JHU POLITIK
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APRIL 20, 2015
VOLUME XVII, ISSUE XII
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JHU POLITIK EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Eliza Schultz MANAGING EDITOR Christine Server
HEAD WRITER Julia Allen
ASSISTANT EDITORS Katie Botto Dylan Etzel Preston Ge Abigail Sia
POLICY DESK EDITOR Mira Haqqani
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Diana Lee
MARYLAND EDITOR David Hamburger
COPY EDITOR Florence Noorinejad WEBMASTER Ben Lu MARKETING & PUBLICITY Chiara Wright FACULTY ADVISOR Steven R. David
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CAMPUS EDITOR Juliana Vigorito
STAFF WRITERS Olga Baranoff Dylan Cowit Arpan Ghosh Alexander Grable Rosellen Grant Rebecca Grenham Evan Harary Shrenik Jain Shannon Libaw Robert Locke Morley Musick Sathvik Namburar Corey Payne Zachary Schlosberg
• April 20, 2015 • Volume XVII, Issue XII
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
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The Great Game Mira Haqqani ’17 Glossip v. Gross:
Lethal Injections and the Eighth Amendment
Dylan Cowit ’16
Feeding 1.2 Billion and Beyond: Indian Agri-Business
Evan Harary ’16
The AIIB Spells Doom for American Hegemony George Gulino ’18 The Masculinity Problem in Gender Studies Andrea Michalowsky ’16 Outrage, the Internet, and the Student Government Elections Zachary Schlosberg ’16
Volume XVII, Issue XII • April 20, 2015 •
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The Great Game
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by Mira Haqqani ’17, Policy Desk Editor
emen is not Syria, and yet there is reason to believe that it is spiraling into similar chaos. Images from Yemen look eerily similar to those from the deadly Syrian civil war that has claimed nearly 300,000 lives since 2011. As Operation Decisive Storm continues to launch attacks into Yemen to defeat the Houthi resistance movement, the Middle East finds itself fighting another proxy war in light of the enduring Saudi Arabia-Iran fight for regional supremacy. The Houthi insurgency in Yemen began in 2004 when Shia leader Hussein al Houthi embarked on a revolt against the Suuni Yemeni government. The Yemeni government, with the support of Saudi Arabia, has since made efforts to control the rebellion, which has spiraled out of control in recent months. Since August 2014, the Houthis have created endless trouble within the country, fighting the government and the police. However, the conflict took a new turn when Houthi militias, allegedly backed by Tehran, attacked the presidential palace and residence of President Mansur Hadi. The attack resulted in Hadi’s resignation as well as that of his Cabinet, thus allowing the Houthis to establish control over the government. Although the conflict in Yemen may seem like a civil uprising from afar, it is clear that an old, external hand is at play in the conflict: Saudi Arabia. The Houthis themselves do not threaten the House of Saud’s Wahabi ideology; rather, it is the sect of Shia Islam that the Houthis represent which poses the real threat, and which therefore unsurprisingly reduces this conflict to a sectarian war between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia – countries with regional ambitions and competing claims over representing the true seat of Islam. Similar to the conflict in Syria, both countries have adopted opposing stances, with Iran condemning Saudi military intervention and Saudi Arabia demanding Iran to end its support for the Houthis. Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Saudi Arabia and Iran have battled against each other in efforts to establish regional supremacy in the Middle East. While neither country can be directly blamed for the creation of conflicts in the
