Sri Lankan President Sirisena’s political war on drugs by Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits

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Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena’s answer to drug-related crimes is bringing back the death penalty. According to recent reports, international drug smugglers are increasingly turning to Sri Lanka as a transit hub in Asia, while drug-related arrests are on the rise. The question is whether the war on drugs is winnable and whether the death penalty will help. Framing the anti-narcotics efforts as a war has been a selling point for the public who are getting weary of everyday drug abusers and dealers.

On 26 June 2019, Sirisena signed death warrants for four prisoners serving sentences for drug-related crimes. His signature brought an end to a 43-year moratorium on the death penalty which begun following a final capital punishment case in 1976.

Sirisena’s return to the death penalty has provoked mixed responses. Some point out that Sirisena cannot present evidence to show that the death penalty can save future generations from the scourge of narcotics and drug trafficking. His attempt to link an undisclosed drug mafia with the April 2019 Easter bombings did not prove convincing for most observers. The claim was flatly contradicted by a Special Presidential Committee appointed to probe the Easter attacks and statements issued by Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. As Sirisena’s arch rival in politics, Wickremesinghe points the finger at home-grown jihadists. Linking drugs with terrorism is a familiar fable in the history of war in Sri Lanka.

Fearing that he might lose the support of his own government, President Sirisena has announced that he will declare a day of ‘national mourning’ if the government does not agree to his reinstatement of capital punishment or seeks to abolish it. For many in Sri Lankan politics, whatever the scale of the drug problem at hand, bringing back capital punishment for drug offences sounds like an over-reaction.

Legal experts point to pitfalls in the road ahead. Reinstating the death penalty requires approval both from an extremely divided national legislature and the Supreme Court. Their legal–moral appeal seems to have had some effect on Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhala–Buddhist population. But the President’s efforts to convince the public by citing blessings he received from a number of Buddhist clergymen have mostly fallen on deaf ears.

Sirisena’s move to bring back the death penalty is not out of character. Almost immediately after being sworn into office in 2015, Sirisena started a morality-inspired war against narcotics. He launched an anti-drug elite task force and increased police powers to deal with drug offenders. An island-wide anti-drug awareness campaign led to the establishment of thousands of committees in schools and villages to combat drugs. Yet in December 2018, Sri Lanka voted in favour of a final moratorium on the death penalty at the United Nations General Assembly. This vote was retracted just six months later. The background to this turn is developing dynamics in Colombo’s political settlement and the huge political stakes involved in the gamble to bring back capital punishment.

Sirisena has tied the war to his personal as well as political agenda. Like his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa, who won the ‘war against terrorism’, Sirisena wants to go down in history for having saved Sri Lanka in the war on drugs. One can attribute President Sirisena’s toughness and bravado of his resolve to an inspirational meeting with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in January 2019. This ‘toughness’ is an effort to politically re-brand himself as stronger and more powerful than Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, a competitor in the December presidential elections.

As a former defence secretary, Rajapaksa has already earned a reputation for being ‘tough on crime’. Contrary to Rajapaksa’s hard-man political image, Sirisena is often depicted as softly spoken and temple-worshipping — an ordinary man of the village. Although Sirisena has yet to officially declare his intention to contest the presidency, his decision to bring back the death penalty could be a sign that he is preparing such an announcement. Reinforcing a reputation for ‘toughness’ is vital for Sirisena given his rapidly declining public approval ratings following the disastrous Easter bombings.

The question is whether the war on drugs is winnable and whether the death penalty will help. Framing the anti-narcotics efforts as a war has been a selling point for the public who are getting weary of everyday drug abusers and dealers. Considerable political momentum was created by the ending of almost 25 years of civil war, and people are accustomed to the warfare frame of reference.

As intended, the reintroduction of the death penalty received the expected reaction from local and international civil society organisations, the United Nations and Western governments — the so-called ‘coalition of enemies’ of the majority Sinhala–Buddhist constituency. Ultimately Sirisena’s political fate will depend on this constituency, which so far seems supportive of his gambit.

Although there are no clear signs that Sirisena will be re-elected, he is making small gains by drawing political attention to himself, while distracting the electoral mass away from compelling issues of national security and economic development. Sirisena’s choice of battleground has been executed with almost military precision, reminding us of Clauzewitz’s claim that ‘war is politics by other means’.

This article was originally published by the East Asia Forum.

About the author: 

shyamika

Dr. Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits is an Assistant Professor in Conflict and Peace Studies at ISS/Erasmus University Rotterdam. She holds a PhD in Development Studies from  the ISS and an MA in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding from Eastern Mennonite University, Virginia, USA. Her current research agenda covers a wide variety of themes including, security sector reform, challenges of post-conflict transition and diaspora politics.

What does Modi 2.0 mean for the world’s largest democracy? By Meenal Thakur

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The mandate of India’s general election silenced the ‘if not Modi then who’ debate which had been brewing given the country’s economic instability and rising communal polarization.  The historic re-election of Narendra Modi as India’s Prime Minister fundamentally re-ordered the country’s political landscape and reaffirmed people’s faith in him to fulfil their economic aspirations. While critics are wary of the ethno-nationalism that fueled social turmoil under the new government, others look forward to Modi’s promised vision of a ‘New India’ in his second term.

Political analysts called the phenomenon a ‘Modi wave’ that gripped the nation, when in May 2014, Narendra Modi – leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was first elected as the Prime Minister of India by the greatest mandate the country had witnessed in over 30 years.

Five years later, Modi was expected to come back to power but with reduced numbers, however, Modi proved the naysayers wrong. Not only did he get re-elected, but his party won 303 of the 542 parliamentary constituencies, breaking its own record of 282 in 2014. The Modi wave, stronger than ever before, consumed whatever came in its way. BJP candidates, including one with terrorism charges against her, piggybacked on Modi’s popularity and rode their way to the Parliament. The biggest casualty being India’s Grand Old Party- The Indian National Congress which was sent back to the pits as it failed miserably to even win enough seats to become the leader of opposition.

The two sides of Modi’s staggering victory were captured by the Time Magazine days before the election ended. The magazine’s May cover called Modi “India’s Divider-in-chief”- a play on his religious nationalism which has resulted in a hostile environment for Muslims who constitute 14% of India’s population.

However, the magazine also carried a counter-view –‘Modi the Reformer’ where it pinned Modi as India’s best hope for economic reform. A similar line was towed by many publications and political analysts back home- India needs change, the opposition is in shambles and Modi remains the only person who can deliver.

The unassailable megalomaniac

This election and the BJP’s historic mandate raises fundamental questions about the values of secularism and liberalism that are the cornerstones of the world’s largest democracy. While India has taken pride in its diverse social fabric- something that its founding fathers and mothers had cherished deeply as the nation’s strength- Modi’s victory acted as a mirror to the Indian society. Blow by blow, he decimated the popular perception of ‘Unity in Diversity’ and appealed to the darkest corner of the middle-class Hindu’s mind.

Modi fanned, and vehemently so, the burning yet unexposed cauldron of religious intolerance in the Indian society. Issues of rising unemployment and farm distress raised by the opposition were overshadowed by Modi’s hyper nationalism. A strategically crafted election campaign coupled with Modi’s gift of the gab roused powerful emotions in the electorate who were made to believe that Modi was the one who would protect the cow (a sacred animal for Hindus) and the country (in the wake of attacks by Pakistan-based terrorist groups).

To be sure, if the BJP’s thumping victory was a result of a toxic ethno-nationalism which painted the country saffron (the colour of India’s Hindu right wing), it also reflected a resonance with Modi’s economic and foreign policies in the last five years. To his credit, Modi’s first tenure saw improved relations with the United States, China, and Japan. Hugging his counterparts on foreign visits not only made for great optics but also earned him the praise of millions of voters for putting India on the world map.

Back home, his social sector schemes helped him expand the BJP’s voter base from upper-caste Hindus and penetrate the lower caste votes.

Road ahead

The pro-incumbency votes mean that people still believe in Modi’s hallmark motto ‘Sabka saath, sabka vikas’ (Collective effort, inclusive growth) and expect him to deliver on reviving economic growth and addressing rising unemployment and farm distress.

Just a day after the BJP government was re-elected, unemployment figures were released showing unemployment at a 45-year high in India. Many allege that the government suppressed the information until the election was over. While the Modi government’s aversion to transparency is the subject matter for another article, let’s just say that the next five years will make or mar the aspirations of millions of unemployed youth constituting more than 50% of the country’s population.

The government also has the task of reviving India’s aviation sector and continue working on the hard-pressed infrastructure sector with the same rigor as shown in its previous term. Challenges will also arise in the health sector for which the government has announced affordable universal health coverage, popularly known as ‘Modicare’- another testament to Brand Modi.

Economic policies aside, Modi’s next term will also shape what political scientist Yogendra Yadav calls ‘the idea of India.’

Concerns have been expressed about the alarming rise of anti-intellectualism as well as subversion of democratic institutions under the BJP government. For example. the appointment of Hindu nationalist ideologue, Swaminathan Gurumurthy (the key person credited with advising Modi to undertake the disastrous demonetization drive in 2016) to the board of the Reserve Bank of India in 2018. However, this is just one of the salvos of the BJP government privileging Hindu religion and identity politics over science and rationality. BJP ministers have in the past dismissed Darwin’s theory of evolution as unscientific.

The next five years will also be crucial for minorities (mostly Muslims and Dalits) who have suffered episodes of mob lynching by self-appointed cow vigilantes who seem to be getting emboldened since the BJP came to power. Silence on Modi’s part and inflammatory statements made by BJP leaders to incite communalism do not bode well for the minorities in India.

The absolute majority with which Modi won has bolstered the already aggressive Hindu right wing and has heightened fears of India heading towards an authoritarian democracy. Nevertheless, the mandate also gives him the legitimate power to decide, act and deliver and, take India on the path of progress.

Meanwhile, the world watches India to see whether the absolute power wrested in Modi would make our worst fears come true. I hope not.

Image Credit: narendramodiofficial on Flickr

Screenshot_20190707-213122About the author:

Meenal Thakur is from India and is currently pursuing her masters in Governance and Development Policy at The International Institute of Social Studies. A former journalist, she wrote on politics and development for one of India’s leading national dailies before joining ISS.

Confronting Apartheid Through Critical Discussion by Ana María Arbeláez Trujillo and Jeff Handmaker

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The history of apartheid in South Africa is generally well-known. Yet, apartheid is not exclusive to that country. According to international law, and on various social grounds, Israel too may be viewed as maintaining an apartheid regime. What does apartheid mean and how has the international community confronted both South African and contemporary regimes of apartheid? This article takes up this discussion, reflecting on a recent event organised at the ISS.

On 11th April 2019, ISS hosted an event  to critically discuss the concept of apartheid and its application. Inspired by the work of known South African legal scholar Professor John Dugard, who addressed this event, he and other panellists went beyond the legal-historical origins of apartheid in South Africa and explored its relevance to the longstanding impasse between Israel and the Palestinians.[i]

Beyond the legal foundations of apartheid in South Africa and it becoming a crime in international law, the panelists explored the social impact of apartheid as separate development and how civic organizations and governments have resisted or maintained this situation.

Apartheid under international law

According to international law, the crime of apartheid, as defined by article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, is a crime against humanity. It consists of:

inhumane acts (…) committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.

The origins of this crime can be traced to the racialized legal regime established in South Africa from 1948 to 1990, although its definition is not restricted to that particular case. To the contrary, it is now an established position within academia, among civil society organizations, and UN agencies that the policies of Israel towards the Palestinian population also may be legally classified as an apartheid regime.

According to Dugard, Israel is more disrespectful of international law than South Africa was. He underscored that South Africa had accepted the importance of complying with norms of international law, yet argued that these norms were not applicable to the facts. By contrast, despite being party to several Human Rights Conventions that South Africa never was,[ii] Israel disregards the applicability of international law norms. This includes the Israeli government’s refusal to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, which in 2004 confirmed that the construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the settlements and associated regime were contrary to international law.[iii]

So, how does one explain such a dismissive attitude towards international law? Both Dugard and Shawan Jabarin, who also spoke at the event, agreed that a combination of State complicity and lack of political will on the part of the United States and the European Union to ensure that Israel respected human rights and other sources of international law played a crucial role in perpetuating Israel’s domination of the Palestinian people.

As Jabarin further highlighted, although legally it is possible to argue that Israel’s occupation has many features of apartheid and colonialism, when assessing how the concept of apartheid applies in the Israel-Palestine territory, a purely legal analysis is insufficient. It is critical to consider political factors and the daily conditions that people face under the regime.

How nationality works in Israel-Palestine

Israel does not legally-recognise Israeli nationality. Instead, Israelis and Palestinians experience profoundly different conditions and enjoy different privileges, depending on their legally-mandated, privileged nationality as Jewish, or in accordance with more than 130 other officially-recognised nationalities. By disassociating the concepts of nationality and citizenship, Israel enforces a particularly strict regime of separate development. Ronnie Barkan, who also addressed the event, argued strongly that apartheid went beyond its application to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, noting that not every Israeli citizen enjoys the same rights. In other words, the dual-layered legal framework of Israel privileges Jewish nationality, while excluding and/or neglecting the rights of everyone else.

