MJPS The McGill Journal of Political Studies
VOLUME XII WINTER 2022
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The McGill Journal of Political Studies (MJPS) is published annually by the Political Science Students' Association of McGill University (PSSA), 843 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, QC H3A 0G4. ISSN 0835-376X All assertions of facts and statements of opinion are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the Editorial Board, the PSSA, the Arts Undergraduate Society, the Student's Society of McGill University, McGill University, or its faculty and administration.
The McGill Journal of Political Studies
Table of Contents 09 Colonized Again: The Effect of Big Tech on African Artificial Intelligence
43 A New Model for Online Speech Governance, An Old Model of Inaccuracy: The Facebook Oversight Board and the Systemic Problem of Inaccurate Content Moderation
77 La Belle Enfance: The Influence of the Québec Model in 21st Century Federal Child Care Debates and Policy
19 Durable Inequality and Colonialism: Why Indigenous Peoples Were Violently Subjugated in Canada
53 Climate Change as a Collective Harm: Evaluating the Mechanism and Extent of Individual Responsibility
85 The Covexit: Instabilities in the European Union caused by COVID-19
107 The Grey Zone: Assassinations as a Tool for the Russian State
31 The Water Crisis in the Middle East and North Africa: a Crisis of Governance
65 Designing Dominicanidad: The Social Construction of Race and Identity in the Dominican Republic
93 The Spectacle of Political Purges: Clientelism, Illiberalism and Belonging Narratives in Thailand
Submission and Review Process The McGill Journal of Political Studies (MJPS) accepts manuscripts in either French or English from undergraduates of any faculty or major. Papers must have been written for a Political Science course at the 300-level or above and must have received a minimum grade of 80% (A-) in the course. Selected manuscripts contain coherent and wellstructured arguments, good grammar, and strong syntax. original analysis and unique perspectives on relevant topics in political science and current affairs distinguish selected papers as some of the best that undergraduate students have written at McGill University. Manuscripts are accepted throughout the Fall and Winter semesters in multiple submission rounds. All manuscripts enter a double-blind review process. Authors' names are withheld while an anonymous team of peer reviewers analyzes and critiques each paper. The Editorial Board then convenes to review the anonymous peer review feedback and select the strongest manuscripts for the journal. At this time, each editor is paired with an author for a revision phase to prepare the manuscripts for publication. The Journal is a student-run enterprise with an Editorial Board consisting of undergraduate students at McGill University.
Editorial Board Editor-in-Chief
Kennedy McKee-Braide Managing Editor
Matthew Molinaro
Director of Peer Reviewers Juliet Morrison Copy Editor Madison McLauchlan
Editors Claudia George Sophie Gunyon Alexandra Holgren Katja Juthans Elena Meyer Emily Segal Lucy Truong
Words from the Editor-in-Chief As MJPS releases its third edition put together at least in part during a pandemic, it’s clear that the hardship of the past few years has not dimmed the academic excellence and intellectual curiosity embedded within the undergraduate Political Science community at McGill. The ten papers found in this journal come from all areas of the field, to which each constitutes a timely and relevant contribution. I hope you enjoy reading these brilliant pieces as much as I have! This journal would not have been possible without, above all else, the hard work and support of the Editorial Board and our team of peer reviewers. Over the past year, they have put their all into their work, always showing their deep dedication to the field and to seeing this process through. In particular, I’d like to extend my gratitude to Juliet Morrison, Director of Peer Reviewers, for coordinating such a large team with ease. Finally, I’d like to say a massive, massive thank you to my Managing Editor and dear friend Matthew Molinaro. He is not only a brilliant individual, but a true joy to work with. He has been by my side through this entire process, and I could not have completed this project without his support and extensive contributions. Finally, I would like to thank everyone else I have had the pleasure of working with over my three years with this journal. This experience has been of paramount importance to both my time at McGill and my academic and professional development. I could not be more honoured to have had the opportunity to lead the team this year. Kennedy McKee-Braide Editor-in-Chief McGill Journal of Political Studies Print, Volume XII
Colonized Again: The Effect of Big Tech on African Artificial Intelligence Sara Parker Edited by Sophie Gunyon
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ABSTRACT Big Tech – a term referring to the five biggest American tech companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook– –now known as Meta, Apple, and Microsoft) – has recently been the subject of intense scrutiny in the Western world due to its anti-competitive and exploitative practices in the pursuit of technological progress. This phenomenon is particularly evident in Africa, where the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry has been undermined due to a persistent debt crisis and consistent co-optation of technological development by Western companies. Through a detailed exploration of the relationships between African and Western tech companies and governments, I argue that Africa’s debt crisis has prevented the emergence of robust technological structures in Africa, leaving the continent vulnerable to “digital colonialism,” a term referring to exploitation by American tech companies that is reminiscent of historical patterns of colonialism. The paper therefore examines structural adjustment programs, criticizes the popular discourse about the African AI industry and AI global governance, and describes the dependencies created by Big Tech to facilitate their exploitation of African technological development. Introduction Big Tech––a term referring to the five biggest American tech companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook–– now known as Meta, Apple, and Microsoft)––has recently been the subject of intense scrutiny in the Western world due to its anti-competitive and exploitative practices in the pursuit of technological progress. These advances are primarily in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can and has already had substantial social and political impacts. Unfortunately, Big Tech’s activities in the Global South have been ignored by Western legislators, and thus go unprosecuted and unregulated. However, the effects of Africa’s debt crisis and subsequent structural adjustment programs have prevented the emergence of robust technological structures in Africa, leaving the continent vulnerable to digital exploitation by American tech companies that is reminiscent of historical patterns of colonialism. This paper will therefore briefly explain how structural adjustment programs undermined African economic development, then expand on the current state of the African AI industry. It will then introduce digital colonialism as a framework for understanding technological development in Africa. A Persistent Debt Crisis Structural adjustment programs (SAPs) were created in response to the debt crises faced by many African countries in the 1980s, but mostly only succeeded in weakening the recipient states. SAPs, as designed and implemented by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), aim to situate struggling economies into the global system by providing loans, conditional on the adoption of policies in line with the Western neoliberal economic regime (Riddell 1992, 53). These policies most often include currency devaluation, the reduced role of the state in the economy, the elimination of government subsidies, and trade liberalization. However, SAPs have done little to relieve state debt and have instead increased the cost of living by devaluing currency; crippled local industries by removing subsidies; and dramatically weakened governments’ ability to build infrastructure and provide services (Riddell 1992, 57-8). As a result, African states are categorically “weak,” with little infrastructure, social services, or economic prosperity, and remain heavily reliant on foreign aid. Furthermore, SAPs have been largely ineffective in addressing the African debt crisis: external debt of African governments continues to rise, with 35 per cent of all debt owed to multilateral institutions responsible for SAPs, like the IMF (Jubilee 2018). While China and private
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lenders are creditors in similar magnitudes (20 per cent and 32 per cent respectively), no other form of conditional loans have so explicitly undermined the strength of African states to build up their own countries. The Current State of the African AI Industry Little attention is paid to the effects of weak state governments on African industrial development due to the prominence of select thriving industries, like the African AI industry. Champions of the industry point to the vibrant startup ecosystems in Nairobi, Lagos, and Addis Ababa––popularly dubbed “Silicon Savannah,” “Yabacon Valley,” and “Sheba Valley,” respectively, after California’s “Silicon Valley”––as evidence of a thriving industry with infinite potential (Birhane 2020, 397; Gwagwa et al. 2020, 6). Indeed, many of the benefits of AI in Africa have already been realized in the fields of health, wildlife conservation, agriculture, water, business development, finance, and public service (Gwagwa et al. 2020, 4). Most of these initiatives target region-specific problems; for example, Kenya’s Tala is a mobile app that assesses and disburses loans to customers without a credit history, a prominent problem in Kenyan microeconomics. Additionally, Nigerian startups have produced two successful apps that provide public transportation directions and traffic congestion navigation that are considered “better than Google Maps,” because they are built with Nigerian urban dynamics in mind (Brandusescu, Ortiz Freuler and Thakur 2017, 4). Unfortunately, these gains are often used to disguise the structural issues that prevent further development of the industry. Caletous Juma argues that the focus on developmental “leapfrogging” obscures the fact that technological progress is almost always fundamentally due to increased construction of the necessary infrastructure, rather than sudden mass public buy-in (Graham 2018, 33). Using the “mobile revolution” as an example, during which the rates of Africans with access to a mobile phone rose by approximately 30 per cent every year, Juma asserts that such an increase was not due to easier access to cellphones, but rather the construction of essential telecommunications infrastructure across the continent (Graham 2018, 34). Nicolas Friederici further demonstrates the essential need for actual infrastructure and physical development by looking at the proliferation of “hubs,” workspaces that connect entrepreneurs and software developers and provide them with computers, Internet access, and office space to create products. First introduced in Nairobi in 2010, hubs quickly multiplied, with almost 200 identified in 2016 (Graham 2018, 193). However, few startups born from these hubs have received equity investments, as most teams lack the skills or resources to build their ideas into businesses; Friederici ultimately finds that “no reliable evidence indicates that innovation hubs are effective at helping startups grow or at delivering development,” to African economies (Graham 2018, 211). He then argues that, although hubs have been “depicted as complementary to physical Internet and ICT infrastructure,” they are poor replacements for essential technological infrastructure. Similar conclusions are made in reports on the state of the African AI industry, which often cite lack of stable Internet connection and insufficient infrastructure as key barriers to further development (e.g., Brandusescu, Ortiz Freuler and Thakur 2017, 5). Moreover, even when companies do receive investment, the funds do not necessarily go into the African economy. A 2018 Village Capital study found that 90 per cent of capital given to AI companies in East Africa went to startups with one or more European or North American founders (Strachan Matranga, Bhattacharyya and Baird 2017, 48). This issue is especially pertinent in the finance technology sector, which is seen as a driving force of economic development on the continent (Strachan Matranga, Bhattacharyya and Baird 2017, 19). For example, Safaricom, a Kenyan company that provides digital microcredit tools, is majority owned by Vodafone, a British
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company, (40 per cent) and wealthy non-African investors (25 per cent); consequently, 65 per cent of its annual profit of $620 million USD was directed into dividend payments to these investors rather than back into the Kenyan economy (Birhane 2020, 402). Evidently, even when actors within the African AI industry are able to thrive despite severe obstacles, Africans remain some of the last beneficiaries of their success. Financing therefore represents a second essential structure that prevents the emergence of a strong tech industry in Africa. Finally, despite the rapid growth of the industry, Africa is still frequently left out of global AI regulation discussions. For instance, the Global Forum on AI for Humanity in 2019 hosted no representatives from Africa, despite claiming to be an international coalition (Gwagwa et al. 2020, 16). In a 2019 examination of the state of AI ethics regulation, Jobin et al. found that African countries were “not represented independently from international or supranational organizations” in inter-state policies (2019, 5). This exclusion has left African states to develop their own legislative frameworks, as they cannot expect international actors to advocate for their interests (Mohamed, Png and Isaac 2020, 11). Mauritius in particular has a robust national AI strategy, while Kenya, Tunisia, Uganda, South Africa, Egypt, and Rwanda all have AI policy task forces (Gwagwa et al. 2020, 13). However, these domestic policies do not address the inherently transnational nature of AI; digital data, like the Internet, has no regard for international borders. It therefore seems that rich countries who get invited to conferences like the Global Forum on AI are unilaterally shaping international AI guidelines and subsequently shaping the global tech policy structure, with little concern for how their policies may affect developing countries (Jobin, Ienca and Vayena 2019, 13). The exception to this is the UNESCO Forum on AI, who hosted a specific event for members of the African AI ecosystem in Morocco in December 2018. The subsequent international expert group’s first draft of recommendations on AI ethics in September 2020 directly addressed benefits and challenges specifically faced in Africa, like linguistic diversity and microwork; the final draft is expected in the common months and is “likely to be a valuable standard-setting tool for African policymakers,” (Gwagwa et al. 2020, 18). However, these policy structures may be too little too late, as Africa has already been exposed to AI-driven exploitation. Digital Colonialism As a result of this critical lack of supporting structures––infrastructure, financial backing, and policy––the African AI is increasingly dependent on foreign technologies. This is dangerous for not only domestic industry actors but anyone who may interact in the African digital space; as explained by Shakir Mohamed et al., “digital spaces […] form digital territories that, like physical spaces, have the propensity to becomes sites of extraction and exploitation, and thus the sites of digital-territorial coloniality,” (2020, 7). By lacking the ICT infrastructure, financial capacity, and policy regimes necessary to foster its own digital space, African states are open to exploitation by technology companies eager to expand their global sphere of influence and potential profit margins––much like conventional colonial powers. This phenomenon is called digital colonialism. The new colonial powers are evidently not states, but major technology corporations with international reach (i.e., Big Tech). The influence of US-based multinational companies is pervasive in the digital sphere; as the main drivers of AI innovation and development, they have unchecked power over how this technology is incorporated into African society and can therefore use technological integration in Africa to their own benefit. As states are unable to build their own digital structures due to a chronic lack of infrastructure and financing, Big Tech companies have unilaterally begun to construct the African digital sphere. Facebook, a social media platform turned technological conglomerate, is particularly evident of this dominance. Firstly, Facebook has taken it upon themselves to build Africa’s internet connectivity infrastructure by installing fibre optic cables
