simply from waste, including the bloated military and the enormous concentrated private wealth that has accumulated in the financial and general corporate sector under neoliberal policies.

There is no economic reason why free education cannot flourish from schools through colleges and university. The barriers are not economic but rather political decisions, skewed in the predictable direction under conditions of highly unequal wealth and power. Barriers that can be overcome, as often in the past.

Bob, what's your own response to the question I posed above?

Robert Pollin: Student debt in the US has exploded in the past decade. In 2007, total student debt was $112 billion, equal to 0.8 percent of GDP. As of 2016, total student debt was [more than] $1 trillion, equal to 5.6 percent of GDP. Thus, as a share of GDP, student debt has risen approximately seven-fold. As of 2012, nearly 70 percent of students left college carrying student loans, and these loans averaged $26,300.

The rise in student debt reflects a combination of factors. The first is that the private costs of attending college have risen sharply, with public higher education funding having been cut sharply. Average public funding per student was 15 percent lower in 2015 than in 2008, and 20 percent lower than in 1990. The burden of the public funding cuts [has] been worsened by the stagnation of average family incomes. Thus, in 1990, average tuition, fees, room and board amounted to about 18 percent of the median household income. By 2014, this figure had nearly doubled, to 35 percent of median household income.

Despite these sharply rising costs, college enrollments have continued to rise. There are many good reasons for young people to go off to college, open their minds, develop their skills and enjoy themselves. But probably the major attraction is the fact that income disparities have increased sharply between those who go to college versus those who do not. This pattern corresponds with the stagnation of average wages since the early 1970s that we discussed [previously]. The reality under neoliberalism has been that, if you want to have a decent shot at a good-paying job with a chance for promotions and raises over time, the most important first step is to get a college education. The pressures to go to college would be much less intense if working-class jobs provided good pay and opportunities to advance, as was the pattern prior to the onset of neoliberalism.

Virtually all student debt in the US is now held by the federal government. It would therefore be a relatively simple matter to forgive some, if not all of it. This would enable young people to transition much more easily into creating their own households and families. At the same time, if the government is going to enact a major program of student debt forgiveness, it should be at least equally committed to relieving the heavy mortgage debt burdens still carried by tens of millions of non-affluent households in the aftermath of the 2007-09 financial crash and Great Recession. Similarly, the government should also be at least equally committed to both lowering the costs of college education in the first place, and [supporting] better wages and work opportunities for people who do not attend college.

The blueprint for a progressive US that the two of you have sketched out requires that a certain course of political action is carried out ... which includes educating the masses in getting from here to there. How is this to be done, especially given not only the peculiarities of American political culture, but also the balkanization of progressive and left forces in the country?

Chomsky: The answer is both easy and hard. Easy to formulate (and familiar), and hard to execute (also familiar). The answer is education, organization [and] activism as appropriate to circumstances. Not easy, but often successful, and there's no reason why it cannot be now. Popular engagement, though scattered, is at quite a high level, as is enthusiasm and concern. There are also important elements of unity, like the Left Forum, novel and promising. And the movements we've already mentioned. Significant efforts are underway, such as those alluded to briefly [before], and there's no reason why they cannot be extended. While the left is famous for constant splits and internal disputes, I don't think that's more so now than in the past. And the general mood, particularly among young people, seems to me conducive to quite positive changes.

I don't feel that there is anything deep in the political culture that prevents "educating the masses." I'm old enough to recall vividly the high level of culture, general and political, among first-generation working people during the Great Depression. Workers' education was lively and effective, union-based -- mostly the vigorous rising labor movement, reviving from the ashes of the 1920s. I've often seen independent and quite impressive initiatives in working-class and poor and deprived communities today. And there's a long earlier history of lively working-class culture, from the early days of the industrial revolution. The most important radical democratic movement in American history, the populist movement (not today's "populism"), was initiated and led by farmers in Texas and the Midwest, who may have had little formal education but understood very well the nature of their plight at the hands of the powerful banking and commercial sectors, and devised effective means to counter it....

I've been fortunate enough to have seen remarkable examples elsewhere. I recall vividly a visit to an extremely poor, almost inaccessible rural village in southern Colombia, in an area under attack from all sides, where I attended a village meeting that was concerned with protecting their resources, including irreplaceable water supplies, from predatory international mining corporations. And in particular. a young man, with very little formal education, who led a thoughtful and very informed discussion of sophisticated development plans that they intended to implement. I've seen the same in poor villages in West Bengal, with a handful of books in the tiny schoolroom, areas liberated from landlord rule by Communist party militancy. The opportunities and, of course, resources are vastly greater in rich societies like ours.

I don't think it is idle romanticism to recognize the potential that can be awakened, or arise independently, in communities that free themselves from indoctrination and passive subordination. The opportunities I think are there, to be grasped and carried forward.

Pollin: I think it is inevitable that leftist forces in the US would be divided, if not balkanized, to some extent. Among the full range of people who are committed to social and economic equality and ecological [justice] -- i.e. to some variant of a leftist vision of a decent society -- it will always be the case that some will be more focused on egalitarian economic issues, others around the environment and climate change, others on US imperialism, militarism and foreign policy, others on race and gender equality, and still others on sexual identity.

I certainly do not have the formula for how to most effectively knit all these groups together. But I do think we can learn a lot from the major successes out there. The 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign is a first obvious example. Another is the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United (CNA/NNU) that I mentioned [before]. This is a union, fighting first for the well-being of its members, who are overwhelmingly women, with a high proportion being women of color. At the same time, CNA/NNU has been in the forefront of campaigns for single-payer health care and even the Robin Hood Tax on speculative Wall Street trading.