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region, their obsession with undermining the other has exacerbated, complicated, and immensely blown conflicts out of proportion. Both countries are to blame for that. Their rivalry has instigated proxy wars in the Middle East, which include, among others, conflicts in Lebanon, Bahrain, Iraq and Syria. In other words, the Saudi-Iranian conflict has resulted in thousands of deaths, millions of refugees and atrocious living conditions for all. In light of Iran’s positive attitude towards striking a nuclear deal with the West, there could be hope for diplomacy at the top level between the two countries. However, Saudi Arabia’s opposition to the Iran nuclear deal has only furthered tensions and made the possibility of diplomacy less likely. As both countries continue their childish bids for regional power, they outlaw the possibility of negotiations that could benefit the entire region. The sounds of the Yemen conflict have also reverberated as far as Turkey and Pakistan. Pakistan, a country torn by its own internal struggles with corrupt leadership and terrorism, seems to have alienated longtime ally Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab world by refusing a Saudi request to join an anti-Houthi coalition of Arab countries. This has created an awkward tension between the two countries as Saudi allies, like the U.A.E., warn Pakistan to prepare for severe consequences resulting from the latter’s refusal to provide military aid to the coalition. The fact that Saudi Arabia feels like it has the right to manipulate nations such as Pakistan into fighting its wars on its behalf is one of the reasons why the Middle East is becoming increasingly dangerous, and more countries are being dragged into armed conflict. As sectarian rhetoric, regional ambitions and mutual suspicion worsen Iranian-Arab relations, both countries have entered a deadlock in a conflict in which nearly every Middle Eastern country has taken a side, further fuelling a rivalry that is likely to result in many losers. The stubbornness at both ends comes at a time when diplomacy is the need of the hour, yet unlikely to occur – hence compromising regional stability, innocent lives, and the credibility of both Iran and Saudi Arabia. ■
• April 20, 2015 • Volume XVII, Issue XII
Glossip v. Gross:
Lethal Injections and the Eighth Amendment by Dylan Cowit ’16, Staff Writer
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ll eyes will turn to the Supreme Court this week as it hears oral arguments in two sets of cases that have long captured the attention of the American public. In addition to the better-known cases on same-sex marriage, the Court will hear oral arguments this Wednesday in a case about the death penalty. This case, Glossip v. Gross, will not question whether the death penalty is unconstitutional. Instead, it centers on the question of whether Oklahoma’s use of a certain sedative in lethal injections violates the Eighth Amendment. Glossip arose in response to the execution of Clayton Lockett, an inmate from Oklahoma. On April 29, 2014, Oklahoma used a three-drug procedure to execute Lockett. The first of these drugs, midazolam, was a sedative intended to register Lockett unconscious so that the next two drugs would not cause pain. However, a few minutes after Lockett was declared unconscious and administered the other two drugs, witnesses noticed that something was wrong. Although Lockett should have been in a coma-like state, he was still able to raise his head and reportedly mutter words of pain. He began to writhe, twitch, and convulse, even attempting to rise from the table. One of Lockett’s lawyers later told reporters that, “It looked like torture.” Lockett did not die until forty minutes after the first injection. The incident sparked outrage across the nation, sharply bringing to public attention the nature of execution procedures. After Lockett’s execution, a group of Oklahoma death row inmates, including Charles Warner, Richard Glossip, John Grant, and Benjamin Cole, appealed to the Supreme Court. These inmates were scheduled to be executed with the same three-drug formula used on Lockett. The petitioners claimed that the use of this formula is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.” They argued that there is a well-established scientific consensus that midazolam cannot maintain the deep, coma-like unconsciousness necessary to prevent them from experiencing pain. Warner, one of the original petitioners, was denied a stay of execution by the Court and executed on January 15, 2015 using the three-drug formula. After the first drug was administered,
