Epistemic (Ir)relevance, Language & Passport Positionality The three hurdles I’m navigating as a UK-based Ethiopian academic

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In this blog, Eyob Balcha Gebremariam offers a deeply personal yet widely resonant reflection on the invisible boundaries that shape knowledge production in global academia. Drawing from his lived experience, he unpacks how the quest for epistemic relevance often clashes with Western-centric validation systems, how the dominance of English marginalises local languages and worldviews, and how the politics of passports continues to gatekeep academic mobility and belonging.

Ethiopian – Leaf from Gunda Gunde Gospels from Walters Arts Museum on Wikimedia

I write this reflection piece to use my personal experiences as a UK-based academic with an Ethiopian passport as a lens to comment on the structural power asymmetries of the academic landscape. I believe I’m not the only one facing these challenges. However, there is hardly sufficient attention, recognition, and space to discuss them. I have no intention of reducing the importance of other challenges by focusing on these three topics. I focused on the three hurdles because I experience them in everyday scholarly work and am determined to engage in critical discussions and reflections.

I often engage with the notion of coloniality when I comment on power asymmetries in academic knowledge production. Coloniality is too abstract for some people, whereas it has become a buzzword for others. However, for people like me, coloniality captures the challenges and obstacles of everyday life encounters. For many of us, it is a daily lived experience. In this piece, I aim to offer a personal reflexive account of coloniality based on the multiple positionalities I occupy.

Epistemic (Ir)relevance

In my academic career, I’m constantly conversing with myself about how relevant my work is to my community in Ethiopia. I was born and raised in Ethiopia. I always want to measure the relevance of my academic career with a potentially positive contribution to policy ideas and practices at least in the Ethiopian context. This means I must develop a strategy to help me reach more Ethiopian audiences. However, the challenge is enormous, and I always need a thoughtful approach to overcome it.

In my field of studies and Development Studies in general, the higher I go in my academic career, the more incentives I have to remain disconnected and alienated from the community I want to serve. I will be more rewarded if I continue to produce academic outputs that target an audience completely distant from most Ethiopians. Even members of the Ethiopian community who may access my work, if interested at all, have minimal access to academic publications. I’m glad most of my outputs so far are open access. However, the fact that the academic outputs are not initially produced to be consumed by the community about whom the research is talking remains a significant challenge. Making academic outputs available free of charge on the Internet is one viable solution. However, this can also have its own layers of challenges, such as the difficulty of accessing academic English for the general public.

One strategy I’ve adopted is to write Amharic newspaper articles that help me translate some of the expertise I acquired in my studies into a relevant analysis of the present-day political economy in Ethiopia. I am unsure to what extent my effort in writing  Amharic commentaries can help me be more relevant to my community. These seemingly simple steps of translation can be valuable. But epistemic (ir)relevance is broader than language translation.

Using language as a medium of communication is one aspect. However, language is also a repository of a society’s deep conceptual, theoretical and philosophical orientations. The epistemic irrelevance of my academic work is more manifested in my limitations in adequately and systematically using my mother tongue to explain key issues of development that could be relevant to my community and beyond.

Most of the conceptual and theoretical insights that inform my academic works on Ethiopian political, economic, and social dynamics are alien to the local context. On the other hand, throughout my educational training, I have not been adequately exposed to Ethiopia or Africa-centred knowledge frameworks and academic conceptual and theoretical orientations. Whenever this happened, they were not systematically integrated or implicitly considered less relevant than Eurocentric epistemic insights. I needed to put extra effort into reading widely to educate myself beyond the formal channels and processes of education. However, the impact remains immense. The more I continued to advance in my academic career, the more I gravitated away from Ethiopia-centred epistemic orientations. Hence, most of my academic insight remains less informed by these perspectives.

I want to emphasise that my concern is primarily about the systemic hierarchy of knowledge frameworks and the casual normalisation of marginalising endogenous and potentially alternative epistemic orientations. No knowledge can evolve without interaction with other knowledge systems. However, we can’t ignore that the interaction between knowledge systems is power-mediated. The power asymmetries between knowledge systems do not stop at the abstract level. They also translate into the institutional arrangements of knowledge production, the producers and primary audiences of the knowledge produced.

[Academic] knowledge is power! But not every [academic] knowledge can be a source of power. Most of the time, academic knowledge becomes a source of power if it is produced by the dominant members of society and for the use of the dominant members.

Language

Amharic is my mother tongue. Several languages in Ethiopia have well-advanced grammar, literature, and folklore. Like other places, these languages are sources of wisdom and knowledge for society. However, none are adequately recognised as good enough in the organisation of the “modern” education system, especially in higher education. After primary school, I studied every subject in English. Amharic remained only as one subject. When I joined Addis Ababa University, Amharic became non-existent in my academic training. Only students who studied the Amharic language and literature used this language as their medium of instruction. All other degree programmes were in English. This might be less concerning if a language is not advanced enough to develop fields of studies and disciplinary knowledge with abstract conceptions and ideas. However, I believe the Amharic language can serve as a medium of instruction for most fields of study, especially in the social sciences.

Studies show that the Amharic language evolved over 1,000 years and became a lingua franca of medieval northern and central highland kingdoms in present-day Ethiopia around the 12th century. The earliest literary tradition dates back to the 14th century, including religious texts, historical notes, and literature. (Image: Gee’z Alphbet @Haile Maryam Tadese of Lalibela)

Despite this, the modernist Ethiopian elites that designed the “modern” Ethiopian education system could not envision reaching the promised land of Westernisation without fully embracing English, in some cases French, and systematically disregarding their rich local languages.

The relationship between epistemic (ir)relevance and language is profound. To be more relevant to my community, I need to communicate in an accessible language and use language as a source of intellectual insights. This could be the most fulfilling academic endeavour. However, to remain a credible member of the academic community of my field, I must produce more in English, and the target audience should not necessarily be my home country community. To remain relevant to my home community, I need to adopt a different set of epistemic orientations, personal convictions and beliefs, and, sometimes, career and financial sacrifices. The additional burden and financial sacrifice are more prominent because it is doubtful that the current academic excellence and achievement framework in the UK or internationally will recognise academic output produced in non-European languages. I’m glad to learn more if there is anything I’m unaware of.

Passport positionality

My idea of passport positionality evolved through my experiences of travelling for academic purposes both across Europe and Africa. My definition of passport positionality is how academics at any level, primarily those with a “Global South” passport, must navigate various ideological, legal, administrative, financial, and psychological barriers to attend academic events or conduct research in countries other than their own. Understanding the interplay between legal and academic citizenship can help us reflect on the implicit and explicit barriers to belonging, exclusion, recognition, and representation. The legacies and current manifestations of colonialism create some forms of exclusion, favouring mainly Global North passport holders. The exclusion of academic researchers from various platforms and spaces of academic deliberations and decision-making processes just because of the barriers imposed on their legal citizenship is a serious structural problem.

At a personal level, I’ve heard several stories of racial profiling, especially in cases where the global south passport overlaps with brown and black skin colour, humiliating interrogation, and unjustified and unreasonable excuses of mistreatment. I share two personal experiences of how passport positionality shapes my travel experiences by creating tension between my academic and legal citizenship.

The first experience happened when I was contracted to facilitate a decolonial research methodologies workshop for an institute in a European country. The agreement was for the research institute to reimburse my travel expenses and to pay me a professional fee. As an Ethiopian passport holder, getting a Schengen visa to travel from the UK at a minimum includes travelling to privately run visa application centres and paying admin and visa application fees. This is on top of preparing a visa application document, where I’m expected to submit at least a three-month bank statement showing a minimum of £600 in my current bank account.

The most infuriating experience was finding the right appointment date and time because the private company only offers regular appointment options at certain hours. Otherwise, applicants are directly or indirectly forced to pay for more expensive premium appointment options. The company runs the visa appointment service to make a profit, so it has all the incentives to capitalise on potential customers’ demands. If seen from the position of potential travellers like me, it is unfair because the company is making money not by facilitating the visa application process but by making it less convenient and difficult.

I managed to get the visa and run a successful and enriching workshop. However, when I submitted my receipts for reimbursement, the institute refused to reimburse all the costs related to my visa application.

(Image: Joe Brusky on Flickr)

I was told that according to the country’s “travel expenses act, they [the visa related cost] are not costs that can be covered.” Honestly speaking, the visa-related expenses were higher than the travel expenses.  I believe there are reasonable grounds for the mentioned policy. However, it is also clear that the policy has a significant blind spot. It does not recognise the challenges that people like me face, jumping multiple hurdles to do their work. Perhaps the people who drafted the policy could not imagine that a visa-paying national would travel to their country to provide a professional service. Hence, no mechanism of reimbursement was set. I used the email exchange with my contacts to highlight the system’s unfairness. Finally, I got reimbursed, and it was a good learning experience.

The second experience I want to share is related to my encounters with border officials at South African airports. Because of my work, I travelled to South Africa seven times over the past three years. Out of these seven travels, I was held at the airport five times for at least one hour or more by border officials who wanted to check the genuineness of my visa. A uniformed officer usually escorts me. When I leave the plane, I will be told they have been waiting for me and will check my documents’ credibility. Often, as I’m told, they’ll take a picture of the visa sticker on my passport and send it to their colleagues in London via WhatsApp to verify whether it is genuine. In the meantime, I will be asked several questions about the reason for my travel, what I do, how I received my visa in London, while I’m an Ethiopian, etc. Some valid and ordinary questions, but some unreasonable questions as well. None of this has happened to me in my travels to other countries.

After some time, I got used to it and plan accordingly. But it never stops being a significant inconvenience to be singled out just because of my passport. On one of these trips, I was travelling with my fellow UK-based Ethiopian academic, and I bet with him that we’d be escorted to a room and interrogated on our arrival. I won the bet. The border official even showed us the screen shot he was sent with our names, two Ethiopian passport holders, who needed to be cross-examined before being allowed to enter the country.

I share these experiences to encourage my academic colleagues to be conscious of their passport positionality and how it helped or constrained them to exercise their academic citizenship. The interplay between legal and academic citizenship needs more reflexive discussions.

Conclusion

I hope sharing these three hurdles of lived experiences can trigger questions, responses, and conversations. There are no simple answers and responses. However, I think it is essential to be aware that some of the buzzwords and abstract ideas we exchange in our academic conversations can lead to experiences far from abstract notions. Hopefully, my moments of internal struggles of questioning relevance, feelings of alienation, efforts of learning and unlearning, and the actual experiences of exclusion, especially when travelling, can contribute to having more grounded conversations when we talk about decolonising academic knowledge production in Development Studies.

