In the fourth of this series of podcasts with UN and other aid leaders making change happen on the frontline, I talked to UNICEF’s Pia Britto about how she and a group of colleagues managed to include Early Childhood Development in the SDGs. 

Duncan: Welcome to the GELI Story podcast. I have a very special guest today, Pia Rebello Britto, who is currently the UNICEF representative to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, previously Global Chief and Senior Adviser for Early Childhood Development at the UNICEF HQ in New York. Before joining UNICEF, she was an academic, Assistant Professor at Yale University, Research Scientist at Teachers College, Columbia University, and she got her doctorate there in developmental psychology. So Pia is a super clever, super experienced person. Welcome Pia!

Pia Britto: Thanks so much, Duncan. I love the superlatives!

Duncan: The reason we got you on, Pia, is because you gave a really interesting talk to the GELI participants on how you and others influenced the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) process around a topic which you’re really passionate about – early child development. It’s a success story of influencing at a global level and I’d like to talk about how you did it. I don’t think – unless you want to – that we need to rehearse why early child development is absolutely crucial. Lots of people know they are right about a particular issue, whether it’s climate change, early child development, cash transfers … what do you do when you know you’re right, in this case, the science was on your side – what else do you need?

Pia Britto: We had a solution to a problem, which was that the Millennium Development Goals [the forerunners of the SDGs] were strong, but they had a core gap – early childhood development. Brains matter. Good, strong, healthy brain development makes a difference. So you’re right. We had the solution. I think that the idea was that to get from here to there, we were almost building the road as we went along because the path for the development of the Sustainable Development Goals, the processes themselves were also being built.

In 2013, the idea was that the Sustainable Development Goals should involve the whole world. It shouldn’t just be a few people. So every time the Sustainable Development Goals came up with a new process, we had to be able to understand, how are we going to infiltrate it? And infiltrate it in a way that a small band or a small group of people or the platform of UNICEF can make a difference. And I think that was one tactical strategy that was continually being used.

When we were assessing the different work streams that were going into forming the Sustainable Development Goals, whether it was the high-level panel of people or the different working groups that were being formed, we were very cognisant of the fact that UNICEF has a tremendous reputation and a tremendous credibility in being able to advocate for children’s rights. So starting with that platform and the leadership of UNICEF, we would do an assessment to say, how can we have a winning strategy? If it was with the different working groups, do we take more of an academic lens? If it’s with the conference of the mayors, do we get one of the mayors to be the spokesperson? If it’s at the General Assembly, do we get a head of state? So in each case, I would say it was leveraging the platform of UNICEF to then bring the influencer who has a voice in that process to deliver the message. I’m not sure this was an approach we were doing unknowingly or knowingly, but it was very much the way we were trying to find the influencer – it’s all about the ‘who’.

Duncan: So this band of heroes: how many of you were there? Did you have a WhatsApp group? Or maybe this is pre-WhatsApp. Did you have a conscious identity of ‘we are going to get early child development into the SDGs?’

Pia Britto: I think this was a goal we set, but I wouldn’t say there was a very tightly defined group. There was a community of academics, development partners, civil society partners and key actors who believed in this solution. We were all informed, keeping each other going in terms of what can make a difference. The academics were very conscious that we needed to get a core academic paper series out in the Lancet; the philanthropic group was very clear that they needed to influence all the philanthropic circle who were a big part of the Sustainable Development calls. The data group was very clear that they had to work with those who were finalising the indicators for the SDGs. So each group knew their role and would keep each other informed. There wasn’t a core communication that went out, but it was a lot of moving with the times and remaining dynamic. But everyone knowing that that’s our goal, I think everyone had one goal in mind.

Duncan: So a clear goal, it sounds like you had a lot of long-term relationships in there, which means trust. You don’t have to spend ages explaining things to each other. You’ve got that ability to just work together on the fly. Is that right?

Pia Britto: Yes. And now that we’re thinking back, I think we had a few very good communicators in our group also. That’s key to influencing because science in and of itself can be quite dry. We had the likes of Jack Shonkoff at the Harvard Center for the Developing Child, who tells the most eloquent story to any audience.

Duncan: You’re not a bad communicator yourself, I remember when you gave the talk, you were talking about baking inequality into the brains of babies, which is both amazingly alliterative and really sticks with you. Clearly, you had some very good narratives which were very powerful to people just as human beings, right?

Pia Britto: That’s a phrase that the President of the World Bank, Jim Kim, made very well known because the World Bank took this on. Tony Lake from UNICEF was die-hard on this message. Everywhere he went – to every head of state, every UN meeting, he delivered this message. These influencers really played a role.

Duncan: How did you do that? On the GELI course, we get people to do map how much stakeholders agree with your issue v how influential they are. So you identify powerful allies and less powerful allies, or you can maybe put the less powerful in touch with the powerful allies as a whole process to build a coalition. Did you do that kind of thing or was it much more just instinctive?

Pia Britto: We mapped all the key moments where decisions were going to be made for the SDGs. So I think we were mapping more the process than the people. We knew there were certain points at which the narrative was going to go to its next iteration, go into finalisation. So how do we influence those and who are the people who can make that happen?

Duncan: And I believe you got Michelle Bachelet involved quite a lot. She was one of your ambassadors, is that right?

Pia Britto: Exactly. She’s another champion of this agenda. It was actually her political campaign in Chile on which she ran for president. And she created a national program which is really a lighthouse for this work. It’s called Chile Crece Contigo: Chile Grow With You. Again, we knew the General Assembly was a very important influencing point. So we worked back from there and said who could actually speak to it? And it was her. Then we went to meet her and asked her to chair an event just the day before the General Assembly. It took a lot of planning, but it was all about spotting milestone moments and then leveraging the platform of UNICEF and this band of people who had been working for a while on the agenda. And just to say, we didn’t have much of a budget at all. It was really shoestring!

Duncan: The Chile story also brings in a brilliant proof of concept at a large scale. People want to see that it’s worked somewhere if they’re going to take it on. I can imagine that was a big plus. Now, how do you deal with the problem of exhaustion and stamina? I mean, the SDGs were interminable. I remember my first SDG meeting, I think, was in 2010 or something. How did you keep going? How did you do it on a personal level and on an organisational level?

Pia Britto: I think that we really were determined. I know I was determined that this had to happen come hell or high water. I don’t know how else to explain it, but sheer grit. We just kept going. I think also what helped us a bit is that we started to see some traction, some buzz. Suddenly, the education community started to invite the early childhood world there and say. So what is it that you’re trying to say? That’s quite motivating. And then when the mayors got together and the mayor of Istanbul hosted the mayors conference and they said, let’s put this on the agenda. Those moments really give you a lift that you are being heard. All of these little successes along the way definitely were motivators that we’re on the right road.

Duncan: So you get to the big SDGs event. Tell us the Shakira story!

Pia Britto: Yeah, that was probably one of the most exciting days, and a pivotal moment. We’d got into the SDGs, which was great, but so did 150 other issues. How do you make your issue stand out and catch the eye? The media want something interesting, they want something new. And the media are going to cover what the Secretary General says that day. So then again, we work back and say, how do we get the attention of the Secretary General? Everyone’s clamouring for his attention. And we thought, why don’t we bring in a non-traditional Goodwill Ambassador like Shakira? She’s not really known in the SDG world, but she’s passionate about young children, about education. Everyone likes her music. I think the Secretary General may have also liked her music!

We also took the first slot that morning. The door opens at 6:30 or 7. We said we wanted the first slot – ours had to be the first event. We snuck Shakira in. We got the whole event started. So the first headline that came out that day was the first quote by the Secretary General that the cornerstone of the SDGs is early childhood development. You could have been running an event in the middle of the day, equally important but by then the media cycles are getting tired. And so that was our very strategic planning to capture the media. And then we won the headlines after that, which was pretty impressive.

Duncan: It’s a phenomenal story. You hit just about every button of the things we’re talking about, the course: understanding the process, understanding the stakeholders, timing, stamina, the incentives of everybody involved. I mean, it is just superb. Just one final question – was it worth it? Has it made a difference on the ground?

Pia Britto: Yes and no. I was recently in an ASEAN meeting. I was blown away that the ASEAN ministerial dialogue was talking about early childhood in a very significant way. I think the entire SDG agenda has taken a hit with the pandemic, and that has really reshaped a big part of what we’re able to achieve. And we know we’re halfway through, but we’re nowhere near halfway achieving the goals. So I think that the entire agenda has taken a hit, but we’re in it. And this is something that governments are being held accountable for. So it is definitely making a difference. But all the SDGs are fragile and under threat right now.

Duncan: Okay, but it’s making a difference. Let’s finish on the positive. A superb example of influencing, which I’m sure will inspire GELI participants and others. Thanks very much, Pia.

The Global Executive Leadership Initiative - GELI - is a leadership development programme designed exclusively for top-level leaders from the United Nations, NGOs, and the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Global Policy's Tom Kirk facilitates it alongside Duncan.

Loria-Mae Heywood draws attention to the market forces at play in the trafficking and exploitation of children, and provides examples of good practices from Europe, Africa and Asia in support of the protection of children against trafficking. She then champions the use of systemic and collaborative approaches, along with ethical practices to support the fight against child trafficking.

This is part of a forthcoming Global Policy e-book on modern slavery. Contributions from leading experts highlighting practical and theoretical issues surrounding the persistence of slavery, human trafficking and forced labour will be serialised here over the coming months.

In every society, be it ‘developed’ or ‘developing’, there will always be vulnerable children, the degree and extent of the vulnerabilities faced by such children differing within and across countries and communities. The circumstances and dispositions that contribute to, and facilitate the vulnerability of children could have a basis in a number of factors including, but not limited to, inadequate economic resources and financial alternatives, a lack of maturity of mind, weak guardianship systems, and inadequate societal exposure.

What is both disconcerting and repugnant is that traffickers have capitalised on such vulnerability factors, targeting boys and girls for their organs, and for the provision of labour, sexual, and other services. That children should be recruited, transported, transferred, harboured and/or received for the purpose of being exploited – the conception of child trafficking based on the UN Trafficking Protocol – speaks not only to the intentionality and criminality involved in trafficking; it also speaks to the bleak prospects that exist for the children whose human rights and dignity would be undermined at the hands of traffickers and at the hands of those who demand and use their bodies, labour, produce, and services for their benefit and pleasure.

Preventing the exploitation of children by addressing factors and practices which enable and facilitate the vulnerability of children is therefore an absolute imperative if children are to be saved the harrowing journeys and experiences that leave them traumatised, abused, and even dead. Focus will therefore be given to some of the strategies that have been used in an attempt to fight child trafficking, and correspondingly facilitate the protection of children. Prior to this focus, insight will be provided into the human trafficking industry – its estimated value, supply and demand factors that fuel this industry, and the children who have been detected and exploited as a consequence of this industry.

A billion-dollar industry

The trafficking in human beings, under which child trafficking is subsumed, is a billion-dollar industry. The specific profits derived from the exploitation of human beings, via trafficking, are not known due to the clandestine nature of trafficking. Nevertheless, it is estimated that the profits generated from forced labour (which includes but is not limited to labour derived from trafficking) amount to US$150 billion per year (ILO, 2014). This estimate is said to be a reflection of both the ILO’s use of an updated methodology from what was used in 2005 to determine the profits derived from the use of forced labour, and the use of data collected for the ILO’s 2012 Global Estimate of Forced Labour. It should be noted that profits generated from state-imposed forced labour are not covered in the 2014 and 2005 estimates. Asia, and Developed Economies are said to be the top sources of profits, with sexual exploitation gaining the highest level of profits of the respective sectors of exploitation. In 2005, economist Patrick Belser, via an ILO Working Paper, estimated that the yearly profits generated from forced labour was US$44 billion – a figure which includes the US$32 billion in profits which the ILO, in 2005, estimated was generated per year by trafficked forced labourers. Most victims were trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation, followed by economic exploitation and mixed forms of exploitation. Further, industrialized countries accounted for half of the profits, while almost one-third of the profits was derived from Asia.

Susceptible to the workings of the market, the trafficking of children and the subsequent profits generated from the exploitation of children is fuelled by demand and supply. The excessive reference to ‘traffickers’ in human trafficking debates may lead one to infer that these actors are the main or only stakeholders in trafficking activities, and may even lead to a feeling of disconnect between the crime of trafficking and one’s personal actions. However, the demand and supply of child victims is fuelled by a number of actors who all contribute, wittingly or unwittingly, to the trafficking and exploitation of children.

On the demand side, employers and business owners, consumers and clients, and third parties such as recruiters and agents all contribute to the perpetuation of the child trafficking industry. For example, the loyal customer who buys beautiful sweaters for his family from his favourite local department store may be blissfully unaware that the fingers of those who knitted those sweaters were those of children recruited to work in deplorable factory conditions, and who received a mere pittance for the hours that they slaved over those items of clothing. Should that scenario be true, that customer would have unknowingly contributed to the demand for trafficked and exploited labour. He would also have profited from the vulnerability of children and the lack of adequate safeguards for the ethical sourcing of products within supply chains and webs, as would the businesses that sourced such products.

As a point of reference for the prevalence of goods potentially produced by child labour or forced labour, the Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) – an operating unit of the United States Department of Labor – revealed that the List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor comprised 155 goods from 77 countries. Based on this 2020 report/list, the agriculture sector has the greatest amount of child labour and forced labour respectively, followed by the manufacturing, mining/quarrying and pornography sectors respectively. The top 3 goods with the most child labour are gold (22 countries), bricks (19 countries) and sugar cane (18 countries), while the top 3 goods with the most forced  labour are bricks (9 countries), cotton (8 countries), and garments (7 countries).

But the furthering of the child trafficking industry and the profiting from the exploitation of children is not only due to demand factors but also to the presence of children who are at risk of being exploited. The supply of children to the child trafficking industry is facilitated by personal, socio-economic and cultural factors that make children vulnerable to trafficking, as well as the presence of individuals who are willing to facilitate their exploitation. These individuals have been and could be family members and persons known to the child/children, or they could be strangers. In Nigeria, for example, there exists a cultural practice of informal fostering in which parents or guardians, many times due to economic challenges, arrange for wealthier members of society to take care of their child/ children. In such arrangements, there is usually the expectation that the child would perform household or other tasks for the host family. This informal system of fostering, which has many positive attributes, has however sometimes been misused to facilitate the trafficking of children for domestic servitude, sexual exploitation and other forms of exploitation as host families take advantage of children in their care or as traffickers operate under the guise of arranging for children to be hosted and in turn facilitate their exploitation. Underpinning the vulnerability of children to trafficking and exploitation, in this instance, is the convergence of economic push factors and cultural enablers situated within the social and communal context of Nigeria. While push factors to trafficking differ across countries, it is common (like in this instance) for a combination of vulnerability factors, including the lack of suitable coping mechanisms and alternatives, to create an enabling environment for the trafficking and eventual exploitation of children.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports that for the year 2016, of the fifty-four countries examined, children comprised approximately 30 per cent of detected victims, with there being far more girls than boys. Of the 2,350 girls detected, 72 per cent had been trafficked for sexual exploitation, 21 per cent for forced labour and 7 per cent for other purposes. In the case of the 711 boys detected, 50 per cent had been trafficked for forced labour, 27 per cent for sexual exploitation, and 23 per cent for other purposes. The ‘other purposes’ for which children had been trafficked included forced begging, forced marriage, forced criminal activities, and to serve as child soldiers. (See the UNODC’s Global Report on Trafficking in Persons – 2018.)

Trafficking has a human cost and the supply and succumbing of children to the trafficking industry makes it imperative to relentlessly pursue efforts to protect and prevent boys and girls from being trafficked and exploited. The three examples featured below serve the purpose of providing insight into efforts that have been made to fight child trafficking by targeting the protection of children. It is hoped that these revelations will provide inspiration for what could be done to fight child trafficking (adjusted to respective country contexts), as well as reveal that the protection of children against trafficking is of win-win benefit to children on the one hand, and businesses and the society at large on the other hand.

Example 1: The Wrap Around Model – the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, the Wrap Around Model has been used to provide composite and consolidated support to the Roma community in an attempt to tackle the trafficking of Roma children for forced criminal exploitation and forced begging. Implemented by the Dutch National Police in collaboration with government and civil society organisations, this Model (featured within Anti-Slavery International’s Trafficking for Forced Criminal Activities and Begging in Europe: Exploratory Study and Good Practice Examples report) is centred around the presence of individuals and services who/which ‘wrap themselves around’ vulnerable Roma families in an attempt to insulate children from trafficking and exploitation. This Model involves the assigning of a Family Manager to each family that is perceived to be at risk of child abuse and child trafficking. The Family Manager serves as the point of contact and intermediary between the designated family and professional support persons and organisations that are working with the family, be it the school, child protection service, housing association, or the police. This manner of operation and coordinated support has helped to provide vital support to target families, while also helping in the identification and prevention of trafficking and the exploitation of children.