Warner stated that his “body [was] on fire” and witnesses observed his neck twitching for seven minutes. He showed no signs of distress as extreme as those exhibited by Lockett. Less than two weeks later, the Court agreed to hear the case of the remaining three petitioners and later delayed each of their executions. A constitutional precedent exists to help guide the Court in its decision. In Baze v. Rees (2008), the Court upheld as constitutional a three-drug formula used by Kentucky on the condition that the first drug ensured a “deep, coma-like unconsciousness.” Without this level of sedation, Chief Justice Roberts argued, there would be a “constitutionally unacceptable risk of suffocation … and pain” from the next two drugs. Were it not for the assurance that the first drug would induce a comalike state before the injection of the next two drugs, the Court likely would have ruled the procedure in Baze unconstitutional. Although Baze concerns different drugs than those at issue in Glossip, the same constitutional standards should apply. In both cases, a three-drug formula was used to execute an inmate. The first drug was intended to bring the inmate into a state of deep unconsciousness, under which they would remain while the next two drugs ended the inmate’s life. If a lack of deep unconsciousness would have made the Kentucky formula unconstitutional, it should make the Oklahoma formula unconstitutional as well. With this precedent in mind, the Court will be faced with the choice of issuing a ruling of either broad or narrow scope. Should it choose to rule narrowly, the Court could focus mainly on the specific properties of midazolam and whether there exists a scientific consensus on its ability to induce a deep, coma-like unconsciousness. The Court could otherwise choose to rule broadly, enabling it to consider the constitutionality of lethal injection procedures in general and establish a precedent with wide applicability beyond Oklahoma. Either way, when the Court releases its opinion in Glossip v. Gross, it will have vital implications not only for the petitioners, but also for constitutional understandings of “cruel and unusual punishments.” ■
Volume XVII, Issue XII • April 20, 2015 •
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Feeding 1.2 Billion and Beyond: Indian Agri-Business
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by Evan Harary ’16, Staff Writer
ndia, the second most populous nation in the world, has a lot of mouths to feed. Though self-sufficient, India has struggled to marshal the capital necessary to transform its largely antiquated agricultural landscape. Consequently, private investors and technological entrepreneurs, both local and abroad, are stepping in to fill the void. This has changed the character of Indian agriculture drastically; land once used for subsistence farming is being cultivated for cash crops and yields are increasingly sold abroad or absorbed into corporate supply chains. As agribusiness caters more to retail market tastes, some worry that insufficient state intervention in the agricultural sector is privileging profits to a dangerous extent and consequently turning its back on its most destitute. To many, now is an exciting time to be involved in Indian agribusiness. While young tech entrepreneurs in the United States search for the next big app, many young Indian professionals with tech expertise turn to agriculture, seeking to modernize and streamline the nation’s farms and methods of crop distribution. Prakash Rai, a graduate of Punjab Technical University and current Mumbai resident, currently runs a startup in which he helps farmers sell specialty produce online. “I had experience with software development and tech knowledge that many in the country do not have,” Rai said. “We show them food processing techniques they wouldn’t otherwise know.” Rai continued, adding that “our long term vision is to transform our home state of Bihar, which is very backwards. By sharing our technological and business knowledge with the farmers of the region we can bring prosperity to the region and revenues to the state, so that it may further help our people.” To many young Indian entrepreneurs, joining technological innovations with traditional agriculture products is the ideal marriage of tradition and modernity, and a powerful means of enriching local farmers. The Times of India concurs, stating that the free market, particularly in the realm of agriculture, is an effective means for India’s poorest to elevate themselves in a society in which the aftereffects of the caste system still linger.