Moreover, Barkan argued that Israel was built upon this sophisticated dual-layered framework that on the surface seemed like a democracy, but only protected the rights of a privileged national group. For example, although Palestinians are allowed to vote, only candidates who recognize Israel as a Jewish state are permitted to participate in elections. In this sense, the participation of Palestinians in the political system is only apparent in so far as it does not have the potential to modify power structures, or their living conditions.

Nationality also determines who gets access to land and who is allowed to live in certain areas. The blockade of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the establishment of settlements and the forced displacement of Palestinians from their villages are further examples of inhuman practices, through which Israel exercises its control.

All panelists agreed that the issue went beyond domination. The long term goal of Israel’s apartheid regime is not merely to exercise control over Palestinians, but to expel them from the land.

Responses to challenge apartheid

In July 2018, Israel issued the “Nation-State Law”.[iv] Among other measures, the law declares that Israel is a Jewish state, and that the only official language is Hebrew, whereas previously the second official language was Arabic. The law is by no means the first, but possibly the most blatant effort to entrench apartheid. Protests from civil society have been considerable, including a stepping-up of the Palestinian-led Movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (the BDS Movement) until Israel respects Palestinian rights.

As observed by the third panelist, Nieuwhof, the BDS Movement offers an action perspective, a tool to mobilize citizens to pressure governments and companies to support the Palestinian people. One of the early achievements of the movement, she noted, was a decision by the Dutch Bank ASN to divest from Veolia, one of many companies that has generated profits from the illegal occupation of the territory of Palestine.

All in all, the event was both timely and highly-relevant to the ISS research agenda on social justice. Regardless of one’s views, it is important to preserve spaces for discussions like this, which allow us to explore a critical perspective regarding one of the most relevant social justice issues of our time.

[i] In addition to Dugard, Ronnie Barkan, an Israeli human rights activist and founder of the movement Boycott From Within shared his perspectives, together with Adri Nieuwhof, a long-standing human rights advocate who worked from the late 1970s with the Holland Committee for Southern Africa and Shawan Jabarin, a Palestinian human rights advocate, Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and General Director of the Al-Haq.
[ii] Israel is signatory of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (ratified on 1973), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ratified on 1979), the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (ratified on 1991), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ratified on 1991).
[iii] Israel’s Supreme Court only partially recognised the ICJ’s ruling. See Susan Akram and Michael Lynk (2006) ‘The Wall and The Law: A Tale of Two Judgements’, Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 24(1): 61-106.
[iv] This was the subject of an earlier event, also organized at ISS.

Image Credit: © 2007 George Latuff. Wikicommons. Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for fighting apartheid in South Africa, said that “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”.

About the authors:

Ana Maria ArbelaezAna María Arbeláez Trujillo is a recent graduate from the Erasmus Mundus Program in Public Policy. She is a lawyer and a specialist in Environmental Law. Her research interests are the political economy of extractivist industries, environmental conflicts, and rural development.

JeffHandmakerISSJeff 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. 

 

 

Right-Wing Populism and Counter-Movements in Rural Europe by Natalia Mamonova

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Right-wing populism has gained high levels of support among rural population in Europe. How could this happen and what are the solutions? Natalia Mamonova, of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative, explains the causes of populism in the European countryside and shares some ideas on potential resistance and the building of alternatives to the regressive nationalist politics.

Right-wing populism can be found right across Europe. Today, every third European government consists of or depends on a populist party. Not for the first time, populist movements have been spreading across this continent, but the current wave is, perhaps, the most significant one since the end of World War II. The contemporary right-wing populists have a strong rural constituency, as was evident by recent elections and referenda, where 53% of British farmers voted in favour of Brexit, for example. The ‘Law and Justice’ party enjoys substantial support from Polish countrymen for its aggressive nationalism and strict Catholicism. French far-right presidential contender Marine Le Pen gained the support of many French food producers with her ‘buy French act’ campaign, in which she called for more food to be produced and consumed in the country.

Does this imply that contemporary European populism is a rural phenomenon? Certainly not, but Europe’s populists are rising by tapping into discontent in the countryside and exploiting rural resentments against elites, migrants and ethnic minorities. Despite the significant rural support for populist parties, the European countryside has remained largely overlooked in the contemporary debates on the political crisis and the ways out of it. Meanwhile, it was in the countryside that both Mussolini and Hitler won their first mass following, and it was angry farmers who provided their first mass constituency. The countryside, however, provides not only a breeding ground for populist parties, it also may for other progressive solutions in form of emancipatory rural politics. The latter is the focus of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), a scholar-activist community that aims at understanding the rise of right-wing populism in rural Europe, as well as the forms of resistance occurring and the alternatives being built.

In the contemporary political and academic debates, the right-wing populism is commonly portrayed as a result of economic and cultural crises that hit Europe during the last decade. Indeed, the economic distress, created by the Global Financial Crisis, followed up by the Eurozone Crisis, has exacerbated economic inequality and social deprivation in rural Europe, which influenced the villagers’ support for populist parties. Likewise, the fears of losing the cultural identity due to globalisation, multiculturalism and the refugee crisis are especially profound in the countryside and make rural dwellers more receptive to the populist message that they are the true protectors of their nation’s culture and heritage.

However, these arguments do not explain why in Spain and Portugal, two of the countries hit hardest by the economic crisis, the far right remains only marginal. Meanwhile, Poland – which has one of the fastest growing economies in Europe – has become paralysed by right-wing populism. Likewise, if we consider the migrant crisis as the reason for right-wing populism, we would not be able to explain why the vote for the Front National in France was particularly high in certain rural areas that have never seen a single immigrant, or why the strongest support for banning minarets in Switzerland was expressed in rural cantons where the number of Muslims and immigrants in general was low.

We argue that the true cause of right-wing populism in Europe (and the world) is the fundamental crisis in globalised neoliberal capitalism. This crisis is the most pronounced in rural areas, where the neoliberal agricultural model of development has failed to provide benefits to the majority, instead facilitating accumulation by the ‘one percent’. For example, according to the European Commission report on the EU Farm Structures, during the last ten years, 100 000 small-scale farms have disappeared in Germany, 300 000 in Bulgaria, 600 000 in Poland and 900 000 in Romania. In total, the number of full-time farmers across the EU fell by over a third during the past decade, representing almost five million jobs. The European Common Agricultural Policy primarily supports larger companies that are oriented to boosting yields and industrial production, while small-scale farmers have become marginalized and forced to close.

The crisis of neoliberal capitalism is directly related to the crisis of advanced representative democracies, which is especially profound in the European context, where the EU is responsible for Eurozone decision-making. In the countryside, the peoples’ feeling of being politically ‘overlooked’ and ‘forgotten’ is not completely groundless. Europe’s political mainstream used to ignore the interests of the rural population because of the following reasons. First, rural votes are not decisive as villagers constitute just 28% of the EU-28 population. Second, the division between the urban and the rural is usually less pronounced in Europe and, therefore, politicians appeal to the working class, not to rural dwellers. And finally, villagers are commonly perceived as apolitical and, thus, not a reliable electoral group. These factors may explain why at the recent UN Human Rights Assembly in Geneva, nearly all European countries voted against or abstained the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas.

The political underrepresentation of rural Europeans is also their own responsibility. Although the last years bear witness to what Michael Woods calls the ‘rural reawakening’ – an increase in rural mobilisation and activism in Europe – rural protest groups remain mostly fragmented and only informally linked. Moreover, rural activists are unable to build coalitions with consumer movements and urban-based food activists who are often more advanced in sustainable food politics. Despite the tremendous efforts of the European Coordination Via Campesina and other EU-focused rural movements, European farmers groups lack an ideological and organisational coherence and, until now, failed to develop strong transnational networks of solidarity and coordinated action. The lack of powerful social movements and political parties that could represent the interests of rural dwellers has contributed to an electoral success of right-wing populist parties in rural Europe.

We believe that top-down initiatives are unable to defeat the right-wing populism in Europe and elsewhere, the resistance should come from below. The first step towards this is to generate a common identity among various groups of food producers and consumers connecting them across class, gender, racial, generational, ideological, and urban-rural divides. Food sovereignty can be the tool to enhance solidarity, collective identity and political participation in rural Europe. It advocates for people’s rights for healthy and culturally appropriate food and offers a sustainable alternative to the neoliberal agricultural model and the way of life.

Furthermore, since the cause of right-wing populism is the failure of globalised neoliberal capitalism, cosmetic changes will not have a long-lasting effect, we need to change the entire system. We need to put food producers – not multinational corporations and supermarket chains (!) – at the centre of the European food system and decision making. This requires a radical transformation of power relations, which is impossible without a large-scale mobilisation of food producers and consumers. The first seed of the transformation has already sprouted. In January 2019, 35 000 of farmers and food activists from around Europe took to the streets of Berlin calling for ‘Agricultural Revolution’. They were ‘fed up’ with industrial agriculture and demanded a reorganization of EU farming policy towards a more sustainable model which supports the welfare of the environment, animals and small-scale farmers, and restores democratic and accountable governance in the food system.

The text is prepared based on multiple discussions with Jaume Franquesa and other ERPI scholars from the research project ‘Right-wing populism in rural Europe: causes, consequences and cures’. It was originally published on ARC2020. 

 

About the author:

csm_natalia-mamonova1_855f13fd5cNatalia Mamonova is a Research Fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Programme, Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI) and Affiliated researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) of Uppsala University, Sweden. She received her PhD degree from ISS in 2016. Since then, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, the New Europe College in Bucharest, and the University of Helsinki.  

 

The Netherlands and Colombia: A Blurry Alliance by Ana María Arbeláez Trujillo

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The Netherlands may have found in Colombia a strategic partner to help expand its commercial activities, but Colombia’s complex social context needs to be carefully considered. Whether this alliance will benefit both countries, or will reinforce the dynamics of the longest conflict in Latin American history, will depend greatly on the Dutch stance towards very sensitive issues that affect the Colombian rural sector.

The Netherlands has found in Colombia a strategic partner to expand its commercial activity in Latin America. In 2017, the exports of the South American country to the Netherlands amounted to 1.542 million US dollars, situating the Dutch economy as the fourth most important destination of Colombian products worldwide, and the first within the European Union[1].

This partnership is presented as a win-win scenario. While the Netherlands could benefit from Colombia’s 40 million hectares of land suitable for agriculture[2], Colombia could fully develop its rural potential through an alliance with the world leader in agricultural innovation. This cooperation holds a great deal of promise. Thus, there are grand expectations regarding the meeting that took place last November in Bogotá between Prime Minister Mark Rutte and President Iván Duque, who came to power in August 2018.

However, some caution is needed. The Prime Minister’s visit occured in a context of uncertainty and digression given Duque’s lack of political will to comply with the peace agreement reached between the former government and the FARC, as well as his dismissive attitude towards structural problems of the rural sector such as the excessive concentration of land, extreme poverty, and inequality.

In this regard, a study conducted by Oxfam in 2017[3] revealed that currently, concentration of land in Colombia is much higher than it was in the 1960s when the conflict started. The statistics show that while 80% of rural land in the country is controlled by 1% of the large estates, small farmers have lost most of their territory. As evidence, 80% of small peasants have a landholding smaller than 10 hectares, which do not occupy even 5% of the census area. Moreover, official data shows that the Gini coefficient of rural property is 89,7% (with 0 corresponding to complete equality and 100 corresponding to complete inequality)[4].

The government’s approach, however, has been to neglect the multidimensional character of the rural problem. Since his presidential campaign, Duque has been skeptical of the peace process. Therefore, although the first point of the peace agreement is to push forward a comprehensive agrarian reform, the policy of the new government has focused mainly on supporting agro-business, implementing modernisation measures, and protecting the property rights of large landowners[5].

This official position has raised a deep concern among many civil society actors who have fears pertaining to the success of historical compromises reached in La Habana. The initiatives that are at risk include: the creation of a Land Fund for the distribution of land that was illegally acquired; the development of procedures to formalise property rights of small and medium farmers; and the establishment of ‘Territorial Spaces for Training and Reincorporation Spaces’ (ETCR in Spanish), which are places dedicated  to training the former members of the FARC for their reincorporation into civil life through productive projects[6]. To this day, the government has not shown a serious commitment to advance any of these strategies, threatening the future of the post-conflict phase.

Most worryingly, the Office of the Ombudsman in Colombia reported that 331 community leaders were killed between January 2016 and August 2018[7], and that the number keeps growing[8]. The seriousness of the situation led the UN[9] and IACHR[10] to urge the Colombian government to strengthen protection measures to guarantee the integrity of social leaders. Although the government has denied the systematic character of these killings,  in the face of strong national and international pressure, the creation of an integral policy to tackle this urgent situation was announced[11].  It is worth noting that 80% of the leaders that have been killed were involved in the defense of the territory and restitution of land efforts[12].

 

In this regard, on 5 April more than 500 Colombians gathered in The Hague to march peacefully from the Colombian Embassy to the Headquarters of the ICC[13]. Their aim was to denounce that the lack of action of the Colombian State is leading to impunity of crimes against humanity, and to raise awareness among the international community[14].