This blog was first published by the European Assosciation of Development  Research and Training Institute

 

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Eyob Balcha Gebremariam

Eyob Balcha Gebremariam is an alumus of the International Institute of Social Studies. He is a Research Associate at the Perivoli Africa Research Centre (PARC), the University of Bristol and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town (UCT). He is a Member of Council at the Development Studies Association (DSA) of the UK and of EADI’s task group on decolonising knowledge in Development Studies.

 

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Humanitarian Observatories Series | USAID suspension is a wake-up call to address fragility of Humanitarian Actions in Ethiopia

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On the first day in office of his second presidential term, Donald Trump signed an executive order freezing the USAID for 90 days, reportedly to assess the programme’s ‘effectiveness and alignment with US foreign policy’. On 10 March 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended the world’s most vulnerable communities’ slight hope by announcing the permanent suspension of the USAID’s 83% programme. This aggressive measure is the harshest blow to the organization’s operation since its establishment in 1961. The UK and Netherlands are also making similar moves, significantly diminishing their overseas development and humanitarian funding. The measure has a significant adverse impact in Ethiopia, where humanitarian aid is the only thread of hope, at least currently, for many affected communities, including millions of internally displaced persons (IDPs). In this blog, Alemayehu B. Hordofa and Marga F. Angerasa contend that humanitarian actors and donors have not achieved the necessary strengthening of local capacities to respond to the ongoing crisis in Ethiopia, and that they should redouble their efforts to take targeted normative and practical measures to enhance local resilience to counterbalance, in the long-term, the adverse impacts of policy changes in donor countries.
This photo was taken in April 2024 by the first author in Seba Care Internally Displaced Persons camp. Volunteers are giving medical support to IDPs as a part of the BilalAid health outreach programme in Seba Care IDP shelter in Mekele, Ethiopia. BilalAid was established in 2024 by local youths who were previously volunteering informally in their communities to respond to humanitarian causes.
Humanitarian funding in Ethiopia Ethiopia is one of the biggest recipients of humanitarian aid in Africa. According to the 2024 Ethiopian Humanitarian Response Plan, over 21.4 million people in Ethiopia needed humanitarian assistance due to complex humanitarian crises such as climate change-induced disasters, armed conflicts, political violence, epidemic outbreaks and landslides. The conflict in Northern Ethiopia (2020-2022), the ongoing armed conflict in the Oromia and Amhara regions and climate change-induced food insecurity in south and south-west parts of the country displaced millions of individuals from their homes and have made them dependent on humanitarian aid. In some parts of the country, conflict(s) have coincided with drought, exacerbating the crisis and worsening the vulnerability of the affected communities. In 2024, the humanitarian community in Ethiopia appealed for 3.24  billion USD to reach 15.5 million people. This appeal raised only 1.79 billion USD, with the US government contributing 405.3 million USD. Beyond responding to the crisis as the primary duty-bearer, the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) also contributed 264.5 million USD to the 2024 Ethiopian Humanitarian Fund (EHF). This year, the EHF has anticipated a requirement of 2 billion USD to respond to multiple crises in various parts of the country. Given the need for humanitarian support, the humanitarian fund in the country is visibly inadequate, and various humanitarian interventions in Ethiopia are being challenged by, among other things, inadequate funding and unfulfilled promises of localization. The USAID suspension is another recent significant blow to the country’s dwindling and inadequate humanitarian funding. The USAID aid suspension has placed the lives of vulnerable communities at risk The USAID funding cut has placed the lives of millions of people in need of humanitarian assistance in peril. The aid was stopped without any back-up, thus exposing vulnerable communities to exceptionally dangerous risks. Beyond the impact on people receiving aid, the decision has resulted in many aid workers being made unemployed. The Ethiopian Ministry of Health terminated 5000 employment contracts due to the USAID aid suspension. These health workers were supporting clinics on HIV-related programmes in various parts of the country. Likewise, even though a significant portion of Ethiopia’s development aid funding now comes from international development banks (World Bank, AfDB, IMF), which come with both punitive interest rates and market reforms, the suspension of USAID affects the country’s foreign currency reserve and flow – further minimizing the agency of Ethiopian policymakers and local organizations. In addition, the suspension of aid affects accountability relations in the humanitarian sector and beyond. Following the announcement of the funding suspension, over 85 percent of Civil Society Organizations suspended their programmes in Ethiopia. These CSOs were implementing programmes ranging from ensuring the right to access justice for displaced communities, advocating for accountability in the humanitarian sector and durable solutions and socio-economic recovery for conflict-affected peoples. The suspension decapitated CSOs operating in complex operational spaces and exacerbated the murky Ethiopian civil society environment. According to one humanitarian worker that we interviewed in Addis Ababa, ‘the suspension suppresses independent voices and shrinks the civic space as it inhibits vibrant CSOs from implementing programmes’. The CSOs that advance diverse perspectives are affected by the USAID suspension and only those that are supported by government will continue to operate in the country. This perspective was also shared by other participants during the interviews conducted by the first author for his PhD research on humanitarian governance in Ethiopia. The devastating impact that the USAID aid cut caused in the first few weeks of the announcement unveiled the fragmentation and fragility of Ethiopian formal humanitarian governance, its excessive reliance on foreign aid and its under-investment in supporting local humanitarian initiatives. Conversely, it allowed the government and the humanitarian actors to revisit and critically reflect on their practices around accountability and localization, as well as build the resilience of local actors to make humanitarian actors more predictable, effective and accountable. The role of local actors in responding to crises Ethiopia’s humanitarian action is noted for its plurality of actors. There are diverse humanitarian actors with their own practices and policies. However, the actors’ interventions vary in mandate, capacity and ability to respond to and cope with emergencies. They possess completely unequal power, leverage and authority, which are dependent on several factors including location, association and who they represent. Beyond targeted and institutionalized humanitarian interventions, humanitarianism by the ordinary citizenry, or vernacular humanitarianism, is a defining feature of Ethiopia’s humanitarian action. Millions of internally displaced persons are living with and supported by the host communities with no meaningful support from international or national formal humanitarian organizations. Ordinary citizens often organize themselves around social media such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram and were able to mobilize millions in support of victims of disasters. For example, ordinary Ethiopians informally organized on social media and did commendable work in averting the devastating consequences of drought in Borena in 2023, supported IDPs displaced from their homes due to political violence around Oromia-Somali borders in 2018 and supported millions of IDPs in Horro Guduru and East Wallagga zones while the institutionalized humanitarians were unable to intervene (during the first phase of the crisis) due to access difficulties. Ethiopian diasporas and business communities also participate in humanitarian action in the country. Apart from these few examples, ordinary Ethiopians are the backbone of the country’s humanitarian efforts and first responders to crises. However, the contributions of local actors remain invisible, are not nurtured and there has been inadequate effort to genuinely strengthen their capacity. The dominant discourse has wrongly portrayed humanitarianism in Ethiopia as a monopoly field of international humanitarian actors belittling the local community’s effort to address their problems. The visibility of localized humanitarianism in Ethiopia has been overshadowed by the increased visibility of the ‘international humanitarian community’s’ response to crises. Likewise, despite the global movement and advocacy for accountability to affected communities, humanitarian practitioners we spoke to in Addis Ababa largely believed that the promises of localization have largely remained unfulfilled. The interviews that we conducted with humanitarian workers and independent observers revealed that humanitarian organizations were primarily preoccupied with service delivery rather than strengthening local capacity to transition to recovery and reconstruction. Thus, to make humanitarian efforts more predictable and effective, humanitarian actors should prioritize local initiatives to make the sector sustainable and least affected by external decisions. The recent policy changes in donor countries, spearheaded by the USAID suspension of foreign assistance, are a wake-up call for the country to strengthen its local humanitarian initiatives and advance and implement the humanitarian reform agenda in national and local contexts. Mobilizing local actors and domestic resources Mobilizing domestic resources can reduce the dependency on foreign countries overseas development and humanitarian aid policies. Local actors play a crucial role in filling the gaps created due to changes in the priorities and policies of donor countries. However, as local initiatives still lack targeted support, external donors finance a significant portion of formal humanitarian action, USAID being the major partner. Yet Ethiopia has recently started some venerable initiatives that could contribute to the country’s self-reliance in the long run. The country started a food sovereignty endeavour, dubbed by the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) as a ‘decisive path toward food self-sufficiency’. The initiative prioritizes investing in local innovations in agriculture and technology. The government planned to address food insecurity through funding by state-owned enterprises and large-scale farming coordinated by its national disaster risk management office, the Ministry of Agriculture and relevant regional offices. The country has also been implementing the Green Legacy Initiative to avert the negative impact of climate change. Similarly, the government has commenced other national initiatives, such as the Bounty of the Basket, which have a significant potential to strengthen local resilience and preparedness. The transitional justice and national dialogue mechanisms have also the potential to end or significantly reduce the humanitarian needs emanating from the devastating impacts of conflict or political violence. However, even though these initiatives have the potential, if appropriately implemented and subjected to rigorous accountability mechanisms, to minimize the impacts of climate change and end the need caused by conflict, they may not counterbalance the adverse impacts of the policy change in donor countries in the short term. Conclusion and the way forward Given the high level of need, it is tremendously challenging to respond to the current humanitarian crisis without support from the international community in general and USAID in particular. The theoretical rhetoric that regarded local actors as genuine partners with a meaningful role in leading and funding humanitarian responses has not yet been translated into practice. Affected communities are still considered passive recipients of aid by the majority of international humanitarian actors working in Ethiopia. The current initiatives by the GoE to satisfy humanitarian needs with local capacity are commendable and can change this narrative in the long run. Such initiatives need to show tangible progress on the ground. Ending conflicts with agreements and finding durable solutions for millions of IDPs currently stranded in various IDP shelters are some of the immediate measures that the government can take to relieve the pressure on humanitarian action in the country. Ensuring government efficiency and addressing rampant corruption that divert critical resources from the public are other measures that the government may immediately take to avert further crisis. Furthermore, local CSOs need to reassess their excessive reliance on international funding and devise innovative means to mobilize domestic resources, strengthen local giving and prioritize local innovations. The promises of localization remained unfulfilled. Donors and the INGOs currently operating in the country need to revisit their commitments to localization and hold themselves accountable for failing to honour the grand bargain’s promises. Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the Authors:

Alemayehu B. Hordofa
Alemayehu B. Hordofa is a Ph.D. researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). He obtained his LLM in International Human Rights Law from the Irish Center for Human Rights (ICHR), University of Galway, Ireland. He is currently working on humanitarian governance in Ethiopia focusing on the role of Civil Society Organizations and Crisis-affected People to shape humanitarian governance ‘from below’. His research interests lie in forced displacement, accountability in humanitarian context, localization of humanitarian aid, transitional justice, and the development of CSOs in Ethiopia.
Marga Fekadu Angerasa
Marga Fekadu Angerasa is a law lecturer at Wolkite University (Wolkite, Ethiopia) with research interest and specialty on human rights, forced displacement and transitional justice. He has an LLM in human rights law from Addis Ababa University (2021). Marga is a member of Ethiopia Humanitarian Observatory and advocates for the advancement of human rights and works with CSOs on human rights issues.    Are you looking for more content about Global Development and Social Justice? Subscribe to Bliss, the official blog of the International Institute of Social Studies, and stay updated about interesting topics our researchers are working on.