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servicing Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, Malawi, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania (Abecassis et al. 2020, 3). As a result, individuals, businesses, and governments are all reliant on consistent Facebook investment into their national digital infrastructure, thereby giving Facebook control over internet connectivity in these countries. Secondly, Facebook announced in 2016 that it was creating a population density map of Africa using computer vision (an AI technology), satellite imagery, and population data to “connect the unconnected” and facilitate humanitarian aid. However, by pursuing this project, Facebook gave itself the power to map, control, and create population knowledge (Birhane 2020, 392). Normally, in independent states, this power is vested in the government; Facebook’s control over this geographic knowledge creation as a foreign entity exemplifies its quasi-imperial role in Africa. While projects like Facebook’s are touted as “technological solutions for the developing world,” the unilateral construction of digital structures has allowed Big Tech to control African digital spaces at their leisure, as there are no international AI policies that protect African interests (Birhane 2020, 393). South Africa, for example, recently introduced a digital education initiative to give e-learning tools to schools across the country. However, the program implements Microsoft and Google cloud-based applications into the education system, meaning solely American companies will financially profit from digital integration in schools and will be able to perpetuate a dependency on non-South African technologies for years to come (Kwet 2019, 4). Technology in education is particularly important for the future of the African AI industry: as Michael Kwet explains, “the specific technologies deployed will forge path dependencies by shaping the baits, preferences, and knowledge base of the first tech generation from childhood. Education offers the ultimate breeding ground for Big Tech imperialism; product placement in schools can be used to capture emerging markets and tighten the stranglehold of Big Tech products, brands, models, and ideology” (2019, 17). These dependencies on American technologies are potentially very dangerous for African users, as American-built AI is not created with African needs in mind. For example, women in Africa are likely to be marginalized by AI in various ways due to training data that does not encapsulate their lived realities. AI systems that seek to predict economic phenomena will likely exclude women, as 92 per cent of total female employment in Africa is informal and not easily represented in datasets (Gwagwa et al. 2020, 8). As these systems are integrated more into the decision- and policy-making processes of African states, these gaps in knowledge could feed biases and further perpetuate inequalities that disadvantage women (Mohamed, Png and Isaac 2020, 4). An additional issue that is ignored by Western AI developers is linguistic diversity, which is integral to preserving African cultural diversity but exceedingly difficult to include in AI systems (Gwagwa et al. 2020, 9). As most AI technologies are trained on English or other Western languages, their implementation could compromise the growth and preservation of African languages. The components of the African digital ecosystem must be created in Africa with African interests in mind, or these technologies will not actually benefit African people (Mohamed, Png and Isaac 2020, 8). This is impossible with digital colonialism, as the major tech companies currently providing the programs have minimal African representation in their workforces. Facebook and Google, for instance, both only have a single African office in Johannesburg, preventing them from adequately tackling African issues as they do not have many African software and hardware developers. The harms of digital colonialism are not restricted to unfair distribution of profit or ignorance of key issues: digital colonialism is an exploitative act, currently practiced predominantly by Big Tech. The international spread of digital connectivity has increased the need for digital labour, a demand from the Global North that is
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overwhelmingly met by low-income countries in the Global South, many of which were previously colonized (Graham 2018, 272). These digital workers are paid low wages to conduct menial tasks necessary for the development of AI systems, like annotating training data; however, they often are not told the details of the projects they work on. These information asymmetries prevent workers from expanding their skillsets, seeking higher-paying and more-skilled jobs, or reaping the benefits of their labour (Graham 2018, 282). These opaque supply chains prevent Western clients and workers alike from fully understanding the extent of exploitative practices that produce these technologies, while the inherent international and non-localized nature of the jobs prevents workers from collectively advocating for labour rights. Consequently, the market power of these workers is incredibly limited compared to their employers, causing a “race to the bottom” for workers to offer the lowest prices for their labour, thereby perpetuating a cycle of labour exploitation driven by Western companies (Graham 2018, 274). Less evident is the exploitative nature of AI itself. Current technologies of data collection, processing, and transmission––all of which are necessary to the creation and deployment of AI systems, are predicated upon extractive dynamics, reminiscent of European imperialism that used similar mechanisms and rationales to extract natural resources (Mezzadra and Neilson 2017, 189, 191). Today, the personal information of Africans is the capital. The 2017 General Elections in Kenya are particularly illustrative of this: Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm based in the United Kingdom and infamous client of Facebook, used social media platforms to spread disinformation about the Kenyan Presidential candidates. While some of their activities may have been conducted at the request of the incumbent Jubilee Party, Cambridge Analytica influenced the election simply to test their algorithmic models and collect more behavioral data before deployment in the UK, which has stricter data protection laws than Kenya (Mohamed, Png and Isaac 2020, 11). In this situation, the political activity and discourse of Kenyans was exploited for financial gain, and yet neither Cambridge Analytica nor Facebook faced any repercussions. Kenya, like other African states, evidently has a different role in the global AI industry than the UK or the US: a peripheral position, wherein Kenyans are subject to exploitation rather than able to dictate their own space in the digital economy. Colonialism, of Past and Present The phenomenon of digital colonialism bears close ties to the explicitly colonial practices prior to African independence in the mid-20 century. As Christophe Bonneuil explains, “village layout and housing, as well as social life, were designed from above so as to turn villages into functional units of command and control,” (2000, 269). As resettlement schemes forcibly displaced Africans, they became “mere factors of production” in the colonialist’s pursuits (Bonneuil 2000, 260). However, the colonial project was rarely framed as a means to control the population; rather, they were often designed by scientists and academics who were seeking to ‘solve’ scientific and social problems and stimulate research (Bonneuil 2000, 265). This could not be achieved without repressing the knowledge and progress of the indigenous population, a practice which became “an intrinsic element in the affirmation of the state, its institution, and its agents,” (Bonneuil 2000, 278). As a result, Africa was systematically exploited for centuries, with little acknowledgement of how colonial practices would continue to disadvantage Africans even after independence. th
We see similar trends today in the practices of American technology companies. The structures necessary for digital integration in Africa are built by these companies, who have little incentive to shape the digital space to benefit anyone else but themselves yet claim their actions are motivated by technological and humanitarian progress. As life moves online, Big Tech companies have control over the African digital ecosystem that cannot be matched
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by national governments nor the still-nascent African AI industry. While the AI industry is often touted as a rising force for African economic growth, it was crippled from the start; economic programs like SAPs did little to grow domestic economies, but rather weakened states and prevented the establishment of strong infrastructure or policy regimes. Furthermore, the international community has done little to acknowledge the growing threat of digital colonialism, instead deciding to exclude African representatives from AI governance and African companies from foreign investment. In the subsequent structural vacuum, digital colonialism has arisen as a powerful space- and knowledge-creating force, creating cycles of dependency that reinforce the influence of Big Tech, while Africans are routinely exploited for their labour and data potential. Conclusion: Looking Forward However, like historic colonialism, digital colonialism is not inevitable nor perpetual. In December 2019, the African Union Cybersecurity Expert Group held its inaugural meeting and declared, “As Africans, we need to articulate our own philosophy, ethics, policy, strategies, and accountability frameworks for cyberspace […] and Artificial Intelligence,” exemplifying an African push to take control over its digital future (Gwagwa et al. 2020, 14). Kwet argues that digital colonialism can be countered with “publicly owned and controlled technology built for freedom by design at the architectural level,” thus moving the power to shape the digital space out of the company’s hands and into the user’s (2019, 17). If the need for African digital structures is realized – in essence, if Africans are given the tools to build their own technological infrastructure, the financing to support the AI industry, and a seat at the table at global AI forums––African states may be able to escape the long shadows of colonialism and debt and build an independent digital ecosystem. In short, digital decolonization is needed. We, as the international community, must deconstruct the colonial mechanisms of power that currently pervade AI to ensure historically oppressed peoples are not forever subjugated. Politics is moving online: independence cannot be left behind.
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References Abecassis, David, Michael Kende, Richard Morgan and Lim Jia Yee. 2020. “The Impact of Facebook’s Connectivity Initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Analysys Mason. https://www.analysysmason.com/contentassets/f8a396952f9c4481982c674724d85356/the-impact-offacebooks-connectivity-initiatives-in-the-ssa-region---30-june-2020.pdf. Birhane, Abeba. 2020. “Algorithmic Colonization of Africa.” SCRIPT-Ed 17 (2): 389–409. https://doi.org/10.2966/scrip.170220.389. Bonneuil, Christophe. 2000. “Development as Experiment: Science and State Building in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, 1930-1970.” Osiris 15 (January): 258–81. https://doi.org/10.1086/649330. Brandusescu, Ana, Juan Ortiz Freuler, and Dhanaraj Thakur. 2017. “Artificial Intelligence: Starting the Policy Dialogue in Africa.” World Wide Web Foundation. https://webfoundation.org/research/artificialintelligence-starting-the-policy-dialogue-in-africa/. Graham, Mark. 2018. Digital Economies at Global Margins. Cambridge, MA: Mit Press. Gwagwa, Arthur, Erika Kraemer-Mbula, Nagla Rizk, Isaac Rutenberg, and Jeremy de Beer. 2020. “Artificial Intelligence (AI) Deployments in Africa: Benefits, Challenges and Policy Dimensions.” The African Journal of Information and Communication 26: 1–28. https://doi.org/10.23962/10539/30361. Jobin, Anna, Marcello Ienca, and Effy Vayena. 2019. “The Global Landscape of AI Ethics Guidelines.” Nature Machine Intelligence 1 (9): 389–99. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0088-2. Jubilee Debt Campaign. 2018. “Africa’s Growing Debt Crisis: Who Is the Debt Owed To?” https://jubileedebt.org.uk/report/africas-growing-debt-crisis-who-is-the-debt-owed-to. Kwet, Michael. 2019. “Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South.” Race & Class 60 (4): 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818823172. Maweu, Jacinta Mwende. 2020. “‘Fake Elections’? Cyber Propaganda, Disinformation and the 2017 General Elections in Kenya.” African Journalism Studies 40 (4): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/23743670.2020.1719858. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2017. “On the Multiple Frontiers of Extraction: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism.” Cultural Studies 31 (2-3): 185–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2017.1303425. Mohamed, Shakir, Marie-Therese Png, and William Isaac. 2020. “Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence.” Philosophy & Technology 33 (4). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00405-8.
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Riddell, J. Barry. 1992. “Things Fall Apart Again: Structural Adjustment Programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 30 (1): 53–68. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x00007722. Strachan Matranga, Heather, Bidisha Bhattacharyya, and Ross Baird. 2017. “Breaking the Pattern: Getting Digital Financial Services Entrepreneurs to Scale in East Africa and India.” https://newsandviews.vilcap.com/posts/2017/06/15/breaking-pattern-getting-digital-financial-servicesentrepreneurs-scale-east-africa-india.
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Durable Inequality and Colonialism: Why Indigenous Peoples Were Violently Subjugated in Canada Chloe Merritt Edited by Katja Juthans
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ABSTRACT Settler colonialism has systematically produced persistent inequality between settler Canadians and Indigenous peoples; however, settler colonial policies have been inconsistent and contradictory since early contact. In this paper, I apply Charles Tilly’s durable inequality framework to the Canadian case to determine whether motivations rooted in ideas or institutions are best able to explain the subjugation of Indigenous peoples under settler colonialism. More specifically, to gauge its explanatory power, I apply Tilly’s framework of durable inequality to the three major periods of Indigenous policy in Canada: nation-to-nation relationships, treaty- making, and later policies of marginalization and assimilation. Ultimately, I argue that Tilly’s framework centered on institutions best explains the durable inequality that exists between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian settler population. In other words, I argue that Canadian settler elites were driven to create and sustain inequality between settlers and Indigenous peoples by their economic desire to acquire and profit from Indigenous lands. While racism and colonial superiority were certainly important ideas that have been used to justify the subjugation of Indigenous peoples, it was primarily the material consideration of land acquisition and profit that functioned as the primary force behind the creation and maintenance of durable inequality between Indigenous peoples and Canadian settlers.