This complex social context must be seriously considered by the Dutch commission that will advise the Prime Minister on his negotiations with Colombia. Whether this alliance will foster both countries, or will reinforce the dynamics of the longest conflict in Latin American history, will depend greatly on the Dutch stance towards these very sensitive issues that affect the Colombian rural sector.

References
[1]http://www.mincit.gov.co/loader.php?lServicio=Documentos&lFuncion=verPdf&id=80988&name=OEE_MA_JM_Estadisticas_de_comercio_exterior_ene-ago_2018.pdf&prefijo=file
[2] https://www.elespectador.com/economia/colombia-tiene-40-millones-de-hectareas-para-producir-alimentos-articulo-795814 and http://es.presidencia.gov.co/noticia/180621-Gobierno-definio-Frontera-Agricola-Nacional-para-avanzar-hacia-el-desarrollo-rural-sostenible-y-proteger-la-biodiversidad
[3] https://d1tn3vj7xz9fdh.cloudfront.net/s3fs-public/file_attachments/colombia_-_snapshot_of_inequality.pdf
[4] https://www.eltiempo.com/economia/sectores/desigualdad-en-la-propiedad-de-la-tierra-en-colombia-32186
[5] https://lasillavacia.com/silla-llena/red-rural/historia/los-programas-agrarios-de-los-candidatos-en-campana-un-analisis  and https://semanarural.com/web/articulo/elecciones-presidenciales-2018-las-propuestas-para-el-campo/504 and https://www.portafolio.co/economia/propuestas-de-los-candidatos-presidenciales-en-el-agro-y-lo-rural-son-incompletas-517480
[6]https://semanarural.com/web/articulo/que-le-espera-a-la-colombia-rural-en-la-presidencia-de-ivan-duque/550 and https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/08/30/planeta_futuro/1535660220_091882.html
[7] https://colombia2020.elespectador.com/pais/agresiones-contra-lideres-sociales-antes-y-despues-del-acuerdo-de-paz
[8] https://www.rcnradio.com/colombia/durante-el-gobierno-duque-22-lideres-sociales-han-sido-asesinados
[9] https://colombia.unmissions.org/en/un-rejects-and-condemns-killings-human-rights-defenders-and-leaders-colombia
[10] http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/media_center/PReleases/2018/065.asp
[11] https://www.elheraldo.co/politica/no-podemos-decir-que-asesinato-de-lideres-sociales-sea-sistematico-mininterior-543998 and https://www.elespectador.com/noticias/politica/gobiernos-de-santos-y-duque-coinciden-asesinato-de-lideres-sociales-no-es-sistematico-articulo-813250
[12] https://www.rcnradio.com/colombia/durante-el-gobierno-duque-22-lideres-sociales-han-sido-asesinados
[13] https://paxencolombia.org/la-cpi-recibio-documentacion-sobre-asesinato-de-lideres-sociales-en-colombia/
[14] https://www.resumen-english.org/2019/04/march-to-the-international-criminal-court-to-stop-the-murders-of-social-leaders-in-colombia/

Ana Maria ArbelaezAbout the author:

Ana María Arbeláez Trujillo is a recent graduate from the Erasmus Mundus Program in Public Policy. She is a lawyer and a specialist in Environmental Law. Her research interests are the political economy of extractivist industries, environmental conflicts, and rural development.

 

 

 

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. 

 

 

Learning from the crisis in international criminal justice by Jeff Handmaker

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A new book on the pedagogy of crises was launched in January 2019 at the ISS, edited by Karim Knio and Bob Jessop. In one of its chapters that focuses on the legitimacy crisis in the system of international criminal justice, Jeff Handmaker argues that the politics of international law must be taken seriously in order to address not only the legal legitimacy problems attached to the functioning of international criminal tribunals, but also the external political challenges it faces. 

Law is impartial, neutral, objective, certain, and predictable … most political scientists would shake their heads in dismay at such a statement. However, it accurately reflects values that are strongly held by international lawyers. This includes legal professionals who are involved in referring, investigating, prosecuting, adjudicating, and defending international crimes.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) came into being in 2002. It was not an easy journey, beginning hundreds of years ago when states started exercising jurisdiction over piracy in the high seas, defining it as a violation of the Law of Nations. Following the gruesome aftermath of the Second World War onwards, the Nuremburg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals were established as ad hoc international institutions, creating a solid institutional precedent and jurisprudence.

The ICC exists alongside other ad hoc international and ‘hybrid’ institutions, such as the Special Court of Sierra Leone, the Cambodia Tribunal, the Lebanon Tribunal, and the Yugoslav and Rwanda Tribunals that preceded them. While nations have long had jurisdiction over crimes committed in their own territories, the ability to prosecute international crimes, irrespective of the nationality of the perpetrator or the victims or where the crimes took place, with the exception of piracy, is still a relatively recent phenomenon.

Since its creation, the ICC has been plagued with technical and resource capacity issues as well as significant management problems, including challenges in hiring qualified staff members. The ICC has also faced political challenges to its legitimacy. The USA, primarily through the bombastic statements of John Bolton, who has served in diplomatic functions for both the Bush and Trump administrations, has actively sought to delegitimise the ICC. Meanwhile, following a string of indictments, particularly against leaders of both the Sudanese and Kenyan governments, the Africa Group of Assembly of State Parties to ICC have accused the ICC prosecutor of Africa bias.

But these are surface-level problems, what Jessop refers to as ‘accidental’ crises that can be somewhat predictably resolved. Indeed, giving either of these surface-level problems credence glosses over a deeper crisis of legitimacy faced by the ICC, which I discuss in my own contribution to the book by Jessop and Knio, namely:

the crude and culturally essentialist way in which the ICC prosecutor, and the NGOs that support the Court, regard themselves, the perpetrators, and the victims/survivors of international crimes … fail(ure) to consider the complex social, cultural and political contexts in which these crimes took place.

This crisis of legitimacy is born largely out of the dominant, liberal underpinnings of international law, which tend to fetishise supposedly Western values. Accordingly, the values of individual elites have held sway over general societal values, and individuals whose human rights have been violated have been expected to make claims themselves against the source of those violations, rather than expect the state to provide a remedy. As a result, there is an innate tendency to regard violators of international crimes as coming from the global South rather than the global North, and committed by individuals rather than by corporations.

The ICC, with its broad and independent mandate and direct jurisdiction over individual violators of international crimes, represents a significant, potential challenge to these values and to chart a new path in securing global justice. This requires the court to not only withstand, but actively confront the external pressures it faces.

Like any institution, the ICC is managed and staffed by individuals who more than often  possess a liberal understanding of international law. This is clearly reflected in the practice of the ICC. Drawing on his conceptualisation of the so-called SVS Metaphor, Kenyan legal scholar Makau Mutua has observed that key actors in international justice efforts have been subject to an intense reductionism. Hence, their approach to complex human rights problems is characterised by simplistic and racialised categories of saviours (from the Global North) pitted against savages (culturally speaking, from the Global South) in order to protect interests of ‘helpless’ victims (also from the Global South).

This untenable situation should trigger some serious and critical reflection by the many legal professionals engaged in the work of international criminal justice. First and foremost, decisions by international prosecutors over who, when and how to prosecute international crimes always have a context that is rarely appreciated, let alone openly acknowledged and engaged with. Second, while the complementarity principle of the ICC Rome Statute ought to compel a much greater commitment to build capacity for prosecuting international crimes at the national level, to date this has not been adequately prioritised by the ICC and its member states. Rather than seeking to preserve elusive legal values, a critically reflexive approach to international criminal justice would likely avoid what Martti Koskenniemmi has termed techno-managerial solutions to complex social and political problems and enable a more transparent engagement with the volatile political environment in which the ICC operates.

 These reflections are also reflected in another, recent volume that I have co-edited with ISS colleague Karin Arts on Mobilising International Law for ‘Global Justice’ (Cambridge 2018), notably regarding the system of international criminal justice.

In short, the politics of international law must be taken seriously in order to address the political, and not just the legal legitimacy problems attached to international criminal justice. It is also essential to cultivate a contextualised understanding among legal experts of how international criminal justice functions, entailing a socio-legal approach to both legal practice and analysis. Finally, it is crucial to develop a strategic approach to international criminal justice that transparently engages with these matters and sidesteps simplistic and often self-serving critiques that dominate discussions on international criminal justice generally and the ICC in particular.

Image Credit: Mark L. Taylor/www.thecommonercall.org

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. 

 

 

Elections in the DRC: Compromises, surprises and the ‘game of gambling’ by Delphin Ntanyoma

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The results of the general elections recently held in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) after being delayed for two years show interesting developments. The opposition remained weak despite rallying together, and the Catholic Church came to play a pivotal role. This post explores the ‘gambling game’ through which these elections have been compromised by surprises. The far-fetched results of the presidential elections will unlikely contribute to the DRC’s long-term stability.

The recent elections held in the DRC were characterised by the high number of candidates running for vacant positions: 23 presidential candidates (of whom 21 finally contended for this position), and about 15,000 candidates vying for 500 seats in the national assembly. At the provincial level, more than 19,000 candidates competed for 780 seats.

But the debates and the media’s coverage of the elections that took place at the national and provincial levels  focused mostly on the presidential elections, as this is the center of Congolese politics and power struggles. Whoever controls this position will certainly have an upper hand. Based on the provisional results announced at the beginning of this year, Felix Tshisekedi Tshilombo, one of three contenders, has been declared the winner, beating Martin Fayulu Madidi and Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, a candidate of the ruling coalition (Front Commun pour le Congo). The latter is widely described as the ‘dauphin’ of departing president Joseph Kabila.

Kabila’s departure

Many observers were surprised by Joseph Kabila’s decision not to run for a third term, even though the DRC’s Constitution does not allow for the extension of presidential rule beyond a second term. Many thought and predicted that Kabila would maneuver to extend his period of rule. Though he had not publicly announced this intent, he made many moves that hinted at attempts to contend again.

But in early November last year, nearly two years after Kabila’s second term ended in December 2016, he expressed willingness to cede power by nominating his ‘heir’, Ramazani Shadary. Few had predicted this scenario. Understanding this choice of Kabila of not running for the third term, one however cannot rule out the pressure and leverage of the international community but also that of regional organisations such as SADC and the African Union.

The persisting weakness of the opposition

While uncertainties were surfacing around elections, the Congolese opposition parties had been struggling to establish a strong scheme through which they could work together, with all of them rallying behind Fayulu as a united candidate. However, Felix Tshisekedi and Vital Kamerhe decided to break away from the agreement, opening a breach to a rift within these opposition political parties. As this withdrawal expressed once again weaknesses within the Congolese opposition, observers could predict a breach through which the ruling coalition could easily influence the electoral process, hence declaring their candidate as the winner.

Since the Peace agreement in DRC in 2002, there seems to be a bunch of surprises and compromises in Congolese politics. Nonetheless, the announcement of Felix Tshisekedi as the new president is seemingly the compromising ‘gambling game’ for the short-term future.

The Catholic Church as saving grace

The delayed electoral process was saved through the intense involvement of the Catholic Church in December 2016, when the elections were originally intended to take place. Via the Congo National Episcopal Conference (Conférence Episcopale Nationale du Congo: CENCO), the failure to organise elections had been ameliorated by reaching an agreement led by Catholic Bishops in Kinshasa. The Catholic Church managed to bring on board opposition parties that had dismissed previous consultations. Moreover, the agreement helped to set up an agreed electoral calendar and eased tensions. Though widely interpreted, the agreement advocated finding a compromise over ‘political prisoners’ and those under prosecution for likely politically oriented motives.

The Catholic Church is among the few institutions and organisations whose actions in the DRC are influential, with the Church wielding power countrywide. The Church is among the few providers of public services in a fragile state setting. It deployed approximately 40,000 observers during the recent elections. And being largely embedded in local communities, it has much leverage and influence to gather information from the polling vote.

Problems with the voting procedure

The voting procedure also reveals the struggle for true representation of the Congolese people. Since 2011, the general election would be won by achieving a simple majority instead of an absolute majority. Among the top three, the announced elected president won 7,051,013 votes (38.57%), while the second on the list, Martin Fayulu, obtained 6,366,732 votes (34.83%)—a difference of 1.7%. Moreover, the participation rate in this election has been estimated to be around 47.56%, meaning that 52.44% of the population did not vote. Winning this presidential election by such a small margin facilitates a discussion on how excluded territories could have been a ‘game changer’.

A ‘gambling game’

Remarkable about the Congolese elections is the role of the church. While the government blocked all international involvement and did not allow observers, the churches have been the binding factor that enabled the election and organised the observers. It shows the relative strength of civil society in the country that is characterised by a severely fragile state. Even though this has probably helped to avert large-scale violent conflict (at least until now), it has not resulted in an uncontested outcome. Instead, one could suspect that the announced results are a ‘gambling game’ that characterises the elite class in the DRC. In most cases, these types of ‘gambling games’ end up with elites making deals to access large shares of the pie to the detriment of its citizens. Notwithstanding all the challenges presented above, these developments could lead to more violence in the future.