The Wrap Around Model (Source)

Example 2: International Cocoa Initiative – Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire

Extending beyond a focus on child trafficking, the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) – a Swiss-based foundation operating in Ghana and the Ivory Coast – has been dedicated towards ensuring a better future for children, and advancing the elimination of child labour. Focusing its activities around the cocoa and chocolate industry, it has worked with multiple partners (including farming communities, businesses, unions, civil society groups and national governments in cocoa-producing countries) towards providing greater protection to children and their rights, managing the risk of child labour within the cocoa supply chain, and sharing knowledge and information in an open and transparent manner. Activities and actions performed in favour of the protection of children have included the following: the organisation of community mobilization meetings on the issues of child labour and child trafficking; the implementation of initiatives to reduce the vulnerability of children to child labour and child trafficking, including through school rehabilitation and the recruitment of teachers; and the establishment of Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems which use facilitators within cocoa-growing communities to bring attention to child labour, and request the remediation of respective cases. (For further details on the ICI: Source(a); Source(b))

Cacao pods (Paul George via Flickr)

While trafficking into the cocoa sector and child labour within the cocoa sector have not been eliminated, the work by the ICI has contributed to the protection of children from child trafficking and child labour. Companies that pursue ethical practices and strive to fight against the exploitation of children within supply chains could be said to have greater prospects of good brand and company reputation, and the concomitant provision of support by members of the public. The converse should also be considered. 

Example 3 – Peer educators and Socialization Centres – Bangladesh

As featured in the Background paper on Good Practices and Priorities to Combat Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Children in Bangladesh, one of the strategies that has been employed in Bangladesh to raise awareness on children’s rights issues has been the use of boys and girls to share relevant information with their peers. The Association for Community Development (ACD) in Rajshahi, for example, has provided training to children, who have in turn discussed issues such as trafficking, early marriage, and sexual exploitation with their peers. Such discussions have been facilitated by adult women and adult men who work with the girls and boys respectively. One achievement, as detailed by a group of girls, was the identification of a suspected trafficker, after which the Union Parishad Chairman was informed.

As further seen via one of the child-focused web pages of the ACD, a community-based approach to the prevention and protection of children from trafficking, commercial sexual exploitation, violence, abuse, and vulnerable situations is facilitated through the use of Socialization Centres. Focusing on the development of children and the community through socialization, services provided by Socialization Centres have included counselling, education on self-protection, and library services. Meetings have also been held with parents and other groups, with focus being given to mainstreaming out-of-school children and identifying children at risk. Other services performed through the Centres have included the following: parenting education sessions on issues such as understanding childhood and development; awareness-raising sessions on the protection of children at the level of the community and society, respectively; and the provision of vocational training to adolescent boys and girls from “untouchable, city slum and indigenous communities”. What is notable is that the voices of children have also been integrated into community-based approaches; children have been used in local-level advocacy so that the community-based governance structure could be more child-sensitive and proactive. The initiatives by the ACD have been said to increase individual and community participation in reducing, inter alia, child marriage, sexual abuse, child labour, trafficking, and discrimination.

Effecting positive change

As contemplation is given to the trafficking and exploitation of children in and from different parts of the globe and the actions that have been directed towards the protection of children, it is evident that only through sustained, individual, collaborative, cross-sectoral, inter-sectoral and sustainable efforts could there be any hope of protecting children from trafficking, and reducing the profitability of the trafficking industry. Such efforts should not be merely directed towards alleviating current realities and influencing consumer habits but should rather be combined with systemic changes.

Awareness-raising, the provision of education and skills training, and the monitoring of supply chains, while important, are surface-oriented strategies. If sustained and sustainable change is to be effected, such efforts need to be combined with the building and strengthening of child protection and social protection systems, the provision of suitable alternatives to those who are at a risk of being trafficked, and the creation, implementation and enforcement of laws that are deemed suitable to support the protection of children and conversely respond to the abuse of children and their rights.

As consumerism is replaced with responsible and ethical consumption, as businesses support and enforce ethical practices, as family systems are strengthened, and as long-term and systemic child protection inputs are made, greater possibilities will exist for the protection of children against trafficking. There is no guarantee that such efforts will result in the transformation of an individual’s character, and in turn increase the value that such an individual attaches to children and their lives. However, the strengthening of child protection and social protection systems and the implementation and enforcement of child protection regulations may, at least, help to curb human deficiencies by facilitating the regulation of conduct.

Loria-Mae Heywood is a researcher, writer, and human and social development advocate whose academic and professional expertise includes work on child protection and child rights, child trafficking, social protection, and human and social development. Her recently published article can be seen as follows: Before Saying “I Do”: Legal and Policy Considerations for Facilitating Clarity on Human Trafficking and the Protection of Children in Albania. She can be contacted via the following address: LoriaMae.Heywood@gmail.com   

Photo by lalesh aldarwish from Pexels

We live in dangerous times — no doubt about it. How did we get to such a state of affairs where democracy itself is in a very fragile condition and the future of human civilization itself at stake? In this interview, renowned thinker, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at MIT and Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona Noam Chomsky, sheds light on the state of the world and the condition of the only superpower left in the global arena.

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, looking at the current state of the world, I think it is not an exaggeration at all to say that we live in ominously dangerous times — and not simply in a period of great global complexity, confusion and uncertainty, which, after all, has been the “normal” state of the global political condition in the modem era. I believe, in fact, that we are in the midst of a whirlpool of events and developments that are eroding our capacity to manage human affairs in a way that is conducive to the attainment of a political and economic order based on stability, justice and sustainability. Indeed, the contemporary world is fraught, in my own mind at least, with perils and challenges that will test severely humanity’s ability to maintain a steady course toward anything resembling a civilized life.

How did we get to such a state of affairs, with tremendous economic inequalities and the resurgence of the irrational in political affairs on the one hand, and an uncanny capacity, on the other, to look away from the existential crises such as global warming and nuclear weapons which will surely destroy civilized life as we know it if we continue with “business as usual”?

The question of how we got to this state of affairs is truly vast in scope, requiring not just inquiry into the origin and nature of social and cultural institutions but also into depths of human psychology that are barely understood. We can, however, take a much more modest stab at the questions, asking about certain highly consequential decisions that could have been made differently, and about specific cases where we can identify some of the roots of looking away.

The history of nuclear weapons provides some striking cases. One critical decision was in 1944, when Germany was out of the war and it was clear that the only target was Japan. One cannot really say that a decision was made to proceed nevertheless to create devices that could devastate Japan even more thoroughly, and in the longer term threaten to destroy us as well. It seems that the question never seriously arose, apart from such isolated figures as Joseph Rotblat — who was later barred reentry to the U.S.

Another critical decision that was not made was in the early 1950s. At the time, there were still no long-range delivery systems for nuclear weapons (ICBMs). It might have been possible to reach an agreement with Russia to bar their development. That was a plausible surmise at the time, and release of Russian archives makes it seem an even more likely prospect. Remarkably, there is no trace of any consideration of pursuing steps to bar the only weapons systems that would pose a lethal threat to the U.S., so we learn from McGeorge Bundy’s standard work on the history of nuclear weapons, with access to the highest-level sources. Perhaps still more remarkably, there has, to my knowledge, been no voiced interest in this astonishing fact.

It is easy to go on. The result is 75 years of living under the threat of virtually total destruction, particularly since the successful development of thermonuclear weapons by 1953 — in this case a decision, rather than lack of one. And as the record shows all too graphically, it is a virtual miracle that we have survived the nuclear age thus far.

That raises your question of why we look away. I do not understand it, and never have. The question has been on my mind almost constantly since that grim day in August 1945 when we heard the news that an atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima, with hideous casualties. Apart from the terrible tragedy itself, it was at once clear that human intelligence had devised the means to destroy us all — not quite yet, but there could be little doubt that once the genie was out of the bottle, technological developments would carry the threat to the end. I was then a junior counselor in a summer camp. The news was broadcast in the morning. Everyone listened — and then went off to the planned activity — a baseball game, swimming, whatever was scheduled. I couldn’t believe it. I was so shocked I just took off into the woods and sat by myself for several hours. I still can’t believe it, or understand how that has persisted even as more has been learned about the threats. The same sentiments have been voiced by others, recently by William Perry [former defense secretary], who has ample experience on the inside. He reports that he is doubly terrified: by the growing risk of terrible catastrophe, and the failure to be terrified by it.

It was not known in 1945, but the world was then entering into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which human activity is having a severe impact on the environment that sustains life. Warnings about the potential threat of global warming date back to a 1958 paper by Hans Suess and Roger Revelle, and by the 1970s, concerns were deeply troubling to climate scientists. ExxonMobil scientists were in the forefront of spelling out the severe dangers. That is the background for a crucial decision by ExxonMobil management in 1989, after (and perhaps because) James Hansen had brought the grave threat to public attention. In 1989, management decided to lead the denialist campaign.

That continues to the present. ExxonMobil now proudly declares that it intends to extract and sell all of the 25 billion barrels in its current reserves, while continuing to seek new sources.

Executives are surely aware that this is virtually a death-knell for organized human society in any form that we know, but evidently it doesn’t matter. Looking away with a vengeance.

The suicidal impulses of the fossil fuel industry have been strongly supported by Republican administrations, by now, under Trump, leaving the U.S. in splendid isolation internationally in not only refusing to participate in international efforts to address this existential threat but in devoting major efforts to accelerate the race to disaster.

It is hard to find proper words to describe what is happening — and the limited attention it receives.

This again raises your question of how we can look away. For ExxonMobil, the explanation is simple enough: The logic of the capitalist market rules — what Joseph Stiglitz 25 years ago called the “religion” that markets know best. The same reasoning extends beyond, for example to the major banks that are pouring funds into fossil fuel extraction, including the most dangerous, like Canadian tar sands, surely in full awareness of the consequences.

CEOs face a choice: They can seek to maximize profit and market share, and (consciously) labor to undermine the prospects for life on earth; or they can refuse to do so, and be removed and replaced by someone who will.

The problems are not just individual; they are institutional, hence much deeper and harder to overcome.

Something similar holds for media. In the best newspapers there are regular articles by the finest journalists applauding the fracking revolution and the opening of new areas for exploitation, driving the U.S. well ahead of Saudi Arabia in the race to destroy human civilization. Sometimes there are a few words about environmental effects: fracking in Wyoming may harm the water supplies for ranchers. But scarcely if ever is there a word on the effect on the planet — which is, surely, well understood by authors and editors.

In this case, I suppose the explanation is professionalism. The ethics of the profession requires “objectivity”: reporting accurately what is going on “within the beltway” and in executive suites, and keeping to the assigned story. To add a word about the lethal broader impact would be “bias,” reserved for the opinion pages.

There are countless illustrations, but I think something deeper may be involved, something related to the “religion” that Stiglitz criticized. Worship of markets has many effects. One we see in the origins of the reigning neoliberal faiths. Their origin is in post-World War I Vienna, after the collapse of the trading system within the Hapsburg empire. Ludwig von Mises and his associates fashioned the basic doctrines that were quickly labeled “neoliberalism,” based on the principle of “sound economics”: markets know best, no interference with them is tolerable.

There are immediate consequences. One is that labor unions, which interfere with flexibility of labor markets, must be destroyed, along with social democratic measures. Mises openly welcomed the crushing of the vibrant Austrian unions and social democracy by state violence in 1928, laying the groundwork for Austrian fascism. Which Mises welcomed as well. He became economic consultant to the proto-fascist Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, and in his major work Liberalism, explained that “It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.”

These themes resonate through the modern neoliberal era. The U.S. has an unusually violent labor history, but the attack on unions gained new force under Reagan with the onset of the neoliberal era. As the business press reported, employers were effectively informed that labor laws would not be enforced, and the U.S. became the only industrial society apart from Apartheid South Africa to tolerate not just scabs, but even “permanent replacement workers.” Neoliberal globalization, precarity of employment, and other devices carry the process of destroying organized labor further.

These developments form a core part of the efforts to realize the Thatcherite dictum that “there is no society,” only atomized individuals, who face the forces of “sound economics” alone — becoming what Marx called “a sack of potatoes” in his condemnation of the policies of the authoritarian rulers of mid-19th century Europe.

A sack of potatoes cannot react in any sensible way even to existential crises. Lacking the very bases of deliberative democracy, such as functioning labor unions and other organizations, people have little choice beyond “looking away.” What can they hope to do? As Mises memorably explained, echoed by Milton Friedman and others, political democracy is superfluous — indeed an impediment to sound economics: “free competition does all that is needed” in markets that function without interference.

The pathology is not new, but can become more severe under supportive social and economic institutions and practices.

Yet, only a couple of decades ago, there was wild celebration among liberal and conservative elites alike about the “end of history,” but, even today, there are some who claim that we have made great progress and that the world is better today than it has ever been in the past. Obviously, “the end of history” thesis was something of a Hegelian illusion by staunch defenders of the global capitalist order, but what about the optimism expressed by the likes of Steven Pinker regarding the present? And how can we square the fact that this liberal optimism is not reflected by any stretch in the politico-ideological currents and trends that are in motion today both inside western nations but also around the world?

The celebrations were mostly farcical, and have been quietly shelved. On the “great progress,” there is serious work. The best I know is Robert Gordon’s compelling study of the rise and fall of American growth, which extends beyond the U.S. though with some modifications. Gordon observes that there was virtually no economic growth for millennia until 1770. Then came a period of slow growth for another century, and then a “special century” from 1870 to 1970, with important inventions ranging from indoor plumbing to electrical grids and transportation, which radically changed human life, with significant progress by many measures.

Since the 1970s the picture is much more mixed. The basis for the contemporary high-tech economy was established in the last decades of the special century, mainly through public investment, adapted to the market in the years that followed.

There is currently rapid innovation in frills — new apps for iPhones, etc. — but nothing like the fundamental achievements of the special century. And in the U.S., there has been stagnation or decline in real wages for non-supervisory workers and in recent years, increased death rates among working-class, working-age whites, called “deaths of despair” by the economists who have documented these startling facts, Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

There is more to say about other societies. There are numerous complexities of major significance that disappear in unanalyzed statistical tables.

Realism, crystallized intellectually by Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince,has been the guiding principle of nation-states behind their conduct of international relations from the beginning of the modem era, while idealism and morality have been seen as values best left to individuals. Is political realism driving us to the edge of the cliff? And, if so, what should replace the behavioral stance of governments in the 21st century?

The two major doctrines of International Relations Theory are Realism and Idealism. Each has their advocates, but it’s true that the Realists have dominated: the world’s a tough place, an anarchic system, and states maneuver to establish power and security, making coalitions, offshore balancing, etc.

I think we can put aside Idealism — though it has its advocates, including, curiously, one of the founders and leading figures of the modern tough-minded Realist school, Hans Morgenthau. In his 1960 work, The Purpose of American Politics, Morgenthau argued that the U.S., unlike other societies, has a “transcendent purpose”: establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere. A serious scholar, Morgenthau recognized that the historical record is radically inconsistent with the “transcendent purpose” of America, but he advised that we should not be misled by the apparent inconsistency. In his words, we should not “confound the abuse of reality with reality itself.” Reality is the unachieved “national purpose” revealed by “the evidence of history as our minds reflect it.” What actually happened is merely the “abuse of reality.” To confound abuse of reality with reality is akin to “the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.”

For the most part, however, realists adhere to Realism, without sentimentality. We might ask, however, how realistic Realism is. With a few exceptions — Kenneth Waltz for one — realists tend to ignore the roots of policy in the structure of domestic power, in which, of course, the corporate system is overwhelmingly dominant. This is not the place to review the matter, but I think it can be shown that much is lost by this stance. That’s true even of the core notion of Realism: security. True, states seek security, but for whom? For the general population? For the systems of power represented by the architects of policy? Such questions cannot be casually put aside.

The two existential crises we have discussed are a case in point. Does the government policy of maximization of the use of fossil fuels contribute to the security of the population? Or of ExxonMobil and its brethren. Does the current military posture of the U.S. — dismantling the INF Treatyinstead of negotiating disputes over violations, rushing ahead with hypersonic weapons instead of seeking to bar these insane weapons systems by treaty, and much else — contribute to the security of the population? Or to the component of the corporate manufacturing system in which the U.S. enjoys comparative advantage: destruction. Similar questions arise constantly.

What should replace the prevailing stance is government of, by and for the people, highlighting their concerns and needs.

The advent of globalization has been interpreted frequently enough in the recent past as leading to the erosion of the nation-state. Today, however, it is globalization that is being challenged, first and foremost by the resurgence of nationalism. Is there a case to be made in defense of globalization? And, by extension, is all nationalism bad and dangerous?

Globalization is neither good nor bad in itself. It depends how it is implemented. Enhancing opportunities for ideas, innovations, aesthetic contributions to disseminate freely is a welcome form of globalization, as well as opportunities for people to circulate freely. The WTO system, designed to set working people in competition with one another while protecting investor rights with an exorbitant patent regime and other devices, is a form of globalization that has many harmful consequences that would be avoided in authentic trade agreements designed along different lines — and it should be borne in mind that much of the substance of the “free trade agreements” is not about free trade or even trade in any meaningful sense.

Same with nationalism. In the hands of the Nazis, it was extremely dangerous. If it is a form of bonding and mutual support within some community it can be a valuable part of human life.

The current resurgence of nationalism is in large part a reaction to the harsh consequences of neoliberal globalization, with special features such as the erosion of democracy in Europe by transfer of decision-making to the unelected Troika with the northern banks looking over their shoulders. And it can and does take quite ugly forms — the worst, perhaps, the reaction to the so-called “refugee crisis” — more accurately termed a moral crisis of the West, as Pope Francis has indicated.