This blog is part of the  Humanitarian Governance: Accountability, Advocacy, Alternatives’ project. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 884139

Disaster Risk Reduction doesn’t (always) need to be expensive: introducing Frugal DRR

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Photo credit : Pixabay

In this blog, to mark global Disaster Risk Reduction Day, Tom Ansell (HSC Coordinator) considers whether disaster risk reduction activities can be made less-resource intensive through Frugal Innovation. Whilst Frugal DRR shouldn’t be considered a money-saving replacement for development and infrastructure work, it does provide an opportunity for communities to reduce their vulnerability and increase their capacity for dealing with the consequences of hazards that could include extreme weather, geological hazards, or other environmental hazards.

What is DRR? And what’s wrong with the term ‘natural disasters’?

Disaster Risk Reduction, according to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) is activities that are “aimed at preventing new and reducing existing disaster risk and managing residual risk, all of which contribute to strengthening resilience and therefore to the achievement of sustainable development.” So, in simple terms, activities that work to prevent and mitigate risks to reduce the effects of disasters. It’s important to note here that we use the term disaster in connection with hazards like earthquakes, floods and others while avoiding the ‘natural disaster’, as this ignores the social dimension of disasters.

People across the world live in places that have different levels of risk and have different vulnerabilities in the face of these risks. More than the hazard itself, a much larger defining factor for how much damage, social upheaval, and loss of life occurs is how vulnerable people are, and how prepared they are for when a potential hazard becomes a disaster. In other words, an earthquake of magnitude 8 will have significantly different effects in a wealthy country with a strong governance system, to a much poorer country with (for example) a fragmented government. In the words of Margaret Arnold at the World Bank, “the key lesson is that disasters are social constructs. People are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and natural hazards due not just to their geographical context, but their financial, their social status, their cultural status, their gender status, their access to services, their level of poverty, their access to decision making, and their access to justice.”

For example, Tokyo often suffers from extreme stormy weather: as many countries with a Pacific coast do. The city of Tokyo, however, also has one of the largest storm drains in the world to help divert water resulting from storms or extremely heavy rainfall. The project, completed in the 1990s and costing around 3 billion US Dollars, means that though the city is often affected by tropical cyclones and typhoons, there is typically much less loss of life in the Tokyo area than others affected by the same typhoon – especially as the city of Tokyo has well-developed evacuation routes, early warning and information systems, and more besides.

This example serves to demonstrate the purpose of DRR activities: to prevent risks and – where this is not possible – to minimize the overall damage caused by extreme weather. As the ‘no natural disasters’ movement emphasizes, reacting after the event is a less intelligent way to respond to disasters, compared to prevention, pre-preparation, and planning is a much more productive and intelligent way to ‘respond’ to disasters. Various frameworks for ‘good’ risk management activities have been devised, including the Hyogo Framework (2005-2015) and Sendai Framework (2015-2030).

Are DRR activities always expensive?

In the example above, of the city of Tokyo, a major contributing factor to mitigating climate risks for the city involved constructing a large piece of public infrastructure. Similar projects have taken place around the world, for example the Delta Works in the Netherlands , the Thames Barrier in the UK, or the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway West Closure Complex in New Orleans in the USA. These three examples are all related to storm surges, flooding, or other water-related hazards. But (expensive) risk-reducing infrastructure also exists to mitigate the effects of rockfall (for example in Interlaken in Switzerland), avalanches (for example the Gazex system), or to stabilize land vulnerable to landslides through enormous retaining walls (for example in West Bengal, India).

At this point, it might seem that all DRR activities are exceptionally expensive, very large public infrastructure that are only available to the very wealthiest regions in the world. But that would be a serious oversimplification of what smaller groups of citizens, with or without the support of institutions, can achieve to mitigate risk and so reduce their vulnerability. DRR activities also include mapping areas that will be most affected by an extreme event, creating evacuation routes, developing information systems and early-warning systems, training citizens on flood-proofing their homes, or even making informational videos on what to do should a disaster strike.

This is not to say that large infrastructure projects aren’t important: indeed they can be transformational. However, it is important to emphasize that DRR activities are not always expensive: even though an all-round DRR plan for a place will likely include both more expensive infrastructure, less economically-expensive activities can also make a difference.

Can ‘Frugal Innovation’ inspire low-cost but effective interventions?

In order to develop new ideas around lower-cost (frugal) risk reduction activities, it is useful to dive into the world of Frugal Innovation. The International Centre for Frugal Innovation (ICFI), based at ISS and part of LDE, considers the practice and approach to be a potentially transformative way of finding new solutions to growing societal problems, in a non-excessive way. Andre Leliveld and Peter Knorringa, in an article from 2017 setting out the potential relationship between Frugal Innovation and development, note that the field sprouted from multiple sources but takes much inspiration from jugaad practices in South Asia. Jugaad is an excellent catch-all term (borrowed from Hindi, and with similar terms in Punjabi, Urdu, and various Dravidian languages including Telugu and Malyalam) for low-cost and often ingenious solutions to nagging problems; as well as the kind of mindset that allows the creative thinking around these solutions to occur. Whilst the term and thinking is often used in business (to create products for people with less purchasing power), it is very versatile.

Utilising some of the thinking inherent within Frugal Innovation in relation to DRR activities requires taking a solutions-oriented approach, and making use of existing resources, skills, or initiatives to reduce vulnerability by mitigating risk.

Painting and planning: Frugal Disaster Risk Reduction in action

How urban communities adapt to heatwaves across India is an interesting way to demonstrate how integrating Frugal Innovation techniques into Disaster Risk Reduction carries the potential for meaningful reduction in vulnerability.

Heatwaves have the potential to be very destructive, and one solution that is being rolled out across several areas that have a high number of informal dwellings in cities including Mumbai and Nagpur is the low-cost but high-yield technique of painting roofs white (to reflect the sun) and installing secondary ‘shade roofs’ on buildings. This can reduce inside temperatures by several degrees on the hottest of days. Similarly, a network of inexpensive recording devices has been installed to track ‘hotspots’ in the city, which can inform where communal ‘cooling zones’ need to be set up local city corporations or voluntary groups. And, in Ahmedabad in the north-west of India, a ‘Heat Action Plan’ was developed by the city corporation and scientific partners that is estimated to have prevented hundreds of fatalities.

Developing evacuation routes, making sure that citizens are prepared for what to do in a disaster, small and uncomplicated changes to people’s homes, or even utilising close-knit communities and communication networks as informal warning systems may not structurally reduce peoples’yet vulnerabilities yet can make a difference in preventing the worst of disaster impacts. And, whilst not as transformational as large public infrastructure projects, any gain in a communities’ resilience is an important step. Luckily ‘Frugal Innovation’ techniques show us that DRR doesn’t always need to be expensive.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author

Tom Ansell

Tom Ansell is the Coordinator of the Humanitarian Studies Centre and International Humanitarian Studies Association.

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Misleading narratives distort antisemitism discourses

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Ferguson is Palestine

Bigotry, in all its forms, is steadily rising. Clearly, being non-racist is not enough; we need to be anti-racist to be able to combat race-related bigotry once and for all. This principle should indeed apply to all forms of bigotry, including antisemitism. However, as this article explains, misleading narratives in the documentary film Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations distort our understanding, and even serve as a cover, for other forms of intolerance, which can move us closer to bigotry instead of further away from it.

Anti-black racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry are on the rise in Europe and elsewhere in the world, according to annual reports of the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance. As a result, people are rising up in protest through #BlackLivesMatter and other movements. The global outcry and calls for change following the police killing of George Floyd vividly reveals just how prevalent racism still is. Yet, it is also clear how some organizations purporting to challenge such hate crimes can use an anti-racist message as “cover” for other forms of bigotry and intolerance, as a recent documentary has also done.

Antisemitism in films and documentaries

In cinematography, antisemitism, like other forms of bigotry, often has been afforded special attention. As a Jewish youth growing up in my congregation, I watched many of these movies dealing with antisemitism—from classics such as Ben-Hur (1959) to the more recent Schindler’s List (1993). One of the most recent and acclaimed documentaries I saw was the bold 2009 film Defamation by Israeli film-maker Yoav Shamir. I was therefore curious about how antisemitism was dealt with in the recently released documentary Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations by the American film-maker Andrew Goldberg. However, I felt very dispirited after watching it. Rather than meaningfully addressing the very real problem of antisemitism in the world, this documentary reproduces misleading narratives that distort discourses on antisemitism.

In this article, I will explain how the film-maker argues that there is a moral equivalence between four different forms or “mutations” of antisemitism and what’s wrong with this conceptualization of it.

Four “mutations” of antisemitism

Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations attempts to show how four different examples of antisemitism manifest in present-day society and the “logics” that purportedly drive antisemitism. The documentary is intended to provide what the film-maker regards as an honest view of antisemitism, but is so unbalanced that it ends up having the opposite effect.

In Part I of the movie, the focus is on the Far Right in the USA. After very moving, personal testimonies by victims of various violent antisemitic attacks, the documentary turns to an interview with a Mr. Walker, who is running for the state legislature in North Carolina. Walker insists that “God likes whites more than blacks”, argues that black persons and Muslims are the same, and finally reproduces a typical antisemitic conspiracy trope that “the Jew was created to destroy white Christian nations”. George Will, a prize-winning Washington Post columnist, then sums up the perverse “logic” behind antisemitism: “In a healthy society that has problems, people ask ‘what did we do to cause this’? In an unhealthy society that has problems, they say ‘who did this to us’? And the Jews are always a candidate.”