Image Credit: MONUSCO Photos/R56A9909

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About the author:

Delphin Ntanyoma is a PhD Researcher in Conflict Economics at the ISS. On his blog www.easterncongotribune.com, he writes about developments in the Eastern DRC.

 

 

 

 

 

Globalisation, international law and the elusive concept of ‘global justice’ by Jeff Handmaker and Karin Arts

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We all talk about the search for ‘global justice’, but what does it really mean, and how can international law help achieve it? The elusive concept of ‘global justice’ is discussed in a new book launched tomorrow at the ISS and edited by ISS scholars Jeff Handmaker and Karin Arts. This blog post shortly introduces the book, which seeks to show how legal vocabularies have framed the possibilities for mobilising international law as an instrument for attaining global justice.

THE ELUSIVE CONCEPT OF (GLOBAL) JUSTICE

Just as is the case with the term globalisation, notions of justice, and even more so global justice, have been elusive and difficult concepts to define. While questions on the rule of law still reveal a liberal leaning, broader questions have also come up, asking: how can law serve as an instrument of global justice?  Such questions explore among others the politics of state (non-)compliance with these norms and the strategic challenges involved in accomplishing global justice.[1]

 LAW AS AN INSTRUMENT FOR PURSUING GLOBAL JUSTICE

Similar to conceptualisations of justice, the function of law as an instrument for global justice is ambiguous, too. Law and legal institutions articulate bold promises, yet contain very definite limits to what they can deliver, let alone explain in relation to complex social phenomena.

Legal perspectives have a very different starting point than other scholarly perspectives, particularly within the social sciences. While there are numerous viewpoints among legal scholars about the content of law, its origins, interpretations, and the institutions created to enforce it, legal scholarship has generally resisted multi- or inter-disciplinary study.

On the other side of the scholarly plain, social scientists often misunderstand law. Law has been regarded as irrelevant, particularly by scholars studying culture in relation to identity, race, lifestyle, ritual, and other factors, conceptualising law and culture as ‘distinct realms of action and only marginally related to one another’. [2]

In our understanding, in so many respects law fulfils a central function in society, in political discourse and in social relations. But its resistance to other scholarly perspectives, and the way in which some legal scholars fail to critically address the normative, liberal bias embedded in law has limited our understanding of the complex interactions between politics and law, not to mention its potential as a vehicle for reaching global justice.

THE STRUCTURAL BIAS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW

Martti Koskenniemi, whose work is a major intellectual reference point for the book, has argued that there is a ‘structural bias’ embedded within global governance institutions, itself a consequence of the fragmentation of international law.[3] According to this concept, international law is not the homogenous system it once was, but has evolved into ‘a wide variety of specialist vocabularies and institutions’.[4] However, the rhetoric of rights has lost its ‘transformative effect’ through over-legalistic explanations and is ‘not as powerful as it claims to be’.[5] Koskenniemi argues that one should look beyond the normative liberal tendency that underpins the world view of many lawyers, that is, to look beyond the content of law.

On the one hand, Koskenniemi argued that international law has been criticised as ‘too apologetic to be taken seriously’ because of its dependence on the political power, and thus the power politics of states.[6] On the other hand, international law has been considered to be too far removed from power politics and thus ‘too utopian’ (or speculative) to meet the challenges of a complex globalised world.[7]

Rather than forming an objective system of ‘concrete and normative’ and therefore ‘valid’ and ‘binding’ rules, as many lawyers claim them to be, Koskenniemi observed that international legal rules were, in fact, highly malleable.

From a different vantage point, in her chapter in our book, Barbara Oomen argues that realising human rights at the municipal level holds tremendous potential for fostering a culture of constitutionalism. Oomen suggests that Koskenniemi’s distinction between talking either ‘rabbitese’ or ‘duckalese’, respectively the language of politics or that of the law, might not be that simple in local practice.

This book as a whole shows in various ways how legal vocabularies have framed the possibilities for mobilising international law for global justice. In addition to showing how this legal mobilisation can potentially hold states, corporations or individuals accountable for violations of international law, numerous inconsistencies within the global liberal legal order are revealed.

References
[1] David Barnhizer, Effective Strategies for Protecting Human Rights (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) and Christopher Lamont, International Criminal Justice and the Politics of Non-Compliance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010).
[2] Naomi Mezey, ‘Law as Culture’ (2001) 13 Yale Law Journal, 35-67 at 35.
[3] Martti Koskennimi ‘The politics of international law – 20 years later’ (2009) 20(1) European Journal of International Law, 7-19: at p. 9.
[4] Ibid., p. 12.
[5] Koskenniemi (2011), at p. 133.
[6] Ibid., p. 9.
[7] Ibid.

This blogpost is an adaptation of the introduction to our edited book Mobilising International Law for ‘Global Justice’ (2019, Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108586665), that is first launched at the International Institute of Social Studies on 30 November 2018.

About the authors:

JeffHandmakerISS_small

 

Jeff Handmaker is Senior Lecturer in Law, Human Rights and Development and csm_4fe244a1a72e59e9c42dc150abedd9c6-karin-arts_78559ee7d1 Karin Arts is Professor of International Law and Development, both at the ISS.

 

 

Public spaces as a battleground by Katerina Mojanchevska

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Public spaces are important in the Macedonian context because they’re one of the few places where people from diverse ethnic backgrounds can interact. But these spaces are undergoing fundamental changes. Public spaces are becoming sites for symbolic wars between the ethno-nationalists of the two major ethnic groups in the country. Diversity is seen as a threat, and a type of “staged multiculturalism” is visible.

The importance of public spaces

In a country divided along ethnic lines, public spaces seem to be the only meeting place left for ethnic groups that are growing more divided. Moreover, contact is the only way to surpass ethnic fragmentation that has been accelerated in recent years in Macedonia.

Macedonia is one of successor countries of ex-Yugoslavia. In 1991, the country proclaimed independence and initiated a process of building a nation-state with a majoritarian political design in a general liberal democratic framework. The Macedonians constituting 64.2 percent of the population were the majority and the legitimate political community while the Albanians, Turks, Roma, Vlachs, Serbs, and Bosnians, which represented 25.2 percent of the population, enjoyed equal rights and obligations as the majority group. Yet in practice, the minorities were stranded by difficulties in equal access to political life, the labour market, education, social and cultural life.

In the Macedonian context of recognising diversity, the popular belief of politicians, academics or citizens is that the dominant group has the right to decide how accommodation of cultural diversity should be installed in public space. Symbols of a group’s ethnic history and cultural memory facilitate recognition and identification with space; public spaces thereby essentially become ethnic spaces.

The subjective valuation of public spaces: a research topic

For my PhD research, I explored how people felt and understood the practices through which language, ethnicity, religion and collective cultural symbols are legitimised in the physical form and the political, social and symbolic (cultural) value of public spaces in their neighbourhoods. The research concludes that the political, social and symbolic values of public spaces in Skopje can be understood in terms of a “diversity paradox”. Why?

Public spaces in Skopje are not natural and spontaneous sites of positive intercultural contact. Residents in mixed neighbourhoods more often than those in ethnic neighbourhoods opt for co-ethnic cultural events in co-ethnic public spaces where people from their ethnic group go. Self-segregation of ethnic groups is prevalent. The colliding ethnocratic accommodation of diversity in public space, especially in mixed neighbourhoods, generates a sense of symbolic threat and forges people to compartmentalise within their own ethnic group.

Diversity as threat to national unity

The research found that diversity is seen as a threat to national unity. My most compelling discovery is that is the case of Skopje and Macedonia we are talking about “staged multiculturalism”—it is not lived or experienced, but designed and created. The effects of such ethnocratic politics are obvious. A high level of ethnic distance in particular among Macedonians and Albanians is evident in personal networking and socialisation in public spaces. Seventeen years after the conflict and systemic investment in multicultural policies, diversity is seen as a threat to national unity,

Relevance of the research

This reading is important to the cities in the Balkans that struggle with ethnic fragmentation as it is to the cities considering themselves as ethnically homogeneous, but which do face claims for the accommodation of diversity, in particular after the explosive waves of immigration that we have witnessed since 2015. Habermas[1] (2016) contends that states and cities have no other option than to open the stage for those different from the “norm”, facilitate the deliberative process of interpretation, and recognize needs and forge active urban citizenship. This leads me to recommend ways in which to plan for diversity in public spaces:

  • The interpretation and recognition of difference through deliberation should follow the political acts of planning of public spaces;
  • The habitual engagement and interdependence of goals and actions between social groups and places should be organised and allow more structural contact, flexibility, contestation, transgression between identity(ies), group(s) and associational belonging(s);
  • The social planning of public spaces as places of conflict and negotiation and a process of “city-making” should couple the technocratic production of “city being made”. Urban and social planning of cities should support each other, rather than professional planning dominating over citizens` involvement in city making.

I conclude with Leonie Sandercock[2] (1998: 30), who critically observes that:

 “The multicultural city cannot be imagined without a belief in inclusive democracy and the diversity of social justice claims of the disempowered communities in existing cities. If we want to work toward a policy of inclusion, then we had better have a good understanding of the exclusionary effects of planning’s past practices and ideologies. And if we want to plan in the future for heterogeneous publics (rather than a unitary public interest), acknowledging and nurturing the full diversity of all of the different social groups in the multicultural city, then we need to develop a new kind of multicultural literacy. An essential part of that literacy is familiarity with the multiple histories of urban communities, especially as those histories intersect with struggles over space and place claiming, with planning policies and resistances to them, with traditions of indigenous planning, and with questions of belonging and identity and acceptance of difference.”

[1]Habermas, J. (2016) ‘For a democratic polarization’. Interview with Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 22 November.
[2] Sandercock, L. (1998) ‘Introduction: Framing Insurgent Historiographies for Planning’, in Sandercock, L. (ed.) Making the invisible Visible: A Multicultural Planning History. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–33.

Picture credit: Paul Goyette

Katerina Mojanchevska_PhD defence2018About the author:

Katerina Mojanchevska is a recent doctoral graduate from the ISS (May 2018). She has been working in the civil society sector in Macedonia on research projects, trainings and seminars in the field of cultural policy, and urban and social development. Her research and professional interests encompass intersection among identity, public space, inter-culturality and innovation in urban governance.

The role of the media in promoting water integrity: the case of Ghana by Abdul-Kudus Husein

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Ghana’s water utilities are undermined by corruption, impeding the ability of millions of Ghanaians to access safe water resources. The media can play an important role in pushing back corruption in several ways. But often, the media’s potential as watchdog is not fulfilled. This article highlights the key challenges that the Ghana’s media sector faces and argues that it is not likely to ensure greater water integrity without support from the government, the private sector, and civil society.

It is 6am on a Saturday morning and Charity Abiamo, a street vendor of oranges, is on a daily mission with her three children to find water. Charity and her children live in Abofu, an informal settlement situated between Achimota and Abelemkpe in Accra, Ghana’s capital.

Charity leads the way in the alleys of Abofu carrying a black plastic container, with her one–year-old child strapped to her back whilst her two other children follow her carrying two yellow jerrycans known as ‘Kuffour gallons’. These yellow one-gallon containers, which have become a symbol of the water shortage in Ghana, were named after the country’s former president, John Agyekum Kuffour (2000–8), under whose rule Ghana experienced a severe water crisis.

The journey from Charity’s home to the source of drinking water, a large drainage channel connecting to the Odaw River in Accra, takes between 10 and 15 minutes. As Charity arrives, other families are already at the Odaw drainage channel, stretching over the edge with their containers to collect water from an overflowing algae-infested pipeline. Charity claims she uses the water for cooking, drinking and washing, despite the water not being treated considering the lack of suitable and safe alternative water sources.

Accra’s water problems

Accra, Ghana is a fast-growing urban area that is facing considerable planning challenges including access to clean water owing to its rising population. With a current total of 4 million, the city’s population is expected to double by 2030, further compounding the water situation as illustrated by Charity.

Water supply to urban populations in Accra is assigned to the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL). Water is provided for inhabitants of these regions using a piped rationing system managed by the GWCL. Additionally, there are private tanker services to provide water to areas that are not served by the GWCL. Despite these measures, both high and low income earners in Accra still face a great challenge in accessing water. High-income earners in areas with piped water connections even purchase large water-storage vessels, such as the ‘poly-tank’, to store enough water to last them a week or more. Those in the low-income bracket rely on small, unhygienic storage systems and informal vendors such as the water-tanker services, community standpipes and boreholes for their daily use.

Poor integrity contributes to water woes

In an article published by Bloomberg, Moses Dzawu (2013) argued that many of the GWCL’s problems can be attributed to weak and outdated pipes, which fail to support the mass production and distribution of water to certain parts of the capital, as well as poor management, a lack of transparency and accountability, and corruption.

Similarly, Peter Van Rooijen (2008) maintains that corruption, together with a lack of transparency and accountability, is a key challenge hindering the GWCL’s effective operation. Corruption in the water sector in Ghana takes many forms, from misappropriations of huge sums of money to illegal connections and consumption of water. Indeed, stories of corruption have always dominated the media space in Ghana.

The link between media and integrity

The media, along with other agencies, plays an important role in corruption detection and promoting transparency and accountability in the water sector. Scholars argue that Ghana’s media has contributed largely to the country’s democratic efforts by holding the state accountable, promoting citizen education and participation, and monitoring state institutions.