Introduction Settler colonialism in Canada has been inconsistent and contradictory since contact. Early colonizers established nation-to-nation relationships with Indigenous peoples, but then proceeded to sign dozens of coercive treaties which forced Indigenous peoples off their lands and onto reserves (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, 49). Later, as disparate colonies came together to form the Dominion of Canada, settler authorities employed simultaneous and competing policies of protection, marginalization, and assimilation (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, 62). Despite these contradictions in policy, settler colonialism has consistently produced and reproduced inequality between settler Canadians and Indigenous peoples. As Julie Evans and her colleagues argue, settler colonialism required, “establishing and then entrenching settler dominance and privilege, in lands that were inhabited by others. Part of securing that dominance, as well as of attempting to repair ‘the acknowledged crime’ of colonisation, would include consideration of how surviving Indigenous peoples were to be incorporated within the political systems that were unfolding” (Evans et al. 2018, 1). In Canada, addressing the “Native Problem” resulting from the demands of settler colonization required the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. Such inequality between settlers and Indigenous peoples continues to be sustained and salient. To this day, settler colonialism results in lower life expectancies, higher mortality rates, higher rates of child poverty as well as educational and socio-economic discrepancies all of which contribute to the systematically lower well-being of Indigenous peoples relative to other non-Indigenous Canadians (Papillon 2019, 240-241). Of course, Indigenous peoples in Canada are by no means the only case of such lasting inequality. In studying Indigenous-settler relations in Canada, I refer to the work of scholars studying inequality at large. The theorist Charles Tilly argues that “durable inequality” in many contexts is not produced by ideologies of superiority and inferiority, but rather that inequalities are produced and reproduced by institutional structures that allow members of one group to exploit others for their profit (Tilly 1998, 8).
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In this paper, I apply Tilly’s framework to the Canadian case to investigate whether ideas or institutions are best able to explain the motivations behind the subjugation of Indigenous peoples under settler colonialism. I examine the subjugation of Indigenous peoples through the period of nation-to-nation relationships, the subsequent period of treaty making, and finally the late period of colonial policies of marginalization and assimilation. I argue that Tilly’s framework can be applied to the Canadian case to explain the durable inequality between Indigenous peoples and the settler population. More specifically, I argue that Canadian settler elites were driven to create and sustain inequality by their economic desire to acquire and profit from Indigenous lands. These material considerations, rather than notions of colonial superiority and anti-Indigenous sentiment, were the primary forces behind the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. This paper begins with a survey of relevant literature. I first outline the structure of Tilly’s argument regarding “durable inequality” before reviewing other theories relating more directly to the phenomenon of settler colonialism. The following section demonstrates how Tilly’s framework can be generally applied to the three policy periods I examine: early contact, treaty making, and policies of marginalization and assimilation. Finally, I elaborate my argument and make concessions to the role played by ideology in the formation of settler notions of entitlement to land and the superiority of European style settler society. Settler-Colonialism and Settler Definitions This paper considers the phenomenon of settler colonialism in Canada and as such the term is used extensively. I refer to the definition of settler colonialism articulated by Patrick Wolfe that states that settler colonialism strives to eliminate Indigenous societies and establish a “new colonial society on the expropriated land base” (Wolfe 2006, 388). This “logic of elimination” has led to a range of outcomes, including genocide, but also policies of religious conversion and political-legal assimilation. Wolfe highlights that with settler colonialism, settlers “come to stay” rather than governing from a far off colonial centre, bringing themselves and Indigenous peoples into close and prolonged contact (388). Such close contact, as in the Canadian case, shapes the dynamics between oppressors and the subjugated. As a result, the settlers and colonizers throughout this paper are those Europeans who remained on Indigenous lands and who were responsible for shaping colonial policies as residents. While the British Colonial Office did play an important role in colonization, I distinguish these actors from settlers because their material considerations and political motivations differed from the colonizers living in the colonies. Additionally, this paper spans a significant period of time in an attempt to demonstrate the broad trends in settler colonialism. While the first colonizers were British, a distinct Canadian identity and political order developed by the time policies of marginalization and assimilation were put into practice. Despite the political changes associated with this transition, I treat the policies concerning Indigenous peoples as largely continuous throughout the paper given that the change did little to alter the motivations of settlers. Survey of Literature In this paper, I use Charles Tilly’s framework to analyze whether institutions or ideas are more useful to explain why first British and later Canadian colonizers subjugated Indigenous peoples. As such it is useful to articulate what Tilly and other theorists focused on Indigenous-settler relations in Canada have to say on the subject.
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Tilly argues that people organize themselves and others into distinct and bounded pairs of groups; the institutionalization of these groups and their unequal access to resources is what ultimately produces durable inequality (Tilly 1998, 7-8). That is, the inequality observed between various groups, on the basis of race, sex, or other social and biological distinctions, may appear different from one context to the next or one group to the next, but can all be reduced to the organizational structure of resource allocation and benefits (15). Tilly finds that ideology has so little a role to play in the production and maintenance of durable inequality that it is not always a conscious effort by elites to subordinate another group: People who create or sustain categorical inequality by means of the four basic mechanisms rarely set out to manufacture inequality as such. Instead they solve other organizational problems by establishing categorically unequal access to valued outcomes. More than anything else, they seek to secure rewards from sequestered resources (11). As the quotation above highlights, it is valuable resources and the outsized benefits from such resources that drive the organization of people into unequal groups. Tilly identifies four key mechanisms through which this process occurs: exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation (10). The first, exploitation, is a process whereby members of a privileged group produce inequality by using their control over valuable resources to benefit from outsized returns at the expense of members of the inferior group (10). In opportunity hoarding, one group reserves access to resources “that [are] valuable, renewable, subject to monopoly, supportive of network activities, and enhanced by the network's modus operandi” for members of their own group (10). The last two mechanisms reproduce the inequality created by exploitation and opportunity hoarding. Through emulation, people recreate unequal organizational structures in other settings and institutions, thus cementing inequality between the categorical pairs (10). Finally, the mechanism of adaptation elaborates “daily routines” based on such unequal structures (10). Tilly aims to provide a causal mechanism of inequality in these four processes that can be applied to inequality in varying contexts with similarly variable outcomes (15). In addition to Tilly, I also rely on the works of other scholars of settler colonial and inequality studies. Julie Evans and her colleagues analyze Indigenous political rights in settler colonial states by examining the developments of Indigenous franchise in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (Evans et al. 2018). The aforementioned authors of Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights view settler colonialism not as a coherent ideology, planned and carried out across contexts, but “as unfolding in specific fields of struggle and its modes of government as both formulated within and responsive to variable and shifting balances of power” (2). That is, settler colonialism is a process, occurring differently in various instances. As such, the authors demonstrate Tilly’s mechanism of emulation in the settler colonial political orders of the countries they study. While Evans et al. explore political rights, Brenna Bhandar explores the development of property law in different settler colonial contexts, namely Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine (Bhandar 2018). Bhandar finds that property law was developed in reference to political ideologies, economic considerations, and colonial imaginaries (22). She argues that property law was used to assert settler colonial dominance in these contexts by appropriating land and forming, “the proper legal subject in the political sphere” (4). Bhandar observes that “in the settler colony the colonial animus is driven by the need to control the land base for the continued growth of settler economies and for the security of settler populations,” (25). In this respect, Bhandar’s argument regarding property law is consistent with the focus that Tilly places on institutional structures. In the cases that
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Bhandar examines, property law is used at the expense of Indigenous peoples in pursuit of the land. As I argue in this paper, land is the primary resource hoarded from Indigenous peoples for the benefit of colonizers. The above works support Tilly’s argument that settler colonialism and the resulting phenomenon they examine are influenced by power and material circumstances as opposed to an overarching ideology. Unlike the other scholars discussed, Jeff Denis argues that Group Position Theory can best explain contemporary relations because it accounts for both racial identities as well as tangible, material interests (Denis 2020). At the same time, Denis acknowledges that any one theory is unlikely to perfectly explain such a complex and ongoing phenomenon and accounts for the role that other explanations, including settler colonial theory, may have in explaining contemporary relations (14). Denis’s work indicates how Tilly’s framework fails to fully explain assimilationist policies. He highlights how ideologies, though not the primary motivator behind colonization, helped shaped the nature of marginalization and assimilation by acknowledging the explanatory power of material interests while making concessions to the role of race-based ideology. Each of the aforementioned authors of settler colonial and inequality studies contribute to this paper by articulating and illustrating how material considerations have shaped colonization and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples during different periods of Canadian colonialism. They build on Tilly’s framework to show how material interest in land has been translated into inequalities within political and legal orders. The following section examines how Indigenous peoples were subjugated and considers the resulting outcomes of inequality between Indigenous peoples and settlers. Relevant Outcomes and Processes As was suggested in my survey of the relevant literature, from first contact to later policies of assimilation, colonizers were driven to dispossess and subjugate Indigenous peoples by their economic interest in land. Bhandar notes that it was land that primarily motivated settlers and Evans and her colleagues note that, “it was the land of Indigenous peoples, not the people themselves, that was the driving concern of the colonisers” (Bhandar 2018; Evans et al. 2018, 3). Indigenous peoples themselves posed a problem for colonizers, whose settlement and exploitation of the land for profit was limited by the presence of sovereign Indigenous peoples. In response to Indigenous resistance to their land being stolen, colonizers used violence and coercion to take control over land and used competing policies of marginalization and assimilation to integrate Indigenous peoples into a European style political order. (Evans et al. 2018). The following sections will illustrate how settler interest in acquiring land drove relations with Indigenous peoples from the period of early contact to treaty making and later policies of marginalization and assimilation. Early Contact When colonizers first came into contact with Indigenous peoples, they did not begin by attempting to subjugate them. Rather, they entered into an existing system of diplomatic relations with Indigenous nations. French and English colonizers may have claimed sovereignty over land in North America in relation to other European powers, but they did not have the means or the need to subjugate Indigenous peoples and incorporate them into their colonies (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, 50). As a result, early colonizers interacted with Indigenous peoples through a nation-to-nation policy; they made treaties and negotiated with Indigenous peoples in addition to fighting wars, both allied with and against Indigenous nations (50).