But none of this is inherent in globalization or nationalism.

In your critiques of U.S. foreign policy, you often refer to the United States as the world’s biggest terrorist state. Is there something unique about the United States as an imperial state? And is U.S. imperialism still alive and kicking?

The U.S. is unique in many respects. That includes the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, “We the People,” a revolutionary idea, however flawed in execution. It is also a rare country that has been at war almost without a break from its first moment. One of the motives for the American Revolution was to eliminate the barrier to expansion into “Indian country” imposed by the British. With that overcome, the new nation set forth on wars against the Indian nations that inhabited what became the national territory; wars of “extermination,” as the most prominent figures recognized, notably John Quincy Adams, the architect of Manifest Destiny. Meanwhile half of Mexico was conquered in what General U.S. Grant, later president, called one of the most “wicked wars” in history.

There is no need to review record of interventions, subversion and violence, particularly since World War II, which established the U.S. in a position of global dominance with no historical precedent. The record includes the worst crime of the postwar period, the assault on Indochina, and the worst crime of this millennium, the invasion of Iraq.

Like most terms of political discourse, “imperialism” is a contested notion. Whatever term we want to use, the U.S. is alone in having hundreds of military bases and troops operating over much of the world. It is also unique in its willingness and ability to impose brutal sanctions designed to punish the people of states designated as enemies. And its market power and dominance of the international financial system provide these sanctions with extraterritorial reach, compelling even powerful states to join in, however unwillingly.

The most dramatic case is Cuba, where U.S. sanctions are strongly opposed by the entire world, to no avail. The vote against these sanctions was 189-2, U.S. and Israel, in the latest UNGA [United Nations General Assembly] condemnation. The sanctions have been in place for almost 60 years, harshly punishing Cubans for what the State Department called “successful defiance” of the U.S. Trump’s sanctions on Venezuela have turned a humanitarian crisis into a catastrophe, according to the leading economist of the opposition, Francisco Rodriguez. His sanctions on Iran are quite explicitly designed to destroy the economy and punish the population.

This is no innovation. Clinton’s sanctions on Iraq (joined by Blair) were so destructive that each of the distinguished international diplomats who administered the “oil for food” program resigned in protest, charging that the sanctions were “genocidal.” The second, Hans-Christof von Sponeck, published a detailed and incisive book about the impact of the sanctions (A Different Kind of War). It has been under a virtual ban. Too revealing, perhaps.

The brutal sanctions punished the population and devastated the society, but strengthened the tyrant, compelling people to rely on his rationing system for survival, possibly saving him from overthrow from within, as happened to a string of similar figures. That’s quite standard. The same is reportedly true in Iran today.

It could be argued that the sanctions violate the Geneva Conventions, which condemn “collective punishment” as a war crime, but legalistic shenanigans can get around that.

The U.S. no longer has the capacity it once did to overthrow governments at will or to invade other countries, but it has ample means of coercion and domination, call it “imperialism” or not.

Why is the United States the only major country in the world displaying consistently an aversion to international human rights treaties, which include, among many others, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)?

The U.S. almost never ratifies international conventions, and in the few cases where it does, it is with reservations that exclude the U.S. That’s even true of the Genocide Convention, which the U.S. finally did ratify after many years, exempting itself. The issue arose in 1999, when Yugoslavia brought a charge of war crimes to the ICJ [International Court of Justice] against NATO. One of the charges was “genocide.” The U.S. therefore rejected World Court jurisdiction on the grounds that it was not subject to the Genocide Convention, and the Court agreed — agreeing, in effect, that the U.S. is entitled to carry out genocide with impunity.

It might be noted that the U.S. is currently alone (along with China and Taiwan) in rejecting a World Court decision, namely, the 1986 Court judgment ordering the U.S. to terminate its “unlawful use of force” against Nicaragua and to pay substantial reparations. Washington’s rejection of the Court decision was applauded by the liberal media on the grounds that the Court was a “hostile forum” (New York Times), so its decisions don’t matter. A few years earlier the Court had been a stern arbiter of Justice when it ruled in favor of the U.S. in a case against Iran.

The U.S. also has laws authorizing the executive to use force to “rescue” any American brought to the Hague — sometimes called in Europe “the Hague Invasion Act.” Recently it revoked the visa of the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC [International Criminal Court] for daring to consider inquiring into U.S. actions in Afghanistan. It goes on.

Why? It’s called “power,” and a population that tolerates it — and for the most part probably doesn’t even know about it.

Since the Nuremberg trials between 1945-49, the world has witnessed many war crimes and crimes against humanity that have gone unpunished, and interestingly enough, some of the big powers (U.S., China and Russia) have refused to support the International Criminal Court which, among others things, can prosecute individuals for war crimes. In that context, does the power to hold leaders responsible for unjust wars, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression hold promise in the international order of today?

That depends on whether states will accept jurisdiction. Sometimes they do. The NATO powers (except for the U.S.) accepted ICJ jurisdiction in the Yugoslavia case, for example — presumably because they took for granted that the Court would never accept the Yugoslavian pleas, even when they were valid, as in the case of the targeted destruction of a TV station, killing 16 journalists. In the more free and democratic states, populations could, in principle, decide that their governments should obey international law, but that is a matter of raising the level of civilization.

John Bolton and other ultranationalists, and many others, argue that the U.S. must not abandon its sovereignty to international institutions and international law. They are therefore arguing that U.S. leaders should violate the Constitution, which declares that valid treaties are the supreme law of the land. That includes in particular the UN Charter, the foundation of modern international law, established under U.S. auspices.

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 Truthoutand collected by Haymarket Books.

This first appeared on TruthOut and was reposted with permission. 

Image credit: TimothyJ via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Great power competition has emerged as a key priority for U.S. foreign policy under the Biden administration. In fact, we may be already at the start of a new New Cold War, according to Richard Falk, one of the world’s leading scholars in the fields of global politics and international law, in the interview below.   Falk has also been a  leading activist since the Vietnam war, and has published more than fifty books and thousands of essays. His latest book is a political memoir titled Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim (Clarity Press, 2021). Falk is Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, where he taught for nearly half a century, and Chair of Global Law at Queen Mary University of London.

C. J. Polychroniou: Richard, US foreign policy under the Biden administration is geared toward escalating the strategic competition with both China and Russia. Indeed, the Interim National Strategic Guidance, released in March 2021, makes it abundantly clear that the US intends to deter its adversaries from “inhibiting access to global commons, or dominating key regions” and that, moreover, this work cannot be done alone, as was the case under Trump, but will require the reinvigoration and modernization of the alliance system across the world. Does this read to you like a call for the start of a new New Cold War?

Richard Falk: Yes, I would say it is more than ‘the call’ for a New Cold War, but its start. The focus is presently much more China than Russia, because China is seen by Washington as posing the primary threat, and besides, it regards Russia as a traditional rival while China poses novel and more fundamental challenges. Russia, while behaving in an unsavory manner, dramatized by the crude handling of the opposition figure Alexei Navalny, is seen as manageable geopolitically. Euro-American strategy is to stiffen resistance to Russian pressure being exerted along some of its borders, and as in the Cold War can be handled by refurbished versions of ‘containment’ and ‘deterrence.’

China is another matter entirely. The most serious perceived threats  are mainly associated with non-military sectors of Western, and particularly, U.S., primacy, its dominance over a dynamic productive economy, especially with respect to frontier technologies. The remarkable developmental dynamism of the Chinese economy has far outstripped anything ever achieved in the West. The United States Government under Biden seems stubbornly blindsided, seemingly determined to address these Chinese threats as if they could be effectively addressed by a combination of ideological confrontation and as with Soviet Union, containment and deterrence. So far, the Biden response is fundamentally mistaken in its approach, which is to view China as a similar adversary than was the Soviet Union.

This Chinese challenge cannot be successfully met frontally. It can only be met by a diagnosis of the relative decline of the West by way of self-scrutiny, selective emulation, and a surge of creative adaptive energies. Such a response needs to be accompanied by a reformist agenda of socio-economic equity, massive infrastructure investment, the adoption of fairer wealth and income tax structures, and a commitment to a style of global leadership that identified the national interest to a greater extent with global public goods. Instead of focusing on holding China in check, the United States would do much better by learning from its successes, and adapting them to the distinctiveness of its national circumstances.

It is to be regretted that the present mode of response to China is dangerous and anachronistic for four principal reasons.

Firstly, the mischaracterization of the Chinese challenge betrays a lack of self-confidence and understanding by the American Biden/Blinken foreign policy leadership. Secondly, the chosen path of confrontation risks a fateful clash in South China Seas, an area that according to the precepts of traditional geopolitics falls within the Chinese sphere of influence, and a context within which Chinese firmness is perceived as ‘defensive’ by Beijing while the U.S. military presence is regarded as intrusive, if not ‘hegemonic.’ These perceptions are aggravated by the U.S. effort to augment its role as upholding alliance commitments in South Asia, recently reaffirmed by a clear anti-Chinese animus in the shape of the QUAD (Australia, Japan, India, and the U.S.), formally named Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which despite the euphemism intends to signify enhanced military cooperation and shared security concerns.

Thirdly, the longtime U.S. military superiority in the Pacific region may not reflect the current regional balance of forces in the East and South China Seas. Pentagon public assertions have been sounding the alarm, insisting that in the event of a military confrontation, China would likely come out on top unless the U.S. resorts to nuclear weapons. According to an article written by Admiral Charles Richard, who currently heads National Strategic Command, this assessment has been confirmed by recent Pentagon war games and conflict simulations.

Taking account of this view, Admiral Richard advises that U.S. preparations for such an armed encounter be changed from the possibility recourse to nuclear weaponry to its probability. The implicit assumption, which is scary, is that U.S. must do whatever it takes to avoid an unacceptable political outcome even if it requires crossing the nuclear threshold. It may be instructive to recall the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when Soviet moves to deploy defensive missile systems in Cuba in response to renewed U.S. intervention to impose regime change. It is instructive to recall that Cuba was accepted as independent sovereign state entitled under international law to uphold its national security as it sees fit, while Taiwan has been consistently falling within the historical limits of Chinese territorial sovereignty. The credibility of the Chinese claim was given diplomatic weight in the Shanghai point Communiqué that re-established U.S./China relations in 1972.

Kissinger recalled that in the negotiations leading to a renewal of bilateral relations the greatly admired Chinese Foreign Minister, Chou En-Lai, was flexible on every issue except Taiwan. That is, China has a strong legal and historical basis for reclaiming Taiwan as an integral part of its sovereign territory considering its armed severance from China as a result of Japanese imperialism. China governed the area now known as Taiwan from 1683-1895. In 1895 it was conquered and ruled by Japan until 1945 when it was reabsorbed and became a part of the Republic of China. After 1949 when the Chinese Communists took over control of China, Taiwan was renamed Republic of China on Taiwan. From the Chinese perspective, this historical past upholds the basic contention that Taiwan is part of China and not entitled to be treated as a separate state.

Fourthly, and maybe decisively, the international claims on the energies and resources of the United States are quite different than they were during the Old Cold War. There was no impending catastrophe resulting from climate change to worry about or decaying infrastructure desperately needing expensive repair or under-investment in social protection by government in the area of health, housing, and education.

CJP: Isn’t it possible that the approach of the Biden administration to the future environment of great power competition could lead to the formation of a Russia-China military alliance, especially since alliance formation constitutes a key element of state interaction? Indeed, Vladimir Putin has already said that the prospect of such partnership is “theoretically… quite possible,”  so the question is this: What would be the implications for global order if a Sino-Russian military alliance were to be formed?

RF: I think we are in a period of renewed alliance diplomacy recalling the feverish attempts of the United States to surround the Soviet Union with deployed military forces, which was a way of communicating to Moscow that the Soviet Union could not expand their borders territorially without anticipating a military encounter with the United States. At first glance, alliances conceived in these traditional terms make little sense. Except in Taiwan it is unlikely that China would seek to enlarge its territorial domain by the threat use of force. In this sense, the ad hoc diplomacy of alliance formation, typified by the QUAD seems anachronistic, and could lead to warfare as one among several unintended consequences.

However, realignment as distinct from alliance frameworks does make sense in an international atmosphere in which the United States is trying to confront its international adversaries with sanctions and a variety of measures of coercive diplomacy that are intended to constrain its policy options.

Many states are dependent on international supply chains for energy and food, as well as reliable trade and investment relations. Reverting to the Cold War the Soviet Union was relatively autonomous. This is much less true under present conditions in which the higher densities of interdependence are linked to acute security vulnerability to cyber attacks, and where access to drone technologies and computer knowhow make non-state actors, extremist political movements, and criminal syndicates an increasingly troublesome part of the global political landscape. In such an emergent global setting, traditional reliance on deterrence, defense capabilities, and retaliatory action are often ineffectual, and quite often even counter-productive. The purpose of contemporary patterns of realignment is less to augment defenses against intervention and aggression than to broaden policy options for countries that need to reach beyond their borders to achieve economic viability.

Another motivation is to deflect geopolitical bullying tactics intended to isolate adversaries. As China and Russia are being portrayed as the enemies of the West, their alignment with one another makes sense if thought of as a reciprocally beneficial ‘security community.’ Compared to past configurations of conflictual relations, current geopolitical maneuvers such as realignment are less concerned with weaponry and war and more with attaining developmental stability, intelligence sharing, and reduced  vulnerability to the distinctive threats and parameters of the Cyber Age.

The logic of realignment gives to countries like China and Russia opportunities to increase their geopolitical footprint without relying on ideological affinities or coercion. Such a change in the nature of world politics is more broadly evident. For instance, important countries such as Iran and Turkey use realignment as a diplomatic tool to offset pressures and security encroachments by U.S. and Israel. In Iran’s case despite radical differences in ideology and governing style it is turning to China and Russia so as to protect its national sovereignty from a range of destabilizing measures adopted by its adversaries. Whereas Turkey, while being devalued as an alliance partner in the NATO context, may be satisfying its overall needs by turning to China and Russia than by sticking to its traditional role of a junior participant in the most potent of Western alliance structures.

CJP: Certain mainstream foreign policy analysts are rehashing old arguments about the US-China competition, in particular, by claiming that this is really an ideological battle between democracy and authoritarianism. What’s your own take on this matter?

RF: I think even more so than in the Cold War the ideological battleground is a smokescreen behind which lurk fears and perceived threats to the Western dominance of the world economy and of innovative military technologies. In the last half century China has already staked a strong claim to have demonstrated a superior development model (‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’) to that produced in the capitalist United States. This Chinese achievement is quite clearly explained and documented by the outstanding Indian liberal economist, Deepak Nayyar, in his important study, Asian Resurgence: Diversity in Development (2019). Great emphasis is placed by Nayyer on the high rate of savings enabling China to finance and strategically manage targeted investment of public funds.

Nayyer downplays the role of ideology and stresses these economistic factors, as he analyzes the development achievements of 14 countries in Asia.

The reality of the Chinese rise makes a mockery of the triumphalist claims of Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and The Last Man (1992), even more so in George W. Bush’s covering letter to the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States in which he claims that the 20th century ended with “a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.” How dated and misplaced such language seems twenty years later!  

If China now additionally manages to challenge successfully the U.S. in such vital areas of technological innovation as artificial intelligence and robotics it will undoubtedly reinforce this image of Chinese ascendancy on the 21st century world stage. It is this prospect of being relegated to the technological shadowland that had made bipartisan elites in the United States so anxious of late. In fact, even Republican stalwarts are willing to put aside their polarizing hostility to join with Democrats in mounting a diplomatic offensive against China that could become war-mongering interaction if Beijing responds in kind. Graham Allison has reminded us that historical instances where a previously ascendent power is threatened by a rising one has often resulted in disastrous warfare. Such belligerence is usually initiated by the political actor that feels displaced by the changing hierarchy of influence, wealth, and status in world order, yielding to pressure to engage the challenger while it still possesses military superiority. [See Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape the Thucydides Trap (2017)]

CJP: Nuclear weapons and climate change represent by far humanity’s two greatest existential crises. Can we really be hopeful that these threats can be managed tamed within the existing international system? If not, what changes are required in current interstate relations?

RF: Of course, at this time we have become acutely aware of such global existential threats by experiencing the ordeal of the COVID pandemic, which has revealed the conflictual state-centric manner of dealing with a situation that could have been more effectively addressed if responding by way of global solidarity. As the pandemic now appears to be subsiding in most parts of the world, we cannot be encouraged by the weakness of cooperative impulses despite the obvious self-interested benefits for all if a global commons approach had been adopted with respect to testing, treatment, and distribution of vaccines. This negative background suggests that it a somewhat vain hope to suppose that the threats posed by nuclear weapons and climate change can be successfully managed over time.

Each of these mega-threats disclose different features of an essentially dysfunctional and inequitable system of world order. World history has now entered a bio-political phase where civilizational achievements are at risk and even the survival of the human species is in doubt.  Analogous dysfunctions of a different nature are evident in the internal political and economic life of most sovereign states.

The relationship to nuclear weapons has been problematic from the beginning, starting from the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities in 1945 as the war was nearing its end. The horrifying civilian consequences seared the consequences of collective human conscience almost to the extent of the Holocaust. The two realities exemplifying the atrocities of World War II are Auschwitz and Hiroshima. It is illuminating that in the first instance the behavior of the loser in the war was criminalized in the Genocide Convention while that of the winner in the second instance was legitimated although left under a dark cloud that lingers until now.