In fact, in 2001, the media, together with the Integrated Social Development Centre (ISSODEC), successfully opposed a World Bank-backed project to fully privatise the GWCL. This effort was largely carried out through increased media reportage, in order to educate the public on the dangers of such privatisation (Amenga-Etego and Grusky 2005: 275).

The media is widely regarded as a defence against abuses of power; excessive politicization of national matters in the Ghanaian media is therefore very worrying. The lack of coverage and at times biased coverage on corruption or lack of integrity show that there is still a way to go before the media plays its potential role of encouraging and catalysing change within the water sector.

Challenges for the media on water integrity

The Water Integrity Network (WIN) supports and connects partners, individuals, organisations and governments promoting water integrity in order to reduce corruption and improve water-sector performance worldwide. In its Water Integrity Global Outlook 2016, it maintains that in order to fight corruption in the water sector there is a need for people to first recognise that corrupt practices exist. Local and national media both have an important role to play in bringing issues of corruption to the attention of civil society, the public and policymakers, to ensure that action is taken through policy or advocacy.

Several things come into play here: first, ownership of the media can play a role. The question of whether the media is independent or state-owned influences the extent to which it can be critical about the level of corruption in state institutions. State media tends to be less critical of government institutions, whilst the private media will most likely be more critical.

Furthermore, the amount of resources available to journalists may influence how effectively the media is able to act as a watchdog in fighting corruption. Ghanaian reporters are often poorly paid, under-resourced and lacking in training. As a result, journalists in Ghana find themselves susceptible to bribery and self-censorship.

Aside from low salaries, the Ghanaian media also suffers from weak capacity. There is a lack of adequate training and mentoring for thousands of journalists in the country in general and in specific the water sector, even though some donor organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have attempted to train reporters. Most of these attempts have, in fact, been frustrated by a lack of commitment from the journalists themselves.

The social media debate

Social media presents opportunities as well as challenges for the future of the news media in promoting integrity in the water sector. It offers many people new ways of networking, and of sharing and receiving information outside of the mainstream media such as TV, radio and newspapers.

Social media can serve as a mechanism to ‘name and shame’ corrupt officials and share information on corruption using blogs and corruption-reporting platforms such as ‘I PAID A BRIBE’ by the GII in Ghana. This online platform helps to collect anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid, and bribes that were expected but not forthcoming.

Looking ahead

The watchdog role of the media does not end at producing information about misbehaviour, but also concerns how that information is used to hold people accountable for their actions. A government must know that people want responsiveness and wish to hold those in power accountable for their actions. A country’s media is likely to have a minimal effect on corruption if it tows the political line or fails to obtain the necessary support from the government, the private sector and civil society.

If the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 on water is to be achieved, the issue of water integrity should be taken more seriously by the media because it plays a key role in various aspects of the SDGs.

It is important that new initiatives are established where the media is further encouraged to take a keen interest in reporting on water related issues. International non-profit organisations, such as WIN, as well as other civil-society organisations have a role to play in ensuring that journalist networks are supported to report on these issues. It is important that the interest of journalists in reporting on such issues is sustained, which could be done through involving them in training courses or broadening their knowledge and awareness on integrity issues in the sector. The government has a role to play in ensuring that the space for the media remains open and that their safety on reporting on sensitive issues is assured.

International non-profit organisations, such as WIN, as well as civil society organisations should intensify their efforts in supporting the media to report on water issues. Journalists who show an interest in the water sector should be given the opportunity, through training courses, to broaden their knowledge and awareness of integrity issues in that sector.

Finally, there is a need for enhanced monitoring mechanisms to be utilised by citizens, civil society and the media in order to strengthen accountability and transparency, and to ensure value for money in water-service delivery.

This post is a shortened version of the original article that can be found here

33591844_10216565409229217_4810907646955618304_n.jpgAbout the author:

Abdul-Kudus Husein graduated from the ISS last year with a MA degree in Development Studies. He is currently the Communications Officer at the Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition (GACC). His professional portfolio includes communication and fundraising with civil society and the private sector. He has over 10 years experience in generating and implementing positive offline and online messages to engage audience and stakeholders and strong long term commitment to public policy, governance, participatory development, communications for change and local economic development.

 

 

Diversity in the Dutch local elections by Kees Biekart and Antony Otieno Ong’ayo

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‘Migrant-led’ political parties are on the rise in the Netherlands—a natural reaction to extreme anti-migration populism of the past decade. Insights into the local elections held on 21 March 2018 across the country show us how the rise of parties led by migrants (so-called allochtonen) can diversify the Dutch political landscape in a positive way.

 

New political parties established by Dutch people with a migration background have been quite successful in the recent municipal council elections in The Netherlands. Especially DENK, a new party formed by people with a migration background (largely from Turkish and Moroccan descent) managed to attract unexpected levels of support. This is quite a contrast with four years ago, when the Freedom Party (PVV) of anti-Islam activist Geert Wilders secured a landslide win in two Dutch cities (The Hague and Almere).

This year, Wilders’s party decided to compete in thirty cities—the ones in which his support was largest during last year’s parliamentary elections. However, his performance was rather disappointing. Wilders and his party lost most of the seats it had acquired four years ago to local parties that the PVV had competed with. These local parties won almost a third of the municipal votes—an increase of ten per cent compared to four years ago. EU nationals and non-EU citizens who lived in the Netherlands for more than five years were also allowed to vote in the local elections. This feature of the Dutch electoral system makes the municipalities an important battleground of political participation.

‘Migrant’ parties: countering anti-migration populism

hsp logoThe boom of the new ‘migrant’ political parties—next to DENK also NIDA, the Islam Democrats, Platform Amsterdam, Ubuntu Connected Front, BIJ1 and the Party for Unity—can be understood as a natural reaction to extreme anti-migration populism of the past decade. This anti-migration sentiment has been echoed by several mainstream political parties, desperately trying to capture the Wilders constituency. That is why the Christian Democrats rallied for the reintroduction of the national anthem in primary school classes, and the liberal governing party VVD reconfirmed its support for Zwarte Piet, a popular (though racist) traditional celebration for young children which is increasingly challenged by a variety of Dutch citizens.

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Not surprisingly, the new political party DENK attracted its support especially in a dozen cities that are known for their elevated migrant (and especially Turkish and Moroccan) population such as Schiedam, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Utrecht. DENK launched a targeted and effective election campaign, largely focusing on young voters via social media. There are also concerns, as DENK leaders have repeatedly voiced their support to the Erdogan government, and some even labelled Turkish parliamentarians rejecting Erdogan’s policies as ‘traitors’. But that seems to be a sideline, as DENK mobilised support particularly from those migrants that feel alienated by mainstream political parties who tell them to ‘better integrate into Dutch society’.

Platform AmsterdamThese voters with a migration background feel offended not only because second or third generation migrants were actually born here, but also because they experience discrimination on the labour and the housing market (even if they feel totally ‘integrated’). DENK (as well as the other migrant-linked parties) offer those ‘new Dutch citizens’ a platform that was absent in most mainstream parties, which often moved (for electoral reasons) closer to the xenophobic and Islamophobic position of Geert Wilders.UCF logo_3

Not surprisingly, there is also tension amongst migrants competing for Dutch council seats. Sylvana Simons, originally part of DENK, left after a conflict over strategic positioning. She is from Surinamese descent, with a more diverse Amsterdam constituency, and decided to run with her own party BIJ1 (“Together”). This new party also includes anti-Zwarte Piet activists from the African and Caribbean community who are generally not very well represented at the political level. The Ubuntu Connected Forum and Platform Amsterdam with largely African and Afro-Caribbean candidates, for example, did not get any council seats in the big cities. Still, Ugbaad Killincci, a young Somali woman, who had arrived as a baby to the eastern city of Emmen, was elected after racist action against her triggered a national campaign in the Labour Party (PvDA) rallying to elect her with preferential votes.

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The political party Bij1 (‘Together’) focuses on a ‘new politics’ of economic justice and radical equality.

Pre-election debates at ISSThe ISS was also involved in this debate on migration and its links to the Dutch elections by organising a public debate in which several local council candidates with a migration background participated. Half a dozen ‘migrant candidates’ brought their transnational linkages to the ISS in order to share their views and motivations to participate in these elections. Coming from Nigeria, Burundi, Suriname, as well as Turkey, they discussed how diversity played a role in the Dutch local elections. Key themes during the debate included perspectives on immigration and integration, economy and jobs, as well as public services.

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Debate held at ISS with representatives of ‘migrant-led’ parties before the Dutch local elections on 21 March 2018.

However, identity issues such as racism, gender and discrimination also emerged as critical topics in the debate. The candidates highlighted the value of their multiple and multi-layered identities, their civic commitment, and the need to leverage these linkages for the benefit of the Netherlands and countries of origin. These multiple identities reflect a demographic shift in the Netherlands, especially the increased multicultural feature of municipalities.

 

Politically, some structural shifts are happening with the ‘migrant vote’. It is about time, many migrants argue, since the majority of the population in the three biggest cities in the Netherlands now has a migration background. Still, we see migrant interests underrepresented and migrant delegates remaining the exception: migrant parties and migrant candidates overall achieved less than 8 percent of the municipal vote.

It is yet to be seen whether the newly established migrant-linked parties will gain more electoral support in the major cities; the increased competition amongst them for the same migrant constituencies may have a divisive effect, leading actually to reducing their seats in municipalities and councils. Notwithstanding, the tendency towards more diversity in Dutch politics is in motion if we look at the Chair of the National Parliament plus the mayors of Rotterdam and Arnhem being from a Moroccan background. Even though similar positions are not yet filled by persons with a Turkish, African, Asian or Caribbean background, this seems to be only a matter of time. The successes of the new migrant-linked political parties certainly are a promising step in that direction.

Main photo: Picture from DENK’s political manifesto stating that ‘people should be able to be proud of their heritage’.

csm_166bed604f68c0443160dc5f1905fa7a-kees-biekart_6d238c8725.jpgAbout the authors:

Kees Biekart is Associate Professor in Political Sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam.

antony.pngAntony Otieno Ong’ayo is a political scientist by training and currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University in The Hague. he focuses on diaspora transnational practices, civic driven change, political remittances and transformations in the countries of destination and origin

 

 

Emancipatory education in practice: perspectives from Rio de Janeiro’s favelas by Veriene Melo

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Emancipatory education is a platform to humanise and redefine the educational process in liberatory terms. Linking theory and practice from this lens can help us explore the role of education as a crucial instrument in the struggle for social change in communities at the margins.

An eye towards liberatory pedagogic practices

The more that traditional schools focus on “one-size-fits-all” curriculums meant solely to prepare individuals for the market, the more they detach themselves from local needs, knowledges, and values. A lack of exposure to critical content about social, economic, and political contradictions in formal education limits people’s ability to challenge the status quo and their attempts to rupture existing hegemonic arrangements.[i] [ii] Moving away from top-down approaches concerned with promoting modernisation processes and exposing notions of oppression and existential violence as authentic and ever-present, emancipatory education advances pedagogic practices that seek to empower individuals to think critically and act upon social and structural inequalities with the aim of transforming their lives and communities.[iii] [iv]

Conceiving education as a cultural act and a two-way process between educators and students based on the co-production of knowledge and critical dialogue, the framework is closely linked to the demands of the community and departs from the experiences and capabilities individuals bring with them to learning spaces. Due to its often more autonomous nature, emancipatory education invites us to embrace non-formal educational platforms as more inclusive learning sites where counter-hegemonic discourses and actions can flourish.[v] From this perspective, the work of civil society organisations can become a source of empowering possibilities and access to democratic life. Results from a case study of a youth program in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil help us bridge the framework’s theoretical and practical dimensions with processes, methods, and experiences reflecting real-world practices.

Realising the potential of favela youth

In the over 750 favelas scattered across Rio de Janeiro, crime and the permissiveness of violence—combined with the chronic lack of services, deep socio-economic deprivation, and a culture of marginalisation of the poor—have, for much of the city’s recent history, confined the majority of its 1,4 million residents to invisibility and intense social exclusion.[vi] As a result, favela youth face serious structural barriers that undermine their social and economic mobility, including exposure to poverty, difficulties moving up the educational pipeline, limited work and income opportunities, and the lack of access to platforms for cultural affirmation. Youths, in particular, are more likely to be out of school and work and are disproportionately impacted by lethal violence and police brutality.[vii]

Within this context, the Networks for Youth Agency program (hereby: Agency)[viii] promotes a capacity-building methodology that supports mostly black and low-income favela youths aged 14-29 in leading actions of social impact by encouraging their protagonism and artistic production. Since 2011, the program—which is now financed by the Ford Foundation and inspires a similar initiative in the UK[ix]—has engaged over 2,500 young people from dozens of Rio favelas, incubating 180 original projects. For a period ranging between two and four months,[x] participants are introduced to several educational instruments meant to stimulate them to cultivate their interests, exercise their analytical and critical thinking skills, and draw from their social history, lived experiences, and cultural identities to advance their ideas.