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Colonizers were able to pursue their economic interest in land by using foreign policy. Settlers used various means to obtain control over land; they purchased land, often through coercion, forged sale documents to prove their ownership, made promises to allow continued Indigenous use of land, and bought land from people who had no right to sell it (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, 50-51). These suspect activities indicate that while colonizers had few resources, they were nonetheless driven to acquire control over land and did so with their limited means. In fact, the coercive practices of settlers forced British colonial authorities to appease Indigenous nations by limiting such behaviour in their colonies. With the Royal Proclamation of 1793, British authorities banned settlement in Indigenous lands not ceded or sold to the British (53). Furthermore, the proclamation decreed that in the future, land could be sold only to the Crown as a treaty between sovereign nations (53). This legislation was implemented in an effort to avoid wars with Indigenous nations over territory disputes with settlers that the British could not afford to fight (53). The period of early contact in which colonizers engaged in nation-to-nation relationships highlights the limited role that ideology played. While settlers used their limited resources to expand their colonies through dubious purchases, it was land they pursued, not the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. That said, ideological and legal justifications for taking over land were formulated during this period of early contact as well. I discuss the role of the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius in the Elaboration section of this paper. While ideology was certainly present, it was not the primary motivator for colonizers. They were instead chiefly interested in acquiring land by whatever means possible, including legitimate negotiations and underhanded practices. Treaty Making As settlers became more entrenched on Indigenous lands, policy shifted and Indigenous peoples were increasingly subjugated and forced off their lands (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, 49). Colonizers transitioned from making one-time land purchases to treaties with annual annuities and provisions for reserves to separate Indigenous peoples from settler communities (57). These changes reduced the cost of acquiring land to settlers as one-time purchases could be expensive and allowed settlers to acquire increasing amounts of land (57). By the time settlers came together to form the Dominion of Canada with Confederation in 1867, the settlers' desire for land had transitioned from the opportunity to profit from trade monopolies to plans for westward economic development. Anglophones in Canada wanted to develop west of Ontario for economic gains and to advance their power relative to Francophones in the East (Miller 2009, 141). Through increased settlement and infrastructure in the west, Canada’s economy could develop as western farmers could consume goods from producers in other parts of Canada and export natural resources and goods internationally (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 105). Additionally, the Canadian government could ensure economic stability by establishing ports on the west coast and building a transcontinental railroad to British Columbia (105). Colonizers thus took rapid control over large parts of Canadian territory by making treaties and confining Indigenous peoples to reserve lands, which were held communally in trust by the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs and not as the private property of Indigenous peoples themselves (Ward 2013, 261). The deliberate policy of colonizers to establish Canadian control over land motivated the forced subjugation of Indigenous peoples by moving them onto reserves. While settlers engaged in opportunity hoarding whenever they acquired land from Indigenous peoples, they created overt inequalities between settlers and Indigenous peoples. With smaller plots of land, Indigenous peoples were unable to maintain their pre-contact hunting and fishing lifestyles and with land held
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in trust were not able to take out loans necessary to adapt to European style agriculture (261). In a bid to acquire land for economic development, Canadian treaty making policies dispossessed Indigenous peoples of land, a necessary resource for their livelihoods, producing inequalities between settlers and Indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples stood in the way of asserting Canadian control over increasing swaths of land. Through forceful claims to sovereignty, Indigenous nations pushed the Canadian government to sign treaties before colonizers could settle the plains. As mentioned, during this period, settlers used a variety of means to ensure the utmost control over land when signing these treaties. However, the transition from nation-to-nation relationships to treaty making was not precipitated by an ideological switch in the minds of colonizers; they were pushed by Indigenous nations to enter negotiations. As James Daschuk argues, Indigenous peoples outnumbered settlers on the Plains, which meant that even if Canadian authorities thought Indigenous peoples should be subjugated, they would not have had the population to enforce such an ideology (2014, 97). Instead, Canadian authorities had to cede to demands for treaties by Indigenous nations on recently purchased Rupert’s Land, colonizers hoped to settle (Miller 2009, 141). Indigenous nations forcefully claimed ownership over such land and demanded recognition from Canadian authorities forcing the government to engage in the treaty making process (Daschuk 2014, 93). For instance, Canada’s intention to develop infrastructure on Métis land without acknowledging the Nation’s ownership provoked the Red River Resistance (also known as the Red River Rebellion) in which the Métis fought against colonial authorities for their self-determination (Miller 2009, 142-145). The violence was only resolved with the Manitoba Act, in which the province of Manitoba was created (145). The Red River Resistance highlights why the Canadian government began signing treaties; settlers saw the power of Indigenous nations and hoped to avoid violence and bloodshed (Daschuk 2014, 96-97). As other Indigenous nations demanded treaties, the Canadian government was forced to respond and began signing the Numbered Treaties across Rupert’s Land from what would become Ontario all the way to the future Alberta-British Columbia border (93). The Numbered Treaties are the product of Canadian settlers’ relentless pursuit of land and the powerful Indigenous resistance to this expansion. The material considerations that forced the Canadian government to engage in treaty making changed as colonizers gained land westward and the treaty making process stopped to the west of Treaty 7 and Treaty 8. In what would become British Columbia, Indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their lands and put on reserves without treaties (Evans et al. 2018, 54). While treaties were necessary in the Plains to avoid costly wars, the costs of treaty making in British Columbia were more than the British or local settler governments were willing to pay (54). As a result, most of the contemporary province is settled on unceded territories, aside from a few treaties negotiated by Sir James Douglas, known as the Douglas Treaties, on Vancouver Island, and modern land claims agreements made with the Canadian state (Government of Canada 2013). Although the treaty making process produced very different outcomes for Indigenous peoples across the country, all treaties signed were driven by settlers’ economic desire to acquire land. Marginalization and Assimilation It might be assumed that with the establishment of settler dominance over land that Canadian settler elites would incorporate Indigenous peoples into the new Dominion of Canada in a more just and equal fashion. If colonial elites were not driven by white supremacist ideologies, then control over land would suggest little need to subjugate Indigenous peoples for economic gains. Instead, simultaneous policies of both marginalization on
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reserves and assimilation into the European style settler society of Canada were enacted. The Canadian government was still constrained by the treaties it had previously signed with Indigenous peoples and colonial elites were driven to minimize and eventually eliminate the economic and political costs associated with fulfilling its Treaty obligations (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, 109). The Canadian government consolidated its dominance through the Indian Act of 1867 which made legal distinctions between Indigenous peoples and settler Canadians and thus, “bound together legal identity and access to land” (Bhandar 2018, 30). The government categorized “status Indians” as the specific group Canada had treaty obligations to and as such were the group marginalized to reserves without access to the economic benefits of land. At the same time, one of the key provisions of the Indian Act was the policy of enfranchisement, a method of legal assimilation used to deny the Canadian government’s treaty obligations (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, 108). Through enfranchisement, Indigenous peoples lost their “Indian status,” which gave them a portion of reserve land as private property, but also extinguished their treaty rights and replaced them with the rights of all other British subjects and Canadian citizens. The Canadian government aimed to enfranchise all status Indians because if there was no one to whom the government had treaty obligations towards, the government could eliminate the costs associated with such obligations (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, 109). The limitation of voting rights to enfranchised Indigenous peoples highlights how simultaneous policies of marginalization and assimilation emulated existing structures of inequality in land and reproduced them in political spheres. Just as the Canadian government sought to minimize costs associated with Indigenous policy, British authorities encouraged Canadian colonies to gain independence to cut the costs of Britain maintaining overseas colonies (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, 105). As a result, the British Colonial Office could not force settler colonial governments to extend voting rights or protect the interests of Indigenous peoples they were “responsible for” (Evans et al. 2018, 58). Through limitations to accessing franchise, settlers effectively preserved political power in their own hands. The most overtly racist exclusion of the franchise was in British Columbia. Yet this exclusion was still driven by the need to preserve the relative power imbalance between settlers and Indigenous peoples given that the settler population was approximately one quarter of the population of Indigenous peoples (55). If settlers had unilaterally extended voting rights to Indigenous peoples, they would have lost political power in the province. As a result, the provincial government implemented various strategies. First, the province required English literacy skills to vote and then later implemented policies which directly disenfranchised Indigenous peoples and Chinese immigrants (55). Treaty annuity payments were dividends paid to status Indians as part of the Canadian government’s treaty obligations. Yet, these payments were manipulated by settlers as charity and used as evidence of Indigenous peoples’ dependence on settlers and thus their inability to exercise franchise (58). Through these arguments, Eastern settlers only extended voting rights to enfranchised Indigenous peoples. While this practice was justified under dependency arguments, the practice effectively kept political power in the hands of settlers through a pragmatic division between Indigenous peoples. Settlers were able to maintain the existing political order because Indigenous peoples who did choose to become enfranchised were unlikely to challenge settler dominance (59). Inequalities produced in access to land and its economic benefits were therefore reproduced in political arenas. Voting rights exclusions prevented Indigenous peoples from electing representatives who would advocate for their interests. Settlers protected their material interests by ensuring that policies of marginalization and assimilation like the Indian Act remained in place by preventing Indigenous peoples from participating in electoral politics. Ostensibly, voting rights exclusions were enacted based on racial fitness to vote, but they were ultimately created to maintain the relative power imbalance in favor of Canadian settler colonial society.
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Elaboration This section aims to elaborate the main points of my argument. Specifically, I will explain why institutions, as articulated by Charles Tilly, play a bigger role in these policies than ideas or ideologies. While racist attitudes were prevalent and continue to persist, the motivating factor behind legislation intended to marginalize and assimilate Indigenous peoples has always been to restrict their economic and political power. Colonizers engaged in exploitation and opportunity hoarding primarily through the valuable resource of land. My analysis has cataloged the different periods of colonial Indigenous policy and how these policies were driven to give settlers exclusive access to land and its economic benefits. I have demonstrated how colonizers, motivated to acquire more land for economic development, were driven by their material circumstances into these varying policies that were not always ideologically coherent. These varying policies were instead knitted together by the mechanisms Charles Tilly identifies as producing and reproducing inequalities. Hoarding land prevented Indigenous peoples from sustaining their pre-contact livelihoods through hunting and prevented them from integrating into the settler colonial economy through private property. Meanwhile, colonizers also engaged in emulation and adaptation by replicating these inequalities in political life. One such example is in Prime Minister John A. MacDonald’s proposed bill regarding the national franchise which included a provision to include Indigenous peoples in 1883 (Evans et al. 2018, 115). The debate over this specific provision was filled with implicit and explicit references to colonial white supremacy and gendered relations in Canadian society. For instance, some political elites argued that the franchise should not have been extended to Indigenous peoples but restricted for white women when women had “everything required for franchise, except sex” and Indigenous peoples were clearly unfit to vote in a variety of ways (123). Similarly, arguments in favour of the proposed bill mentioned that franchise could, in some small part, compensate for the original sin of settlement – the dispossession of land from Indigenous peoples (121). In both these positions, debaters were conscious of inequalities in Canadian society. Opponents of the bill made no reference to the influence that the extension of the franchise to Indigenous peoples would have to the economic stability of settlers. Similarly, proponents argued against the supremacy of white settler society, by equating dispossession to a moral failing and the franchise as an apology. The debate may be regarded as a counterexample which might suggest that policies on voting rights, and perhaps other policies regarding the lives of Indigenous peoples, may have been motivated and created by ideology rather than economic considerations. However, the debate over MacDonald’s 1883 proposed bill for national franchise merely demonstrates the ubiquity of white supremacist ideologies. While it may not have been mentioned explicitly in the debate, Evans and her colleagues note that extending the franchise to Indigenous peoples would have risked white hegemony in the electorate and thus Canada’s political institutions (124). Underlying this argument is the assumption that Indigenous peoples would vote antagonistically to white settlers who had dispossessed them of their land and marginalized them on reserves. Retrospectively, Evans et al. find that MacDonald’s inclusion of Indigenous peoples in the franchise could have limited the power of Band Councils who, while their positions were subject to the whims of the Canadian government, has considerable discretion over the governance of their reserves (118). These considerations, the influence of Indigenous peoples on the electoral makeup of the country and the power of band councils, demonstrate that this policy, and other similar policies which upon first inspection look to be rooted in ideology, can also be explained through institutions. In this case, elites opposing the bill engaged in
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emulation, intending to preserve the organizational structure of Parliament to reflect the unequal distribution of resources between settlers and Indigenous peoples already observed in Canadian society. Even if arguments around such policies are articulated through ideology, they demonstrate how Tilly’s mechanisms cement inequality into society by reproducing unequal access to resources in various organizations. This is not to say that anti-Indigenous sentiments and racist ideology were not at the heart of colonization. While I contend that Tilly’s framework best explains why settlers created and cemented inequality, mythologies around colonization also developed to justify colonization and settlement. As mentioned at the outset of this paper, settler colonialism aimed to eliminate Indigenous societies and replace them with a European colonial order. Religious and legal ideologies justified stripping Indigenous peoples of their land and human rights in order to make way for settler society. The belief that settler society was inherently superior to Indigenous societies also led settlers to forcefully attempt to incorporate Indigenous peoples into Canadian society through the residential schooling system and various other assimilation policies. During the period of early contact, the Doctrine of Discovery and concept of terra nullius emerged from notions of the racial and religious superiority of Chritstian Europeans and became European customary law. The Doctrine of Discovery is outlined in the 1493 Papal Bull “Inter Caetera”, where Pope Alexander VI declared only Christians able to discover and rightfully inhabit land (Reid 2010, 336). Religious and legal ideologies codified in documents like papal bulls and European law justified taking over the land of so-called “infidels” (Miller et al. 2010, 96). These theories argued Indigenous peoples were uncivilized, negating their rights to the land they inhabited and rendering their nations illegitimate (94). In the absence of a governing authority, European settlers were thus the “first” to unoccupied territory and could claim “‘rightful’ and righteous settlement of Indigenous peoples’ lands” (94). Racial and religious superiority were thus used to justify underhanded practices to acquire land as well as marginalization and assimilation in the future (100). Ideology can also help explain why Indigenous peoples were not systematically segregated and exploited for labour––colonial elites instead sought to assimilate Indigenous peoples through enfranchisement and residential schools. Tilly’s main mechanism of exploitation can be applied to land Canadian context. Yet, Tilly also argues that members of the privileged group profit from “the effort of outsiders whom they exclude from the full value added by that effort” (1998, 10). Assimilationist policies sought to mould Indigenous peoples into proper British subjects, unlikely to challenge the existing political order, but Indignous peoples were not systematically segregated and exploited for their labour. There were, however, instances of exploitation of labour. James McGill for instance, enslaved at least five people, two of whom were Indigenous children. That said, these instances of exploiting Indigenous labour for profit do not constitute the main thrust of exploitation in the Canadian context. It was the belief in the superiority of European colonial society, used to justify taking over land, that formed the necessary background to Canadian policies of assimilation (Denis 2020, 12). Settlers wanted to incorporate Indigenous peoples into the Canadian state to eliminate the Indigenous nations and societies they believed to be inferior. In other words, the normative goal of creating a settler state, rather than an economic incentive to exploit Indigenous labour, required assimilating Indigenous peoples into members of Canadian settler society (14). The political order of colonial society can be seen as a demonstration of opportunity hoarding, where colonial elites maintain control over profitable land by excluding Indigenous nations with legitimate claims to the land from voting rights and other aspects of political life. I have outlined how these policies were poorly designed and, above all, how the Canadian government aimed to minimize the costs of their Indian policy, which led to the abuse of children in Residential Schools. However, assimilationist policies were by no means the inadvertent reproduction of inequality through
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exploitation and opportunity hoarding. Rather, they were deliberate efforts by those involved (the state, missionaries, supportive settlers) to pursue an idealized European settler society. While Tilly’s framework largely explains the Canadian case, the emergence of colonial ideologies of racial superiority and the role they played in the elimination and assimilation of Indigenous peoples in Canada must be acknowledged. Conclusion This paper has analyzed whether competing theories of institutions or ideas can be used to explain discrimination against Indigenous peoples in the Canadian context. I have argued that the colonial desire to acquire land and the threat posed by Indigenous peoples led to violent dispossession and later assimilation. With respect to Tilly’s argument that members of a privileged group hoard valuable resources for their benefit, I argue that land in the Canadian case was the most valuable resource from the perspective of colonizers. To achieve a monopoly over land, colonizers engaged in a variety of policies towards Indigenous peoples who, while not being the primary concern of settlers or colonial elites, stood in the way of control over land. Through the periods of first contact, treaty making, and finally marginalization and assimilation, colonizers dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their land. This process resulted, as a side effect to the acquisition of land, in the subjugation of and discrimination against Indigenous peoples which was justified using ideologies of racial superiority. Indigenous policy thus varied tremendously between respect for the sovereignty of Indigenous nations to the genocidal policies of residential schools. While I argue that Canada’s Indigenous policy over time was ideologically inconsistent because it was driven by material considerations as opposed to a coherent overarching ideology, I do acknowledge that ideologies of racial superiority were used to justify the pursuit of these material considerations and helped to reify the discriminatory policies directed at Indigenous peoples beyond what would have been necessary to satisfy the economic motives outlined by Tilly’s mechanisms of durable inequality.