The reality is that nuclear weapons are retained for possible use by nine states, including the most militarily powerful countries. The fact that the great majority of non-nuclear governments and the sentiments of most people in the world unconditionally oppose such weaponry has hardly mattered. The UN recently sponsored the Treaty of Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) that entered into force in January 2021; however, neither law nor morality can challenge the resolve of the nuclear weapons states to retain their freedom to possess, deploy, develop, and even threaten or use such weaponry of mass destruction. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the first states to develop nuclear weapons, have issued a formal statement expressing their belief in the non-proliferation regime and deterrence as a preferred model of nuclear war prevention to that associated with a norm of unconditional prohibition reinforced by phased, monitored, and verified disarmament treaty process.

Martin Sherwin in his definitive study, Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Rouletter from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis (2020), convincingly shows that the avoidance of nuclear war has been a consequence of dumb luck, not rational oversight or the inhibitions on use associated with deterrence. The point being that despite the magnitude of the threats posed by the existence of nuclear weapons the structures of Westphalian statism has prevailed over considerations of law, morality, common sense, and rationality. What is absent with regard to these existential global threats is a sufficient political will to transform the underlying structural features by which authority, power, and identity have been managed on a global level for last several centuries. The absence of trust among countries is given precedence, and is further reinforced by the weakness of global solidarity mechanisms, resulting on leaving this ultimate weapon in potentially irresponsible hands, the fate of the earth in Jonathan Schell’s book bearing that title, published in 1982.

Climate change has dramatized a different facet of this statist structure of world order. The need for the cooperative and urgent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions has been validated by a strong consensus of scientific opinion. The effects of inaction or insufficient action are being concretely experienced in the form of global warming, ocean levels rising, extreme weather events, glacial melting, and migrations from droughts and floods. Yet effective responsive action is blocked by inequalities of circumstances and perception that generate disagreements about the allocation of responsibility and by short-termism that makes private and public sector decision makers reluctant to depress performance statistics by expensive adjustments that cut profits and development. There is a widespread recognition of the need for drastic action, but the best that the collective will of governments have been able to do is to produce the Paris Agreement in 2015, which leaves it up to the good will and responsible voluntary behavior of governments to reduce emissions, a rather wobbly foundation on which to stake the future of humanity.

The UN as now constituted cannot provide platforms for addressing global existential threats in an effective and equitable manner. The responses to the COVID pandemic offer a template for such a negative assessment. It was obvious that short-term national economic and diplomatic interests prevailed at the expense of minimizing the health hazards of virus COVID-19. Once these interests were satisfied the richer countries felt virtuous by resorting to feel good philanthropy, which was masked as empathy for poorer countries and their populations. These societies had been left almost totally without access to the protective medical equipment, ventilators, and vaccines during the height of the health hazards.

A revealing extreme instance of the pattern was embodied in the Israeli approach which was very effective within Israel, while withholding vaccines from the approximately five million Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This disparity ignored Israel’s explicit obligation under Article 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention to accord protection  to an occupied people in the event of an epidemic. What is disclosed beyond reasonable doubt is the structural dominance of statist and market forces combined with the weakness of existing mechanisms of global solidarity, which are preconditions for upholding global public goods. An analogous dynamic occurs within states, reflecting the class, gender, and race interests and the disproportionate burdens borne by the poor, women, and marginalized minorities.   

C. J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist who has taught at numerous universities in Europe and the United States and has also worked at various research centers. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Delaware and is author/editor of several books, including Marxist Perspectives on Imperialism (1991), Perspectives and Issues in International Political Economy (1992), Socialism: Crisis and Renewal (1993), Discourse on Globalization and Democracy: Conversations With Leading Scholars of Our Time (in Greek, 2001) and hundreds of articles and essays, many of which have been translated into scores of foreign languages. His latest book is a collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky titled Optimism Over Despair: On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (Haymarket Books, 2017).

Image: John Morgan via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Brian Stoddart on the interconnections and tensions between South Indian politics and film.

The world has showered India with justifiable praise for its successful conduct of the massive  national elections that slowed the Narendra Modi-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) juggernaut and enlivened a hitherto ponderous political opposition. Over nine hundred million registered voters (though the actual turnout was lower than anticipated) defied pre-poll predictions with the BJP aiming to lift from 303 seats to 400 but instead retreating to 240, well short of an outright majority. That included a stunning setback in the BJP’s Uttar Pradesh heartland where Rahul Gandhi, the Indian National Congress and its complex INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) group won unanticipated support.

Outside India, much of the “a win for democracy” celebration carried a whiff of the country having met a Western system and process standard and, to a degree that is true – the Election Commission of India and its electronic voting system outstrips its counterparts anywhere (although there are ongoing legal battles about its efficiency). In Australia, we struggle with an upper house voting paper so large it might well have destroyed a tree per voter.

That celebration, too, reflects the burgeoning international desire for India to be playing by the same international “rules” as a major global force that has marked the rush to Delhi by the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, Australia and others as part of the search for a counter to China. As Satyajit Das points out in the manufacturing and defence areas, India might never become what all those other players want it to be.

Further to that point, we might also suggest that inside this apparent East-West bonding through “democracy”, there reside flavours and features unique to India and that surprise or even look unfathomable to outsiders.

An immediate example concerns one of the “local” parties now assisting Narendra Modi and his BJP to remain in government. After Independence, Andhra Pradesh was the first new state created on the basis of language (Telugu), then in 2014 was redrawn into Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Language and culture being at the heart of state formation both before and after Independence led directly to the emergence of a major film industry.

In the early 1970s, my first stay in Hyderabad was at a hotel next to a theatre screening Telugu movies. The first showing was at nine in the morning, the last for the day at one the next morning. All sessions were packed. That enthusiasm began in 1909 when Ragupathi Venkaiah Naidu charged entry to a short film exhibition, then the first silent feature appeared in 1921 and the first Telugu talkie in 1932. That enterprise was based first in Madras (now Chennai), capital of the British India Madras Presidency that incorporated what we now know as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and part of Odisha.

All those language regions produced significant film industries and the Andhra one, known as Tollywood, is sometimes reckoned bigger than Bollywood, the Hindi film industry based in Mumbai. In 2023 Tollywood saw approximately 240 million admissions yield $US300 million in ticket sales from a population of approximately 54 million (remembering that Telugu-speaking populations are not confined to Andhra Pradesh, and that Telangana has around 38 million with approximately 75% speaking Telugu).

But why is this significant for Narendra Modi?

Because his new ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that allows him to continue as Prime Minister has the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) as a major constituent, holding sixteen national seats and arguing hard for key Ministerial posts. The TDP’s national success matched its sweep in the simultaneous Andhra Pradesh state voting where the incumbent government slipped from 151 seats to just 11, the sort of swing rare in other “democracies, even if some see similar possibilities in the upcoming UK polls.

The new Chief Minister in Andhra Pradesh is state veteran N. Chandrababu Naidu, a former Congress member gone over to the TDP founded by his father-in-law, NT Rama Rao, one of Tollywood’s early gods and renowned for playing portraying Hindu deities in over 300 films. He was writer, actor, producer, director and the father of several children, most of whom are in the film industry. Daggubati Purandeswari, his daughter, for example, is another Congress turned TDP turned BJP politician newly elected to the national parliament from Andhra.

NT Rama Rao put the film industry at the heart of Andhra politics, recognising its vote bank drawing power and ability to carry contemporary political messaging. The West has seen this in limited cases like Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger who went nowhere near the Indian phenomenon where political advertising and movie posters are almost interchangeable and political rallies resemble film sets.

That film-politics nexus in Andhra Pradesh is further boosted by the election of K Pawan Kalyan of the Jana Sena Party (People’s Army Party) to the national assembly. He founded the JSP and branded it with a red star flag like that of Che Guevara. Aligned now with the TDP, his party’s ruling tenets downplay caste, emphasise Telugu culture, stress anti-corruption and pro-people policies. A karate black belt holder, he is also younger brother to an even bigger movie star, Chiranjeevi.

Often described as “bigger than Bachchan” (Amitabh Bachchan of Bollywood fame),  Chiranjeevi has appeared in more than 150 films. With a net worth north of $US200 million, he formed the Praja Rajyam Party (People’s Rule Party) that initially lined up with Congress and he became Minister for Tourism in a Manmohan Singh-led government. As his brother rose in the BJP sphere, though, Chiranjeevi has openly supported Narendra Modi and taking his film fans with him.

These recent elections also produced a Kerala film and politics connection when Suresh Gopi won a first-ever seat for the BJP and rewarded with an appointment as Minister of State for Tourism, Petroleum and Natural Gas. Prominent in Malayalam language films for years, he has also appeared in Bollywood,Telugu and Kannada productions. His father was a film distributor, so he appeared first as a child actor before becoming a star, and started his political life in the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) group before moving towards Congress then later more leftist organisations.

But that film and politics nexus film is  as pronounced in Tamil Nadu. Very early post-independence leader CN Annadurai, who formed the Tamil-based DMK party, was a playwright with a heavy film involvement that he openly promoted  as a realm of political influence. The DMK later became the power base for M. Karunanidhi, Chief Minister on several occasions and a leading screenwriter of major films and for actors like MG Ramachandran, the first big name actor to become Chief Minister anywhere. He led the rival AIADMK formed by Annadurai, and  was followed later by big name actress Jayalalitha whose 2016 death precipitated a major political crisis.

The DMK presently holds power in Tamil Nadu, led by MK Stalin, a son of Karunanidhi who bitterly opposes the BJP. He crafted a local alliance of several parties to oppose the BJP which won no national seats from Tamil Nadu. That alliance is part of the INDIA opposition, so very different from the Andhra film-led camp now part of the BJP coalition. That Tamil Nadu pushback includes linguistic opposition to the BJP’s emphasis on Hindi, a more relaxed approach to the primacy of Hinduism compared to the BJP’s fierce attacks on Islam, a more technology-based approach to economic development, and a keen sense that southern states fare poorly in national development schemes. So why does the TDP support the BJP so strongly when it shares commonalities with the DMK on language and social development.

There are two conjoined answers.

First, there is an Andhra-specific financial dimension. When Telangana split off and severely dented the Andhra economy, then Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu believed he had assurances of compensation from Modi. So the TDP joined the NDA in 2014 but, compensation not forthcoming, left in 2018. Now, though, he has a more powerful hand to play with Modi and is already pushing hard for compensation.

The second reason concerns Chandrababu Naidu’s personal position. While in opposition, the then ruling government pursued him on corruption charges and he spent time in jail. The Modi alliance will stave off those still unsettled allegations, and as a now stronger national powerbroker he will gain greater following and status at home.

And that is why Pawan Kalyan’s movie-driven presence has become more significant. It is a strong reminder of the NT Rama Rao and Chandrababu Naidu extended family network that stretches now into the elected ranks of the BJP. We should also note that other members of the Kalyan-Chiranjeevi family fold are also prominent actors and political presences.

There may also be a deeper vested interest for southern film industries. Throughout its time in government, the BJP has pressured Bollywood to produce films that align with the party’s Hindutva ideology. Because the northern industry’s leading figures include Muslims like Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan, that remains contentious. As that most knowledgeable of India observers Robin Jeffrey notes, that has allowed south India to transform into the more progressive film centre which it’s leaders will want to continue. Having a strengthened political position in Delhi will help.

As if on cue, events at Cannes Film Festival this year confirmed the connection between Indian politics and film. For the first time an Indian, Payal Kapadia, won the Grand Prix for All We Imagine Is Light featuring women nurses living in Mumbai (Bombay). But she still faces court charges from 2016 when she led protests at the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India’s against Modi’s appointment Gajendra Chauhan as Director. Though a lesser regarded actor, Chauhan was the BJP’s cultural advisor so influential in it’s approach to the industry.  

Predictably, though, FTII congratulated Kapadia on her win and essentially claimed credit for developing her skills. Those claims were challenged immediately, confirming there is much more to come on this issue of film in the politics of India.

Photo by Keith Lobo

This is part of a forthcoming Global Policy e-book on modern slavery. Contributions from leading experts highlighting practical and theoretical issues surrounding the persistence of slavery, human trafficking and forced labour are being serialised here over the coming months.

The anti-trafficking movement has been able to expand and impact on ever-broader circles of life in spite of – and often because of – a failure to achieve its stated goals. These goals are broadly encapsulated within the much-lauded 4P ‘anti-trafficking paradigm’ – Prevention, Protection, Prosecution, and Partnership – which, in turn, responds to the ‘master-narrative’ of human trafficking: the belief that ‘Trafficking in persons is on the rise, and it depends largely on legal shortcomings and thus demands the strengthening of laws and support for NGOs’ (Lindquist 2013: 320).  Within these broad parameters, the whole anti-trafficking eco-system or, as some (Kapur 2017, Agustin 2008, Kempadoo 2015) argue, ‘industry’ has continued to grow: anti-trafficking ‘researcher-evaluator-consultants’ gain currency by making sensationalist statements based on anecdote and misinformation rather than evidence, linking human trafficking to terrorism, money-laundering, ISIS, Boko Haram and, recently, QAnon, and offering anti-trafficking workshops, trainings, accreditations and certificates.

With that in mind this article will discuss some examples of this expansion, focussing on ineffective and harmful anti-trafficking, including ineffective awareness-raising, poor-quality anti-trafficking apps, and harmful enforcement action. We call for two responses to this: firstly, a defunding of the anti-trafficking industry (alongside investment in more effective responses to trafficking and exploitation); secondly, where an anti-trafficking approach is the best option (as opposed to, for example, a focus on workers’ rights, migrants’ rights, or wealth redistribution), there should be more critical appraisal of which approaches work, and which do not.

While there has been some increase in effort at evaluating ‘what works’ in anti-trafficking (see for example Bryant and Landman’s 2020 summary) such research is limited by its failure to give enough attention to what does not work, by the limited evidence available to assess what is or is not working, and by the limited apparent benefits of interventions which are classed as ‘working’. In evidence evaluation in medicine, ‘do not do’ lists (see, for example, NICE 2021) are sometimes used to discourage pointless and harmful interventions. In the context of anti-trafficking, there is a need for critical work that draws on extensive and growing experience of failure to highlight what does not work and – ultimately – build knowledge of what approaches to avoid.

Ineffective and harmful anti-trafficking

This article was inspired by several critical pieces published by Vice on the US-based anti-trafficking group Operation Underground Railroad (OUR). OUR was set up in 2013 to ‘bring an end to child slavery’ (OUR 2021); its modus operandi revolves around self-assigned undercover raids and ‘sting’ operations to rescue ‘exotic victims from the ‘darkest corners of the world’ (Nagaishi 2015, Quirk & O’Connell Davidson 2015). The organisation claims to have ‘rescued...thousands of survivors in 28 countries and 26 U.S. states’ (OUR 2021) The ‘new abolitionism’ – a recent concept to capture the contentious nature of such ‘rescue missions’ (Kempadoo 2016) – draws on the ‘usual’ tropes of grassroots and, increasingly, state-sponsored anti-trafficking (to the detriment of engaging with structural issues), which, as Heynen and van der Meulen note (2021: 1) ‘build on melodramatic narratives of victims and (white) saviours, depoliticize the complex labour and migration issues at stake, reinforce capitalist logics, and enable policy interventions that produce harm for migrants, sex workers, and others ostensibly being “rescued.”

One of Vice’s (2021) reports discusses one such ‘sting operation’ in a remote village on the border of Haiti and Dominican Republic, which used a psychic medium to try to locate a missing and, allegedly, trafficked child. What is striking here is not so much that there is poor behaviour in the anti-trafficking industry but that, after a detailed account of harmful and ineffective aspects of the OUR’s action, Vice reported that ‘OUR's future seems, by all appearances, to be bright’ with the organisation’s external funding (described as ‘contributions and grants’ and as reported to the USA’s Inland Revenue Service) increasing from less than a million US dollars in 2013 (OUR 2013) to almost 7 million in 2016 (OUR 2016), and 22 million in 2019 (OUR 2019). (1)

This is a striking example of one issue in the anti-trafficking movement: there is little apparent action taken to curtail ineffective or harmful activity whilst individuals and organisations are often satisfied to be ‘doing something’ or ‘doing more’ (of the same), even where there is no good reason to think that what they are doing is beneficial nor any robust appraisal of risks and harms from such anti-trafficking actions (see Mendel and Sharapov 2020). There is currently inadequate pushback against anti-trafficking activity that is actively harmful or is a waste of money that could be better spent elsewhere. With this in mind, we outline and discuss some key categories of ineffective and harmful anti-trafficking below.

Harmful enforcement-focussed anti-trafficking

An enforcement-focussed approach to anti-trafficking brings clear risks and potential harms. In a UK context, Mustafa Dawood’s case is one prominent example of this. In July 2018, UK media reported on a tragic death of Mustafa Dawood, a man who fled the Darfur region of Sudan, and who died in Newport,  Wales while trying to escape immigration officers who were carrying out a raid at a hand car wash (BBC 2018). In their critical appraisal of the state and immigration regimes’ role in creating human vulnerability to abuse and exploitation, Martins Junior and O’Connell Davison (2021) argue that people who the anti-slavery activists tend to describe as ‘modern slaves’ – making parallels to the transatlantic slavery – have far more similarities to maroons  - runway or fugitive enslaved persons within the context of the transatlantic slave trade. For Martins Junior and O’Connell Davison, ‘Mustafa Dawood risked and lost his life not because he was naïve or ill informed or had been told lies by employers to control him, but because he knew what would happen if he was found working in the car wash… Like many other migrants and asylum seekers found working illegally in hand car washes in recent years, the chances are he would have been taken to a detention centre and eventually deported’.