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But some worry that the unfettered marketization of all areas of the Indian economy will introduce as many problems as it solves. Michael Sandel, a professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, spoke to The Times of India on this issue. “[T]here needs to be a serious public debate about where markets serve the public good and where they don’t belong, and where they may be corrosive of the moral and civic fabric of the society,” Sandel states. “I … think there needs to be balance.” But even as agribusiness booms in India, many remain hungry. Despite private agricultural investment increasing by a factor of five in the past ten years, India still has the highest rates of malnutrition in the world for children under five, five times higher than China and two times higher than Sub-Saharan Africa. Overall, India is home to a quarter of the world’s undernourished. In transforming Indian agriculture to suit the demands of the global market, foreign and local investors may be neglecting the subsistence needs of the rural poor. Farms in the Indian province of Gujarat were historically small, family owned, and devoted to serving the needs of their occupants. Foreign companies such as McCain, a McDonald’s affiliate, have moved to consolidate farms, leading to more productive yields but also dispossessing many. Some fear that the larger players in agriculture are accumulating land at the expense of the livelihoods of the poor. Changes in agriculture occur among larger changes to Indian society. As India moves to open itself more to international markets, inequality rises with national wealth. In agriculture, this effect is particularly potent because of just how many rural poor live hand-to-mouth. But, even as larger agricultural producers box out the lowest socioeconomic strata, there is hope that increased marketization and the expertise it brings will bring positive change to India’s poorest. People like Romit Choudry, an affiliate of Prakash Rai, believe that business and technology can empower as much as it deprives. “If you give technology to the people, you give them the means to help themselves,” Choudry asserts. “With the right knowledge and networks, we can connect even the most backwards farmers to the world.” ■
• April 20, 2015 • Volume XVII, Issue XII
The AIIB Spells Doom for American Hegemony
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by George Gulino ’18, Contributing Writer
his spring, the United States witnessed a defection from the ranks of its allies, the extent of which is unprecedented in the history of the post-war world order led by America. Late last year, twenty-one Asian nations participated in the unveiling of the China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). America’s closest allies – including the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, and South Korea – stayed away, citing China’s claim of 50 percent of the voting power, and therefore vetoing power, as well as its failure to make enough guarantees about social and environmental protections. However, all it took was China’s scaling back of complete veto power earlier this year for America’s allies to start deserting it en-masse. If the SinoAmerican competition for global hegemony were a chess game, this moment in history would likely be remembered as the play that made American leaders realize they were just a few moves away from checkmate. The best estimates claim that Asia needs about $8 trillion in infrastructure investment between now and 2020; the AIIB’s purpose is to funnel money from member states to meet this demand. When the Chinese international institution is more readily financing Asian nations’ roads, bridges, stadiums and more, American influence in the region will diminish. The American-dominated institutions that the AIIB is set to compete with have seen their influence wane in recent years. A key reason for this is open hostility shown toward the Bretton Woods Institutions – the International Monetary Fund and World Bank – by American legislators. Republicans, especially, have blocked the United States’ ratification of the IMF’s 2010 governance reform proposal, cutting off billions in potential investment and limiting its effectiveness. It should not, then, come as a surprise that the vacuum left by an American lack of economic ambition is being exploited by another actor. While the U.S. cowers at the call to help shape the development of some of the world’s most promising developing markets, the successful launch of the AIIB represents an opportunity that has been wrenched out of America’s hands. Republicans regularly demand that the military receive more funding at the expense of the rest of the budget. What they perhaps willfully ignore is that, for the last few centuries, military power has only functioned as one of the two primary