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References Bhandar, Brenna. 2018. Colonial Lives of Property. NC: Duke University Press. Denis, Jeffrey S. 2020. Canada at a Crossroads: Boundaries, Bridges, and Laissez-Faire Racism in Indigenous-Settler Relations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Daschuk, James William. 2013. Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. Vol. 65. Regina: University of Regina Press. Evans, Julie. Patricia Grimshaw, David Philips, and Shurlee Swain. 2003. Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830-1910. Studies in Imperialism. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Government of Canada. 2013. “Treaty Texts - Douglas Treaties.” Treaties and Agreements. Last modified August 30, 2013. https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100029052/1581515763202. Miller, James Rodger. 2009. Compact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty-Making in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Miller, Robert J., Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg. 2010. Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Papillon, Martin. 2019. “Segmented Citizenship: Indigenous Peoples and the Limits of Universality” in Universality and Social Policy in Canada, edited by Daniel Béland, Gregory P. Marchildon, and Michael Prince, 137-154. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Reid, Jennifer. 2010. "The Doctrine of Discovery and Canadian Law." The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 30, no. 2 (2010): 335-359. Tilly, Charles. 2002. Durable Inequality. Berkeley & LA: University of California Press. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. Canada's Residential Schools: The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. McGill-Queen's Native and Northern Series, 80-86. Montreal: Published for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada by McGill-Queen's University Press. Ward, Tony. 2013. “Aboriginal Economies in Settler Societies: Maori and Canadian Prairie Indians.” in Settler Economies in World History, edited by Christopher Lloyd, Jacob Metzer, and Richard Sutch. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native." Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387-409.
The Water Crisis in the Middle East and North Africa: A Crisis of Governance Madelyn Evans Edited by Juliet Morrison
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ABSTRACT This paper explores the issue of water scarcity as it affects the MENA region, firstly assessing how the issue is derived from an absence of strong water management policies. Applying a neoliberal institutionalist lens to the issue, this paper argues that the underlying cause of water scarcity in the region is weak international institutions. This paper then explores the implications of water scarcity through a neorealist lens, which views the water crisis as rooted in mutual distrust among states who are seeking to maximize their personal security and survival. Next, this paper examines the counter-arguments provided by neoliberal institutionalism in order to highlight the shortcomings of a neorealist analysis to this issue. Finally, this paper assesses existing environmental governance institutions to address water scarcity, including NGOs, agencies and regional councils. Overall, through the application of a neoliberal institutionalist lens, this paper seeks to demonstrate that the root causes of water scarcity in the MENA region can be traced to poorly designed international institutions. Introduction Home to just one per cent of the world’s freshwater resources, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is the most water-scarce region in the world (Al-Zu'bi 2019). According to the World Resources Institute, a total of 12 out of the top 17 most water-stressed countries are located in the MENA region (Hofste, Reig and Schleifer 2019). Water is a crucial resource to the region’s economic and agricultural development and its shortage has compounded economic losses, rising unemployment, and the loss of traditional livelihoods such as agriculture. The lack of water in the region constitutes a humanitarian crisis, having led to domestic fighting, a spike in violence against women, growing frustrations with governments’ inability to provide basic services, the mass resettlement of populations, and recruitment to terrorist groups such as ISIS (The World Bank 2018). Concerns related to water scarcity have increasingly become a primary driver of the region’s widespread instability and this shortage continues to be exacerbated through rapidly changing climate patterns (Mostajabi 2019).
This paper will explore the issue of water scarcity as it affects the Middle East and North Africa region. Firstly, it will assess the factors of water scarcity in the MENA, finding the issue as predominantly rooted in the absence of strong water management policies across the region. Applying a neoliberal institutionalist lens to this issue, the underlying cause of water scarcity in the MENA region will be traced to weak international institutions. Due to the importance of institutions, cooperative efforts have been strongest when governance institutions are effectively designed. This paper will then explore the implications of water scarcity through a neorealist lens, which views the water crisis as rooted in mutual distrust among states who are seeking to maximize their personal security and survival. From the neorealist perspective, water scarcity will lead to inevitable conflict because of the anarchic nature of the international system, the lack of international law, and states’ rational behaviour of acting in their own self-interest. Next, this paper will examine the counter-arguments provided by neoliberal institutionalism in order to highlight the shortcomings of a neorealist analysis. Finally, this paper will assess existing environmental governance institutions that address water scarcity, including NGOs, agencies, and regional councils. Overall, through the application of a neoliberal institutionalist lens, this paper seeks to demonstrate that the root causes of water scarcity in the MENA region can be traced to poorly designed international institutions. Current efforts to
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address the water crisis have not failed due to the competition which flows from mutual distrust among states but, rather, have been undermined by an absence of consistent policies, weak institutional mechanisms, and the mismanagement of water resources at the national and international governance levels. Water Scarcity in the MENA Region and its Underlying Cause While arid conditions, low rainfall, and high levels of evaporation are all contributors to the MENA’s limited naturally available water resources, the root cause of the region’s widespread water scarcity can be traced to weak water governance institutions (IHE Delft Institute for Water 2018). The lack of effective institutions has led to the absence of consistent policies and poor water management across the region (The World Bank 2018). A report issued from the 2018 World Water Week conference highlighted how the region’s current policies are at the root of the water crisis, as the ineffectiveness of these policies have left citizens and communities exposed to the increasingly severe impacts of water scarcity. As a result, the report called for a shift toward “long-term management of water resources” (The World Bank 2018). Currently, many Arab countries have already developed the institutional and legislative frameworks for good water governance—allocation of water policy-making roles, transparency practices and regular monitoring and evaluation systems—however, they “lack legislative instruments to support its implementation” (United Nations Development Programme 2013, 7). Governance has been weakened by inefficient institutions, lack of coordination, limited public awareness, and ineffective enforcement mechanisms (6). Additionally, the region currently lacks adequate environmental regulations, which has had harmful impacts on states’ socio-economic development (3). Distortions in policies and institutions have resulted in overdrawn aquifers and the failure of water management systems to signal any potential water shortages (Steduto 2018). Weak governance structures and poor resource management have also impeded water use efficiency and the equitable allocation of water between different sectors of society (IHE Delft Institute for Water 2018). Furthermore, the regional water shortage has continued increasing because there is a lack of sufficient incentives to curb water consumption and encourage conservation (Steduto 2018). Evidently, issues of weak governance institutions and poor water management are the primary factors behind water scarcity in the MENA region and threaten to continue exacerbating the shortage unless substantive reforms are undertaken. The Neoliberal Institutionalist Perspective: Cooperation Over Conflict As neoliberal institutionalism maintains that institutions are the primary means to achieving cooperation in the international system, the current obstacles to addressing water management challenges can be overcome by restructuring international institutions to more efficiently facilitate cooperation and enforcement. Neoliberal institutionalism adopts several key realist assumptions: the international system is anarchic; states are the principal actors in world politics; and states behave in rational ways rooted in self-interest (Kibaroğlu 2002, 26). However, diverging from realist theory, neoliberal institutionalists contend that states are less concerned with the relative gains of other states and can cooperate with the assistance of institutions to maximize their absolute gains (Rees 2010, 13). They view international institutions as organizational bodies which facilitate interaction and negotiations between states and improve the cooperative processes (Kibaroğlu 2002, 26). Neoliberal institutionalists believe that cooperation is attainable among actors in areas of common interests. Furthermore, they believe that established institutions decrease uncertainty and lower the costs of cooperating because they increase transparency in the realm of international politics (26). Applied to the case of water scarcity in the MENA region, a neoliberal institutionalist perspective argues that if the region’s institutions are well-designed, they can generate policy coordination among
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states and facilitate a shift towards strong institutional arrangements for water resources management and allocation (26). Moreover, water scarcity has served more to reinforce peace, rather than to provoke war (Rabbo and Tal 2010, 3). Thus, negotiations over water resources can be an opportunity for cooperation, rather than conflict. According to neoliberal institutionalists, overlapping interests are crucial for meaningful cooperation. In the MENA, over half of the surface water is transboundary and almost every country’s water supply depends on shared rivers or aquifers (The World Bank 2018). Due to the region’s long history of shared water management and the transboundary nature of water, every country in the region has a mutual interest in safeguarding access to water (The World Bank 2018). This high degree of interdependency necessitates cooperation among states and encourages multilateral cooperation above unilateral action (Rees 2010, 1). Neoliberal institutionalists argue that because there are shared interests among the different countries in the region, cooperation on the issue of water scarcity is possible. Even for oil-rich countries such as the Gulf States, who are able to use their spending power to desalinate their water, addressing the region’s water shortage is crucial because desalination plants are not sustainable for development. The United Arab Emirates, for example, is currently confronting a serious depletion of available water resources, predicting that at the current rate of consumption, it will deplete its natural freshwater resources in about 50 years (Barton). Additionally, Saudi Arabia, a country “as water-poor as it is oil-rich,” has depleted their aquifers since 2008, which has subsequently shrunk the country’s grain harvest (Brown 2013). Evidently, addressing the challenge of water scarcity is an issue of mutual importance for all countries in the region, whether oil-rich or not. Hence, the intensifying shortage of water increases the interdependence between countries, in turn facilitating the creation of a transnational community that needs cooperation to manage water resources effectively (Ide and Detges 2018, 65-66). Because neoliberal institutionalism places value in governance institutions as the best way of facilitating cooperation in the international system, scholars of this theory argue that ongoing efforts to address water scarcity in the MENA region have been undercut by the lack of “consistent policies and investments” across sectors and a deficiency of effective governance institutions (Food and Agriculture Organization Regional Office for Near East and North Africa 2019). In maintaining that the international system is anarchic, neoliberal institutionalists recognize the existing problem of compliance. Without the presence of an agency to enforce international law, agreements between states are unreliable and the costs of cooperation can be high. Thus, neoliberal institutionalists believe institutions are essential to reducing the biggest barriers to cooperation: cheating and non-compliance (van Der Ven 2020). Current intergovernmental initiatives on water scarcity issues, however, have been undermined by weak governance institutions in the region. Regional cooperation on environmental issues has mostly been limited to “talk fests” at summits with little follow-up (Stang 2016, 1). The shortcomings of these summits, which have resulted in “unimplemented reports, strategies, and protocols,” can be traced to the fact that country representatives and experts often lack the authority to move beyond consultations or report writing (7). Currently, there are various successful regional efforts on water scarcity that demonstrate the potential of engaging in processes of cooperation. Outside of these efforts, however, environmental cooperation has proven difficult to establish “in the absence of wider political and economic cooperation processes” (7). Overall, if the governance organisations in the MENA region are redesigned to strengthen cooperation, enforce compliance, and monitor water use, as per neoliberal institutionalists, environmental cooperation efforts will be more effective.