Nonetheless, enforcement against this type of activity is often uncritically seen as a virtuous, philanthropic thing to do: for example, the ‘anti-trafficking’ Car Wash app, where members of the public can report their suspicions about potential ‘modern slaves’ washing their cars, has been described as ‘a valuable weapon the public can wield in the fight against modern slavery’ (Motoring Research 2019). The narrow ways in which complex phenomena such as human trafficking, informality and forced labour are defined in law and operationalised in policy do not tell the whole story of exploitation, disadvantage and marginalisation (Sharapov 2017: 529). Many migrants (authorised or not) do work in exploitative situations and their migration journeys - which take place within a specific context of increasingly restrictive and racialised regimes of border control and migration management (FitzGerald 2016, Sharma 2017) – often make them more vulnerable to exploitation. However, efforts to ‘rescue’ them by raiding their places of work and detaining them and/or deporting them back to situations they often strongly desired to leave may cause greater harm and make them even more vulnerable. A focus on anti-trafficking enforcement as a solution to the varied exploitation faced by many workers may make it harder to see the potential of other approaches like enhancing the rights of migrant workers (or all workers, including citizens who are exploited without crossing any borders) or challenging increasingly restrictive border control and immigration policies.

Wasteful awareness-raising

Awareness-raising campaigns are often wasteful activities, where efficacy may be unknown or under-evaluated or – worse – where there is good evidence that they will not be useful. In her assessment of the wastefulness of human trafficking awareness campaigns, Dina Haynes (2019) argues that ‘it is now well established in marketing sciences that after seeing a ‘short spot’ on human trafficking – such as a public service advertisement or poster – a majority of people can feel subconsciously satisfied with what they have contributed to the cause, with no further action undertaken on their part. Awareness campaigns can therefore make people feel good without asking much if anything in terms of a real contribution.’ (2)

In June 2021, at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe‘s annual Alliance against Trafficking in Persons Conference, Helga Gayer, President of the Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (responsible for monitoring the implementation of the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings) noted that despite ‘numerous examples of countries which have targeted demand through awareness raising campaigns often organized by civil society… the impact of such measures is rarely measured’ (OSCE 2021). Referring to a project in Ireland, which attempted to raise awareness amongst potential buyers of sexual services of the harm caused by demand for sexual services, she noted that ‘…awareness raising campaigns alone are likely to produce limited results and changes of behaviour’ (ibid). The 2015 report by the European Commission on prevention initiatives on trafficking in human beings attempted to systematically evaluate the impact of anti-trafficking actions, including public awareness campaigns (European Commission 2015). This research examined 43 prevention initiatives projects, 85% of which included information and awareness-raising activities. The report identified significant gaps in evaluating the impact of these externally funded activities suggesting that the project-level evaluation was akin to monitoring the delivery of the project rather than assessing the extent to which the objectives (including increasing awareness) were achieved. The report noted that even though ‘…mass media campaigns may increase people’s awareness regarding the problems of THB…this may not necessarily be translated into changes in people’s daily and cultural behaviours’ (2015: 30).

It is unfortunate for charities and governments to use their resources on activities that either lack evidence of efficacy or where there is evidence of ineffectiveness.  Worse, ‘awareness-raising’ campaigns may actually contribute to public, practitioner and politicians’ ignorance about trafficking (Mendel and Sharapov 2016; 2020).There are a number of false assumptions underlying much awareness-raising: (a) that it is possible to reduce awareness and understanding of the complexity of human trafficking to a simple binary state of aware – unaware; (b) that such awareness translates into an equally ambiguous and ill-defined ‘behaviour change’ (from not buying ‘fast fashion’ items to curbing one’s own ‘sexual addictions’); and (c) that such behaviour change would necessarily lead to less reliance on exploitative labour, even in the absence of changes to structural relations of labour exploitation within the context of increasingly globalised neoliberal economies (Sharapov et al 2019).

Further critical accounts/research exist on the ‘ideal victims’/’ideal criminals’ tropes underlying much of the anti-trafficking awareness-raising campaigns. However, the aforementioned assumption that awareness-raising is intrinsically virtuous means there is very little research available on the potential harms of such awareness raising: from obfuscating the true nature of exploitative relations in the minds of ‘consumer-citizens’ (Mendel and Sharapov 2020; Sharapov 2016) to more concrete harms. Sardina (2019), for example, discusses a range of dangerous and damaging impacts of particular types of anti-trafficking awareness-raising on those ‘who labour in alternative economies that the laws do not protect’, including sex workers. Discussing the impact of awareness campaigns within the context of child domestic work in South-West Nigeria, Olayiwola (2019) argues that: ‘By ignoring such structural constraints, awareness creation creates doubts and uncertainties for the general public about the difficulties faced by children in domestic service and/or their parents’.

Given the above, there should be considerable caution about whether money or resources used in awareness-raising are likely to have any benefit, and there is a need to move from the common assumption that awareness-raising is a ‘good thing to do’ to the presumption that awareness-raising in general is probably not a useful activity. While particular awareness-raising activities may be beneficial (for example, to focus on a particular target audience), this utility is something that should be evidenced rather than simply assumed. Where awareness-raising is still done, this should be combined with a needs analysis and with independent monitoring and assessment of impacts – to mitigate the high risk of waste and to inform future practice. To generate a sector-wide guide to good and poor practice, there should be a presumption in favour of making these assessments public. However, doing research should not be used as a justification for continuing with awareness-raising where there is already good evidence that it is ineffective.

Poor legislative practice: FOSTA-SESTA

FOSTA-SESTA is a particularly striking example of poor practice, in that the legislation offers an inversion of what is commonly seen as good practice in the development and implementation of evidence-informed policy. In the US, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) became law in 2018; their “stated goal was to reduce human trafficking by amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and holding Internet platforms accountable for the content their users post” (Blunt and Wolf 2020). The legislation was presented as targeting websites’ and platforms’ alleged facilitating of and profiting from sex trafficking. Musto et al. (2021: 3) describe it as “the latest legislative iteration of the U.S. anti-trafficking movement’s enduring neo-abolitionist and sexual humanitarian approach refashioned in networked form”. Unsurprisingly, given this history, harms from this legislation were predicted prior to its passage. As Musto et al. (2021: 2) note, criticisms of the dominant narrative around the legislation were prominently made, and opponents of the legislation organised effectively. Whereas the hope is that evidence-informed policy making can review the existing evidence and respond to what is known about the likely impacts of policy change, in the case of FOSTA/SESTA there was clear evidence of harm from the proposed legislation and a lack of plausible ways in which this legislation might effectively challenge sex trafficking or sexual exploitation. Nonetheless, FOSTA/SESTA became law with bipartisan political support.

By making it possible to prosecute websites for engaging “in the promotion or facilitation of prostitution” or facilitating “traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims”, this legislation has had considerable negative impact on sex workers in the US and elsewhere. Following the law’s passage – and even before its full implementation – sex workers felt its impact as websites began to eliminate platforms previously used to advertise services. For example, YourDominatrix.com stopped “U.S. listings, with a note saying this was ‘due to a recent bill passed by Congress’” (McCormick, 2018) (3). Blunt and Wolf’s (2020) participatory research with and survey of sex workers found a number of harms, including: reduced income and more financial instability; harm reduction (including the use of tools like ‘bad date’ lists) becoming more difficult; and both online communities and financial technologies becoming more inaccessible. In ethnographic work that reflects on the harms of FOSTA/SESTA and other law and policy, Musto et al. (2021: 15) argue that “there is an inversely proportional relationship between the criminalization faced by migrant sex workers and their ability to access justice, assert their rights, and live their lives”. In contrast to the evidence of harm, there is no convincing evidence of this legislation being an effective response to sex trafficking or exploitation, and the impacts noted above make sex workers more vulnerable to exploitation.

In evidence-informed policy making, one would hope that legislation and policy is evaluated after implementation – so that benefits and harms can be assessed, and this can inform practice elsewhere. However, despite evidence of harm, FOSTA/SESTA is often presented in a positive way (indeed, the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation sees this as something to emulate). In an odd kind of inversion of conventional hopes of how evidence might inform policy, we see legislation implemented and presented as an example to emulate despite clear evidence that it would be and has been harmful and ineffective. The circles of anti-trafficking action expand through the failure of legislation to meet its stated goals.

Poor use of technology: anti-trafficking apps

Technology is often used badly in anti-trafficking. Anti-trafficking apps are one striking example of this. In 2017, we analysed 63 mobiles applications (apps) which could be described as anti-trafficking apps (Mendel and Sharapov 2020). We found that ‘a significant number of apps (some of which received public funding)…had a very small number of downloads; a lot of apps also did not work, which often involved important functionality like “report trafficking” forms being out-of-date. It was often unclear what apps were aiming to achieve beyond things that, for example, a well-designed website might do. " It is quite understandable that some app launches fail, and some projects do not develop as hoped. However, we found issues in most of the apps in our sample, and found no evidence of appraisal of such failure or any evidence of critical actions taken in response to this.  We also found that the functionality of apps varied with some apps offering a variety of features, including reporting suspected victims of trafficking or traffickers (including photo uploads) with very little information provided on what happens with this information, where the data are stored, processed and who these data are passed on to.

In reviewing this hodgepodge of apps, we raised the questions of potential harm from technical responses to trafficking. For example, the TraffickCam app is promoted as a way of ‘rescuing’ trafficked people by identifying hotel rooms in online adverts for sexual services. However, there are concerns that this might be used against sex workers (Romero-Alston et al. 2021: 7). One might also note that – even where the app (like TraffickCam or CarWash) may lead law enforcement agencies to trafficked people – it is far from clear that this would be to their benefit. Despite the proclamations of its unwavering commitment to justice and human rights and combatting ‘modern slavery’, the UK Government’s approach towards identified victims of trafficking can be summarised as: ‘Liberate’ and Deport. As of May 2021, ‘Nearly 3,000 people identified as potential victims of trafficking [in the UK] have been detained since 2019 due to their immigration status… In law, detention may be used only when there is the intention to remove a person from the UK’ (Taylor 2021). Back in 2003, the English Collective of Prostitutes suggested that ‘…anti-trafficking legislation and initiatives are most often used to deport women’ (ECP 2003). The situation has since worsened, with the number of deportations set to increase following the recent approval of changes to the Home Office rules which made it easier for the UK immigration enforcement to detain (and deport) trafficking victims. More needs to be done to challenge the purported power of technology to liberate ‘slaves’ and to incarcerate ‘criminals’ by examining the real damage done by such technology in the name of narrow yet grant-generating interpretation of human trafficking as ‘slave trade’.

The increasing number of problematic practices, outcomes, activities associated with anti-trafficking work has not yet been accompanied by any increase in appraisal of, accountability for and responsibility for its outcomes. Indeed, as discussed above, there is sometimes an odd type of inversion of evidence-informed policy making where the failures of anti-trafficking are used to argue for its expansion. We argue elsewhere that understandings of trafficking in policy discourses often focus too much on the micro- and meso-scale of crime and victimisation, without considering broader structural aspects of exploitation (Mendel and Sharapov 2016). However, what remains striking here is that ineffective and harmful anti-trafficking takes place at scales ranging from very local awareness-raising or small charities releasing an app, to legislation and policy like FOSTA-SESTA with a major international impact. Such activity is able to expand regardless of – and sometimes facilitated by – its failures. Critical anti-trafficking thus also needs to operate on and critique poor practice across a broad range of scales.

Defund the anti-trafficking industry

There is currently a resurgence of interest in moves to defund the police, and in abolitionist approaches to policing and the broader criminal justice system (see for example Akbar 2020; Chua 2020; Coyle and Schwept 2018; Davis 2005; Gilmore 2007; Herzing and Ontiveros 2011; McDowell and Fernandez 2018; Monford and Taylor 2021). Vitale‘s (2017: chapter 6) analysis of modern policing as a tool of social control sets out a detailed account of the failures of policing sex work and the failures of police action to target sex trafficking. Mac and Smith (2020: 488) go beyond a call for defunding sex work-specific policing and revoking sex work-specific laws to argue that ‘[w]here police still retain power over sex workers via routes other than prostitution law (for example, the prosecution of migrants or those in possession of drugs), they abuse it’. Vitale (2017: 96) draws attention to how the evolving models of policing ‘inflict tremendous harm on some of the most vulnerable people in our society’ and calls for these areas of policing to be defunded. Building on this work on defunding and abolition, we would argue for less reliance on law enforcement responses to human trafficking and broader exploitation: there is considerable risk of harm, and such responses cannot address structural issues which lead to exploitation. Alongside this, though, we would also emphasise that community-based approaches do not necessarily offer a ‘good’ solution to these issues. In the context of anti-trafficking, we would argue for a move beyond a focus on defunding the police – instead, the aim should be to defund much anti-trafficking policing (including by non-police actors) and other ineffective and/or harmful anti-trafficking activity. The aim should be to defund the anti-trafficking industry.

Firstly, this should mean a defunding of ineffective and harmful enforcement-based anti-trafficking. In particular, a raids-based approach lacks evidence of efficacy and can lead to state and other actors directly deploying violence against trafficked and exploited people. The risks of this approach extend to the death of the people being ‘rescued’ or, more commonly, the detention and deportation of people in ways that can worsen their situation. Given the significant risk of harm – alongside the expensive nature of much enforcement – particularly robust evidence of benefit should be required before money is spent on such enforcement.

Secondly, where organisations are currently using public and/or charitable money for awareness raising and doing so in ineffective and/or harmful ways, there is no reason to continue funding such activity. We suggest that awareness-raising should largely be deprioritised; where awareness-raising is needed, the poor previous record of many anti-trafficking organisations should be a strong argument against them receiving funds to do this work.  Any future awareness-raising should include focus on the complexity of individual circumstances and individual responses to the structural inequality, poverty and discrimination which push individuals into exploitation. The priority target groups for this type of awareness campaigns should not be the amorphous ‘general public’ but groups such as health and medical professionals, judicial authorities, social services – which are often the key points of contact for individuals who need support and assistance – or populations particularly vulnerable to trafficking.  

Thirdly, public money should not be used to develop and implement new anti-trafficking laws and policies without first having good reason to think that they will work. The resources poured into developing and implementing FOSTA/SESTA have only succeeded in making things worse for vulnerable groups. There is also a significant opportunity cost here. There are real possibilities for legislation to challenge exploitative working conditions in the US and/or to improve conditions for sex workers – for example, legislation might strengthen trade union rights, decriminalise sex work, or try using approaches such as a basic income to address financial vulnerability – but instead time in the Senate and Congress was used to make things worse.

Additionally, much of the development and deployment of anti-trafficking technology should be defunded. A lot of this is intended (even if it works exactly as hoped) to be used for ineffective or harmful activity like the raids or awareness-raising discussed above. Moreover, as we found when looking at anti-trafficking apps, much anti-trafficking technology simply does not work well – for example, an awareness-raising app that almost no-one uses is not going to work even just to raise awareness. The poor design of some apps risks serious harms (for example, the leak of sensitive information). There is a real need to critically appraise the likely harms and benefits of technologies such as apps before spending money on them, to think about the broader social context of the technologies, and to consider whether this is the most effective use of the money. While there clearly are opportunities to use technology to challenge exploitation, one should also be aware of the risk of being seduced by more novel and ‘exciting’ technical solutions to issues where a lower-tech solution might be more effective. It remains the case that, as Musto and boyd (2014:477) argue, addressing exploitation “requires far more low-tech solutions; specifically, political will and agitation for redistributive justice, the hardest assets to find”.

While we argue for defunding the anti-trafficking industry, this does not mean that we think less money or less effort should go towards addressing exploitation and vulnerability. Indeed, people are made vulnerable to exploitation in ways which need to be addressed through redistributive justice, and we support broader social campaigns to challenge exploitation, strengthen workers’ and migrants’ rights and resist the ways that discrimination and stigma can make some groups more vulnerable. Some of this funding might be redistributed to more effective anti-trafficking organisations and activities – for example, some of the projects by La Strada International which focus on specific groups for a specific purpose. In its ‘Rights at Work!’ project (2017), the key focus was on trade unions and labour organisations to help them better identify and reach precarious sectors with low levels of labour organisation, as an anti-trafficking prevention measure. Some of this funding might go to address problems of vulnerability and exploitation in ways that are not framed as anti-trafficking – for example, to fund activists protecting workers’ rights, or as part of broader redistributive efforts to address financial vulnerability (such as cash transfers to impoverished people and communities, or basic income initiatives).

Conclusion

The anti-trafficking industry has been able to expand in spite of – and sometimes because of – a lack of evidence of efficacy for many practices, and clear evidence of harm. In an inversion of evidence-informed policy processes, policies such as FOSTA/SESTA are implemented despite prior evidence that they are likely to be worse-than-useless; when post-implementation evaluations show that these policies are harmful, the fact of their implementation is used to argue for these policies to be emulated elsewhere. Such a miserable situation demands radical responses.