In Part II, the focus is on a smear campaign by the right-wing, nationalist president of Hungary, Victor Orban, aimed at the liberal Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist George Soros. Classic antisemitic tropes are invoked, presenting clear examples of antisemitism through the use of grotesque cartoons and photoshopped images of Soros with exaggerated Judaic features. Moreover, the Hungarian media juxtaposes images of Muslims entering the country against accusations that they are “inundating your culture” and, moreover, are part of a “Soros plan”. Posters, billboards and television ads all reinforce these patently antisemitic and Islamophobic messages.

I am disgusted. However, something crucial is missing. While examples of antisemitism by Orban and others in his government are well established, paradoxically, as one interviewed professor notes, Orban does not want to be accused of antisemitism. Indeed, “he wants to pose with ‘them’—he even wears the hat”. Why is it, then, that Orban, his political party and the Hungarian government crudely reproduce antisemitic tropes while simultaneously object to being called antisemitic? The film-maker doesn’t address this crucial issue at all, also avoiding Orban’s very public cultivation of diplomatic ties with the State of Israel.

Further omissions are apparent in Part III of the film, which purports to focus on antisemitism among the “Far Left” in the United Kingdom. There is no mention of antisemitism within the Conservative Party. The focus is squarely on the Labour Party. The accusation is that Labour’s alleged antisemitism problem is due to “left-wing extremists” who condemn capitalism, criticize Israel and therefore by definition are antisemitic. This is both highly unconvincing and inflammatory, reinforced by interviews with embittered former Labour members who are also vocal supporters of Israel (and neo-liberal economic policies), such as former Labour leader Tony Blair.

Totally unaddressed are what these so-called “left-wing extremists” criticize, namely Israel’s discriminatory and brutal policies against Palestinians that have been labelled as an “apartheid regime”. While maintaining its thin claims against “leftists”, the film-maker fails entirely to engage with the many critics of these claims, such as Jamie Stern Weiner or Mehdi Hasan. Or with a comprehensive report on distorted media coverage of the Labour Party by Dr. Justin Scholsberg of Birkbeck College and journalist Laura Laker. Or with the book Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, The Party and Public Belief by award-winning journalists and academics Greg Philo, Mike Berry, Justin Scholsberg, Antony Lerman and David Miller. To name but a few.

Part IV focuses exclusively on what the filmmaker describes as “Islamic radicalism” in France. The primary perpetrators of antisemitism, it is claimed, are “Islamic extremists”. Brief reference is made to what is described as “France’s colonial experiment”, which led to hundreds of thousands of Muslims to move to France. The implication is that those suffering from “post-colonialism” have a problem. Rather than acknowledge the country’s expansive Islamophobia, the film-maker plays directly into it, asserting that, based on “surveys”, one-third of Muslims in France are antisemitic, as compared with ten percent of non-Muslims. The suggestion that Muslims are far-more inclined than anyone else to hate Jews is both unsubstantiated, based on anecdotal examples and utterly fails to address the historical context of both antisemitism and Islamophobia.

 Time for a serious discussion about antisemitism

As the film does reveal, there is clearly a problem of antisemitism (as well as Islamophobia, racism and other forms of bigotry and intolerance), deserving of a serious discussion. However, the film is so filled with distortions that it doesn’t help to really understand, let alone combat this problem.

The film’s fatal flaw, noted elsewhere by Michelle Goldberg, is its conflation of criticisms of Israel and antisemitism. Indeed, this becomes a conspiracy theory of its own that “people hate Israel because they simultaneously hate the Jews, capitalism, and Western democracy”. Moreover, by interspersing credible examples of antisemitism with highly questionable examples, the selective treatment of these four “mutations” and the drawing of a moral equivalence between them critically undermine the very important goal of addressing antisemitism.

The need for critical reflection

The global fight against bigotry must be taken seriously. Hence, a serious and balanced documentary about antisemitism would be something different entirely. It would acknowledge the context of antisemitism as being part of a broader pattern of hatred, intolerance and discrimination affecting many persecuted groups. It would include constructive criticism of the film-maker’s assumptions. And finally, it would not make simplistic and distorted assumptions that critics of Israel’s expansionist, colonial and discriminatory regime are de facto antisemitic.Jeff Handmaker

About the author:

Jeff Handmaker is a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and focuses on legal mobilisation.

He is a regular author for Bliss. Read all his posts here. 

When outright racism triggers migrant precarity: Britain’s Windrush Scandal and the need to move beyond arguments on legality by Anna Cáceres

By Posted on 4643 views
Windrush Protesters 2018

[Versión en español abajo]

In 2018 Britain once again made news headlines, this time for the Windrush scandal that saw scores of British citizens with migration backgrounds wrongly detained and deported. Almost all were migrants from Commonwealth countries who had migrated to Britain after the Second World War and because of a series of policy changes starting in 2012 were no longer recognized as citizens by 2018. The scandal is important for two reasons. First, it demonstrates the importance of viewing ‘citizenship’ as a fluid, and indeed socially constructed, category, rather than a binary legal designation. Second, it shows how racism, when coupled with racially exclusive constructions of national identity, can be a more important trigger for migrant precarity than legal status.

The UK’s increasing flirtation over the last decade with right-wing populist discourses on migration has been well-documented and came to a legislative climax with the passing of a migration policy package known as the Hostile Environment (HE) by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2012. HE policies ostensibly sought to increase the ‘voluntary return’ rate of undocumented migrants in the UK, but in effect acted to flip the burden of proof in migration cases. Whereas previously it was up to migration enforcement officials to prove the undocumented status of an individual, HE ensured that it was now up to an increasingly random array of non-specialist civil society actors to police the migration status of their fellow residents. Such actors came to include employers, benefit officers, healthcare providers, and landlords.

It was not until 2018, when The Guardian exposed the treatment of legal migrants under HE, that criticism started to gain real traction and several internal investigations were launched. Central to this coverage was a portion of British residents known as Windrush Migrants (WM)—Commonwealth citizens who migrated to the UK between 1948 and 1973. This group was severely and systematically swept up in the HE despite having the legal right to reside in the UK.

In essence, the HE acted to reintroduce migration-related precarity into the lives of WMs, individuals who had lived in the UK for decades and no longer viewed themselves as ‘migrants’. In the literature on precarity, it is emphasised that migrants experience both traditional socioeconomic precarity—i.e. low-pay, inherently unstable work—and migration-specific forms by virtue of being non-citizens. Problems with legal status, ‘deportability’, and everyday discrimination are all common examples. However, the focus on ‘citizenship’ is limiting, as it is typically defined as a binary legal construct: one either is, or is not, a citizen.

WMs pose a unique example of a group who were citizens and then became non-citizens. Here, the history of Windrush migration is exceedingly important: most WMs had equal citizenship status to British-born residents at the time of their arrival. The passage of the British Nationality Act of 1948 had granted citizenship status, including permanent residency rights, to all subjects of the Commonwealth. These rights were progressively stripped back with the passage of several immigration acts in the 1960s and 1970s, which began differentiating between Brits born on mainland Britain and those born outside of it.  By the time the Immigration Act of 1971 came into force in 1973, individuals from the Commonwealth had been downgraded from ‘British citizens’ to ‘foreign immigrants’. The case of WMs thus shows that citizenship is a fluid category, which can and is reconstructed as suits the needs of the politics of the day.

Even more importantly, citizenship as experienced by WMs was in the eyes of the beholder: white British residents. All of the WMs who were swept up in HE policies had a legal right to reside in the UK, and indeed would have been eligible for full British citizenship, had they even been aware that they didn’t have it already. Many individuals reported feeling stunned by their sudden designation as ‘undocumented migrants’ and indeed even felt betrayed by a country they perceived to be their own. Thus, Paulette Wilson, born in Jamaica but resident in the UK since 1968, had the following to say:

“I don’t feel British. I am British. I’ve been raised here, all I know is Britain. What the hell can I call myself except British […] I’m still angry that I have to prove it. I feel angry that I have to go through this”.[1]

Two things were at play in facilitating the reclassification of WMs as illegal outsiders under the HE. First was a shocking ignorance of the history of migration to Britain and the policies that governed it. Whilst this is not surprising when discussing the myriad members of the public who were being asked to police migration, specialists at the Home Office itself appeared to be blissfully unaware as well.

This collective amnesia about the legal rights and cultural significance of WMs was facilitated by the second factor: structural racism. By asking British residents to trigger immigration checks of their fellow residents, HE opened the floodgates for the harassment of ethnic minorities based entirely on non-specialist judgements of who ‘looks foreign’. That WMs were systematically perceived as ‘foreign’, despite having all the trappings of long-term residents—cultural knowledge, fluency in English, local accents etc.—is a reflection of racially exclusive construction of the British identity in popular memory.

This is to say that in cultural discourses, the historic presence of, and indeed significant impact made by non-white individuals in Britain has been written out at a systematic level. We see this in the all-white casts of British WWII films. We see it, too, in the violent hostility to Britain’s first black female MP, Dianne Abbott, who in a parliamentary career spanning over 30 years has been on the receiving end of the most abuse received by any female parliamentarian. Finally, we see it in a national History curriculum, which in the limited areas where migration is even mentioned does so in the context of ‘race relations’, effectively glossing over the agency of these individuals in favour of reconstructing the perpetually foreign migrant victim.

Windrush migrants present a uniquely fertile case study for migration scholars of all disciplines because of what it reveals about the interplay between citizenship and racism. More importantly however, the injustices of HE have flourished in a climate of wilful ignorance. The more scrutiny this case receives, the better.

[1] Amelia Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (London: Guardian Faber, 2019), P.40.

Selected literature:

Gentleman, Amelia, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (London: Guardian Faber, 2019).

Olusuga, David, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Pan Macmillan, 2016).

Paret, Marcel and Gleeson, Shannon, ‘Precarity and agency through a migration lens’, Citizenship Studies (2016), Vol.20, issues 3-4, pp.277-294. 

Williams, Wendy, ‘Windrush Lessons Learned Review’, Independent Review for the House of Commons (March 19, 2020) [online] Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/windrush-lessons-learned-review [Accessed on, April 1, 2020].