tools of global hegemony. As the world’s first truly global superpower, Britain developed the complementary and arguably equally potent tool: credit. Interestingly enough, the key demand of the British negotiators who conceded independence to American rebels was that they repay outstanding debt to British creditors. The British navy served its role, but London financial institutions were more consequential in shaping the world once the smoke of battle had cleared. London’s willingness to be the lender of last resort also stabilized the gold standard system and therefore the world economy. Since World War II, this function was part of the hegemonic superpower baton, so to speak, passed on to the eager United States by a weary United Kingdom. The U.S. has performed similar functions, with its dollar becoming an extremely successful reserve currency and its funding the greatest portions of Bretton-Woods development projects. This arrangement has been especially important to the United States as a competitive tool against superpowers in an age when military conflict with them can mean nuclear catastrophe. Meanwhile, it has long been postulated that, if China can maintain extraordinary growth rates and if its current dip is temporary, its long-term primary economic objective must be to dislodge itself from the constraining effects of a dollar-based world economy. Losing the world’s most economically important region can mean the beginning of the end of the dollar’s reign. It likely means that the United States’ descending trend as the world’s premier superpower has indeed crystallized. All the military bases and smart aircraft carriers in the world will mean little when America’s ability to finance them has diminished in proportion to its economic vitality. Military power is in fact already next-to-useless in directly challenging fellow nucleararmed superpowers. In the 21st century, finance power is state power. The United States is bleeding its leadership clout in shaping the world to its will with the power of credit. Its allies’ loyalty, along with American hegemony, will continue to diminish accordingly. ■
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The Masculinity Problem in Gender Studies
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by Andrea Michalowsky ’16, Contributing Writer
an up” and “grow a pair” are comments we hear all the time. Just the other day, I found myself saying, “I don’t think I’ve got the balls for it,” to get out of jumping in the President’s Pond behind Gilman. We don’t think twice about phrases like this, but perhaps we should. For years, feminists have been studying slang terms like “pussy” and “bitch,” but somehow their male counterparts go largely unnoticed. From childhood, men have a definite role to fill. They must be strong, sexual, economically successful, and devoid of vulnerability. Because of their privilege, though, these limitations often go ignored – and this is not a harmless oversight. Our stereotypes of masculinity can be damaging to individuals in the same way that stereotypes of femininity are – giving rise to stress and lowering self-esteem and all the problems associated with these psychological issues. On a larger scale, our concepts of masculinity lead to sexual abuse and violence. Sex and World Peace, a pioneering political theory book by Hudson, Balliff-Spanvill, Caprioli, and Emmett, explains how a greater divide between genders in a country correlates to a greater incidence of domestic violence. In a TEDTalk, sexual violence activist Jackson Katz emphasizes that the abuse that we so often classify as a “women’s issue” is in fact a “men’s issue.” Somehow, we have created a society that teaches men that sexual violence is acceptable. He shows how the sentence “John beat Mary” morphs into “Mary was beaten,” and, ultimately, “Mary is a battered woman,” making the event part of Mary’s identity while John has entirely left the conversation. The original act, however, came from John, and a recent study on males convicted of intimate partner violence found that this abuse correlates with a sense of threatened masculinity.
This moderate progress is seen within academia as well. But although the study of masculinities is receiving more attention, it remains far behind feminism. At Johns Hopkins, the gender studies program does not explicitly mention men in its title, calling itself “The Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality” (WGS). While the name of the program may not seem to matter, the apparent exclusion of men from this discussion remains problematic. Women fighting for change, although invaluable, can only go so far without the support of the men; the gender roles that feminists want to change cannot be revolutionized without them. As such, WGS does hold classes on masculinities and the interaction between genders. However, the vast majority of classes focus on feminism and queer theory. Similarly, although one of the co-directors of the program is a man, the undergraduate students participating in the classes are overwhelmingly women. In any given WGS course, one can expect most, if not all, of the other students to be women. According to the Registrar, only three of the 19 current WGS minors are men. Thankfully, we are not restricted to academic study alone. If you are a man, you can choose not to follow the stereotypes and stand up against other men who use masculinity as an excuse for violence. If you are a woman, you can change your expectations of men. We must break this narrow vision of masculinity in the same way feminists work to break the narrow vision of femininity. Ideally, ultimately, we can allow the boundary between the two to blur so that each individual may be whoever they may wish, defined by their humanity rather than certain gender traits. ■
Granted, acceptable notions of masculinity are broadening. Stay-at-home dads are becoming more common, men who show their feelings are sometimes considered “sensitive” and endearing, and there is a growing online conversation about alternative masculinities. Nonetheless, while “be a man” connotes strength, “playing like a girl” means to fail.