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Linking theory and practice in emancipatory education

An in-depth analysis of Agency points to three aspects of the program’s methodology that are particularly reminiscent of a Freirean emancipatory education. The first involves situating participants as agents of community transformation. Approaching young people as potent individuals and changemakers, the program provides participants with instruments to formulate and carry out initiatives that bear a potential territorial impact, placing them at the heart of local development processes in favelas. The result is an assembling of diverse projects that manage to reach hundreds of residents. From strategies to promote women’s empowerment and youth conflict resolution, to platforms to address education, work, and urban transportation challenges, these localised actions are mechanisms of positive social regeneration that help create a counter-narrative to dominant discourses about favelas and its young residents, which tends to be driven by assumptions of criminality and precariousness.

The program’s bottom-up approach to community development brings us to its second emancipatory education-related dimension of contextualised learning and praxis. The various instruments and exercises applied in the methodology integrate the interests, realities, and demands of young people, creating a dynamic and interactive platform that attract participants to join the learning process as active subjects rather than passive objects. It is, therefore, by first contextualising education to the lifeworld of young people and respecting their dispositions and abilities that Agency can stimulate participants to draw from elements of their social and physical world to advance context-sensitive initiatives that are based on community conditions, resources, and everyday practices.

The third broader linkage to emancipatory education has to do with the adoption of an educational model based on reflective practices and critical dialogue. Agency educators stimulate participants to think critically about their place in the world, their life conditions, and different issues impacting their communities. The advancement of tools that promote a critical analysis of dominant discourses and unequal social structures is, however, meant to go beyond supporting young people in the process of broadening their political conscience and social critique, to encourage them to use that reflection to realise their potential for social engagement by envisioning solutions.

A platform of possibility in efforts to transform education

Conclusions from my analysis of Agency points to opportunities for emancipatory education to play a key role in efforts to capacitate, empower, and more actively engage youth in local development processes via non-formal educational platforms in communities at the margins. The study inevitably also reveals great and multifaceted challenges. For instance, the program must grapple with a series of operational and methodological constraints as well as obstacles pertaining to the social context where it operates. Also, as an incrementalist strategy, there can be no guarantee that Agency’s outcomes are long-lasting—which does not diminish its transformative significance in particular settings and at a particular points in time.

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In all, despite its shortcomings, emancipatory education remains a relevant platform of inspiration and hope as we dare reinvent education moved by hopes for social justice and equity. Ultimately, exploring the personal experiences of participants and the local impact of provisions that are helping young people in poor and violence-stricken communities tap into their potential, cultivate a more critical reading of their world, and become agents of social change, is an important step in efforts in identifying and supporting transformative pedagogical initiatives that are bottom-up not only on paper, but also in essence and practice.

[i] Mayo, P. (2015) ‘Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love’ by Antonia Darder. Journal of Transformative Education, 2004, 2 (1), 64-66.
[ii] Illich, I. (1971) Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row.
[iii] Torres, C. (2013) Political Sociology of Adult Education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
[iv] Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.
[v] Giroux, H. (2011) On Critical Pedagogy (Critical Pedagogy Today Series). New York: Bloomsbury.
Torres, C. (1990). The Politics of Nonformal Education in Latin America. New York: Praeger.
[vi] Jovchelovitch, S. And Priego-Hernández, J. (2013). Underground sociabilities: identity,           culture and resistance in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. UNESCO Office in Brazil and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Souza e Silva, J. (2014). “Towards a New Paradigm of Public Policy in Rio’s Favelas.” Conference on Violence and Policing in Latin America and U.S. Cities. Stanford, CA, April 28-29 2014.
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE). (2010). Censo Demográfico 2010. Características Gerais da População, Religião e Pessoas com Deficiência. Rio de Janeiro: IBGE.
[vii] Waiselfisz, J. (2015). Mapa da Violência 2015: Mortes Matadas Por Armas de Fogo. Brasília: UNESCO.
Instituto Pereira Passos (IPP) and Instituto TIM. (2017). Agentes da Transformação: Cadernos da Juventude Carioca. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Pereira Passos.
[viii] For more on Networks for Youth Agency (Agência de Redes Para Juventude), please visit: http://agenciarj.org (in Portuguese).
[ix] For information on Agency’s UK version, see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/young-enterprise/11489791/How-the-Rio-slums-helped-inspire-a-start-up-revolution.html
[x] The full methodology promoted by Agency lasts a total of four months, but groups who are not awarded the funds to implement their projects leave the program at an earlier phase upon completion of the first two months of workshops.

About the author:

UntitledVeriene Melo is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the UCLA Graduate School of Education and a former visiting student at the ISS. For over five years, she worked at the Stanford Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov), participating in policy-oriented research projects on public security, local governance, and youth education with a focus on Rio’s favelas.

Confronting authoritarian populism: building collaborations for emancipatory rural resistance by Sergio Coronado

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Authoritarian populism is increasingly resisted across the world. Such contestations and expressions of resistance against oppressive authoritarian regimes are being understood as emancipatory rural politics. The Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) through a conference hosted by ISS on 17 and 18 March 2018 sought to explore the dynamics of authoritarian populism and pathways of resistance.

 

The ERPI Conference: A meeting place for activists

The phrase ‘a new political momentum is underway’1 was embodied on 17 and 18 March 2018 when more than 250 scholars, activists, practitioners, and policymakers representing more than 60 countries gathered at the International Institute of Social Studies to discuss the rise and effects of authoritarian populism at the ERPI’s ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’ conference.

Authoritarian populism is a contested and highly debated concept. In a recent blog by Ian Scoones, it is described as follows: ‘In Gramscian terms, authoritarian populisms can emerge when the “balance of forces” changes, creating a new “political-ideological conjuncture”. Drawing on populist discontents, a transformist, authoritarian movement, often with a strong, figurehead leader, is launched, mobilising around “moral panics” and “authoritarian closure”, and being given, in Hall’s words, “the gloss of populist consent”.’

On the surface, it seems that academics, practitioners, and the media use this concept to broadly describe political circumstances within different countries. One of the primary expectations of the conference was to capture the attention of a wider community of scholars and activists to promote a collective reflection about the ongoing political momentum surrounding this topic, and mainly to figure out whether the proposed definition of authoritarian populism is useful to understand what is happening.

At least three academic debates captured the attention of the participants of the conference. First, some conference participants critiqued the use of the notion of authoritarian populism to describe the uprising of conservative politicians after the crisis induced by the undelivered promises of neoliberal governments. Trump, Duterte and other populists are seizing political power in their countries partly because of the failure of neoliberal regimes to successfully transform poverty and to deliver the fulfilment of social and economic rights for the vast majority of poor classes.

Second, the debates focused on the use of this concept to generalise uneven and even contradictory situations, particularly concerning matching, yet different kinds of political regimes regardless of their political orientation. Notably, in the Latin American context, there could be an apparent coexistence of left-wing and right-wing populist regimes with different goals and political dynamics that prevent them from being comparable in these specific terms.

Third, the debates reflected on the accuracy of the concept to understand the current political phenomenon. For instance, some argued that the conceptualisation of authoritarian populism by Stuart Hall is more nuanced and specific than that by the authors of the ERPI framing paper, but they argue that Hall’s definition does not necessarily inform the complex dynamics of the current rural world.

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The result of the conference was an endowment of the debate around this concept. Authoritarian populism has been challenged by scholars, activists, and scholar-activists participating in the conference. Different critiques of this mode of governance have enriched understandings of the concept in multiple, innovative and exciting ways. During the conference’s first working groups session, participants discussed the realities of authoritarian populism via the cases and contexts described in the 70+ conference working papers.

Despite the lack of consensus on the concept, significant commonalities were found: even though the contexts of countries such as Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey differ significantly, authoritarian modes of governance are recognisable in all of these contexts: the shift toward nationalism; the existence of iron-fist leaders concentrating political power; the legitimation of repressive policies by appealing to the presence of external threats; and increasing human rights violations committed against people demanding democracy. Therefore, although these are clearly different situations, the existence of standard features helps illuminate common ground for comparing, understanding and confronting this problematic.

Making alternative rural politics visible

Alternatives to authoritarian populism are also visible in the rural world. One of the most important political forces confronting the rise of conservative populism is agrarian social movements such as La Via Campesina—a paradox, because populists seek social legitimation by appealing to traditions deeply rooted in the countryside. This contradiction vividly illuminates how rapidly the rural world is transforming, not only because of the enlargement of large-scale capitalist agriculture and the dispossession of the rural poor, but also because of the emergence of alternatives to such developments, constructed by rural people and social movements.

In her recent blog on Open Democracy, Ruth Hall describes how in South Africa rural social movements, like the Alliance for Rural Democracy, are contesting the state, market and chiefly power through claims for the protection of communal rights over land. Particularly, such movements focus on the demands for the democratisation of customs that currently enable chiefs to subscribe to prejudicial agreements with private investors, affecting the rights to land of people that depend on its access for their subsistence.

Such contestations and expressions of resistance against oppressive authoritarian regimes are being understood as emancipatory rural politics. This conference explicitly aimed to bring together academics and activists, and discuss ways in which emerging emancipatory politics can be supported. However, a huge challenge remains of providing security to the people on the front lines of such struggles. A shocking amount of violence is exerted against movement leaders, and threats against their lives are increasing globally. Social movements have constructed innovative strategies for self-protection.

A way to promote and support alternatives to the effects of authoritarian populism on people living in the countryside is through facilitating a deeper understanding of the phenomenon and clarifying the nuances between different regions and countries. Resistance towards authoritarian populism has multiple expressions; although social mobilisation is the most prominent, other kinds of political activities are taking place everywhere.

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“Sin fiesta no hay revolución”

“Sin fiesta no hay revolución”: without a party, there is no revolution. After the conference, the ERPI collective aims to continue growing as an expanded community of activists and scholars, aiming to construct critical understandings of authoritarian populism and to critically engage with emancipatory politics emerging in the rural world. Artists like Boy Dominguez and Rakata Teatro are now part of this process of the enlargement of the ERPI community and show how to diversify ways of expressing resistance.

We hope to take this initiative even further: follow us on Twitter @TheErpi, and Facebook to become involved and stay updated.

 

1This expression opens the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) framing paper, published almost one year ago in the Journal of Peasant Studies. The article aims to raise awareness among a global community of academics and activists working in the rural world about the rise of populist politics around the globe and the agrarian origins and the impacts of these politics on rural lives.
Main picture: Populismo by Boy Dominguez, launched at the ERPI conference.

Also see: Confronting authoritarian populism: challenges for agrarian studies by Ian Scoones

IMG_0160 2About the author:

Sergio Coronado is a PhD researcher affiliated with both the Free University Berlin and the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS). Currently, he is writing his dissertation on peasant agency and institutional change in Colombia, and co-coordinates the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) secretariat. Email: sergio.coronado@fu-berlin.de.

 

 

Deglobalisation Series | Is anti-globalisation only a preoccupation in the Global North? by Rory Horner, Seth Schindler, Daniel Haberly and Yuko Aoyama

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A remarkable ‘big switch’  has emerged from the turn of the millennium in terms of attitudes towards and discourses over globalisation. But while the world is currently witnessing a new backlash against economic globalisation, considerable support for globalisation within some parts of the Global South should not be overlooked.

While the world is currently witnessing a new backlash against economic globalisation, considerable support for globalisation within some parts of the Global South should not be overlooked. Supporters of the UK’s exit from the European Union seek to “take back control” from Brussels, while Donald Trump’s economic ethno-nationalism has promised to put “America first”. In contrast, the picture that emerges in the Global South is quite different, as part of a remarkable ‘big switch’ that has been taking place from the turn of the millennium in terms of attitudes towards and discourses over globalisation.

Support for globalisation in the global South

The polling company YouGov, in a 2016 survey of people across 19 countries, found that France, the US and the UK were the places where the fewest people believe that “globalisation has been a force for good”. In contrast, the survey found the most enthusiasm for globalisation in East and Southeast Asia, where over 70% of respondents in all countries believed it has been a force for good. The highest approval rate, 91%, was in Vietnam.

From a poor starting point, many in the Global South have experienced some improvement in basic development indicators in the 20th and 21st Centuries. People living in Asia accounted for the vast majority of those who experienced relative income gains from 1988 to 2008. In comparison with the 1990s, the Global South now earns a much larger share of world GDP, has more middle-income countries, more middle-class people, less dependency on foreign aid, considerably greater life expectancy, and lower child and maternal mortality rates.

Less of a backlash in the Global South necessarily means support for neoliberal globalisation—and the optimism in countries such as Vietnam may paradoxically be a result of an earlier rejection thereof. China, in particular, has not followed the same approach to economic globalisation as that which was encouraged by the US and organisations such as the IMF and World Bank in the late 20th Century.

Meanwhile, many of the world’s poorest in the Global South have seen very little improvement in quality of life in recent years, yet they are much more marginal and less well-positioned to express their frustrations than the ‘losers’ in countries such as the US and UK. They must not be forgotten.