Counter Theory: Water Scarcity Through the Neorealist Lens
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In 1995, former World Bank vice-president Ismail Serageldin stated that “the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water” (Barnaby 2009, 282). The phenomenon of “water wars” forms the base of neorealist analysis of the issue of water scarcity. Neorealists claim that water has been a source of conflict since ancient times, serving as a “target and casualty of war” (Mostajabi 2019). Hence, they argue that the underlying cause of water scarcity in the MENA is fundamentally rooted in a lack of trust and the competition which flows from that mutual distrust. From their perspective, cooperation is nearly impossible because states always seek to make relative gains and to maximize their personal security and survival. Thus, neorealists believe that water scarcity will likely ultimately lead to conflict due to the anarchic nature of the international system, the lack of international law, and the self-interest of states as a primary driving factor behind their actions. A fundamental tenet of neorealism is that the structure of the international system is characterized by anarchy. Neorealists argue that states engage in conflict because there is no world government to enforce laws between countries. They also claim that competition and conflict over water resources can be traced to the absence of legally binding international law ensuring that states’ water rights are upheld (Mulholland 2011, 1). Traditionally, given the primary focus on maximizing national security, neorealists have perceived water as a low political issue (Rees 2010, 13). However, as water scarcity has heightened threats to human survival, securing water resources has become a core national security concern across the MENA region (13). When water is viewed as a finite and strategic resource, which “perpetuates wealth and relative political leverage,” continued access to water becomes a zero-sum game whereby “shared water becomes the object of competition” (13). States, as rational actors seeking to maximize their relative security in the struggle for survival in an anarchic system, will compete for strategic water resources because it ensures their continuing existence (14). Thus, according to the neorealist perspective, states will rationally decide to take unilateral action or engage in conflict in order to safeguard their access to water resources (13). A further characteristic of neorealism which highlights the underlying cause of water scarcity is their belief that cooperation is very difficult to achieve. Within the fundamentally anarchic international system, there is no trust between states and there are few incentives to cooperate. Hence, from this perspective, any instances of states’ collaboration are weak, shallow, and viewed as a pretence for establishing power and domination. Neorealists argue that international water treaties, even if well-designed, produce nothing substantive because follow-up interactions and trust building efforts are not guaranteed (Mulholland 2011, 6). A key example of cooperation on water management, which neorealists would deem superficial, is the Joint Water Committee (JWC), a water accord established between Israel and Palestine from the articles of the 1995 Oslo II agreement (Ide and Detges 2018, 66). The accords, according to neorealists, “can hardly be termed cooperative” given the ongoing tensions and grievances between the two sides (66). There have been limited spillover cooperation effects and the JWC suspended all meetings held between 2010 and 2016 (66). Furthermore, neorealists argue that the asymmetry of power present in the accords that privilege Israel allow the state to maintain further domination over Palestinians, rather than an example of genuine cooperation. In sum, according to the neorealist perspective, the strategic reality of water will lead to zero-sum competition over water resources due to their interpretations of the international system as anarchic and states as rational actors seeking to maximize personal security.
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The Shortcomings of the Neorealist Perspective While neorealists argue that it is inevitable that water scarcity will lead to conflict in the MENA, a neorealist perspective fails to consider the historical precedents of countries solving water shortages through trade and international agreements rather than war, as well as the substantive role of NGOs and other environmental governance institutions and states’ mutual interest in safeguarding access to clean water (Barnaby 2009, 282). Firstly, while water may be a source of tension and instability, it does not cause war. Throughout history, though countries have engaged in conflict with each other, traditional wars were rarely waged over water alone (Gleick 1993). For example, between the 1950s-1970s, Israel, Jordan and Egypt each ran out of water to meet all of their needs (Barnaby 2009, 282). Though these countries have fought against each other, they have not explicitly fought wars over water. Another situation which disclaims the notion of a “water war” is the situation in the West Bank between Israel and Palestine. Though power dynamics and politics have led to overt and institutionalized conflict over water, there has been no armed conflict over water resources “as there is over borders and statehood” (282). Rather, Israeli and Palestinian water professionals collaborate through the JWC, even in the face of tension and military action (282). While the Israeli-Palestinian JWC is not an equal partnership, neoliberal institutionalists would argue that the shortcomings of these water accords are not a result of superficial cooperation, but rather poorly designed governance institutions. The success of other bilateral administrative bodies in Israel and Palestine, including NGOs such as Friends of the Earth Middle East and the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information (which will be subsequently discussed), demonstrates that international organizations and non-state actors can work effectively when designed well. In the case of the JWC, the unequal structure of the committee and the fact that “aid agencies in their water programs took too little cognizance of the weakness of the Palestinian state” have undercut the accords’ impact (Twite 2010, 302). Experts in the region contend that “innovative institutional frameworks will need to be created” for IsraeliPalestinian water governance to be successful (3). Thus, neoliberal institutionalists reject the realist notion that the weaknesses of the Israeli-Palestinian water accords are due to superficial cooperation, arguing instead that the committee needs to be restructured for more effective water governance. Due to the neorealist assumption that states are unitary actors, the neorealist perspective also fails to take into consideration the role of NGOs, agencies, and committees in generating environmental action on water scarcity issues. Neorealists contend that states are the only actors that matter, which discredits the substantive progress that environmental governance institutions in the MENA region have accomplished. Contrastingly, neoliberal institutionalists see value in the role of non-state actors, such as NGOs, multinational corporations, and religious organizations. Furthermore, while neorealists argue that water scarcity in the region will ultimately lead to violent conflict, such a perspective ignores the mutual stake countries have in management over shared water resources. Interdependence, heightened in the context of shared transboundary waters, necessitates that states work together in some way in order to utilize the river or other shared body of water (Dinar and Dinar 2016, 23). Though the level of water vulnerability may not always be equally felt by both parties, such a lopsidedness will not necessarily lead to a zero-sum situation (23). The costs of armed conflict over water far outweigh a state’s potential benefits from a victory due to the expensive engineering systems used to exploit water resources, and thus, cooperation is still likely to ensue (23). Hence, viewed through a neoliberal institutionalist lens, the highly interdependent nature of water increases the likelihood that water-related disputes will lead to political negotiations and agreements rather than war.
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Existing Efforts and Future Prospects Currently, there are various ongoing initiatives in the MENA region which prove that when international governance institutions are designed well, regional water cooperation is both possible and meaningful. The efforts of NGOs, such as EcoPeace Middle East and the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, for example, have been widely successful in bringing officials, professionals and academics together under a common goal (Rabbo and Tal 2010, 293). EcoPeace Middle East, an organization which utilizes a “bottom-up” (grass roots/community) approach coupled with “top-down” advocacy, has put the principle of environmental peacemaking into practice (EcoPeace Middle East n.d.). Environmental peacebuilding views common dependency on natural resources and the need for a healthy environment as facilitators for joint collaboration and, ultimately, as a way to foster lasting and sustainable peace in conflict regions (EcoPeace Middle East n.d.). Through the efforts of these types of NGOs, Middle Eastern water experts have been working together for years in a variety of seminars, conferences, and on-the-ground projects (Twite 2010, 301). These initiatives have played an instrumental role in coordinating joint research, activism, and educational initiatives on water, energy, and food security and have proven the potential of cooperative work in tackling environmental issues (Rabbo and Tal 2010, 293).
Additionally, cooperation is seen even across those states that should be in competition with each other, such as the oil-rich states. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, has been the most successful example of subregional cooperation in the region (Stang 2016, 8-9). Since 1986, the GCC has undertaken various environmental initiatives, including shifting their agricultural policies away from improving food self sufficiency, developing an environmental action plan on information sharing, and expanding research on climate issues (8). The Gulf region has also established two notable intergovernmental bodies: the Regional Organization for the Conservation of the Environment of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden and the Regional Organization for the Protection of the Marine Environment (8). Such efforts have broadened the strategic dialogue between the Gulf states and other states in the region. The success of the GCC emphasizes the idea of minilateralism, or clubs of small groups of powerful states. Neoliberal institutionalists believe that minilateralism improves the chances of cooperation because it is easier to find mutual interests among a smaller group of actors (van Der Ven 2020). The similarities between the six GCC states in terms of political, socioeconomic, and geographic attributes contribute to its relative cohesiveness and increasing institutionalization (Stang, 8). The benefits of cooperating with a smaller group of like-minded countries may also explain why larger international organizations tend to proliferate and fragment. Across the region, there has been a significant trend towards environmental collaboration (Dinar and Dinar 2016, 24). Not only have numerous countries begun to integrate the Sustainable Development Goals into their development plans, but there has been an increase in the exchange of “hydrological data, flood forecasting, joint hydroelectric power and water-recovery ventures” (Kibaroğlu 2002, 15). The Food and Agriculture Organization’s Water Scarcity Regional Initiative supports countries in strategically planning their water resource management and allocation, as well as assisting them in modernizing their national governance and institutions (Steduto 2018). As political leaders across MENA countries have increasingly recognized the value in engaging in collaborative environmental processes, there has been a growth of international engagement in multilateral initiatives (Stang, 1). Importantly, UN agencies and transnational NGOs (such as the UNDP, UNEP and the World Bank) have played a key role in connecting and supporting various environmental initiatives, which neoliberal institutionalists would
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argue highlights the significance of well-designed institutions (Stang, 6). Though some governance institutions have been fundamentally misdesigned, such as the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee, the success of other multilateral environmental initiatives indicate that processes of international cooperation to address water scarcity will persist. By reorienting policy, restructuring weak institutions, promoting education and awareness of water issues, strengthening enforcement mechanisms, and establishing international agreements, governance in the MENA region can more successfully develop efficient water management practices (Ide and Detges 2018). Conclusion This paper has explored the issue of water scarcity in the Middle East and North Africa and its underlying causes. Firstly, it analyzed water scarcity through a neoliberal institutionalist lens, which traced the regional water shortage to poorly designed water governance institutions. Then, it assessed the problem from a neorealist perspective, considering its argument that water scarcity is rooted in mutual distrust between states and that competition and conflict flows from states’ desire to maximize personal security. Drawing from a neoliberal institutionalist counter argument, however, it is evident that the neorealist perspective failed to capture in full the substantive role of NGOs and other governance institutions in facilitating cooperative environmental efforts. These efforts are underscored by neoliberal institutionalism and highlight how water scarcity has led to cooperation rather than conflict. This can be evidenced by several current initiatives in the MENA region which demonstrate how well-designed international governance institutions can lead to effective and meaningful regional water cooperation. The water crisis in the Middle East and North Africa is therefore a crisis of governance above all else. As climate change continues to exacerbate water scarcity, incentives for regional leaders to engage in collaborative environmental processes will continue to increase and international cooperation in addressing water scarcity will persist.
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References Al-Zu'bi, Ibrahim. 2019. "Water scarcity is a growing problem across the Middle East. Is this how we solve it?" World Economic Forum. Last modified March 29, 2019. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/03/water-scarcity-is-a-growing-problem-across-the-middle-eastis-this-how-we-solveit/#:~:text=Due%20to%20the%20hot%20and,irrigation%2C%20flushing%20toilets%20and%20more. Barnaby, Wendy. 2009. "Do nations go to war over water?" Nature 458, no. 19 (March): 282-283. https://www.academia.edu/10351844/Do_nations_go_to_war_over_water. Barton, Alexandra. n.d. "Water in Crisis - Middle East." The Water Project. Accessed February 2020. https://thewaterproject.org/water-crisis/water-in-crisis-middle-east Brown, Lester R. 2013. "Peak Water: What Happens When the Wells Go Dry?" Earth Policy Institute. Last modified July 9, 2013. http://www.earth-policy.org/mobile/releases/update115. Dinar, Shlomi and Ariel Dinar. 2016. International Water Scarcity and Variability: Managing Resource Use Across Political Boundaries. Berkeley: Univ of California Press. EcoPeace Middle East. n.d. “About Us.” Accessed March 5, 2022. https://old.ecopeaceme.org/ecopeace/aboutus/ EcoPeace Middle East. n.d. “Environmental PeaceBuilding.” Accessed March 5, 2022. https://old.ecopeaceme.org/ecopeace/environmental-peacebuilding/ Food and Agriculture Organization Regional Office for Near East and North Africa. 2019. "FAO calls for a new generation of policies and investments to sustainably address water scarcity in the Arab region." Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Last modified October 21, 2019. http://www.fao.org/neareast/news/view/en/c/1240671/. Gleick, Peter. 1993. "Water and Conflict." International Security 18, no. 1 (Summer): 79-112. http://www2.pacinst.org/reports/international_security_gleick_1993.pdf. Hofste, Rutger Willem, Paul Reig and Leah Schleifer. 2019. World Resources Institute. Accessed March 5, 2022. https://www.wri.org/insights/17-countries-home-one-quarter-worlds-population-face-extremely-highwater-stress Ide, Tobias and Adrien Detges. 2018. "International Water Cooperation and Environmental Peacemaking." Global Environmental Politics 18, no. 4 (November): 63-84. https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00478. IHE Delft Institute for Water . 2018. "Taking on the Water Crisis in the Middle East." UNESCO. Last modified November 27, 2018. https://www.un-ihe.org/stories/taking-water-crisis-middle-east.