As a first step, the anti-trafficking industry should be defunded. Alongside this – and using the money saved by this defunding – there should be a refunding of more effective responses to exploitation: both through more critical and evidence-based anti-trafficking, and through activity to challenge exploitation that is not framed as anti-trafficking. Thakor and boyd (2013: 284) note the growth of anti-trafficking networks, while Musto et al. (2021) argue that this is leading to ‘Networked Moral Gentrification and Sexual Humanitarian Creep’. A strong and well-networked critical anti-trafficking sector will be important to challenge these aspects of the networked anti-trafficking industry.

Sadly, in recent decades major parts of the anti-trafficking industry – and many large anti-trafficking organisations - have achieved little, and have particularly failed to challenge root causes of trafficking such as inequality, poverty, violence and discrimination. Alongside trying to determine what works in anti-trafficking, there is a real need for critical reflection on this substantial experience of (and continuing investment into) failure – in order to determine what does not work, and to determine whether some approaches are so unpromising that further research into them would be wasteful and unethical. Echoing practices around evidence-based medicine, there is a real need for ‘do not do’ lists in anti-trafficking.

More broadly, we would restate our argument (Mendel and Sharapov 2016) for more emphasis on addressing structural aspects of exploitation. No amount of awareness raising or enforcement could hope to address the way that international capitalism impoverishes many and relies on exploitative working conditions. Defunding the anti-trafficking industry should absolutely not be used to shift focus away from exploitation nor to move resources away from challenging exploitation; instead, this defunding needs to open up space for more politically radical and economically redistributive responses to exploitation.

Jonathan is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Dundee. He researches questions around policy, information and evidence, with a particular focus on online spaces. Recent and ongoing projects investigate online state surveillance, the right of access to environmental information, and engagement between police and seldom heard communities. Jonathan’s work on human trafficking (co-authored with Kiril Sharapov) has developed agnotological approaches to studying technology, trafficking and anti-trafficking, throughdiscussing topics such as anti-trafficking apps and docufictions.

Kiril is Associate Professor at the School of Applied Sciences, Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland, Associate Director at the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science, and Convenor of the Migration and Mobilities Research Network. He is a scholar of forced migration and is recognised internationally for his research on public understanding of trafficking in human beings. In 2013 - 2014, he undertook a European Union funded study (FP7) to explore public understanding of human trafficking in Ukraine, Hungary and the United Kingdom generating, for the first time ever, representative datasets of how the general public in these three countries understand and respond to the phenomena of human trafficking. His subsequent work (co-authored with Jonathan Mendel) interrogated media and policy representations of human trafficking and, recently, its online dimensions. As a human rights activist and advocate, he is currently involved in three research projects investigating the impact of the pandemic on the most vulnerable communities: refugees and asylum seekers in the UK housed in temporary accommodation, Syrian refugees in Scotland, and internally displaced people with disabilities in Ukraine.

Photo by Johannes Plenio from Pexels

Notes

(1) It is possible that subsequent critical coverage may impact OUR’s future ‘success’, but this does not currently appear to have had this impact (see here).

(2) We argue (Sharapov and Mendel 2018) that the idea of interpassivity is helpful for understanding some anti-trafficking activity – people feel reassured that something or someone else (whether an app or a video or a poster or a ‘rescuer’) is active in their place, in much the same way as one might feel satisfied by owning but not viewing a DVD, as if the DVD player watches it in one’s place.  This might be pleasant for the viewer of an anti-trafficking campaign, but is of no wider public benefit and is a poor use of government or charity funds.

(3) See Mendel and Sharapov (2020) and Peterson et al. (2019).

Dante showed us the pathway out of the Ukraine war. Dante anticipated both federalism and democracy. And Dante showed us how someday humanity might abolish war.

It’s difficult to imagine any sort of connection between the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and something that occurred in an unremarkable bedroom in Italy almost exactly 700 years prior. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the deep historical connections between Russia and Ukraine, at many times one and the same state, during the preceding seven centuries. But last autumn marked the 700th anniversary of the death of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, from malaria, in Ravenna, on September 14, 1321. His bones lie there still.

And though it’s almost wholly unknown today, Dante was arguably the first great political philosopher to make a systematic case that all wars between nations might someday be eliminated entirely, and that it is within the power of human ingenuity to cast war forever onto the rubble heap of history. Dante showed us the pathway out of the Ukraine war. Dante anticipated both federalism and democracy.

And Dante showed us how someday humanity might abolish war.

The great poet, of course, is considered one of the brightest stars in the firmament of humanity because of his immortal poem, “The Divine Comedy.” Yet another wonderful new translation just arrived this year from the poet Mary Jo Bang. It contains three parts: “Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” and “Paradiso.” It’s universally held up as one of the most important works of literature in history. It’s deemed one of the primary progenitors of the Renaissance. It puts on display the full spectrum of human behavior, from dark depravity to divine benevolence—and suggests that any one of us can journey from the one to the other. Its poetic rhythms and deployment of vivid imagery are spellbinding. And because he wrote in the Italian dialect of the Florence of his day, Dante is considered today no less than the “Father of the Italian Language.”

And though his distant heirs today likely receive zero royalties, “Dante’s Inferno” has even been made into a wildly-popular video game as well.

But if one considers not just literary excellence but also historical impact, it may be, in the very long run, that another more obscure work by Dante will provide humankind with an even greater tangible consequence. Because in a work called “De Monarchia,” (“On Monarchy”)—this one written in Latin in 1313—Dante put forth one singular grand idea about how the human race as a whole might one day organize its affairs. And it appears to be the very first work of literature to present in a comprehensive, coherent, and compelling fashion a solution to the problem of war. He called it “world government.”

It is difficult to understand why Dante’s manifesto about the political unification of humanity is so wholly unknown today. (Pope John XXII’s decree in 1329 that it be cast into the flames in the public square of Bologna might have something to do with that.) Strobe Talbott expressed his exasperation about this obscurity in his 2008 book “The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation.” Talbott was Bill Clinton’s Rhodes Scholar housemate at Oxford, a longtime TIME magazine correspondent, the number two State Department official for most of the Clinton administration, and president of the Brookings Institution think tank from 2002-2017. His book is an eloquent narrative history of the world state as a philosophical idea. And Talbott recalls and laments a “high-brow international conference in Venice,” where his erudite Italian hosts could recite long passages of “The Divine Comedy” from memory, but had not even heard of “De Monarchia”!

Dante concerns himself in Books Two and Three of “De Monarchia” with an issue that preoccupied many in 14th-century Europe—the political power struggle between various secular rulers and the pope of the Roman Catholic Church. Dante in these two books (and in “The Divine Comedy” as well) clearly came down on the side of the former, arguing that while the pope was responsible for the fate of one’s eternal soul, other individuals and institutions should govern our earthly pursuits. This writing is seen by many scholars as one of the important early lodestars that led finally to the separation of church and state in much of the world five centuries or so down the road.

In Book One, however, Dante concerns himself instead with the political power struggle between those autonomous secular rulers—and the perpetual state of war, or preparation for war, that prevailed among them all.

Speaking to His Own Age and Speaking to Us

Did Dante himself believe that this small work might prove someday even more consequential than “The Divine Comedy”? The opening page of “De Monarchia” suggests as much.

“If I have seen further,” said Isaac Newton in a 1675 letter to the scientist Robert Hooke, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” While the very first line of Dante’s “De Monarchia” is not nearly as well-known as Newton’s famous tribute to the scientific geniuses who came before him, it expresses much the same sentiment: “All men whose higher nature has endowed them with a love of truth obviously have the greatest interest in working for posterity, so that in return for the patrimony provided for them by their predecessors’ labors they may make provision for the patrimony of future generations.”

(While Dante refers to “men” and “mankind” throughout this work, today in a similar context we use terms like “people” and “humankind.” Dante quite obviously means the latter, but nevertheless I will quote the text accurately whenever the former appears.)

Dante’s sentence, indeed, is richer and more elaborate than Newton’s. (Both have been called perhaps the smartest humans ever to walk the Earth—though we might qualify that to recognize the 99% of all who ever lived, past and present, never given the opportunity to develop any of their intellectual gifts at all.) Not only do we “stand on the shoulders” of those who have gone before us, but also we hold living obligations to these departed souls. (And as we will see, Dante name checks several of his intellectual predecessors in “De Monarchia.”) To honor what they have provided to us, we must provide them with something “in return.” How might we do that? By taking the torch they have passed forward to us, says Dante, by holding it aloft and endeavoring to make it burn even more robustly, and by handing it off then to those who will come after us.

It is hard to imagine a more powerful definition of a meaningful life than that.

Dante then lays out how he proposes, in “De Monarchia,” to contribute to “the public weal.” Not for him a mere elaboration upon “a theorem in Euclid,” or yet another exploration of “true happiness which Aristotle has already shown,” or extolling “old age as Cicero did.” No, says Dante, “I wish not to be charged with burying my talent … [So] I endeavor … to bear fruit by publishing truths that have not been attempted by others.” And which uncultivated verity does he choose?

“The knowledge of a single temporal government over mankind is most important and least explored … (and) has been neglected by all.”

And then, Dante says something remarkable for its open display of abundant ambition.

“I therefore propose to drag it from its hiding place, in order that my alertness … may bring me the glory of being the first to win this great prize.”

Hardly anyone would openly proclaim such a thing today. Public modesty is the fashion of our age. One invariably balks when asked to assess one’s own contributions in most any endeavor. Are you the greatest shooter of a basketball of all time Stephen Curry? “That’s for others to judge.” Many writers, thinkers, and actors in many arenas may privately hope or believe that their contributions to the larger world, whatever they may be, may “bring them the glory.” But no one openly says so.

Why did Dante? Perhaps an extravagant confidence or even cockiness was not frowned upon then and there, in the same way as here and now. Perhaps he refused to engage in what today we call “false modesty.” Or perhaps Dante simply possessed such conceit in a greater quantity than almost anyone alive today. As the ancient schoolyard taunt goes: “It ain’t bragging if it’s true.” Perhaps Dante recognized that his literary and creative achievements would remain as luminescent as anyone who has ever lived.

And yet, seven centuries on, it is undeniable that “De Monarchia” failed to bring Dante any kind of glory whatsoever. His openly stated aspiration remains wholly unfulfilled. Many educated and literate individuals in the 21st century have heard of “The Divine Comedy.” Some of those have read it from beginning to end. A few of them have even fully understood it. (I do not count myself among the latter.) But today, 700 years later, virtually no one thinks of Dante as “the first to win the great prize” of revealing to the world the Big Idea that world government might banish war from the human condition forever. As Strobe Talbott discovered, hardly anyone, even among the well-read and privileged, has even ever heard of “De Monarchia.” And our human race doesn’t seem a whole lot closer to bringing about “a single temporal government over mankind” today than we were when Dante died 700 years ago.

But what if we fast forward another seven centuries, let’s say to the year 2722? It doesn’t strike one as wholly fanciful to suppose that humanity by then will have put war behind itself, gotten a grip on our greatest transnational challenges (climate change paramount but hardly alone among them), and somehow inaugurated the spiritual, political and constitutional unification of humankind. One might even posit that if we don’t manage somehow to move in that direction long before then, and learn how to manage as a whole the complex affairs of our one human race, seven centuries from now we may not find any descendants of ours around at all.

But if we do? Then perhaps it is not too farfetched to suppose that those denizens of a future age will see “De Monarchia” as not just a towering literary achievement like “The Divine Comedy,” but a work of literature that, in the very long run, helped to move human history in the direction of its destiny.

Why a World Government?

The central idea of Dante’s “De Monarchia,” like so much of the literature on the basic causes of peace and war that followed in subsequent centuries, is the distinction between law and anarchy. Dante observes that while there are laws that govern relations within individual political communities, no such laws exist to govern relations among political communities. The result of the absence of such enforceable law is a continual state of war between those separate political communities. Such a state was defined by Dante in much the same way as it would be a couple of centuries later by Thomas Hobbes and many others: not just violent conflict, but the absolute necessity in the absence of a superior legal order to constantly prepare for the next violent conflict to come.

And yet, Dante asks, why can’t there be laws on that largest level of human community? If we could find a way to establish the world rule of law—through the establishment of world government—we would bring about the end of that state of perpetual war.

Dante signals the logical case he intends to construct with the titles of his opening chapters. “The goal of human civilization [Chapter 2] … is the realization of man’s ability to grow in intelligence [Chapter 3]. The best means toward this end is universal peace [Chapter 4]. To achieve this state of universal well-being a single world government is necessary [Chapter 5].” “De Monarchia” consists of 16 such focused individual chapters. He concludes one with this statement: “Hence it follows that mankind lives best under a single government, and therefore that such a government is necessary for the well-being of the world.” As if he is teaching a class on symbolic logic to a room full of college undergraduates, Dante ends almost every one of the 16 chapters with a similar forthright assertion.

No hidden meanings in parables that one must struggle to puzzle out. No camels passing through the eye of a needle. Dante is convinced that a single world state could bring about permanent world peace. And in “De Monarchia” he sets out not just to convince us of that but to “prove” his assertion—a word he uses repeatedly throughout his manuscript.

Dante launches directly into illuminating the logic of anarchy in the absence of higher authority. Conflict, Dante tells us, is inevitable in human relations. This is true of interactions between both individuals and groups. Without some way to resolve such conflicts in a peaceful manner, they likely will be—as they have been throughout all history—settled in a less-peaceful manner.

Between any two governments, neither of which is in any way subordinate to the other, contention can arise … Therefore there should be adjudication between them … a third and wider power which can rule both within its own jurisdiction. … We must arrive at a first and supreme judge for whom all contentions are judiciable … and this will be our world governor or emperor.

Now as terrifying as the phrase “world emperor” might seem, as quick as it might be to summon images of a universal Stalin or Hitler or Genghis, consider closely the words that Dante deploys in this passage: “judge,” “jurisdiction,” “judiciable contentions.” The possibility of a world government becoming a global dictatorship is not one to be just casually dismissed. But it’s a danger that Dante clearly wanted to forestall. How can we know that?

Because astonishingly, in “De Monarchia,” nearly 500 years before the American and French Revolutions, Dante presaged both the republican principles and the federative structures that most of the nations of the world have adopted in our own age.

No World Tyranny, But a Carefully-Balanced World Authority

“It should be clearly understood that not every little regulation for every city could come directly from the world government … nations, states, and cities have their own internal concerns which require special laws.”

Obviously, it is those on the ground, in those localities, who are best acquainted with those local concerns—and best equipped to devise the consequent necessary “little regulations.” Seven centuries later, we call that “subsidiarity” or “federalism.”

And who, in those nations, states and cities, should be devising and applying those special laws? Local leaders, says Dante, “raised to office by the consent of others.” Seven centuries later, we call that “democracy.”

And when Dante offers up a couple of examples to illustrate his thesis, he reveals a bit of what the people of his own time and place knew about world geography a couple of centuries before Columbus. The “Scythians” he writes, must govern themselves in certain ways because of an “almost intolerable, freezing cold.” “Garamantes,” on the other hand, choose very different practices because they live “below the equinoctial circle, where daylight and dark of night are always balanced, and where the excessive heat makes clothes unendurable.”

Take note, 21st-century conservative Christians who, in the view of some, concern themselves excessively with issues of “public morality.” Apparently, according to arguably the greatest of all medieval Christian thinkers, no world government should ever ban public nudity!

Those “Scythians” lived in what we would describe as the former Soviet Union, in the seemingly endless forests and steppes to the north and east of the Black Sea, and are referred to often in Greco-Roman times. The reference to the “Garamantes” is a bit trickier. They were a civilization that first appeared in modern-day Libya about 1000 BCE. Yet they had long since disappeared by Dante’s day. Moreover, “equinoctial circle” is another term for the equator, and Dante indicates as much by his clear understanding of the “balance” between day and night. The equator, of course, runs not through the Libya of today, but the heart of Africa a good 1000 miles to the south. So Dante appears to be referring to sub-Saharan Africans, which Italians in the early-14th century knew very little about. But enough, presumably, to insist that if they were someday to be incorporated into a world state, they should be allowed to devise their own “special laws” for their own “internal concerns!”

And yet, these local customs and governing mechanisms, Dante makes clear, would have to be consistent with the larger laws of the world state. And as example for this point the great poet summons Moses. The best guess of modern historians is that the Jewish patriarch lived roughly 1300 BCE. But 2600 years later, Dante informs us that Moses skillfully sustained the same kind of delicate poise that must prevail in a future world state: “Moses followed this pattern in the law which he composed, for having chosen the chiefs of the several tribes, he left them the lesser judgements, reserving to himself alone the higher and more general.”

This, we might posit, is why Moses instructed his followers to obey ten commandments, not ten thousand. The chiefs, however, in rendering those “lesser” judgements, must act consistently with those ten. “These common norms,” says Dante, “were then used by the tribal chiefs according to their special needs” (emphasis added).

The Goal of Human Endeavor

Like so many later thinkers about the world government idea, Dante sees it hardly as an end in itself—glorious though perpetual peace might seem to our eternally warring world—but a means to a grander end still. In this regard he is much like H.G. Wells, who six centuries later would forecast that what he called “a federation of all humanity” would bring about “a new phase in human history.” What is that grander end for Dante?