China and India warn against deglobalisation

Most notably, the last two World Economic Forum gatherings at Davos have seen explicit statements from the respective leads of China and India warning against deglobalisation. In January 2017, China’s president Xi Jinping said that his country would assume the leadership of 21st Century globalisation. Defending the current economic order, Xi said that China was committed to making globalisation work for everyone—its responsibility as “leaders of our times”.

At Davos in 2018, Narendra Modi, prime minister of India, warned against deglobalisation:

It feels like the opposite of globalisation is happening. The negative impact of this kind of mindset and wrong priorities cannot be considered less dangerous than climate change or terrorism.

 The ‘big switch’ on globalisation

It is remarkable that the backlash most associated with the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US has emerged from the right of the political spectrum, in countries long recognised as the chief architects and beneficiaries of economic globalisation.

At the turn of the millennium, the primary opposition to globalisation was concerned with its impacts in the Global South. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank, in his 2006 book Making Globalization Work wrote that “the rules of the game have been largely set by the advanced industrial countries”, who unsurprisingly “shaped globalization to further their own interests.” Their political influence was represented through dominant roles in organisations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the WTO, and the corporate dominance of their multinationals.

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Protests in Seattle against the WTO in 1999. By Steve Kaiser from Seattle via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

In the 1990s the anti-globalisation movement opposed neoliberal economic integration from a range of perspectives, with a particular emphasis on the Global South. The movement was populated by activists, non-governmental organisations and groups with a variety of concerns: peace, climate change, conservation, indigenous rights, fair trade, debt relief, organised labour, sweatshops, and the AIDS pandemic.

Yet, in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, UK prime minister Theresa May offered a sceptical assessment at the 2017 World Economic Forum at Davos, arguing that “talk of greater globalisation can make people fearful. For many, it means their jobs being outsourced and wages undercut. It means having to sit back as they watch their communities change around them.” The US, under Trump, subsequently began renegotiating NAFTA and withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Significant proportions of the population in the US and other countries in the Global North have experienced limited, if any, income gains in the most recent era of globalisation. Leading global inequality expert Branko Milanovic has explored changes in real incomes between 1988 and 2008 to show who particularly lost out on relative gains in income. He found two groups lost most: the global upper middle class—those between the 75th and 90th percentiles on the global income distribution scale, of whom 86% were from advanced economies—and the poorest 5% of the world population.

Emerging evidence indicates that increased global trade has played a role in economic stagnation or decline for people in the North, especially in the US. MIT economist David Autor and his colleagues suggest that the ‘China shock’ has had major redistributive effects in the US, leading to declines in manufacturing employment.

Economists had previously argued that the “losers” from trade could be compensated by transfers of wealth. Autor and his colleagues found that while there have been increases in welfare payments to regions of the US hardest hit by the trade shock, they fall far short of compensating for the income loss.

Not just globalisation

Not all of the stagnation and decline experienced in the Global North can be attributed to economic globalisation. Technological change is a big factor and national policy choices around taxation and social welfare have also played key roles in shaping inequality patterns within countries. In such a context, ‘globalisation’ has been deployed as a scapegoat by some governments, invoking external blame for economic problems made at home.

The current backlash is not just about economic globalisation. It has involved ethno-nationalist and anti-immigrant components, for example among supporters of Trump and Brexit.

A key lesson from the late 20th Century is to be wary of wholesale attacks on, and sweeping defences of, 21st Century economic globalisation. In light of the difficulties of establishing solidarity between ‘losers’ in different parts of the world, the challenge of our times is for an alter-globalisation movement which addresses all of them.

Moreover, if the stellar growth rates of the last 15-20 years slow down, the relatively positive view of globalisation in much of the global South may not continue, with the possibility of a backlash (re)emerging beyond the Global North.

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

About the authors:

Rory_Horner_work_profile_photo.JPGRory Horner, Lecturer, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester; 321250

Daniel Haberly, Lecturer In Human Geography, University of Sussex;

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Seth Schindler, Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, and Aoyama2016

 

Yuko Aoyama, Professor of Economic Geography, Clark University

 

Toward greater tolerance? Ethno-nationalist lawfare and resistance through legal mobilisation by Jeff Handmaker

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JeffHandmakerISS_smallAbout the author:

Jeff Handmaker teaches law, human rights, development and governance and conducts research on legal mobilisation at the ISS. He is also an associate member of the Faculty of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Editor-in-Chief of the South African Journal on Human Rights and a member of the EUR INFAR Project.

In September 2014 Henk van Oss, a caravan dweller and member of the Dutch traveler community, received a letter from the Dutch municipality of Oss. Condolences were expressed for the recent death of his mother. And, in accordance with the Dutch “extinction policy”, he was informed that the permit for his mother’s caravan had been withdrawn and that he had to leave. His story of ethno-nationalist lawfare and the struggle for citizens to defend themselves reveals the importance of research on the contested terrain of legal mobilisation.

Victory for van Oss

Mr. van Oss, who had cared for his mother until her death, did not accept the municipality’s demands. He came in contact with the Dutch organisation Public Interest Litigation Project, who took his case to the Netherlands Human Rights Institute and brought a legal claim against the municipality of Oss. While the legal battle continued for some years, it was ultimately successful. The Human Rights Institute declared that the actions of Oss Municipality were unlawful. The courts (on appeal) declared that the municipality had acted illegally by withdrawing their permission for the caravan stand.

It was in some respects a legal tale of David and Goliath.  From an analytical standpoint it was a classic case study of how ethno-nationalist lawfare to end what the Dutch government regards as an undesirable cultural practice met the counterpower of the Sinti, Roma and Traveler community, who used strategic litigation, a form of legal mobilisation, to claim their rights.

The traveler community: A precarious existence

The history of the Sinti, Roma and Traveler community in Europe is not an altogether happy one. Historicially, the community travelled for economic opportunities or to escape persecution. But this wasn’t always enough. During the Second World War, several hundred members of the community were arrested and deported from the Netherlands by the Nazi occupation authorities. They were sent to concentration camps; most died. While the number of persecuted travelers in the Netherlands was relatively small, they met a similar fate as several hundred thousand other travelers did across Europe.

Ander-kamp-Oss-in-2013-grotendeels-ontruimd-3
A modern-day caravan in the Netherlands.

Over the course of the past few decades, a range of restrictive legal measures have been taken against Sinti, Roma and Travelers by both national and municipal governments across Europe. These measures frequently reflect ethno-nationalist, autocratic tendencies rather than the values expected of liberal democratic states. Such measures are also rooted in populism. They are framed by over-exaggerated perceptions of criminality and sometimes invoke the mantra of integration or even emancipation as a thin, and disingenuous form of justification.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Dutch “extinction policy”1, largely implemented at the municipal government level, and sometimes containing a benevolent, moral message aimed at improving the socio-economic conditions of the community, is met with such revulsion and hostility. Ultimately, the government’s legal measures represent an oppressive use of law, with the overall aim of reducing, if not completely eliminating the community; in other words, these measures are a form of lawfare.

Resistance through legal mobilisation

Meanwhile, civic-led, law-based efforts to protect members of the community facing discrimination and to advocate for more rights-respecting policies make it difficult for such restrictive measures to take hold legally, particularly at the local/municipal level. These efforts serve as a counterpower to the exercise of ethno-nationalist lawfare against these legally-recognised ethnic groups.

As I argued in a paper presented at the Dutch-Flemish Socio-Legal Studies Association (VSR) in January 2018, legal mobilisation as an analytical lens can help to explain the potential for civic-led legal instrumentalism to protect groups against retrogressive measures by the state. According to my colleague Sanne Taekema, Professor of Legal Theory at Erasmus School of Law and leader of the project on Integrating Normative and Functional Approaches to the Rule of Law and Human Rights (INFAR) in which I am also participating,

traditional separation or balance of powers focuses on formal mandates of public actors and their interactions. Given the fact that in many states executive and legislative powers have become strongly intertwined, a veritable trias politica is merely an ideal.

Taekema’s research explores whether a model of balance of powers can be extended to include non-state actors. Together, we are investigating whether it is possible to revise the theory to include counterpowers outside of the state and serve as “direct and indirect checks” on government abuse of power. More broadly, my research explores how an analytical lens of lawfare can explain governmental-led instrumentalisation of law against communities, such as the Sinti, Roma and Travelers community, and how an analytical lens of legal mobilisation can explain the strategic potential of law-based, civic-led social justice claims.

A legal mobilisation lens: Useful in practice

The usefulness of a legal mobilisation lens is is further affirmed by Dutch attorney Jelle Klaas, litigation director of PILP, who led the strategic litigation on behalf of Henk van Oss. The Amsterdam-based organisation pursues what it describes as strategic litigation, a concept that is in fact broader than what most legal advocacy organisations traditionally understand strategic litigation to be, and incorporates various forms of law-based, civic-led advocacy. Klaas has noted that

sometimes, alternative routes to justice are blocked. Sometimes dialogue and lobbying are ineffective on their own. In these cases, legal action may be necessary as a form of counterpower to curb government overreach or harms caused by corporations.

PILP’s work is about using legal action to bring about social, political or legal changes. The goal is not necessarily to win a case for a particular client. Strategic litigation complements other ways of bringing about change: from lobbying and advocacy to community organising and protests. According to this approach, an organisation focused on strategic litigation should act as an ally to activists, NGOs and grassroots organisations. Klaas further explains PILP’s litigation strategies:

Usually, the aim is to go to court for a legal victory, but sometimes you can win by losing a case. Where injustice is exposed and publicity generated, there is often an opportunity for non-state actors to be a form of counterpower, regardless of the outcome of the case.

Conclusion

The case brought by Henk van Oss was “won” by PILP-supported lawyers in 2017, albeit not on the grounds of human rights violations as PILP had hoped and eloquently argued for. However, the case elevated the plight of Sinti, Roma and Travelers to the national spotlight. Furthermore, in laying out a detailed dossier of state-based discrimination, the case produced a vivid portrait of the community, giving the legal issue a human face and according credibility to the Sinti, Roma and Traveler movement’s campaign to end discrimination.

Beyond this particular issue, I feel it is crucial to understand the dynamics of legal mobilisation, both in a specific case and – generally – as a form of counterpower against lawfare exercised by state and indeed corporate actors. In this regard, context always shapes the socio-cultural possibilities for legal mobilisation. Furthermore, it is crucial to understand the structural bias embedded within national and international laws that condition the opportunities for exercising agency. Finally, the existence of structural bias, carefully leveraged, can form a powerful basis for advancing a social justice claim.

1The “extinction policy” is known in Dutch as the “uitsterfbeleid”.

New cabinet, new direction? ‘Building blocks’ for new Dutch minister Sigrid Kaag by Linda Johnson

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About the author:

DSC01062 (1)Linda Johnson is currently the Executive Secretary at ISS. She has been involved in international relations in higher education since 1988, holding a variety of posts in the field, including Head of International Office, Head of Educational Affairs, Director of an American Study Abroad Programme and Head of International Relations. She speaks and writes regularly on topics pertaining to the internationalisation of higher education and research and on diversity.

Partos* and SAIL**, two umbrella organisations for development knowledge in the Netherlands, presented a number of urgent recommendations to incoming Minister of Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Sigrid Kaag in December 2017. The two organisations hope to inform the minister’s new policy by means of a number of policy recommendations framed as ‘building blocks’. ISS, as a member of SAIL, co-created the building blocks in line with its vision of ensuring the societal impact of its research and of deepening collaboration with partners in the development sector.

A New Cabinet – and New Opportunities

The Dutch elections of March 2017 resulted in a protacted period of negotiation between Dutch political parties before sufficient agreement was reached for a new coalition government to be formed in October 2017. Incoming Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade and Aid, Sigrid Kaag1, an experienced diplomat and a member of the political party D66, now faces a number of challenges in deciding which direction the Dutch developmental policy will take over the next five years.

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Dutch Minister of Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Sigrid Kaag.

The new policy is expected to be revealed in the coming months. For this reason, SAIL and Partos as platforms representing expertise in the development field, worked together on formulating a document for Minister Kaag that could help shape her new policy. The document highlights six key areas of the Dutch development policy requiring attention: Development Cooperation and Forced Migration; Humanitarian Action; Trade; Shrinking Civic Space and Human Rights; Partner Countries; and Climate Support to Developing Countries.

Development Cooperation and Forced Migration

The new cabinet’s goal is to focus on the prevention of migration and the return of migrants and refugees to their countries of origin. One strategy for doing this is to address the root causes of migration to reduce the number of people seeking refuge in Europe. SAIL and Partos recommend that the government focuses on tackling the root causes of forced migration (as opposed to voluntary migration), such as climate change, exclusion and violence, and argue that the positive aspects of migration should also be acknowledged.

SAIL and Partos recommend the avoidance of conditional aid, which has proven to be ineffective, and underline the fact that the purpose of development cooperation and development aid is to further social and economic development. They also warn that the ‘ring around Europe’, which currently receives most attention, should not prevent a focus on other regions where help is desperately needed.

Humanitarian Action

Partos and SAIL praise the Netherlands for its leadership in taking humanitarian action, but recommended that its aid financing mechanisms should be flexible, independent, unconditional and multi-year in order to better handle the increasing complexity and extent of humanitarian disasters and conflicts. They furthermore stress the importance of ‘localisation’, and stated that the Netherlands’ extensive experience of network governance and localisation should be put to good use. They also reflect on the importance of focusing on gender through providing increased protection to women and children, and the need for attention to be paid to the conditions in camps housing Libyan refugees.