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Kibaroğlu, Ayşegül. 2002. Building a Regime for the Waters of the Euphrates-Tigris River Basin. London: Kluwer Law International. Kibaroğlu, Ayşegül. 2019. "State-of-the-art review of transboundary water governance in the Euphrates–Tigris river basin." International Journal of Water Resources Development 35, no. 1 (2019): 4-29. Mostajabi, Masoud. 2019. "Environmental challenges plague Iran and the rest of the Middle East." Atlantic Council. Last modified March 28, 2019. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/iransource/environmentalchallenges-plague-iran-and-the-rest-of-the-middle-east/ Mulholland, Holly. 2011. "Water Politics in the Middle East: A Multicase Approach to Regional Water Shortage." Master's thesis, University of Central Florida. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3085&context=etd Rabbo, Alfred and Alon Tal. 2010. Water Wisdom: Preparing the Groundwork for Cooperative and Sustainable Water Management in the Middle East. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. muse.jhu.edu/book/903 Rees, Gerdy. 2010. "The Role of Power and Institutions in Hydrodiplomacy." Master's thesis, University of London. https://transboundarywaters.science.oregonstate.edu/sites/transboundarywaters.science.oregonstate.edu/fil es/Publications/Rees%2C%20G%202010%20%20The%20Role%20of%20Power%20and%20Institutions%20in%20Hydrodiplomacy.pdf Steduto, Pasquale. 2018. "Solutions to water challenges in the Middle East and North Africa region." Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Last modified August 30, 2018. http://www.fao.org/faostories/article/en/c/1150870/. Stang, Gerald. 2016. "Climate Challenges in the Middle East: Rethinking Environmental Cooperation." The Middle East Institute's Regional Cooperation Series. MEI Policy Paper 2016-2. Washington, DC: The Middle East Institute. https://www.mei.edu/publications/climate-challenges-middle-east-rethinking-environmen talcooperation. Twite, Robin. "The Role of Third Parties in Helping to Resolve the Conflicts over Water Issues in Israel and Palestine" In Water Wisdom: Preparing the Groundwork for Cooperative and Sustainable Water Management in the Middle East edited by Alon Tal and Alfred Abed Rabbo, 295-307. Ithaca, NY: Rutgers University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813549774-043 United Nations Development Programme, Regional Bureau for Arab States (RBAS). 2013. Water Governance in the Arab Region: Managing Scarcity and Securing the Future. New York, NY: United Nations Publications. https://www.undp.org/content/dam/rbas/doc/Energy%20and%20Environment/Arab_Water_Gov_Rep ort/Arab_Water_Gov_Report_Full_Final_Nov_27.pdf van Der Ven, Hamish. 2020. "Liberalism and Global Environmental Politics." (Lecture, McGill University, Montreal, January 22, 2020).
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The World Bank. 2018. "Effective Management of Water Resources in Arab World Key to Future Growth and Stability." The World Bank Group. Last modified August 28, 2018. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/08/28/effective-management-of-waterresources-in-arab-world-key-to-future-growth-and-stability
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A New Model for Online Speech Governance, an Old Model of Inaccuracy: The Facebook Oversight Board and the Systemic Problem of Inaccurate Content Moderation
Hannah Downard Edited by Elena Meyer
A New Model for Online Speech Governance, an Old Model of Inaccuracy: The Facebook Oversight Board and the Systemic Problem of Inaccurate Content Moderation
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ABSTRACT In September 2019, Facebook embarked on a revolutionary new approach for governing online speech: a ‘Supreme Court’ for content moderation decisions known as the Facebook Oversight Board. This paper will examine the potential for the Oversight Board to remedy the inaccurate removal of content, in light of Facebook’s existing flawed approach to content moderation. First, it will be argued that clumsy content moderation is rooted in the structure of the ‘Community Standards,’ which currently leave wide room for users to get crafty with hate speech—a reality that the Supreme Court’s non-binding policy recommendations are not guaranteed to fix. It will then be argued that the creation of the Supreme Court fails to correct the deeply flawed infrastructure of human content review ailed by widespread outsourcing and dismal working conditions. Finally, it will be argued that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for moderation may facilitate inaccurate content removal, as it has the potential to function with the ingrained biases of its programmers—a facet which the oversight board also fails to alter. Through examining the key issues with the company’s guiding content moderation policy and the flaws in its deployment of moderation through human review and AI, this paper will ultimately argue that while Facebook’s implementation of an independent Oversight Board is a step in the right direction towards increased transparency and accountability in the moderation process, it fails to address the heart of Facebook’s institutional problem: continually producing inaccurate content moderation. Ultimately, this works to unjustifiably erode some users’ right to public speech, and in some cases, leaves harmful digital attacks untouched. Introduction In September 2019, Facebook embarked on a revolutionary new approach for governing online speech: a ‘Supreme Court’ for content moderation decisions (Klonick 2018). Formally entitled the Facebook Oversight Board, the independent third-party body—exclusively dedicated to the “appellate review” of disputed removed user content— represents a concrete departure from existing models of content moderation, and more broadly, online speech governance itself. In the context of Facebook moderating over 2.3 billion monthly users’ posts, shares, and comments, the platform functions as a “curator of public discourse” in the digital age by simply deciding what content stays up and what comes down (Reuben Binns et al. 2017, 1). With a consequent monopoly over the expression of free speech on its platform, Facebook vows to only limit this expression by prohibiting posts that fail to align with the company’s ‘Community Standards’, which privilege safety, dignity and authenticity while shielding users from ‘objectionable content’ such as hate speech and violent or graphic content (Community Standards Facebook 2020). Yet, according to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook “makes the wrong call” in more than one out of every ten cases, by leaving hate speech up or removing benign content (Zuckerberg 2018). This paper will examine the potential for the Oversight Board to remedy the inaccurate removal of content, in light of Facebook’s existing flawed approach to content moderation. First, it will be argued that clumsy content moderation is rooted in the structure of the ‘Community Standards,’ which currently leave wide room for users to get crafty with hate speech— a reality which the Supreme Court’s non-binding policy recommendations are not guaranteed to fix. It will then be argued that the creation of the Supreme Court fails to correct the deeply flawed infrastructure of human content review ailed by widespread outsourcing and dismal working conditions. Finally, it will be argued that the use of
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artificial intelligence (AI) for moderation may facilitate inaccurate content removal, as it has the potential to function with the ingrained biases of its programmers—a facet which the Oversight Board also fails to alter. Through examining the key issues with the company’s guiding content moderation policy and the flaws in its deployment of moderation through human review and AI, this paper will ultimately argue that while Facebook’s implementation of an independent Oversight Board is a step in the right direction towards increased transparency and accountability in the moderation process, it fails to address the heart of Facebook’s institutional problem: continually producing inaccurate content moderation. Ultimately, this works to unjustifiably erode some users’ right of public speech, and in some cases, leaves harmful digital attacks untouched. A Framework for Inaccuracies: ‘Community Standards’ for Whom? To understand how Facebook’s approach to content moderation facilitates inaccuracies, it is imperative to understand the company’s policy dictating exactly what content is to stay up and what is to come down. A chaotic approach to content moderation is rooted in the company’s history as it scrambled to develop “ad-hoc rules” balancing users’ free expression while shielding them from abusive content (Kadri and Klonick 2019, 39). By examining the evolution of the company’s ‘Community Standards’ and its current holes, this section will argue that inaccurate content moderation is rooted in insufficient ‘rules of the game’—a reality which the implementation of an Oversight Board will not necessarily address. The platform’s principles governing online speech originated as an arbitrary one-page internal memo listing all prohibited content, including “things like Hitler and naked people” (Klonick 2018, 1638). The document upheld the company’s driving ethos at the time for content moderation: “if it makes you feel bad in your gut, then take it down” (Klonick 2018, 1626). It was only in 2009, after facing increased calls for transparency—five years after the company’s launch—that the platform hired lawyer Jud Hoffman to spearhead a specialized team of 12 people “to formalize and consolidate an ad hoc draft of rules” which later became known to the public as the platform’s reigning ‘Community Standards’ (Klonick 2018, 1626). In crafting the guidelines, Hoffman explains that standards strove to reflect Facebook’s mission statement of “make the world more open and connected” (Klonick 2018, 62). Accordingly, the company attempted to foster an inclusive approach to content while attempting to balance “concerns about harmful speech” (Klonick 2018, 61). The solution to this digital age paradox lay in the platform’s approach to ‘protected characteristics’. As the Community Standards state, Facebook will delete any “curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks,” (Angwin and Grassegger 2017) only when they directly attack ‘protected characteristics,’ defined by the platform as “race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disease or disability” (Community Standards Facebook 2020). While these standards appear to be democratic and benevolent on paper, investigations by the New York Times and ProPublica into the implementation of this approach revealed its underside in motion, functioning to keep harmful speech on the site, while unjustly removing other forms of expression. This contradiction occurs because the status of ‘protected categories’ can operate to “give users broader latitude when they write about subsets of ‘protected categories” (Angwin and Grassegger 2017), thereby allowing for harmful speech that does not overtly address these protected characteristics to pass through the platform’s sieve. Comparing the posts by United States’ Republican Congressman Clay Higgins and Boston poet and Black Lives Matter activist Didi Delgado illustrates this failing. Following the devastating 2017 London terror attack, Representative Higgins made a post calling for the death of ‘radicalized’ Muslims, stating “Hunt them, identify
A New Model for Online Speech Governance, an Old Model of Inaccuracy: The Facebook Oversight Board and the Systemic Problem of Inaccurate Content Moderation
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them, and kill them…Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all” (Angwin and Grassegger 2017). This post remained untouched by the content moderators. In contrast, Delgado’s post stating “All white people are racist. Start from this reference point or you’ve already failed” was promptly removed and her account was disabled for a week (Angwin and Grassegger 2017). The rationale behind Facebook’s moderation of these two posts reveals an acceptance of harmful speech while prohibiting expression that is more moderate. Higgins’ post remained on the site because he attacked a ‘subset’ of Muslims—radicals—while Delgado’s post was removed for targeting ‘white people’, a protected category, as a whole (Angwin and Grassegger 2017). This troubling case is not an outlier. The Verge described the testimony of a content moderator who explained how the phrase “autistic people should be sterilized”, though seemingly offensive to the moderator, remained on the platform because “autism is not a ‘protected characteristic’ the way race and gender are, and so it doesn’t violate the policy” (Newton 2019). This ‘subset versus protected category’ dichotomy is deeply ingrained in Facebook’s training manuals for moderators. Leaked training documents featured a slide, providing three possible answers to the question “which are protected categories?”: white men, female drivers, and Black children. The correct answer is ‘white men’ (Angwin and Grassegger 2017). In tandem, both the case of Higgins and Delgado and the reality of the company’s training documents highlight the problematic nature of the company’s “one-size fits all rules”, illustrating why the New York Times reported that Facebook’s leaked 1,400-page training manual for moderators “revealed numerous gaps, biases, and outright errors” (Fisher 2018). Fundamentally, in its Community Standards, the platform has “failed to carve out hate speech protections for certain sub-categories” (Gorwa et al. 2020, 11). Given this reality, the implementation of an independent Oversight Board tasked with improving Facebook’s approach to content moderation provides great hope that the Board will be able to positively alter the policy’s discrepancies. However, there is a crucial facet impeding the potential impact of the Oversight Board: its subjugation to non-binding policy recommendations. As detailed by the board’s charter, the scope of the board is narrow, with the primary task of “reviewing individual content moderation decisions made by the company” (Patel and Hecht Felella 2019). While Facebook states that the ‘Supreme Court’s’ decisions on these appeals “will be binding, and Facebook will implement [the decisions] promptly” (Patel and Hecht Felella 2019), it also states that it can “only recommend policy changes to Facebook” (Klonick 2019). Facebook is thus “not under a mandate to take up the board’s recommendations” to alter moderator training or the Community Standards (Klonick 2019). The Board may therefore be incapable of effectively addressing governing policies which lie at the heart of Facebook’s failure to engage in effective content moderation. The Inaccuracy of Human Content Moderation Due to the sheer volume of content posted on Facebook, averaging billions of posts per day, the platform relies on a combination of human content moderators and algorithms to implement its complex content policies (Allan 2017). This section will examine Facebook’s deeply flawed infrastructure of human reviewers, arguing that the company’s financial reliance on outsourced contract labour for content moderator work creates a lack of oversight, while dismal working conditions privilege efficiency over accuracy. The interaction between these two factors exacerbates inaccurate content moderation. This structural problem presents a key source of inaccuracy, which cannot simply not be fixed by the introduction of an independent third-party appellate court.