“This goal is proved to be the realization of man’s ability to grow in intelligence.”

Now many today would protest immediately that so much else needs to be done, for so many in our world of nearly eight billion souls, before we can start tutoring them on the most arcane points of philosophy or mathematics or high art. A habitable planet that hasn’t been driven completely haywire by climate change. Clean air. Clean water. Healthy food. Adequate, comfortable, perhaps even beautiful places to live. Safety, especially for the young, from sexual abuse. Safety for everyone from violence and fear of physical assault. An ability to make a living, to receive meaningful compensation for an honest day’s labor. An opportunity to live a life of dignity and purpose. Perhaps even a chance to pursue one’s dreams.

Yet, though Dante doesn’t put it in those terms, one feels certain that he would agree. All these things are necessary and desirable, and for Dante, the bedrock variable that allows any individual to pursue such things is the opportunity “to grow in intelligence.”

Moreover, Dante draws a distinction between particular individuals expanding their knowledge, and the human race as a whole doing much the same thing. “There is some proper function for the whole of mankind as an organized multitude which cannot be achieved by any single man, or family, or neighborhood, or city, or state … There must be a multitude … through whom this whole power can be actualized.”

Now it is certainly not the case today that there is absolutely no cross-border intellectual collaboration of any kind. But plenty of such potential collaborations are constrained by international borders and conflict. Moreover, so much intellectual effort gets diverted away from international collaboration and diverted instead into national competition—most especially in the military and “national security” realms. When that kind of rivalry is eliminated forever, says Dante, it will be not just individuals, but the collective global brain, which can then move toward its highest potential in ways we probably cannot begin to imagine.

So how do individuals often achieve their own intellectual enhancement, and enlargement, and perhaps even original breakthroughs? And how might humanity do the same? Dante’s answer seems spectacularly obvious: “Since individual men find that they grow in prudence and wisdom when they can sit quietly, it is evident that mankind, too, is most free and easy to carry on its work when it enjoys the quiet and tranquility of peace.”

Peace and quiet. When we as individuals can find some, our brains begin to clear, our minds begin to work, and sometimes our creativity begins to soar. It sounds so simple, and yet, for so many, it is so often elusive. Dante, who was of course a devout Christian, summons the heritage of Christianity to make the point. Yet his analysis is every bit as relevant for non-Christians and non-believers in any kind of deity alike.

The good news from the shepherds, Dante says, was “not of riches, nor pleasures, nor honors, nor long life, nor health, nor strength, nor beauty.” It was instead, he insists, quoting from the Book of Luke, “peace to men of good will.” Indeed, says Dante, the standard greeting given by Jesus Christ was “peace be with you.” He calls it “the supreme salutation.” It is the greeting that the disciples of Jesus adopted as their own. And it is the same greeting that all Roman Catholics today, about 2/3 of the way through each Sunday mass, are asked to give to their fellow parishioners sitting around them in the adjacent pews.

We often attain our highest and best moments, and our greatest achievements, when we can sit down and sit still. Surely, says Dante, if all the human race, for the first time in history, could similarly “sit quietly,” and not have to live perpetually in fear of conquest, and not have to concern itself with the requirements of military security, this year and next year and every year after that, the same will be true “for the whole of mankind as an organized multitude.”

Step by step, almost as if he is constructing a mathematical theorem, Dante has built the road to the redemption of humanity. World government will bring universal peace. Such peace will bring the quiet life. That quiet life, for human individuals and the human race alike, will bring a new and unprecedented “growth in intelligence.” And that growth will generate a creative spark that will allow at last the full unfolding of the capacities of the human mind, and the full flowering of human civilization.

Dante, it seems, in drawing the analogy between quiet human beings and a quiet human race, crafted for us in “De Monarchia” a parallel of perfection.

The Shoulders of Giants

Moses is not the only intellectual predecessor summoned by Dante in “De Monarchia.” The late University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins (who also chaired the 1948 “Committee to Frame a World Constitution”) spoke often of “the great conversation”—great minds engaging each other about great ideas across the gulf of many centuries. In this spirit Dante repeatedly cites Aristotle (in both “De Monarchia” and “The Divine Comedy”), 16 centuries prior, to drive home his points. (He calls him simply, as did others during the Middle Ages, “The Philosopher.”)

“Things hate to be in disorder,” says Dante quoting Aristotle, “but a plurality of authorities is disorder; therefore, authority is single.” But when one goes in search of this passage in Aristotle, and finds it in his “Metaphysics,” we see that the philosopher there is himself quoting Homer from 

“The Iliad”—which as best we know was written four or five centuries before Aristotle. (Or, more precisely, that’s when “The Iliad” was written down, recording oral traditions that originated perhaps four or five centuries earlier than that!)

Now the phrase “authority is single” is most problematic when expressed in the present tense. Authority was certainly not “single” in the lands around the Aegean Sea circa 1200 or 1300 BCE, otherwise there would have been no dreadful war between the Mycenaean Greeks and the Trojans over a beguiling woman named Helen. Authority was certainly not “single” in the lands of the Peloponnesus during Aristotle’s lifetime (384 to 322 BCE), otherwise there would have been no catastrophic war between Athens and Sparta just a few decades before Aristotle was born. (Although before Aristotle died a strong single authority was imposed on Ancient Greece, and far beyond, by the conquests of his own student Alexander the Great in 335 BCE—possibly suggesting why this passage appeared in the “Metaphysics.”)

So what if we take the liberty of altering the text from the present to the future tense? What if we suppose that the sentence might have been intended—possibly by Homer, perhaps by Aristotle, and almost certainly seen in its context by Dante—as prescription rather than description? “Things hate to be in disorder, but a plurality of authorities is disorder,” perhaps sang some ancient bard, perhaps as long as 33 centuries ago, perhaps as she or he observed the denizens of the Aegean world slaughtering each other incessantly during the grueling and protracted Trojan War. “Therefore authority,” she or he pleaded, “must someday become single.”

Was this single sentence merely a throwaway line in “The Iliad”? Perhaps. And yet, one of our human heritage’s great geniuses, Aristotle, found it important enough to quote five centuries later. And another great genius, Dante, chose to highlight it again 16 centuries after that. So perhaps it is not too much of a stretch for us to suppose that the first glimmer of the idea that a “single authority” can bring an end to war appeared in the first known work of Western literature, Homer’s “Iliad”—which, as every undergraduate learns in World Civilization 101, is a piece of literature quintessentially about the human condition during the (so far) eternal times of war.

But Can it Ever Happen? Dante Says Yes, Because Once it Did Happen

Dante brings Book One of “De Monarchia” to a close with the same kind of poetic brilliance and cri de coeur he displayed in “The Divine Comedy,” which has brought him, if not the glory of delivering eternal world peace to all subsequent generations, nonetheless still an eternal fame. And he does so by insisting that his vision is the opposite of some forever unattainable utopia—because in fact it had already once come to pass. When? During the days of Pax Romana.

Dante was likely not blind to the flaws and depredations of Ancient Rome. He certainly knew of the cruelties of slavery (which of course were not unique in the ancient world to Rome). He certainly knew that in that age (as well as in Dante’s), women almost never obtained the same kind of opportunities to develop their minds and lead fulfilling meaningful lives as (some) men. He certainly knew that the magnificent edifice of the Roman Empire had been constructed by the hard hammer of Roman conquest, unfolding over the course of several centuries.

And yet the peace that resulted within that vast empire, brought about by a single unified political authority, seems to Dante to be no less than the greatest achievement in all of human history.

During the Augustan Empire there prevailed a maximum of world peace … [but] miseries have overtaken man since we departed from that golden age. … For if we recall all the ages and conditions of men … we shall find that not until the time of Augustus was there a complete and single world government which pacified the world. That in his time mankind enjoyed the blessing of universal peace and tranquility is the testimony of all historians.

Now we must acknowledge that Dante uses terms here that he undoubtedly knew to be hyperbolic. “Pacified the world.” “Mankind.” “A complete and single world government.” Obviously Roman rule and its consequent Pax Romana did not extend over the entire planet. And while Dante certainly didn’t know of the existence of the Americas, and probably did not recognize the full extent of Eurasia to his north and east and Africa to his south, the earlier passage about “Scythians” and “Garamentes” clearly indicates that he knew of vast lands far beyond the borders of the Roman Empire 12 centuries or so earlier. So too did the Romans themselves.

And yet, to the Romans themselves, at their empire’s height of extent and power and durability, it must have seemed like it was in effect all of humankind that mattered to them, all of the world that needed to be governed by them. They conquered and reigned over everything west of Rome to the shores of the vast Atlantic Ocean, and all the way as far north as Scotland. They completely encircled the Mediterranean Sea. They extended their domain as far east as the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Arabian Sea. They controlled completely the three great rivers that had served as the earliest cradles of civilization in antiquity: the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates.

They interacted and somehow coexisted peacefully with only one other entity that we might today consider a state—the Parthian Empire (roughly modern-day Iran), to the east of the vast lands of the Levant, which Rome had brought under its sway (roughly modern-day Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq). This vast dominion for them, measured by speed of travel and communication, was a great deal larger for the Romans than the entire world is for us today. “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus,” it is said in the Bible’s Book of Luke about events surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ, “that all the world should be enrolled.” That was surely not the only time that Romans referred to their realm as “all the world.” To the Romans themselves, and to Dante looking back on this time with longing, it must have seemed very much like it was “a complete and single world government.”

And regardless of his extravagant depiction of the geography of

Roman rule 12 centuries earlier, Dante’s substantive point about the consequences of that rule is, in many ways, the point of “De Monarchia.” It brought “the blessing of universal peace and tranquility.” That blessing was not some fantastic dream, the kind that Machiavelli would scornfully insist a couple of centuries after Dante had “never been known or seen.” A robust peace had once extended over a vast portion of geography and an enormous and diverse assortment of humanity. It had endured for many centuries. And it had been brought about by Dante’s own ancestors on the Italian peninsula.

And more than a millennium later, Dante knew well that the absence of such peace, brought about by the dissolution of Roman rule, had brought only woe to humankind. And so he concludes Book One of “De Monarchia”: “O race of men, how many storms and misfortunes must thou endure, and how many shipwrecks, because thou, beast of many heads, strugglest in many directions!”

It is a question we strugglest to answer still.

The Legacy of “De Monarchia”

Just about a year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in early 2021, something went terribly wrong on a 44-year-old Indonesian military submarine, the KRI Nanggala, just a few miles off the coast of the idyllic island of Bali. It descended into the depths, broke at some point into three pieces, and was found on the ocean floor 2750 feet below. All 53 crew members perished. Emergency survival suits were found floating underwater, indicating that perhaps the crew had tried desperately to put them on at some point during their ordeal. It may never be known whether the 53 young men drowned, were crushed to death by the immense pressure of half a mile of water weight above them, or were slowly asphyxiated as the oxygen supply on their submarine dwindled and finally disappeared. “All Indonesians convey deep sorrow for this tragedy,” said the nation’s president, Joko Widodo. “They are the best sons of the nation, patriots guarding the sovereignty of the country.”

Why was the submarine at sea in the first place? It was deployed to conduct a “torpedo firing drill.”

Dante teaches us that perhaps such military exercises won’t have to take place forever. Dante teaches us that perhaps young submariners won’t have to perish in such a horrible fashion forever. Dante teaches us that perhaps countries won’t have to “guard their sovereignty” forever, through perpetual preparation for the possibility of military action against some other country, which will be guarding a sovereignty of its own.

How we might get from this world to that is a thorny problem indeed. How such a world government might be designed is no less difficult a question. Dante in “De Monarchia” provides us with no form of a constitutional framework at all.

Many later thinkers in subsequent centuries would elaborate upon both the concept and the case for world government, including Erasmus, William Penn, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, the founder of the Baha’i Faith Baha’u’llah, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Victor Hugo, Sigmund Freud, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Albert Einstein. Projects such as the Hutchins committee mentioned above tried to flesh out the details of a constitutional structure for a hypothetical future world state. And many scholars and activists today, in the “global governance” arena, propose imaginative innovations that might be seen as “in between” the 1945 United Nations Charter and the full world government Dante envisions. Many of their proposals will be placed squarely on the table during the “Summit of the Future” that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres plans to convene in September 2023.

But must the Westphalian sovereign state system, which many historians date precisely from 1648, serve as the final form of global political organization? Must we all be divided into tribes with clubs for all of eternity? And even though we cannot forecast which diabolical creations will emerge from the weapons laboratories, not only 700 but even just seven years from now, must all nations engage in arms races in the latest in weapons technology forever until the end of time?

Dante teaches us that, just possibly, our best daughters and sons, of our one global nation, might one day devote their patriotism not to their separate countries but to our one indivisible planet, and that they might guard not their separate nations but our one human race, and that someday, our descendants might all dwell together in perpetual peace.

And then at last we can bestow upon Dante Alighieri the glory, for “De Monarchia,” that he so richly deserves.

Tad Daley, JD, PhD, is author of the book” Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World” from Rutgers University Press. He served as an advisor, coauthor, and/or speechwriter for Congressman (and Democratic presidential candidate) Dennis Kucinich, Congressman (and independent presidential candidate) John B. Anderson, U.S. Senator (and JFK White House staffer) Harris Wofford, and U.S. Senator (and Democratic presidential candidate) Alan Cranston. He lives in Los Angeles, and serves now as Director of Policy Analysis at Citizens for Global Solutions. @TheTadDaley

This was first published in the Jewish Journal and reposted with permission.

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

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, racism, inequality, mass incarceration and gun violence are pathologies that run deep inside American society. How would a progressive government begin to address these problems if it found itself in a position of power in, say, the next decade or so?

Noam Chomsky: Very serious problems, no doubt. In order to address them effectively, it's first necessary to understand them; not a simple matter. Let's take the four pathologies in turn.

Racism certainly runs deep. There is no need to elaborate. It's right before our eyes in innumerable ways, some with considerable historical resonance. Current anti-immigrant hysteria can hardly fail to recall the racist immigration laws that at first barred [Asians] and were extended in the 1920s to Italians and Jews (under a different guise) -- incidentally, helping to send many Jews to gas chambers, and after the war, keeping miserable survivors of the Holocaust from US shores.

Of course, the most extreme case for the past 400 years is the bitter history of African Americans. Current circumstances are shameful enough, commonly held doctrines scarcely less so. The hatred of Obama and anything he touched surely reflects deep-rooted racism. Comparative studies by George Frederickson show that doctrines of white supremacy in the US have been even more rampant than in Apartheid South Africa.

The Nazis, when seeking precedents for the Nuremberg laws, turned to the United States, taking its anti-miscegenation laws as a model, though not entirely: [Certain] US laws were too harsh for the Nazis because of the "one drop of blood" doctrine. It was not until 1967, under the impact of the civil rights movement, that these abominations were struck down by the Supreme Court.

And it goes far back, taking many strange forms, including the weird Anglo-Saxon cult that has been prominent for centuries. Benjamin Franklin, the great American figure of the Enlightenment, pondered whether Germans and Swedes should be barred from the country because they are "too swarthy." Adopting familiar understanding, he observed that "the Saxons only [are] excepted" from this racial "defect" -- and by some mysterious process, those who make it to the United States may become Anglo-Saxons, like those already accepted within the canon.

The national poet Walt Whitman, honored for his democratic spirit, justified the conquest of half of Mexico by asking, "What has miserable, inefficient Mexico ... to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race? Be it ours, to achieve that mission!" -- a mission accomplished by the most "wicked war" in history, in the judgment of General-President U.S. Grant, who later regretted his service in it as a junior officer.

Coming to recent years, Henry Stimson, one of the most distinguished members of the FDR-Truman cabinets (and one of the few to oppose atomic bombing) "consistently maintained that Anglo-Saxons were superior to the 'lesser breeds'," historian Sean Langdon Malloy observes in his book, Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb -- and again reflecting not-uncommon views, asked to have one of his aides reassigned "on the slight possibility that he might be a Hebrew," in his own words.

The other three maladies that you mention are also striking features of US society -- in some ways, even distinguishing features. But unlike racism, in all three cases, it is partially a contemporary phenomenon.

Take inequality. Through much of its history, the US did not have high inequality as compared with Europe. Less so, in fact. That began to change in the industrial age, reaching a peak in 1928, after the forceful destruction of the labor movement and crushing of independent thought. Largely as a result of labor mobilization, inequality declined during the Great Depression, a tendency continuing through the great growth period of regulated capitalism in the early postwar decades. The neoliberal era that followed reversed these trends, leading to extreme inequality that may even surpass the 1928 peak.

Mass incarceration is also period-specific; in fact, the same period. It had reached high levels in the South in the post-reconstruction years after an 1877 North-South compact gave the South free rein to institute "slavery by another name," as Douglas Blackmon calls the crime in his study of how the former slave-owning states devised techniques to incarcerate much of the Black population. By doing so, they created a renewed slave labor force for the industrial revolution of those years, this time with the state, rather than private capital, responsible for maintaining the slave labor force -- a considerable benefit to the ownership class. Turning to more recent times, 30 years ago, US incarceration rates were within the range of developed societies, a little towards the high end. By now they are 5 to 10 times as high, far beyond those of any country with credible statistics. Again, a phenomenon of the past three decades.