Anna CarceresAbout the author:

Anna Cáceres is currently finishing her ResMA in Migration History at Leiden University. Her research focuses on migration and the British public healthcare system since WWII. She is particularly interested in the historic roots of contemporary migration discourses and the role – or lack thereof – of history in national identity.

 

Title Image Credit: Steve Eason on Flickr. The image has been cropped.

Cuando el racismo abierto produce la precariedad de inmigrantes: el escándalo de Windrush en el Reino Unido y la necesidad de sobrepasar el enfoque sobre legalidad por Anna Cáceres

En el 2018 el Reino Unido estaba de nuevo en los medios, esta vez por el escándalo de Windrush que vio a cientos de ciudadanos Británicos con antecedentes migratorios incorrectamente detenidos y hasta deportados. Casi todos eran inmigrantes de países de la Mancomunidad[1] que habían inmigrado al Reino Unido en los años siguientes a la segunda guerra mundial, pero que en 2018, bajo nuevas políticas introducidas a partir del 2012, no eran más reconocidos como ciudadanos Británicos. El escándalo es importante por dos razones. Primero, demuestra la importancia de concebir al “ciudadano” como una categoría fluida y construida socialmente, en vez de una designación binaria legal. Segundo, demuestra cómo el racismo, cuando se encuentra mezclado con construcciones de la identidad nacional que son racialmente exclusivas, puede ser un catalizador para la precariedad de inmigrantes más importante que el estatus legal.

En la última década, el creciente alineamiento del Reino Unido (RU) con los discursos populistas de derecha sobre la inmigración ha sido ampliamente documentados, y llegando a su clímax legislativo con la aprobación de políticas sobre la inmigración llamado el Ambiente Hostil (AH) por la coalición Conservadora- Liberal Demócrata en el 2012. Las políticas del AH aparentemente buscaban aumentar la tasa de ‘retorno voluntario’ por los indocumentados, pero en actualidad sirvieron para invertir la carga de prueba en casos de migración. Mientras antes era la responsabilidad del oficial migraciones aprobar el estatus indocumentado de las personas, AH aseguró que ahora una jurado aleatoria y no especialistas de miembros del público,   estaban a cargo de vigilar el estatus migratorio de sus compañeros residentes. Este jurado llegó a incluir empleadores, oficiales a cargo de subsidios estatales, proveedores de servicios médicos, y propietarios.

No fue hasta el 2018, cuando The Guardian expuso el tratamiento de inmigrantes legales bajo el AH que las críticas ganaron verdadero apoyo y varias investigaciones internas fueron iniciadas. Una de las piezas centrales de esta cobertura mediática fue una porción de residentes Británicos conocidos como los Inmigrantes del Windrush (IW) – ciudadanos de la Mancomunidad que llegaron al RU entre el 1948 y el 1973. Este grupo fue severa y sistemáticamente marginalizados por el AH, aunque tenían el derecho legal de permanecer en el RU.

Esencialmente, el AH sirvió para reintroducir una situación de precariedad de inmigrante a las vidas de los IW, personas que llevaban décadas viviendo en el RU y ya no se veían como ‘inmigrantes’. En la literatura sobre la precariedad, se pone énfasis en que los inmigrantes sufren una forma de precariedad atada al estatus de ser inmigrantes, además de la precariedad tradicional, económica – es decir sueldos bajos, y empleo inestable –  a causa de no ser ciudadanos. Dificultades legales, la posibilidad de ser deportados, y la discriminación cotidiana son todos ejemplos comunes de la precariedad de los inmigrantes. Sin embargo, el enfoque sobre la ‘ciudadanía’ es limitante, porque en general la ciudadanía está definida como una designación binaria y legal: uno es, o no es, un ciudadano/a.

Los IW son un ejemplo único de ciudadanos que fueron convertidos en no-ciudadanos. Aquí, la historia de la inmigración del Windrush es sumamente importante: El Acto de la Nacionalidad Británica del 1948 dió estatus legal equivalente a los residentes natales del RU, incluyendo derechos de residencia, a todos los sujetos de la Mancomunidad, y entonces también a la mayor parte de los IW. Estos derechos fueron poco a poco revocados con el paso de varias políticas de inmigración en los años 1960s y 1970s, que empezaron a diferenciar entre británicos nacidos en RU y los nacidos afuera. Cuando llegó a promulgarse el Acto de Inmigración del 1971 en el 1973, las personas de la Mancomunidad ya habían sido degradadas de ‘ciudadano Británico’ a ‘inmigrante extranjero’. El caso de los IW demuestra que la ciudadanía es una categoría fluida, que se puede y es reconstruida para servir los intereses políticos del día.

Aún más importante, la ciudadanía experimentada por los IW era condicional y dependía de la aprobación del observador: en este case los residentes blancos del RU. Todos los IW afectados por las políticas del AH tenían un derecho legal a permanecer en el RU, y hasta hubiesen sido aptos para solicitar la ciudadanía británica completa, si se hubieran enterado que ya no la tenían. Muchos de ellos reportaron un shock terrible al darse cuenta que de repente estaban designados como indocumentados, y hasta se sentían traicionados por un país que percibían como el suyo. Así, Paulette Wilson, nacida en Jamaica pero residente en el RU desde el 1968 dijo lo siguiente:

“No me siento británica. Soy británica. Fui criada acá, todo lo que conozco es Gran Bretaña ¿Qué diablos puedo decir que soy sino Británica? […] Todavía estoy enojada que lo tengo que demostrar. Me siento enojada que tengo que pasar por esto” .[2]

Dos factores facilitaron la reclasificación de los IW como extranjeros ilegales bajo el AH. El primero fue una escandalosa ignorancia sobre la historia de la inmigración al RU y las políticas que la rigieron. Mientras esto no es sorprendente cuando consideramos la miríada de miembros del público que fueron reclutados para vigilar la inmigración, miembros del ministerio del interior también aparentaron estar felices con su ignorancia en el tema.

La amnesia colectiva sobre los derechos legales y la significancia cultural de los IW estaba facilitada por un segundo factor: el racismo estructural. En pedir que los residentes Británicos inicien investigaciones migratorias contra sus compañeros residentes, el AH abrió las puertas al acoso de minorías étnicas basado exclusivamente en el juicio de no-especialistas en quien “parecía extranjero”. Que los IW estaban sistemáticamente percibidos como “extranjeros”, aunque tenían todas las características de residentes de largo plazo – conocimiento cultural, fluidez en el inglés, acentos locales etc. – es un reflejo de la construcción popular de una identidad Británica que es racialmente exclusiva.

En los discursos culturales en Gran Bretaña, existe una amnesia colectiva sobre la presencia histórica, y el impacto significante creado por personas no blancas. Esto los vemos en los repartos completamente blancos de las películas Británicas de la segunda guerra mundial.  También lo vemos en la hostilidad violenta dirigida a la primera parlamentaria negra del país, Dianne Abbott, que en una carrera que ha durado más de 30 años ha recibido más abuso que cualquier otra mujer parlamentaria. Finalmente, lo vemos en un currículo nacional de historia, que en los pocos lugares donde se menciona la inmigración, se hace solo en el contexto de las “relaciones raciales”, efectivamente encubriendo la voluntad de estas personas en favor de reconstruir un inmigrante perpetuamente victimizado.

Los IW presentan un caso únicamente fecundo para investigadores de la inmigración de todas disciplinas por lo que demuestran sobre el intercambio entre ciudadanía y racismo. Aún más importante, las injusticias del AH han florecido en un ámbito de ignorancia intencional. La mayor atención que se le dé a este caso, mejor.

[1] La Mancomunidad de Naciones es una asociación de países que formaban la mayor parte del imperio Británico. Se inauguro en el 1926, cuando empezaron las primeras holas de descolonización y ha sido una forma de mantener influencia británica en estos territorios.

[2] Amelia Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (London: Guardian Faber, 2019), P.40.

Literatura Seleccionada

Gentleman, Amelia, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (London: Guardian Faber, 2019).

Olusuga, David, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Pan Macmillan, 2016).

Paret, Marcel and Gleeson, Shannon, ‘Precarity and agency through a migration lens’, Citizenship Studies (2016), Vol.20, issues 3-4, pp.277-294. 

Williams, Wendy, ‘Windrush Lessons Learned Review’, Independent Review for the House of Commons (March 19, 2020) [online] Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/windrush-lessons-learned-review [Accessed on, April 1, 2020].

Anna CarceresBio de la autora:

Anna Cáceres está terminando su  ResMA en Historia de Inmigracion en la Universidad de Leiden. Su investigación se concentra sobre la inmigración y el sistema de salud pública en el Reino Unido a partir de la segunda guerra mundial. Está particularmente interesada en las raíces históricas de los discursos actuales sobre la inmigración y el rol – o no, como sea el caso – de la historia en construir la identidad nacional.

 

Crédito de la imagen del título: Steve Eason en Flickr. La imagen ha sido recortada.

Brexit tales of discontent: the revenge of Empire by Helen M. Hintjens

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Nobody knows what happens after UK general elections on 12 December 2019: Brexit, a referendum on Irish unity, on Scottish independence, or a No-Deal exit from the EU?  In 1977, Tom Nairn in The Break up of Britain warned that during “extreme difficulties and contradictions, the prospect of break-down or being held forever in the gateway… may lead to… nationalist dementia for a society” (p. 349). The election taking place this week will decide whether the ghosts of imperial ancestors win the day, or whether younger generations can save the UK from its divided self.

Crisis? Which one?

Uncertainty over Brexit is wreaking havoc on the Brits. Those who want to remain in the EU are in despair; those who want to leave are angry. Most are sick of it. Britain’s collective mental health, already poor before Brexit, is worsening dramatically.

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Illustration 1: anti-depressant prescriptions in England: another opioid crisis.

In 2012, the Jimmy Savile scandal erupted, resulting in a public crisis in confidence in the British establishment. The public enquiry under then-PM Teresa May into “Historic Child Sexual Abuse” involved serious charges against MPs, celebrities, and royals. The crisis recently resurfaced when Prince Andrew gave a BBC interview on his Epstein connection. He was soon forced to withdraw from UK public life. The Savile crisis is almost forgotten, yet in 2012, John Simpson in The Guardian called this “the worst crisis I can remember in my nearly 50 years at the BBC”. Brexit is now the second “worst crisis in 50 years” in less than a decade.