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Outrage, the Internet, and the Student Government Elections by Zachary Schlosberg ’16, Staff Writer
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he Internet conversations of today are exhibiting a disturbing trend. We all know how much hate exists online. We know how easy it is to say nasty things via an anonymous keyboard or to tweet regrettable jokes. We think only for a few seconds before posting a mean-spirited Facebook comment, deciding it’s worth the three or four likes. It is especially easy to express outrage at something a celebrity does or says, or did once, or said in the distant past. It is easy to kick dirt onto the graves of scandal-ruined public figures, to hold up our celebrities as perfect and then point menacing online fingers when it turns out that they are just human and not perfect. Our always hungry, collective outrage finds new victims each day. Slate tracked the 2014 Year in Outrage, with a comprehensive full-year report of 365 things we were outraged about, ranking them on a scale from minor to atrocious. Often, our outrage has the same face when butting against minor issues as it does when we approach more serious ones: when railing against the sexual predation of Bill Cosby or taking down PR executive Justine Sacco over an unfortunate tweet. The Sacco incident was a boiling point for our outrage, when a couple of the pitchfork-wielders stopped and thought, “Why are we doing this? What is this accomplishing?” There is a beautiful moment in Sam Biddle’s reflection on his part in the Sacco incident (Biddle, a writer at Gawker and Johns Hopkins graduate, called attention to and initially disseminated Sacco’s tweet) when he receives an email invitation from Sacco, her career ruined, to meet for drinks. Biddle, over the course of the conversation, realizes that even though Sacco is a public figure who tweeted something questionable, she is also a human who in no way deserved the chain of events that followed. Every person on Earth is a human being. Everyone is therefore entitled to not be told on the Internet, where anyone can see, that they are a pathetic person that everyone hates. They are entitled to not have vitriol poured on top of them without regard to their humanity. This may be a radical notion, as we are accustomed to communicating
intense rage and hatred over the Internet, but I say that even if an individual did something bad, no one deserves online slanderers spewing that they are “a petty frog, [and] the world is laughing at you.” At Johns Hopkins, of course, we don’t have celebrities, but we do have people who, for better or for worse, enter into the public consciousness. Let’s say, for example, someone wins an election on a technicality – an election he actually lost by a wide margin. How do we take this, as a student body? What we’ve done so far is spread malice. We’ve taken to Facebook and The News-Letter website and commented abusively about our fellow student, and fellow human: “You, and everything you represent, disgust me.” “You are an utter embarrassment to Johns Hopkins University.” “You’re a bad man, and the entire school knows it.” “You are a pathetic excuse for a person.” “We hate you, and that will never change.” My point is not to defend this individual’s actions. I don’t know him at all, and I think that, given the choice between right and wrong, he made the wrong one. While his choice to grab the election from the hands of his competitor may have been within his rights as a candidate and in accordance with election bylaws, but was his choice ethical, graceful, and humane? Of course, this is the kind of nuance missing from our online discourse. I simply want us recognize that there is a breathing, feeling human at the other end of our words. I want us to step back and ask: why are we doing this? What does this accomplish? How do we recognize that someone has done a bad thing without turning him into a pariah? How do we recognize that we too have all done bad things – in fact, still do bad things – probably more frequently than we’d like to? How do we recognize that we are all humans, fumbling blindly for a path toward goodness and oftentimes falling down along the way? How do we look somebody in the eye and say, “You shouldn’t have done that. I’ve done things before that I shouldn’t have. Let’s talk about it.” ■
Volume XVII, Issue XII • April 20, 2015 •
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JHU Politik, founded in 2008, is a weekly publication of political opinion pieces. We proudly seek to provide the Johns Hopkins community with student voices and perspectives about important issues of our time. Rather than hide within a cloistered academic bubble, we know we must critically engage with the world that surrounds us. That, we believe, is at the heart of what it means to be learning. We are lucky to be situated in the city of Baltimore, a city with a rich history and an ever-changing politics. We aim to look at the politics of the Homewood campus, the city of Baltimore, the domestic landscape of the United States, and the international community . While we publish the Politik weekly, we work simultaneously on our special issues which come out once per semester. These magazines confront a single topic from multiple angles. We have run issues covering topics like the political nature of research, the Arab Spring, and our city Baltimore.
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