There are other progressive organizations that have proven track records of success. One is the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), which has long been active around both living wage and other worker rights issues, as well as community economic development and environmental justice. A more recently formed coalition is NY Renews, which is comprised of 126 organizations in New York State who have come together to advance a serious program in the state to both dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and expand good job opportunities. The Washington State Labor Council -- part of the AFL-CIO -- has also been committed and innovative in bringing together coalitions of labor and environmental groups.

The US left needs to learn and build from the achievements and ongoing work of these and similar groups. In fact, as Margaret Thatcher used to say, "there is no alternative" -- if we are serious about successfully advancing a left alternative to the disasters caused by 40 years of neoliberal hegemony.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His main research interests are in European economic integration, globalization, the political economy of the United States and the deconstruction of neoliberalism's politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout's Public Intellectual Project. He has published several books and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into several foreign languages, including Croatian, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. He is the author of Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change, an anthology of interviews with Chomsky originally published at Truthout and collected by Haymarket Books.

This post first appeared on TruthOut and was reposted with permission.

Image Credit: Sean MacEntee Via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

With Eritrea, a strange partner has taken over the chair of the “Khartoum Process”, the forum for EU-African dialogue on migration.

In early March 2019, the Eritrean government has taken over the chair of the forum in which Europe and states from the Horn of Africa discuss the critical question of migration. Known as the ‘Khartoum process’, after the Sudanese capital in which the relationship was struck, it is both influential and poorly understood by the general public. This is no accident. Images of Africans drowning in the Mediterranean, their bodies washed up on Italian beaches, have appalled many.

The projects and programmes implemented under the Khartoum Process are often hard to grasp, and have been far from transparent, but it is apparent that there is a divergence between the EU’s apparent commitment to human rights and its explicit policy of working with African states to restrict migration by almost any means. Concerns were heightened when minutes of a meeting of the ambassadors of the 28 EU member states on 23 March 2016 leaked in the German magazine Der Spiegel. They contained this chilling warning: ‘Under no circumstances’ should the public learn what was being discussed. The magazine said equipment would be sent to Sudan to assist in the control of its refugee population.  Despite these concerns these transfers have taken place. A regional operational centre is now up and running in Khartoum, staffed by European civil servants, with links to the Sudanese security forces.

The relationship between states of the Horn of Africa and the EU has been gradually fostered since May 2012. Spurred on by the rising number of Africans crossing the Mediterranean it is governed by a steering committee. This is made up of five EU Member States (Italy, France, Germany, UK, Netherlands) and five African partners (Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan). They are served by the European Commission, the European External Action Service and the African Union Commission.

Eritrea’s poor state of democracy

During 2018 Italy chaired this dialogue, now the Eritrean government has taken control. It is worth stopping for a moment to consider just what this implies: the key decisions affecting Africans as they flee repression and conflict are being steered by one of the most dictatorial countries in the world. The nature of the Eritrean state is revealed clearly in the Bertelsmann Transformation Index. The BTI measures the current state of democracy and market economy in 129 countries worldwide, its evolution over the past two years and the quality of governance performed by its leadership. In the 2018 report, few countries have a lower rating than Eritrea, which ranks 128 out of 129 in terms of the governance index, 126 in terms of the political transformation and 127 in economic transformation.

The country report states: “Since Eritrea’s independence in 1993, there have been no elections on the national or regional (zoba) levels and no free elections on the sub-regional and local levels. The PFDJ [the ruling party] remained the only legal political party, and President Isaias Afewerki, who has been in power since independence, showed no readiness to accept elections or any change in the country’s political status quo.” The report goes on to explain the measures that are taken to retain this monopoly of power. Minorities, religious groups and other political parties face ruthless repression, with no recourse to the courts or parliament. “Separation of powers including checks and balances is nonexistent both de jure and de facto, as Eritrea has no implemented constitution. A small number of high-ranking cadres of the ruling PFDJ and the government form a monolithic power apparatus, and the parliament is not convened.”

The EU adheres to human rights

In the circumstances, is it any surprise that Eritrean citizens continue to flee the country, risking all to seek a better life? This has continued despite dramatic changes in the region in 2018. In June the newly-elected Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed visited the Eritrean capital, Asmara for the first time in almost 20 years. He received an ecstatic welcome from the Eritrean public, who hoped that his arrival marked the end of tensions over their mutual border. Ethiopia’s refusal to accept a binding international decision on the border, over which the two countries fought a ferocious war (1998 – 2000), had been the stumbling block to a normalisation of relations. Prime Minister Abiy’s decision to reverse Ethiopian policy and accept the border demarcation opened the way to a new era between his country and Eritrea. This is now being shaped. What has not been transformed are the internal politics of Eritrea itself. The absence of democracy, the severity of the human rights abuses and the inability of ordinary men and women to shape their own lives has in no way been transformed.

European diplomats are well aware that this is the case. Despite this the EU has accepted Eritrea as the chair of the Khartoum process, in an apparent contravention of the EU’s avowed to adhere to human rights in all its activities as well as its commitment to the protection of refugees and migrants. One is forced to observe that Brussels has found a strange partner with which to fulfil these objectives.

Martin Plaut is a freelance journalist and Senior Research Fellow, Horn of Africa and Southern Africa, Institute of Commonwealth Studies. He is the former Africa Editor of BBC World Service News.

Image credit: EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Organisation via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)