Myths and lies

Some see the 2016 Referendum result as based on myths and lies. The language of war—betrayal, surrender—gained currency. More recently, the Labour Party accused Johnson  and his rich friends of planning a ‘Big Short’ on a No-Deal Brexit. Pro-Brexiteers accuse Remainers (termed ‘Remoaners’) of thwarting the “will of the British people”. Tory MPs who are pro-Remain have been thrown out of the Conservative Party. Support for Brexit remains in rural, small-town and post-industrial England, despite the dire warnings of Operation Yellowhammer [1]. In London, Bristol and Birmingham, and across Scotland and Northern Ireland, the majority wants to Remain. Welsh opinion has moved towards Remain, or even Independence.

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Illustration 2: Humour is essential

This joke sums up the dilemma for smaller UK countries: “An Irishman, a Scotsman and an Englishman go into a bar. The Englishman wants to leave, so they all have to leave”. Brexit humour abounds, and it helps a little, but only a little.

Macho English Nationalism

On Gender and Brexit, Aida Hozic and Jacqui True comment whilst “men took up 85% of the press space and 70% of television coverage”, during the Brexit campaign, “women [became]… visible as actors… to ‘clean-up’ the mess left by their male counterparts” (p. 276). Women and men voted similarly on Leave-Remain. Young people were notably more pro-Remain than their elders. Commenting in Third Text, Finlayson comments: “Farage’s Brexitism… opposes the small, ordinary, decent, local and familiar to the big, distant and untrustworthy”, showing a ‘little Englander’ mentality harking back to Empire. Pro-Brexit rhetoric centres on ‘guts’ and courage: “…phrases [that] invoke boyhood stories of wartime bravery against the odds and of standing up to boarding school bullies” (pp. 602-603), and tales of the Empire.

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Illustration 3: Brexit and Dangerous Jingoism

Outdated imperial values are dangerous. Both racist and sexist, such values risk renewing sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. The murder of Labour MP Jo Cox and UK-wide spike in hate crime since the Referendum leaves minorities fearing the future. And small-minded English nationalism merely intensifies Scottish, Northern Irish, and Welsh nationalism. The 12 December 2019 elections are crucial.

Algorithms and Rule by Nobody

In today’s networked age, algorithm-based ‘filter bubbles’ limit social media users’ suggested content to their existing comfort zone. Guardian investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr found that the Leave campaign defeated Remain by using such filtering algorithms effectively [2]. Causing suspicion of his motives, Boris Johnson recently refused to allow the publication of a parliamentary report on Russian social media interference in UK elections.

Pro-Brexiteers also frame Brexit as revolt against ‘faceless Brussels bureaucrats’, echoing Hannah Arendt’s ‘Rule by Nobody’. Yet EU neoliberalism could give way to UK financial deregulation, a danger with the UK constitution now collapsing. Abandoning compromise also means Britain could break into three or four national units. Sectarian and anti-minority violence would likely accompany this break-up.

End Thoughts

Nairn warned the Brits—especially the English—of the danger of rooting around in their imperial past for renewed nationalist identity symbols: “… once these well-springs have been tapped there is no real guarantee that the great forces released will be ‘controllable’” (p. 349). As minorities in the UK live in fear of the future, Brexiteers need constant reminding that words can be mortally dangerous. We are now in Karl Marx’s vision in The Eighteenth Brumaire where “[t]he tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living… [drawing]… from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history”. Rather than plunge back into its imperial past, and end up divided, it is hoped the UK electorate will vote to remain in the EU. The question now will be whether the EU will want us!

At a Research in Progress Seminar 12 December 2019 ‘BREXITLAND FAIRY TALES’, Helen Hintjens will elaborate on some of the points in this blog. 13.00-14.00, ISS. This happens to be on the same day as the UK national parliamentary elections!

[1] The latest Operation Yellowhammer document was released on 2 August 2019. It predicts shortages of medicine, “risk… panic buying… [which could] exacerbate food supply disruption”, “[u]rgent action… to ensure [continued] access to clean water”, “[the disruption of] [la]w enforcement data/information sharing UK-EU”, and “[p]rotests and counter-protests… across the UK” alongside “… a rise in public disorder and community tensions”.
In Northern Ireland “growth of the illegitimate economy” especially in cross-border areas“.
[2] https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/11/exclusive-dominic-cummingss-secret-links-to-russia/
Cadwalladr also in:  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/17/dark-money-democracy-billionaires-funding
Image Credit Main Photo: Williams Murray Hamm on Flickr

20160917_190837

About the author:

Helen Hintjens is Assistant Professor in Development and Social Justice. She publishes on asylum policies and on post-genocide reconciliation in the African Great Lakes region, and Rwanda in particular.

 

 

Distorted anti-Semitism allegations in UK’s Labour Party are a cover for Israeli apartheid by Jeff Handmaker

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On 18 February 2019, Luciana Berger and six other British Members of Parliament (MPs) left the UK Labour Party. The most prominent reason provided by the departing MPs, led by Berger, is that the Party had become ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’, due mostly – or so it would appear – to Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s outspoken criticisms of the Israeli government and military. As discussed in this blogpost, which draws on a longer article published on Mondoweiss, these allegations are both dangerous distortions of anti-Semitism and serve as a shameful cover for Israel’s regime of apartheid.

In the extensive reporting that followed the departure of the Labour MPs, a Spectator columnist alleged that this was the beginning of the end for Labour, while the Guardian claimed that the party faced an anti-Semitism crisis. It was hardly mentioned in any of this reporting that the seven Labour Party members who decided to leave were all closely tied with Labour Friends of Israel, an avowedly pro-Israel organisation. Berger is its former director.

A report by the Media Reform Coalition identified ‘myriad inaccuracies and distortions’ in the reporting of anti-Semitism claims against the Labour Party, which prompted a public statement by prominent journalists and scholars. Fomenting a strategy of disinformation is consistent with claims made by Jonathan Cook, a highly respected author and long-time journalist, who has established that the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs has long been actively seeking to marginalise its critics through a range of measures.

But where did the anti-Semitism claim come from?

The IHRA Definition

The contemporary ‘debate’ over anti-Semitism within the Labour Party relates to August 2018, when pro-Israel members of the party proposed the incorporation of a highly controversial definition of anti-Semitism. Called the “Working Definition of Antisemitism” and drafted in 2016 by a group called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), the IHRA definition contains vague and dangerously far-reaching conflations of criticisms of Israel and references to the holocaust.

The lobby to incorporate the IHRA definition was fierce and unrelenting, largely led by Berger and others affiliated with Labour Friends of Israel. At the time of the August 2018 debate, there were even efforts to smear Hajo Meyer, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz who had once spoken at a Labour Party rally where he made comparisons between the Nazi regime and his observations of Israeli policies. Meyer, an outspoken retired theoretical physicist, recorded his experiences in a moving memoir The End of Judaism: An Ethical Tradition Betrayed, published in 2012.

Steven Garside, a member of the UK Labour Party and Palestine Solidarity Campaign who strongly opposed the IHRA definition, maintained that erroneous allegations of anti-Semitism were in fact related to Corbyn’s harsh criticisms of the Israeli government and military. Ash Sarkar of the Sandberg Instituut condemned the move as a threat to free expression. Prominent human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson warned that the definition would suppress legitimate criticism of Israel while failing to cover genuine cases of anti-Semitism.

But despite these criticisms and warnings, Labour ultimately decided to incorporate the definition in full.

Since then, emboldened by the wide-ranging IHRA definition, groups such as Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Chronicle, with very little substantiation, have sought to equate criticism of Israel as “Jew hate”.

For liberal supporters of Israel, adopting the IHRA definition has been a crucial strategy. However, the true aim of such vacuous, yet highly damaging allegations is to avoid a critical dialogue on Israel’s policies of apartheid against Palestinians. Unlike South Africa apartheid, which from the 1960s became increasingly reported, understood and eventually condemned, Israeli apartheid has been shamefully underreported and is far less understood.

So what does Israeli apartheid look like?

The many forms of apartheid in Israel

Israeli apartheid takes many forms, whether this be the overt racism enshrined in Israel’s 2018 “Nation-State law” that discontinued Arabic as an official language, which is now being challenged in Court, or Israel’s continued blockade and bombing of Gaza (since 2005) that is currently the subject of a preliminary examination by the International Criminal Court.

Apartheid also takes the form of literally hundreds of insidious Israeli military orders, including Order 101 that makes it impossible for Palestinians to legally protest. Israeli regulations make it virtually impossible for Palestinians to build a home. This is due to the fact that Israel’s land and zoning regulations are, according to Israel’s Basic Law, oriented around “preserving” the land for Israel’s Jewish inhabitants.

But the most insidious manifestations of Israeli apartheid are the decades-long, everyday experiences of Palestinians. Farmers have to stand in long lines to reach their sheep in the agricultural village of Qalandia (that is surrounded by a high, concrete wall). School children in Hebron cannot walk to school without being stopped daily by soldiers at a military checkpoint to check the contents of their schoolbags. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women has heard numerous cases of official abuse against Palestinian women, including a seven-month pregnant woman assaulted at a checkpoint.

Given these examples, and much more, of Israel’s apartheid policies, it is exasperating that there is such a resistance to criticise Israel. And yet, this is exactly what happens. Liberal groups such as Labour Friends of Israel in the UK, Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) in the Netherlands and others repeatedly fuel the public’s outrage on anti-Semitism through disingenuous use of the IHRA definition, yet simultaneously maintain a silence that Israel’s policies amount to apartheid, not unlike the approach of like-minded liberal groups in Israel.

Apartheid cannot compete with a global social justice movement

Just as was ultimately the case in South Africa, neither Israel’s government, nor its most adamant, liberal supporters, can compete with a global social justice movement committed to ending Israel’s regime of apartheid. Rooted in equal rights claims, this movement is bolstered by growing judicial attention to Israel’s commission of war crimes and a highly successful, Palestinian-led global campaign of boycott divestment and sanctions (BDS).

The success of the BDS movement is acknowledge to have transformed the debate on Israel-Palestine. Indeed, as prominent Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has put it, BDS has been a true success story for the movement, succeeding to undermine Israel’s strongly cultivated image as a liberal democracy.

The conclusion that can be drawn from all this is that just like those who turned a blind eye for decades to apartheid in South Africa, the failure of Luciana Berger, Labour Friends of Israel, CIDI, and others to confront Israeli apartheid will place them all on the wrong side of history.

Image Credit: https://www.stopthewall.org/apartheid-wrong

JeffHandmakerISS
About the author:

Jeff Handmaker is a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and focuses on legal mobilisation.