Trade

The coalition agreement highlights the government’s desire to further combine trade and aid. SAIL and Partos warn that trade should be an instrument serving development and should not be an aim in itself. They also call for the creation of a good investment climate based on a ‘do-no-harm’ principle in developing countries and for support of local SMEs in developing countries.

Shrinking Civic Space and Human Rights

The coalition agreement emphasises the Netherlands’ support for human rights and its pledge to increase the budget for its human rights fund. Partos and SAIL call for steps to be taken to strengthen civil society to help create the conditions for a well-functioning, free and democratic society in which a sustainable and inclusive economy can flourish.

Partner Countries

The two organisations argue that migration issues should not inform the Netherlands’ choice of its partner countries. Partner relationships should be based on long term cooperation, and on enduring global challenges such as climate change, poverty and population growth.

Climate Support to Developing Countries

The coalition agreement reveals the importance assigned to sustainable development. The new cabinet announced its intention to start a national climate fund, but no concrete financial commitments to this fund have been made as yet. Could this point to lack of commitment?

SAIL and Partos call for a concrete financial commitment to be made in line with the Climate Law for the periods 2020-2025 and 2026-2030, and for financial flows to be targeted towards lower income countries and used for the support of vulnerable groups. Moreover, they recommend that the Netherlands should commit itself to making international funds such as the Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund2 more accessible for developing countries and the organisations combating climate change within them.

Concluding remark

The collaboration between Partos and SAIL was an interesting and highly rewarding learning experience. Scientists, policy-makers and practitioners work together less frequently than they should. Our experience of co-creating the ‘building blocks’ for Minister Kaag made it eminently clear to us that creating spaces in which the worlds of evidence and practice can meet and debate things that matter is very worthwhile indeed. We plan to continue the collaboration and hope that the ‘building blocks’ will be the start of a good conversation with Minister Kaag.

 

*Partos is the association for development cooperation, with more than 100 Dutch organisations active in the field holding membership to this association.
**SAIL is the platform for international knowledge institutes in The Netherlands, with the ISS as one of the six members.
1Dr. Sylvia Bergh, Associate Professor in Development Management and Governance at the ISS, in 2016 interviewed Minister Sigrid Kaag regarding her work at that time in Syria, where she was a United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon (watch the video here).
2The Green Climate Fund is a global fund created to support the efforts of developing countries to respond to the challenge of climate change. The Adaptation Fund is intended to help developing countries to adapt to climate change.

Confronting authoritarian populism: challenges for agrarian studies by Ian Scoones

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About the author:
Ian_Scoones2016.jpgIan Scoones is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex and co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre. He is one of the initiators of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative and is a member of the editorial collective of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

 

A few weeks back I was in Russia at the fascinating fifth BRICS Initiative in Critical Agrarian Studies conference. Throughout the event we heard about the emergence of particular styles of authoritarian populist regimes, including in the BRICS countries, but elsewhere too. Based on my remarks at the final plenary, I want to ask what the challenges are for agrarian studies in confronting authoritarian populism.

ERPI 2m ssssThis is a theme that is at the core of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), hosted by ISS and launched in May this year. The open access framing paper is available from the Journal of Peasant Studies, as is a brilliant contribution to the JPS Forum on this theme from Walden Bello.  The ERPI conference in March next year will be held at the ISS, and now also has an open call for contributions (deadline, Nov 15).

We have been somewhat overwhelmed by the global response to the initiative, and we had a flood of applicants for small grants, with the winners of the 2017 competition announced recently. There is a very vibrant network emerging among scholars and activists around the world, and many were present at the conference in Moscow.

So, what do we mean by authoritarian populism? It takes many forms, but we draw on the arguments of Stuart Hall and others made in the context of Thatcherism in the UK. In Gramscian terms, authoritarian populisms can emerge when the ‘balance of forces’ changes, creating a new ‘political-ideological conjuncture’. Drawing on populist discontents, a transformist, authoritarian movement, often with a strong, figurehead leader, is launched, mobilising around ‘moral panics‘and ‘authoritarian closure’, and being given, in Hall’s words, ‘the gloss of populist consent’. Sound familiar?

In this blog, I want to discuss the implications and challenges for how we think about agrarian issues in the context of authoritarian populism, and want to make four brief points.

First, as Dani Rodrik, the Harvard economist, explains, the form of populism that emerges around the world – broadly characterised as authoritarian or progressive – depends very much on the historical engagements with globalisation, and how populists mobilise, either around ethno-nationalist arguments when global migration flows create discontents or around class divisions when global trade has impacts on livelihoods. I think this is an important argument, but so far in his writings he doesn’t flesh out the detail, and in particular how globalisation processes affect rural spaces in different ways to urban metropoles, with contrasting implications for class, caste, gender or age – and so processes of political mobilisation. I’d argue that agrarian studies needs to engage with these questions, and perhaps bring more of a global political economy angle back in, where the economics are taken seriously.

Second, the emergence of populism, with a strong rural base, needs a careful analysis of the social and cultural dynamics of rural change, asking sympathetically why it is that young people, women, peasant farmers and others are often strongly behind reactionary populist positions. Liberals and leftists may argue that this does not serve their interests and they are somehow mistaken, but we need to look beyond such rationalist arguments, and think harder about the politics of identity, belonging, recognition and community. Rural religion and cultural identities are important, but not conventionally part of agrarian studies. Interest-based analyses (centred on class or whatever category) and conventional political economy may simply be not enough.

Third, at the same time, authoritarian populism provides an impetus to the continuation of extractive exploitation of rural resources – land, water, resource grabbing continues apace. But this time with a nationalist tinge, and with new capital-elite-state alliances forged. These processes, which were a response to the global financial crisis of 2008 and the desperate search for investment opportunities by global capital, now have a new context in many settings. How do new configurations of power, and a populist, nationalist, often anti-globalization narrative, affect the politics of dispossession in rural spaces, and with these the dynamics of accumulation, among local and international elites? I think these wider political shifts mean that our conversations around grabbing and extractivism that occupied many of the presentations at the conference, require an expanded frame that takes populist politics seriously.

Fourth, the ERPI is interested in how alternatives are forged and resistances mobilised to authoritarian populism. Our analyses must probe why these don’t happen, but also how and when they do. We also must think hard about the conventional frames for mobilisation, and ask whether these do the job today, in the face of authoritarian populisms. Take the idea of food sovereignty. For many, the food sovereignty movement has been a site for progressive discussion about agrarian alternatives. But the notion of sovereignty, localism, autonomy and rejection of the role of the state and globalism, has frequently been captured by regressive populist positions. Why do peasant farmers support such political leaders? Because they claim to offer a voice and a commitment to protecting their autonomy from the ill-winds of global trade and state interference. The Natural Farming Movement in India is a case in point. A perfectly good idea about agro-ecological farming gets wrapped up in exclusionary Hindutva nationalism, yet is celebrated as a food sovereignty success. A new politics of the mainstream requires a new politics of the alternative, and agrarian movements need in my view some hard thinking about positioning.

As outlined in our ERPI framing paper, a new moment is emerging: a critical, historical conjuncture, when the tectonic plates of global power relations shift. We cannot pretend this is not happening. In Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, for sure, but also in Turkey, the Philippines, Indonesia, much of Europe and of course the US, political reconfigurations are underway, responding in different ways to a quite fundamental crisis in globalised neoliberal capitalism, with huge ramifications across rural worlds everywhere.

New contexts require new questions, new analytical frames and new forms of mobilisation. And with this moment unfolding rapidly, in alliance with others, the intellectual and political project of agrarian studies must rise to the challenge.

This post first appeared on Zimbabweland It was written at the occasion of the BICAS conference in Moscow last 13-16 October co-organized by ISS, and looks forward to the international conference on “authoritarian Populism and the Rural World” at ISS on 17-18 March 2018.

The Age of Democratic Resilience by Mohamed Salih

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About the author:
M_SalihMohamed Salih is PhD in Economics and Social Science, University of Manchester, UK, 1983) is Professor of Politics of Development at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague and the Department of Political Science, University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Regional research interests, fieldwork, academic and policy research interests: Africa and Middle East and shortly in the English-speaking Caribbean.

This posting is an excerpt of the valedictory lecture of Mohamed Salih at the occasion of his retirement from the Institute of Social Studies. The lecture was held on 12 October 2017

Current academic views, media reports and policy and development practitioners often claim that democracy and development are declining or even ending. Mohamed Salih maintains that democracy is not dying but expanding beyond its classic form of representative democracy. What has declined, however, is educated democracy and authentic development that sides with the poor and critically embraces solidarity against want, hunger and fear, resisting tyranny and authoritarianism or confronting discrimination in all its forms.  

It is perplexing that the phenomenal expansion of democracy during recent decades has lately been greeted by suggestions in a considerable number of publications that it is in decline or has died. This, in spite of the fact that we live in an age in which democracy has flourished like never before. Democracy, and development, are flourishing in new spaces, institutional forms and practices. These capitalize on new freedoms democracy has unleashed and new technologies that have created millions of globally networked communities of interest, with a direct bearing on politics locally, nationally, regionally and globally.

I have lived over six decades of how development policy intertwines with African politics, living half of my age in the Sudan and the other half in Europe, as well as conducting research, teaching and offering policy advice for the larger part of my life.  A pessimist may argue that over five decades, during which fundamental social, economic and environmental problems have preoccupied academia, policy and practice, these problems are not only still lingering, but some have even been exacerbated, and new social problems have been piled upon the old. Moreover, the intensification of old and new threats to human survival and wellbeing such as poverty, persistent hunger and inequality, epitomized by the juxtaposition of foods that kill and famines that kill[1], climate change and biodiversity loss, are common features that unite the first and current decade of development. Rather than considering the glass empty, in my mind there remain reasons to stay optimistic, and find the glass is more than half-full.

Despite negative reporting on Africa’s recent democratic development, led both by the media and academics, data collected from the field show contrary results. In the case of Africa, the development and democracy trends between 1999 and 2016 are moderately positive. More importantly, critics fail to ask whether what is happening is a decline of democracy or the emergence of new spaces and forms of democracy. There are three developments that characterize the past two decades of democratic resurgence. Local and grassroots democracy have expanded in what can also be termed the fourth wave of democratization,[2] cyber democracy and electronic voting.

Firstly, citizens’ withdrawal from state-created political spaces to participate in local and indigenous forms of direct deliberation instead of representation is not new to Africa, but has taken immense proportions over the past decades. Youth, women, farmers, pastoralists, traders, and non-governmental and civil society organizations deliberate on local issues from water to health and from education to forestation. They also discuss soil and water conservation on their own or supported by like-minded transnational organizations. Those who declare the decline of democracy should go beyond national statistics to engage the emergent new forms of local level, community and grassroots deliberations practiced by the majority of the world.

Second, since the late 1990s, the rapid expansion and convergence of information and communication technologies has created new spaces for political engagement, which has expanded citizens’ freedom to exchange information, organize political action and social movements, and rediscover the growth of a new vocabulary of resistance. While democracy’s essential values have persisted, the forms and spaces of democratic practices have multiplied. Consider, for example, e-government, e-political parties, e-parliaments, e-civic networks and associations which have become prominent features of citizens’ vehicle not only for accessing information but also for using information to make government more responsive.

Third, already, during the 1960s, Western democracies started experimenting with electronic voting and achieved mixed results. Despite many disadvantages, e-voting creates huge possibilities for deliberation and influencing politics across the globe.

Democracy and development are the most cherished values defining the aspirations of every human society. Almost all political elites use democracy and development to bestow legitimacy on their system of governance. However, both democratic and authoritarian regimes often use democracy and development as instruments to legitimize their retention of power, which often imposes oppressive pathways for regulating and controlling the totality of citizens’ human affairs. In some developing countries, the state has even demanded that citizens should suspend their democratic rights and freedom in the wake of development until this cherished national project is accomplished. All too often, too, democratic majorities relish what is known in democratic theory as the “tyranny of the majority.” Absolute majority rule usurps political ideologies and practices that are an affront to democracy and human flourishing.

Democracy and development are about inclusion and ensuring that the rights of the minority are not forsaken by regimes that are discriminatory or in the business of widening the wedge between citizens according to their race, religion, sex, creed or region for short-term political gain. What has declined, in my mind, is not democracy but educated democracy; not development but authentic development that sides with the poor and critically addresses the main messages and meaning of development. For, if democracy is allowed to decline and development to die, there would be nothing left for humanity to celebrate by way of embracing solidarity against want, hunger and fear, resisting tyranny and authoritarianism or confronting discrimination in all its forms. In a nutshell, humanity is not complete without the pursuit of authentic democracy and inclusive and empowering development.

[1]I contrasted foods that kill as a metaphor for the rich over consumption of food, which causes obesity vis-a-vis famine that kills as a metaphor of severe food shortages among the poor, which causes hunger and famine (Mohamed Salih 2009).

[2] This characterization follows on Huntington 1990. The Third Wave of Democratization.