The gun cult is also not as deeply rooted as often supposed. Guns were, of course, needed to conduct the two greatest crimes of American history: controlling slaves and exterminating [Native Americans]. But the general public had little interest in weapons, a matter of much concern to the arms industry. The popular gun cult was cultivated by gun manufacturers in the 19th century in order to create a market beyond governments. Normal capitalism. Methods included concoction of "Wild West" mythology that later became iconic. Such efforts continue, vigorously, until the present. By now, in large sectors of the society, swaggering into a coffee shop with a gun shows that you are really somebody, maybe a Wyatt Earp clone. The outcomes are sobering. Gun homicides in the US are far beyond comparable countries. In Germany, for example, deaths from gun homicide are at the level of deaths in the US from "contact with a thrown or falling object." And even these shocking figures are misleading. Half of suicides in the US are with firearms, more than 20,000 a year, amounting to two-thirds of all firearm deaths. 

Turning to your question about the four "pathologies" -- the four horsemen, one is tempted to say -- the questions virtually answer themselves with a careful look at the history, particularly the history since World War II. There have been two phases during the postwar period: regulated capitalism through the '50s and '60s, followed by the neoliberal period from the late '70s, sharply accelerating with Reagan and his successors. It is the latter period when the last three of four pathologies drove the US off the charts.

During the first postwar phase, there were some significant steps to counter endemic racism and its devastating impact on the victims. That was the great achievement of the mass civil rights movement, peaking in the mid-1960s, though with a very mixed record since. The achievements also had a major impact on the political system. The Democratic Party had been an uneasy coalition, including Southern Democrats, dedicated to racist policies and extremely influential because of seniority in one-party states. That's why New Deal measures [were] largely restricted to whites; for example, household and agricultural workers were barred from Social Security.

The alliance fell apart in the '60s with the fierce backlash against extending minimal rights of citizenship to African-Americans. The South shifted to Republican ranks, encouraged by Nixon's overtly racist "Southern strategy." The period since has hardly been encouraging for African Americans, apart from elite sectors.

Government policies could go some way towards ameliorating these social pathologies, but a great deal more is needed. Such needs can only be fulfilled by dedicated mass popular activism and educational/organizational efforts. These can be facilitated by a more progressive government, but, just as in the case of the civil rights movement, that can be only a help, often a reluctant one.

On inequality, it was low (by comparative standards) during the period of regulated capitalism -- the final era of "great compression" of income as it is sometimes called. Inequality began to increase rapidly with the advent of the neoliberal era, not only in the US, though the US is extreme among developed societies.

During the tepid recovery from the Great Recession of 2008, virtually all gains went to the top few percent, mostly 1 percent or a fraction thereof. "For the United States overall, the top 1 percent captured 85.1 percent of total income growth between 2009 and 2013," an Economic Policy Institute Study revealed. "In 2013 the top 1 percent of families nationally made 25.3 times as much as the bottom 99 percent." And so, it continues. The latest Federal Reserve studies show that "The share of income received by the top 1 percent of families rose to 23.8 percent in 2016, up from 20.3 percent in 2013. The share of the bottom 90 percent of the distribution fell to 49.7 percent, the lowest on record in the survey's history." Other figures are grotesque. Thus, "Average wealth holdings for white families in 2016 were about $933,700, compared with $191,200 for Hispanic families and $138,200 for black families," a product of deep-rooted racism exacerbating the neoliberal assault.

The gun culture, too, has expanded rapidly in recent decades. In 1975, the NRA formed a new lobbying arm -- a few years later, a PAC -- to channel funds to legislators. It soon became one of the most powerful interest-group lobbies, with often fervent popular participation. In 2008, the Supreme Court, in an intellectual triumph of "originalism," reversed the traditional interpretation of the Second Amendment, which had previously respected its explicit condition on the right to bear arms: the need for "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...." That provision was understandable in 1790. There was almost no standing army. The world's most powerful state was still an enemy. The slave population had to be controlled. And the invasion of the rest of what became the national territory was about to be unleashed. Not exactly today's circumstances.

Since 2008, our "constitutional right to bear arms," as declared by the right-wing Roberts Court, has become Holy Writ.

There are many contributing factors to the sharp break between the two postwar periods -- neither [of] which began to approach what is surely possible in the richest society in world history, with incomparable advantages.

One leading factor is the financialization of the economy, creating a huge bloc of largely predatory institutions devoted to financial manipulations rather than to the real economy -- a process by which "Wall Street destroyed Main Street," in the words of Financial Times editor Rana Foroohar. One of her many illustrations is the world's leading corporation, Apple. It has astronomical wealth, but to become even richer, has been shifting from devising more advanced marketable goods to finance. Its R&D as a percentage of sales has been falling since 2001, tendencies that extend widely among major corporations. In parallel, capital from financial institutions that financed business investments during the postwar growth period now largely "stays inside the financial system," Foroohar reports, "enriching financiers, corporate titans, and the wealthiest fraction of the population, which hold the vast majority of financial assets."

During the period of rapid growth of financial institutions since the '70s, there seem to have been few studies of their impact on the economy. Apparently, it was simply taken for granted that since it (sort of) accords with neoliberal market principles, it must be a Good Thing.

The failure of the profession to study these matters was noted by Nobel laureate in economics Robert Solow after the 2008 crash. His tentative judgment was that the general impact is probably negative: "the successes probably add little or nothing to the efficiency of the real economy, while the disasters transfer wealth from taxpayers to financiers." By now, there is substantially more evidence. A 2015 paper by two prominent economists found that productivity declines in markets with rapidly expanding financial sectors, impacting mostly the sector most critical for long-term growth and better jobs: advanced manufacturing. One reason, Foroohar observes, is that "finance would rather invest in areas like real estate and construction, which are far less productive but offer quicker, more reliable short-term gains" (hence also bigger bonuses for top management); the Trump-style economy, palatial hotels and golf courses (along with massive debt and repeated bankruptcies).

In part for related reasons, though productivity has doubled since the late '70s when finance was beginning to take over the economy, wages have stalled -- for male workers, declined. In 2007, before the crash, at the height of euphoria about the grand triumphs of neoliberalism, neoclassical economics and "the Great Moderation," real wages of American workers were lower than they had been in 1979, when the neoliberal experiment was just taking off. Another factor contributing to this outcome was explained to Congress in 1997 by Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, when testifying on the healthy economy he was managing. In his own words, "Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity." Insecurity that was, as he noted, markedly increasing even as employment prospects improved. In short, with labor repressed and unions dismantled, workers were too intimidated to seek decent wages and benefits, a sure sign of the health of the economy.

The same happened to the minimum wage, which sets a floor for others; if it had continued to track productivity, it would now be close to $20 an hour. Crises have rapidly increased as deregulation took off, in accord with the "religion" that markets know best, deplored by another Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, in a World Bank publication 20 years ago, to no effect. Each crisis is worse than the last; each following recovery weaker than the last. None of this, incidentally, would have come as a surprise to Marxist economists, who pretty much disappeared from the scene in the United States.

Despite much lofty rhetoric about "free markets," like other major industries (energy, agribusiness, etc.), financial institutions benefit enormously from government subsidy and other interventions. An IMF study found that the profits of the major banks derive substantially from the implicit government insurance policy ("too big to fail"), which confers advantages far beyond the periodic bailouts when corrupt practices lead to a crash -- something that did not happen during the earlier period, before bipartisan neoliberal doctrine fostered deregulation. Other benefits are real but immeasurable, like the incentive to undertake risky (hence profitable) transactions, with the understanding that if they crash, the hardy taxpayer will step in to repair the damage, probably leaving the institutions richer than before, as after the 2008 crash for which they were largely responsible.

Other factors include the accelerated attack on unions and the radical reduction in taxes for the wealthy, both natural concomitants of neoliberal ideology. Another is the particular form of neoliberal globalization, particularly since the '90s, designed in ways that offer very high protection and other advantages to corporations, investors and privileged professionals, while setting working people in competition with one another worldwide, with obvious consequences.

Such measures have a mutually reinforcing effect. As wealth becomes more concentrated, so, automatically, does political power, which leads to government policies that carry the cycle forward.

A primary goal of the neoliberal reaction was to reverse the falling rate of profit that resulted, in part, from growing labor militancy. That goal has been achieved with impressive success. The professed goals, of course, were quite different. And as always, the reaction was buttressed by ideology. One staple has been the famous thesis of Simon Kuznets: that while inequality increases in early economic development, it begins to decrease as the economy reaches a more advanced level. It follows, then, that there is no need for redistributive policies that interfere with the magic of the market. The Kuznets thesis soon became conventional wisdom among economists and planners.

There are a few problems, however. One, as [American University economics professor] Jon Wisman observes, is that it wasn't a thesis, but rather a conjecture, very cautiously advanced.

As Kuznets explained, the conjecture was based on "perhaps 5 percent empirical information and 95 percent speculation, some of it possibly tainted by wishful thinking." This slight qualification in the article was overlooked in a manner not uncommon when there is doctrinal utility in so doing. Other justifications fare similarly.

One might almost define "neoliberalism" -- a bit cruelly, but not entirely unfairly -- as an ideology devoted to establishing more firmly a society based on the principle of "private affluence, public squalor" -- John Kenneth Galbraith's condemnation of what he observed in 1958. Much worse was to come with the unleashing of natural tendencies of capitalism in the neoliberal years, now enhanced as its more [brutal] variants are given virtually free rein under Trump-Ryan-McConnell Republicanism.

All of this is under human control, and can be reversed. There are many realistic options, even without looking beyond short-term feasibility. A small financial transaction tax would sharply reduce the rapid trading that is a net loss to the society while benefiting a privileged few, and would also provide a progressive government with revenue for constructive purposes. It's common knowledge that the deterioration of infrastructure has reached grotesque proportions. Government programs can begin to address these serious problems. They can also be devoted to improving rather than undermining the deteriorating public education system. Living wage and green economy programs of the kind that Bob Pollin has developed could go a long way toward reducing inequality, and beyond that, creating a much more decent society. Another major contribution would be [an equitable] health care system. In fact, just eliminating the exorbitant patent protections that are a core part of the neoliberal "free trade agreements" would be a huge boon to the general economy -- and the arguments for these highly protectionist measures are very weak, as economist Dean Baker has shown convincingly.

Legislation to put an end to the "right to scrounge laws" (in Orwellian terminology, "right to work laws") that are designed to destroy unions could help revive the labor movement, by now with different constituencies, including service and part-time workers. That could reverse the growth of the new "precariat," another matter of fundamental importance. And it could restore the labor movement to its historic role as the leading force in the struggle for basic human rights.

There are other paths toward reviving a vital and progressive labor movement. The expansion of worker-owned and managed enterprises, now underway in many places, is a promising development, and need not be limited to a small scale. A few years ago, after the crash, Obama virtually nationalized a large part of the auto industry, then returning it to private ownership. Another possibility would have been to turn the industry over to the workforce, or to stakeholders more broadly (workers and community), who might, furthermore, have chosen to redirect its production to what the country sorely needs: efficient public transportation. That could have happened had there been mass popular support and a receptive government. Recent work by Gar Alperovitz and David Ellerman approaches these matters in highly informative ways. Conversion of military industry along similar lines is also quite conceivable -- matters discussed years ago by Seymour Melman. [There are all] options under progressive initiatives.

The "right to work" legislation that is a darling of the far right will probably soon be established solidly by the Roberts Court now that Neil Gorsuch is in place, thanks to some of Mitch McConnell's more sordid chicanery in barring Obama's nominee. The legislation has an interesting pedigree. It traces back to the Southern Christian American Association, an extreme racist and anti-Semitic organization that was bitterly opposed to unions, which its leaders condemned as a devilish contrivance in which "white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes." Another enemy was "Jewish Marxism," the "Talmudists" who were planning to Sovietize the world and were already doing so in the US through the "Jew Deal," known elsewhere as the "New Deal."

An immediate objective of moderately progressive policy should be to sharply cut the huge military budget, well over half of discretionary spending and now expanding under the Republican project of dismantling government, apart from service to their wealthy/corporate constituency.

One of many good reasons to trim the military budget is that it is extremely dangerous to our own security. A striking illustration is the Obama-Trump nuclear weapons modernization program, which has sharply increased "killing power," a very important study in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reported last March. Thereby, the program "creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike." These developments, surely known to Russian planners, significantly increase the likelihood that they might resort to a preemptive strike -- which means the end -- in case of false alarms or very tense moments, of which there are all too many. And here, too, the funds released could be devoted to badly needed objectives, like quickly weaning ourselves from the curse of fossil fuels.

This is a bare sample. There's a long list.

The United States spends more money on health care than any other nation in the world, yet its health care system is highly inefficient and leaves out millions from even basic coverage. What would a socialized health care system look like in the US, and how can the opposition from the private insurance sector, big pharma and the medical industries in general be overcome?

Noam Chomsky: The facts are startling. It's an international scandal, and not unknown. A recent study by the US-based Commonwealth Fund, a nonpartisan health policy research group, found that once again, as repeatedly in the past, the US health care system is the most expensive in the world, far higher than comparable countries, and that it ranks last in performance among these countries. To have combined these two results is a real triumph of the market. The roots of the achievement are not obscure. The US is alone in relying on largely unregulated private insurance companies. Their commitment is to profit, not health, and they produce huge waste in administrative costs, advertising, profit and executive compensation. The government-run component of the health system (Medicare) is far more efficient, but suffers from the need to work through the private institutions. The US is also alone in legislation barring the government from negotiating drug prices, which, not surprisingly, are far above comparable countries.

These policies do not reflect popular will. Poll results vary, depending on how questions are formulated, but over time, they show considerable, often majority support for a public health system of the kind found elsewhere. Usually, Canada is the model because so little is known about the rest of the world, though it is not ranked as the best. That prize has regularly been won by the British National Health Service, though it, too, is reeling under the neoliberal assault. When Obama's [Affordable Care Act] was introduced, it included a public option, supported by almost two-thirds of the population. It was unceremoniously deleted. Popular opinion is particularly striking in that [it] receives so little mainstream support, even articulation; and if even brought up, is usually condemned. The main argument against the far more successful systems elsewhere is that adopting their framework would raise taxes. [However, single-payer usually results in] cutting expenses considerably more and benefitting the large majority -- so the experience of other countries indicates, [as does] US Medicare.

The tide may be turning finally. Sanders has received considerable support, even within the political system, for his call for universal health care to be achieved step-by-step in his plan, by gradual extension of Medicare and other means. The temporary collapse of the fanatic seven-year Republican campaign to destroy "Obamacare" may provide openings as well -- temporary collapse, because the extremist organization in power has means to undermine health care and are likely to use it in their passionate dedication to destroying anything connected to the reviled Black president.... Nevertheless, there are new openings for some degree of [reason], which could greatly enhance people's welfare, as well as improving the general economy.

To be sure, there will be massive opposition from private power, which has extraordinary influence in our limited class-based democracy. But it can be overcome. The historical record shows that economic-political elites respond to militant popular action -- and the threat of more -- by endorsing ameliorative measures that leave their basic dominance of the society in place. New Deal measures of social reform are one of many illustrations.

Bob, you produced recently an economic analysis for the backing of a single-payer bill in California (SB-562) and worked on Bernie Sanders's proposal for universal health care, so what are your own views on the previous question?

Robert Pollin: A socialized health care system for the US -- whether we call it "single-payer," "Medicare-for-All" or something else -- should include two basic features. The first is that every resident ... should be guaranteed access to decent health care. The second is that the system achieves significant overall savings relative to our existing system through lowering administrative costs, controlling the prices of prescription drugs and fees for physicians and hospitals, reducing unnecessary treatments and expanding preventive care.

In our study analyzing the California single-payer proposal, we estimated that providing decent coverage for all state residents -- including, in particular, the roughly 40-45 percent of the state's population who are presently either uninsured or who have inadequate coverage -- would increase total costs by about 10 percent under the existing system. But we also estimated that operating the single-payer system could achieve overall savings in the range of 18 percent relative to the existing system in the areas of administration, drug prices, fees for providers and cutting back on wasteful service delivery. Overall then, we found that total health care spending in California would fall by about 8 percent, even with the single-payer system delivering decent care for everyone. My work on the Sanders's Medicare for All bill is ongoing as of now, so I will hold off on providing estimates of its overall impact.

Let's consider how transformative the California-type outcomes would be. Under single-payer in California, decent health care would be established as a basic human right, as it already is in almost all other advanced countries. Nobody would have to forego receiving needed treatments because they didn't have insurance or they couldn't afford high insurance premiums and copays. Nobody would have to fear a financial disaster because they faced a health care crisis in their family. Virtually all families would end up financially better off and most businesses would also experience cost savings under single-payer relative to what they pay now to cover their employees.

How can the opposition from the private health insurance sector, big pharma and the medical industries in general be overcome? It obviously will not be easy. Health care in the US is a $3 trillion business. Profits of the private companies are in the hundreds of billions, even while most of the funding for our existing health care system comes from the federal, state and local government budgets. As one example of how to respond to this political reality, we can learn from the work of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United. The nurses' union has been fighting for single-payer for over 20 years. They bring enormous credibility to the issue, because their members see firsthand how the health and financial well-being of especially non-wealthy people in the US suffer under our current system.

There is no secret as to how the nurses' union fights on behalf of single-payer. They believe in their cause and are highly effective in the ways they organize and advance their position. The basics are as simple as that.

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.

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