He is a regular author for Bliss. Read all his posts here. 

 

 

IHSA Conference 2018 | The instrumentalisation of disasters by David Keen

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Today, not just disaster but the functions—and instrumentalisation—of disaster have been brought right into the heart of Europe. If widespread official violence and the instrumentalisation of disaster can happen right under the eyes of a free press and under the watch of two of the world’s most established democracies, what then is possible in greater seclusion? This blog is based on a keynote speech delivered at the International Humanitarian Studies Association Conference held in August 2018 at the ISS.

Visiting Calais in October 2015, the child psychiatrist Lynne Jones asked, “how is it possible that on the borders of a north European town, there are some 6,000 people living in conditions worse than those I have encountered with Somali refugees on the Ethiopian border, Pakistanis after a devastating earthquake, or Darfuris in the deserts of Northern Chad, one of the poorest countries in the world?”

It was shocking to realise that such a situation could develop—and be allowed to develop—in the heart of Western Europe. When disasters have occurred in more distant lands, government and aid officials have often pointed to obstacles like remoteness, insecurity and the rainy season. But Calais is an hour-and-a-half by train from London and Paris.

Where the functions of disaster have been recognised, this has often been in relation to ‘faraway’ places. These functions may include political repression in a ‘state of emergency’ as well as profits from price movements and from the depopulation of resource-rich areas. But today, not just disaster but the functions—and instrumentalisation—of disaster have been brought right into the heart of Europe.

The instrumentalisation of disasters

A big part of the instrumentalisation of disasters today is the logic of deterrence. Many aid workers and human rights workers saw the appalling conditions on the Greek island of Lesbos as part of an attempt to deter migration. In Calais, government officials have sometimes made it pretty clear that they want to maintain pressure on the migrants and to make conditions so bad as to discourage people from coming, and migrants/refugees in Calais themselves also saw a connection. For example, one young Sudanese man from Darfur said in the summer of 2016 when we were in Calais that “beatings are getting worse as large numbers are here now and they [the police] want to discourage it.”

The political instrumentalisation of Calais has involved not just deterrence, but also political theatre aimed at domestic audiences. This is partly about stirring up fears and then exploiting them politically. Particularly in the run-up to the UK’s Brexit referendum in June 2016, Calais was repeatedly on the front page of the UK’s Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the Sun—considered right-wing newspapers. It somehow symbolised, crystallised and exacerbated very deep-rooted fears about immigration, criminality, disease, terrorism, and loss of control.

Another political pay-off from the high-profile situation in Calais was that it allowed the British government under Labour and then under David Cameron to send a strong message that, even while still within the EU, the UK was taking tough measures to control illegal immigration. When UK border controls were set up in France in 2002, this contributed to a sharp fall in UK asylum applications. It also had the effect of fostering the informal migrant settlements around Calais, which were then used to underline the necessity of strong controls.

Ever since the first major settlement in Calais in 1999, there have been periodic police actions to intimidate and disperse people. I think a great many British people do not realise what has been done ‘on their behalf’ in Calais and surrounding areas. This is an example of what Mark Duffield referred to a long time ago as ‘functional ignorance’. The UK government is been deeply complicit in this particular ‘hostile environment’, and indeed Calais migrants have often expressed this view. The UK has helped to plan and fund dispersals and has also sometimes taken credit for them. For example, a 2010 UK government press release welcomed the package of actions agreed with France the previous year, saying a key measure was “the dismantling of the illegal encampments along the Channel and North Sea coast.”[1]

In October 2016, French police, in coordination with the UK, destroyed the most famous ‘jungle’ camp, which had been established on a landfill site ridden with asbestos in January 2015. But such measures tend to disperse migrants and make them less visible rather than actually resolving the situation. In his book Illegality Inc., Swedish anthropologist Ruben Andersson brilliantly documented the way migration controls shift the problem geographically while allowing short-term gains from appearing tough.

In Calais, the violence of French police has been well documented, for example by the Refugee Rights Data Project (now Refugee Rights Europe) and by Human Rights Watch. One Calais volunteer told us: “Everyone has had experience of teargas or rubber bullets. The head injuries from rubber bullets were terrible.”

Sadly, the very enterprise of the migrants seems to have attracted further police repression. This may reflect what Noam Chomsky once called the threat of a good example. While we were at the camp in 2016, there was a series of large-scale police raids on the surprisingly vibrant network of shops and restaurants, closing some and confiscating food, drinks and documents.

Violent action and the plausibility of propaganda

This brings me to Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘action as propaganda’ – essentially the use of violent action (often by totalitarian regimes) to create a world in which implausible propaganda becomes more plausible over time. One historical example she gave was confining Jews to insanitary ghettoes and camps so that they came to appear disease-ridden and even less than human, in line with Nazi propaganda. Calais has been a horrendous example of ‘action as propaganda’, with harsh punishment of any signs of cultural or economic life; meanwhile, violence and disease are generally portrayed as part of the threat that Calais poses, ignoring the reality of a community that could be extraordinarily kind and hospitable. Even the violence and disease that have occurred in the camp have overwhelmingly been a consequence of neglect and overcrowding. Meanwhile, the very brutality of police responses has helped reinforce the message that these vulnerable people are somehow an existential threat to Western populations.

Calais is part of a much wider phenomenon of outsourcing migration control. This involves a large dose of de-responsibilisation, a fairly systematic tolerance for human rights abuses that are in some sense functional and that can also be conveniently blamed on others.

And if widespread official violence and the instrumentalisation of disaster can happen right under the eyes of a free press and under the watch of two of the world’s most established democracies, what then is possible in greater seclusion?

EU member states have enabled the Libyan Coast Guard to turn back thousands of people to Libya, where they face torture, sexual violence and other horrendous abuses[2]. In Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces (which grew out of the notorious Janjaweed militias responsible for genocide) have been deployed against migrants (usually from ethnic groups victimised in the genocide) as part of Sudan’s effort to demonstrate to the European Union that it can contain flows of migrants[3].

We need to be extraordinarily wary of the signals sent when certain populations are deemed systematically to be unwanted and even, in Arendt’s telling word, ‘undeportable’. Arendt showed that in the 1920s and 1930s, in a context of mass expulsions in Europe and a corresponding unwillingness to receive these people, “the very phrase ‘human rights’ became for all concerned—victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike—the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy.”[4] The Nazis had carefully tested the ground and found that almost no-one was willing to receive the Jews, Arendt stressed, before they launched their project of elimination.

How can all this possibly be justified? Well, today the shadowy figure of the ‘people smuggler’ has acquired important political functions as a scapegoat and a convenient alibi for neglect and abuse by a range of political authorities and unaccountable militias. Studies of the diverse economic and political functions of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism suggest that the rebel or terrorist has frequently become a kind of useful enemy[5]; I would suggest that in many ways the figure of ‘people smuggler’ has stepped conveniently into this pre-existing paradigm. And like the terrorist, the ‘exploitative smuggler’ is also routinely reproduced by the policies of those who claim to revile him, not least the tightening of immigration controls (as Andersson and others have shown).

Closely related to the relentless official focus on the ‘human smuggler’ is the tendency to place everything within an ‘anti-crime’ framework. Again, crime is a reality, but it is very dangerous when anything and anyone remotely connected to migration—including the attempt to claim asylum—is labelled as criminal. The emerging ‘anti-crime’ framework is also a great alibi for abusive officials or neglectful officials and a great way of disguising official involvement in fuelling conflict.

The redefinition of humanitarianism

Closely related to the war on crime and on human smugglers is a fairly systematic redefinition of humanitarianism. Humanitarianism has today been routinely redefined as the prevention of dangerous journeys. In these circumstances, Western government policies that make these journeys more dangerous; for example, the curbing of search-and-rescue in the Mediterranean, or encouraging violence in Calais, or even turning a blind eye to attacks on migrants travelling through Mexico serve as another form of Arendt’s ‘action as propaganda’. Within this emerging system, drowning may come to serve two related functions—first, as deterrence and, second, as propaganda for the allegedly ‘humanitarian’ project of preventing people from making the journey in the first place.

It seems to be a case – to paraphrase Henry II’s infamous reported incitement to the murder of archbishop Thomas-a-Becket, of “who will rid us of these troublesome migrants?” As with the creation of ‘safe areas’ in Bosnia that turned out not to be safe, Western governments cannot be honest about the evolving situation in France, Greece, Libya, Sudan, Mexico, Turkey, Sri Lanka and many other countries when they are obsessed with containing people within those environments.

[1] UK Prime Minister’s Office, 2010, UK-France Summit 2010 Declaration on Immigration, November 2. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-france-summit-2010-declaration-on-immigration
[2] Amnesty International, 2017, Libya’s Dark Web of Collusion, December
[3] Suliman Baldo, 2017, Ominous Threats Descending on Darfur, Enough, Washington, November; Susanne Jaspars and Margie Buchanan-Smith, 2018, Darfuri migration from Sudan to Europe; From displacement to despair, ODI, London, September forthcoming
[4] Hannah Arendt, 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Harcourt Brace.
[5] David Keen, 2012, Useful Enemies: When Waging Wars is More Important than Winning Them, Yale University Press.

David-Keen.jpgAbout the author: 

David Keen is Professor of Conflict Studies, London School of Economics. He has worked extensively on understanding war, including its causes and functions.

Economic diplomacy: bilateral relations in a context of geopolitical change by Peter A.G. Bergeijk and Selwyn J.V. Moons

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Economic diplomacy, although perceived as marginally important by neoclassical economists, is a highly relevant topic first and foremost because it works in practice, but also because it provides an essential policy answer to the increasing uncertainty of international transactions. In this article, Peter A.G. van Bergeijk and Selwyn J.V. Moons, editors of the recently released Research Handbook on Economic Diplomacy, briefly introduce the topic of economic diplomacy and highlight the value of the new publication, to which several ISS researchers have contributed.

The eminent breakdown of multilateralism and supranationalism due to Trump and Brexit has led to a revival of the debate on economic diplomacy, properly understood as a broad field that comprises those aspects of diplomacy that are aimed at:

  • the opening of markets to stimulate bilateral cross-border economic activities such as imports, exports, mergers and acquisitions and greenfield foreign direct investments;
  • the building and use of bilateral cultural, political and economic relationships between countries in order to assist domestic companies; and
  • the use of bilateral economic relationships, including (the threat) to discontinue these activities, as a tool of diplomacy.

Neoclassically oriented economists in the past have considered this topic of marginal interest only. Their analysis typically heralds the costs of government intervention and the benefits of free international trade and investment flows. Consequently, the economic analysis of positive and negative diplomatic interactions did not feature prominently on their research agenda. But it is increasingly being recognised that economic diplomacy is  a highly relevant topic, especially in Development Studies, (a) because economic diplomacy works (Moons 2017, 2018, Muniz 2018), (b) because it is more important for developing countries and emerging markets (Rhana 2018) and (c) because it provides an essential policy answer to the increasing uncertainty of international transactions (Bergeijk and Moons 2018).

Surprise and confusion

The international economic reality of 2018 is surprising and confusing. Europe struggles with its trans-Atlantic ally, and the UK’s exit and a new Italian government with an anti-EU attitude contribute to this sense of confusion. America is separating itself from its traditional partners (the EU, NAFTA, and the OECD). The trade relationships between the world’s economic #1 and #2 are more strained than ever before. Trust in the multilateral backbone of the world economy evaporates and US hegemonism is weakening. Clearly a new and better understanding of the interactions between governments is necessary because of the changing playing field and dynamics.

Brave new world

Four key stylized facts that apply to this new environment make the Research Handbook on Economic Diplomacy: Bilateral relations in a context of geopolitical change timely and highly relevant:

  1. In the brave new world of Trump and Brexit, trade and investment uncertainty increases significantly with a negative impact on trade and investment;
  2. Trump’s open confrontational approach to foreign policy as a form of negative diplomacy bears costs both in the US and abroad;
  3. Bilateral relationships become more relevant and valuable, especially for developing and emerging economies; and
  4. Bilateral economic diplomacy needs to be carefully designed and properly managed in order to generate optimal impact.

9781784710835Representing a move away from Eurocentric books on the topic, the Research Handbook offers relevant and focused contributions that provide three valuable lessons for current and future policies. First, in addition to the full coverage of positive interactions, our contributors also explicitly consider the impact of negative interaction. Second, the Research Handbook in addition to the analysis of OECD markets provides a comprehensive set of detailed empirical analyses of developing and emerging economies in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The contributions by 31 leading experts from industrial nations, emerging economies and developing countries in five continents provide a unique perspective on both the heterogeneous dynamics of economic diplomacy and the tools to analyse the impact and efficiency of economic diplomats both qualitatively (case studies, interviews) and quantitatively (macro-economic gravity models, micro-economic firm level data, surveys, meta-analysis, cost benefit analysis). Third, the Research Handbook provides detailed discussions of information requirements, data coverage and the impact of (changes in) the level and quality of diplomatic representation. The studies in the Research Handbook thereby reveal how and under which conditions economic diplomacy can be effective, providing clear guidance for evidence-based policy.

Evidence base

What are the major findings and implications of recent research? First, economic diplomacy works and this is true both for positive and negative interaction. One can build on positive interaction to strengthen economic ties and similarly the twitter tsunami of the current US president and his increasing reliance on economic sanctions will carry a significant cost (Rose, 2018). Second, uncertainty itself already reduces international specialisation: the threat of trade disruption and discontinuation of treaties in itself influences perceptions and thereby the behaviour of consumers, firms and governments. Third, a one-size-fits-all approach does not work. Economic diplomacy should be aimed at the niche where its contribution can be most significant: complex products, complex markets and countries with diverging political, cultural and historical background (Moons 2017).

Relevance for developing countries and emerging markets

Bilateral economic diplomacy is important for building a good country image and to promote an emerging market as a reliable trading partner with high quality export products, especially in developing countries. It is a relatively more significant determinant of bilateral exports among African states compared to regional integration (Afesorgbor 2018). New modes of economic diplomacy and (development cooperation) are being developed based on China’s pioneering approach to development (De Haan and Warmerdam 2018). Economic diplomacy, however, is not a panacea as Maharani (2018) clarifies while discussing challenges such as lacking exporter preparedness, substandard logistic infrastructure and budgets that remain below those of neighboring countries.

References:
Afesorgbor, S.K., Economic Diplomacy in Africa: The Impact of Regional Integration versus Bilateral Diplomacy on Bilateral Trade chapter 20 in Research Handbook on Economic Diplomacy: Bilateral Relations in a Context of Geopolitical Change, editors P.A.G. van Bergeijk en S.J.V. Moons, Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, UK
Bergeijk, P.A.G. van en S.J.V Moons (2018) ‘Introduction to the Research Handbook on Economic Diplomacy’, chapter 1 in Research Handbook on Economic Diplomacy: Bilateral Relations in a Context of Geopolitical Change, editors P.A.G. van Bergeijk en S.J.V. Moons, Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, UK
Bergeijk, P.A.G. van, S.J.V. Moons en C. Volpe-Martincus (2018) ‘The future of economic diplomacy research’, chapter 23 in Research Handbook on Economic Diplomacy: Bilateral Relations in a Context of Geopolitical Change, editors P.A.G. van Bergeijk en S.J.V. Moons, Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, UK
Arjan de Haan and Ward Warmerdam China’s foreign aid: towards a new normal? chapter 22 in Research Handbook on Economic Diplomacy: Bilateral Relations in a Context of Geopolitical Change, editors P.A.G. van Bergeijk en S.J.V. Moons, Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, UK
Moons, S.J.V (2017) Heterogenous Effects of Economic Diplomacy: Instruments, Determinants and Developments. PhD thesis ISS.

pag van bergeijkAbout the authors: 

Peter van Bergeijk (www.petervanbergeijk.org) is Professor of International Economics and Macroeconomics at the ISS.

DJ_20170714_0642Selwyn Moons has a PhD in economics from ISS. His research focus is international economics and economic diplomacy. Selwyn is currently working as Partner in the public sector advisory branch of PwC the Netherlands. Previously he worked in the Dutch ministries of Economic Affairs and Foreign Affairs.

Deglobalisation Series | Deglobalisation 2.0: Trump and Brexit are but symptoms by Peter A.G. van Bergeijk

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We live in strange and usual times. Actually, this is what people always do. And all people always think that their era is unique. We seem to live in the times of Trumpism, Brexitism and deglobalisation. It definitely feels like something unique. But it is not.

Our grandparents have been here before. Of course, the voices and characters on the world stage are different. But the stories of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession that we are still living today are similar.

The start is a financial crisis. Then follows a collapse of world trade and world investment that marks the end of decades of intensifying globalisation characterised by increasingly free international trade and capital flows. This collapse starts a period of deglobalisation that at first is hidden under the veil of recovery, but later becomes clear as a reduction of the share of international trade in production. This happened in the 1930s and it is happening now.

Graph Deglobalization 2.0
Deglobalisation 1.0 (in the 1930s) and 2.0 (today)—these two periods are shown in red. Index numbers 2007=100.

Many observers make the error of blaming Trump and Brexit for deglobalisation. They are wrong and confuse the symptoms and the causes of the disease. Why are Trump and Brexit only symptoms? Because the virus of deglobalisation is widespread: the Dutch referendum opposing the treaty with the Ukraine, and the Belgian opposition of the trade agreement between the EU and Canada, are just two examples. And in other countries such as Austria, Germany and France, anti-globalist election platforms have gained significant strength. An interesting observation is that anti-globalism now has a strong foothold in the Global North, with much different attitudes in the Global South, particular among the BRICS countries.

Déjà Vu: The 1930s (and today)

Although deglobalisation is a recurring phenomenon, scientists have so far treated the different periods of deglobalisation as isolated cases, limiting our knowledge of deglobalisation to a hermeneutic understanding of this real-world phenomenon. In science “one” is typically not enough, but economists and political scientists have unfortunately limited their research to the most recent manmade trade disaster at hand.

The problem is that we therefore do not learn from history, do not compare it with other occurrences of the phenomenon, and cannot correctly understand our current situation.

Of course, the two major phases of deglobalisation are not identical twins. I would like to add: fortunately so. One can only learn if both similarities and differences occur. The two phases of deglobalisation were equally triggered by a demand shock in the wake of a financial crisis. Both in the 1930s and in the 2000s the composition of trade was a second key determinant: manufacturing trade bore the brunt of the contraction.

Before the start of deglobalisation, income inequality increased significantly, and the recent rise in inequality has been linked to international trade. And as in the 1930s, the political institutions are key for understanding where and when deglobalisation of economies occurred. Unlike is often assumed, a “world” trade collapse and its deglobalisation aftermath is characterised by significant heterogeneity of country experiences and practices, implying that a one-size-fits-all approach to deglobalisation will be deemed to fail.

Democracy and deglobalisation

The differences, however, are equally important. In the 1930s, democracies supported free trade, and deglobalisation was driven by autocratic decisions to strengthen self-sufficiency. In the 2010s, political institutions are just as significant, but now democratic decisions drive the deglobalisation process worldwide. Indeed, while the industrialised countries this time avoided the pitfalls of protectionism and deflation, they have experienced different political dynamics.

It is important that their significance measurably and significantly occurs well before the presidential elections in the US or the Brexit referendum. Trump and Brexit are consequences of the underlying political dynamics. These manifestations have a self-reinforcing character, but fighting them will not cure the world economy from the deglobalisation virus.

This raises an important question regarding the concept of the liberal peace (trade between democracies reduces the probability of war by increasing the cost of conflict) that underpins the Bretton Woods institutions. Now that the 19th and 20th Century hegemons are repositioning towards lesser integration into the world economy, the maintenance of the multilateral rules for trade and investment are under threat; thus the very concept of the liberal peace may be eroding. It is interesting to see that the developing and emerging economies understand the importance of these rules and regulations against the power play of economic world leaders. China, the emerging hegemon of the 21st Century , is one of those important voices. In the era of Trump and Brexit, it is essential that this voice is heard.

 This contribution is the first of a series of blog articles on deglobalisation. It is based on a peer reviewed journal article that econometrically investigates the deglobalisations of the 1930s and the 2000s:
van Bergeijk, P.A.G. (2018) ‘On the brink of deglobalisation…again’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society rsx023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsx023

pag van bergeijkPeter van Bergeijk is Professor of International Economics at the Institute of Social Studies (of Erasmus University Rotterdam), one of Europe’s leading development studies institutes. He is author of On the Brink of Deglobalization: An Alternative Perspective on the Causes of the World Trade Collapse, Edward Elgar 2010. His latest book, Deglobalisation 2.0, is to appear in 2018.