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Currently, Facebook outsources nearly all of its content moderation work, with moderators working in call centers in the Philippines, Ireland, Mexico, Turkey, India, Eastern Europe (Klonick 2018, 1640) and Morocco (Fisher 2018). As demand has grown, the platform has also expanded its domestic operations to include sites in states like Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California (Newton 2019). While Facebook’s Vice President of Operations, Ellen Silver, has stated that the use of contract labour “allows Facebook to scale globally evaluating posts in more than 50 languages at more than 20 sites around the world”, the use of globalized contract labour also creates a decentralized system of moderation with a lack of control over the sites. Facebook has “little visibility” into these giant externally contracted sites, meaning they cannot police the deployment of content moderation, while having limited leverage to engage in any correction due to their heavy reliance on contractors’ services (Fisher 2018). As a result of this limited oversight, contracted sites can engage in their own harmful modifications of content moderation policy in favour of efficiency. For example, an anonymous moderator divulged to the New York Times the presence of “an office wide rule to approve any post if no one on hand can read the appropriate language” —despite this rule strictly contradicting Facebook’s guidelines (Fisher 2018). In this particular instance, as the moderator detailed, this rule may have contributed to inciting ethnic violence in Sri Lanka and Myanmar as “posts encouraging ethnic cleansing [in foreign languages] were routinely allowed to stay up” (Fisher 2018). The performance expectations of moderators working at outsourced firms, and the dismal working conditions to which they are subjected, represent another deep structural problem for accurate content moderation. Despite Facebook reporting that “moderators are given ample time” to thoughtfully review posts, and are not subjected to quotas, moderators divulge that they “face pressure to review about a thousand pieces of content per day, with eight to ten seconds for each post” (Fisher 2018). This reality is illustrated by Genpact, one of Facebook’s contracted reviewing sites in Hyderabad, India. At Genpact, each of the monitoring firm’s 1,600 employees are required to review at least 2,000 posts in an eight-hour shift, at a rate of nearly four posts per minute, with 15 seconds per post (Vengattil and Dave 2019). Further, in some firms, moderators’ pay is tied to their speed, providing a strong incentive for efficiency over accuracy (Vengattil and Dave 2019). Finally, with the minimal oversight Facebook does exert, the system for ensuring accurate auditing is superficial. For each contracted site, Facebook “audits a subset of contractors’ decisions to ensure its full-time employees agree with contractors” (Vengattil and Dave 2019). The rate of agreement with the collective deliberations generates an ‘accuracy score’ to measure and judge the performance of moderators (Vengattil and Dave 2019). For every 1,500 posts a moderator reviews, Facebook will randomly audit approximately 50. However, driving this auditing is a standardized quota of a 95% accuracy score for all firms. Yet, Miguel, an auditor at Cognizant, an Arizona moderating firm, says that “this number is fake” (Vengattil and Dave 2019). Miguel explained this systemic flaw, highlighting how “accuracy is only judged by agreement. If me and the auditor both allow the obvious sale of heroin, Cognizant was ‘correct’ because we both agreed” (Vengattil and Dave 2019). In highly pressurized environments with selective auditing, this superficial system cannot work to accurately monitor off-site moderators’ conduct. Both the lack of oversight for contracted content review and the onerous performance expectations present key drivers for inaccurate content moderation. While the Board’s express purpose is to “protect free expression by making principled, independent decisions about important pieces of content”, by only having the power to review user’s appeals about “content they think was incorrectly taken off the site” (Ghaffary 2020), the Board cannot address the heart of the problem. This generates the need for appeals in the first place—the lack of oversight and arduous workplace conditions that continue to privilege efficiency and superficial accuracy (Oversight Board
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Charter 2019). To have a meaningful impact on protecting free expression while shielding against online abuse, Facebook must address these issues. Economic considerations also suggest that Facebook has a strong incentive to tolerate the problems resulting from the use of contract labour because it is radically cheaper. While the median Facebook employee earns $240,000 annually, including bonuses, salary and stock options, an American content moderator in Arizona earns just $28,800 per year (Newton 2019). Further, entry-level moderators in India earn approximately $1,404 annually—the equivalent of $6 a day (Vengattil and Dave 2019). With the platform earning “$6.9 billion in profits, on $16.9 billion in revenue” in 2019, contract labour crucially contributes to an exorbitantly high profit margin (Newton 2019). The Inaccuracy of Artificial Intelligence Finally, Facebook’s reliance on “algorithmic moderation systems” can also work to facilitate inadequate content moderation. This section will examine the shortcomings of the platform’s use of AI. It will be argued that due to the nuance and complexity of ‘toxic speech classifiers’, a reliance on AI, defined as “systems that classify usergenerated content based on either matching or prediction, leading to a decision and governance outcome” (Gorwa et al. 2020, 3), results in the deployment of a biased algorithm, improperly removing content. In his 2018 congressional testimony, Mark Zuckerberg famously referred to AI as the “future solution to Facebook’s current [moderation] problems” (Gorwa et al. 2020, 2). This is because algorithmic moderation employs “automatic classification systems to flag ‘toxic’ comments” (Gorwa et al. 2020, 9), thereby holding the potential to efficiently and proactively monitor a large volume of posts—something the platform desperately needs (Klonick 2018, 1636). More specifically, this system functions by programmers “training machine learning algorithms on a large corpora of texts manually annotated for aggression, offence, or abuse” (Reuben et al. 2017, 2). However, this training presents another key driver for inaccurate content moderation. A study by Binns et al. revealed the great flaw in the programming of algorithms: AI can serve as a conduit of the biases of its programmers. In coding ‘toxic speech’ identifiers used to indicate potential hate speech, the study found “evidence of a difference between male and female annotators regarding the labelling of comments as toxic” (Reuben et al. 2017, 6), where female annotators were less likely to find a comment ‘toxic’ than their male colleagues. This reality thereby indicates an inherent discrepancy in the algorithms’ model, causing the status of content to potentially vary due to the personal biases of the programmers (Reuben et al. 2017, 8). This discrepancy can result in “content classifiers in general, whether used for recommendation, ranking, or blocking, [to be] more or less favorable to content associated with gender, race and other protected categories” (Gorwa et al. 2020, 11). By virtue of AI holding the potential to be encoded with the positionality of its programmers, it can thereby operate to “disproportionately flag language used by a social group, thus making that group’s expression more likely to be removed” (Gorwa et al. 2020, 11). Ultimately, the discrepancies of AI present an increasingly problematic mode of moderation that must be addressed. With the implementation of the Oversight Board, the enduring potential problems with AI, and the system’s racialized impacts, will only have the potential to be addressed after the fact, if the user so chooses to launch an appeal. As aforementioned, due to the Board’s narrow scope of authority over appeals, while only possessing the
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ability to recommend rather than decide upon policy changes, the creation of the Board will not necessarily solve this ingrained source of inaccuracy. Conclusion: Why Accuracy Matters This paper has argued that the creation of a Facebook Oversight Board fails to address the larger reality of enduring systemic problems driving inaccurate content moderation, ultimately working to impede some users’ right to public speech, while in other cases maintaining harmful digital attacks. This claim has been supported through examining key issues with the company’s guiding content moderation policy and the flaws in the platform’s deployment of moderation through human review and AI. Above all, accuracy matters because “norms of acceptability do not exist in a vacuum” (Reuben et al 2020, 2). Facebook’s 2.3 billion users “leave a giant footprint on the character of online speech” (Kadri and Klonick 2019, 2) with the moderation of online public discourse actively shaping this character. Inaccurate moderation can work to increase polarization, remove diversity of thought, heighten discrimination, and ultimately impede on users’ right to public speech (Reuben et al. 2017, 2). .
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References Allan, Richard. 2017. “Hard Questions: Who Should Decide What is Hate Speech in an Online Global Community?” Facebook Newsroom. June 27, 2017. https://about.fb.com/news/2017/06/hard-questions-hatespeech/ Angwin, Julia and Hannes Grassegger. 2017. “Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men From Hate Speech But Not Black Children.” ProPublica, June 28, 2017. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebookhate-speech-censorship-internal-documents-algorithms Binns, Reuben, Michael Veale, Max Van Kleek, and Nigel Shadbolt. 2017. “Like Trainer, Like Bot? Inheritance of Bias in Algorithmic Content Moderation.” Social Informatics: 405-415. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-31967256-4_32. Facebook. 2020. “Community Standards.” https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/violence_criminal_behavior. Fisher, Max. 2018. “Inside Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech.” New York Times, December 27, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/world/facebook-moderators.html Ghaffary, Shirin. 2020. “Here’s how Facebook plans to make final decisions about controversial content it’s taken down.” Vox. January 28, 2020. https://www.vox.com/2020/1/28/21112253/facebook-contentmoderation-system-supreme-court-oversight-board Gorwa, Robert, Reuben Binns, and Christian Katzenbach. 2020. “Algorithmic Content Moderation: Technical and Political Challenges in the automation of platform governance.” Big Data and Society 7, no. 1: 1- 15. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719897945. Kadri, Thomas and Kate Klonick. 2019. “Facebook v. Sullivan: Public Figures and Newsworthiness in Online Speech.” Southern California Law Review 93, no.37: 37-98. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3332530. Klonick, Kate. 2018. “The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech.” Harvard Law Review 131, no.1598: 1599 – 1670. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2937985. Klonick, Kate. 2019. “Does Facebook’s Oversight Board Finally Solve the Problem of Online Speech?” Centre for International Governance Innovation. October 28, 2019. https://www.cigionline.org/articles/does-facebooksoversight-board-finally-solve-problem-online-speech Munsif, Vengattil, and Paresh Dave. 2019. “Some Facebook content reviewers in India complain of low pay, high pressure.” Thomson Reuters. February 28, 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-content-indiafeature/some-facebook-content-reviewers-in-india-complain-of-low-pay-high-pressure-idUSKCN1QH15I
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Newton, Casey. 2019. “The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America.” The Verge. February 25, 2019. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-contentmoderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona Facebook. 2019. “Oversight Board Charter.” https://about.fb.com/wpcontent/uploads/2019/09/oversight_board_charter.pdf Patel, Faiza and Laura Hecht Felella. 2019. “Evaluating Facebook’s New Oversight Board for Content Moderation.” The Brennan Centre for Justice. November 27, 2019. https://www.brennancenter.org/ourwork/analysis-opinion/evaluating-facebooks-new-oversight-board-content-moderation. Zuckerberg, Mark. 2018. “A Blueprint for Online Governance.” Facebook. November 15, 2018. https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-blueprint-for-content-governance-%20andenforcement/10156443129621634.
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Climate Change as a Collective Harm: Evaluating the Mechanism and Extent of Individual Responsibility Rose Mardikian Edited by Emily Segal
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ABSTRACT While the recent political environment in the United States might prove otherwise, there has not and will probably never be a legitimate “pro climate change” group that is advocating for human-induced global warming and coordinating the actions of willed-individuals in pursuit of that goal. The reality of the environment’s instability is much bleaker in its aimlessness, for it is the sum of uncoordinated and unconcerted actions of many individuals. When those actions, like driving one’s car 15 kilometres one morning, are considered in isolation, they are “harmless” insofar as they cannot singlehandedly offbalance Earth’s climate. I will thus argue that climate change is an inherently collective act—and a model of collective responsibility should be employed—given that the harm of climate change could not come about without the uncoordinated, yet parallel actions of individuals who are acting rationally in pursuit of the goals they have been socialized to pursue. Introduction Climate change, as a collective harm, struggles to fit neatly into the categories that have been established by political theorists who have written about collective acts. The individuals who are participating in climate change are not part of a clear cooperative collective with intentions and objectives, which makes it particularly difficult to ascribe responsibility to the individual. As Isaacs claims in Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts, global warming is a “harmful cumulative consequence of uncoordinated parallel actions,” and the individuals who participate in this externality are not part of a collective entity “to which we might ascribe agency” (Isaacs 2011, 26). She further argues that the nature of the harm of climate change may generate collective and individual obligations, but the mechanism by which those obligations can be calculated and assigned remains underdeveloped. Others, like Kant, argue that responsibility cannot be attributed to the individual because of their causal insignificance and the “imperceptible marginal difference made by each individual contribution” (Kutz 2000, 118). In this paper, I will investigate the extent to which individuals are responsible for climate injustice, how they are responsible, and the subsequent implications that follow from the responsibility I have attributed to individuals for mitigating climate injustice. In order to find the mechanism by which and the extent to which individuals are responsible for climate injustice, I will employ Christopher Kutz’s quasi-participatory basis of accountability, which is a participatory account of responsibility that holds individuals accountable for the harm or wrong that is done collectively, independently of the actual difference the individual makes (Kutz 2000, 122). Further, I will argue that the social context within which these individuals are performing parallel actions that produce an unstructured harm must “itself be understood as cooperative” (Kutz 2000, 12). As Kutz argues, and as the case of climate change shows, we must consider all the transactions surrounding harm and understand how certain behavioural dispositions can be shaped by social contexts, which are inevitably shaped by the values of individuals.
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The Injustice of Climate Change Causes and Consequences of Climate Change The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report, released in 2022, has provided the greater public with damning evidence of human-induced global warming, which induces the “climate change” to which we commonly refer. Increased instances of flooding, wildfires, rising sea levels, hurricanes, and other severe weather events are some of the most prominent outcomes among the wide range of impacts that a shift in atmospheric temperature implies for humans and their respective ecosystems. This climate crisis has been to the detriment of present individuals, who have become increasingly threatened by food insecurity, displacement, and direct bodily harm. This suffering usually reigns onto individuals along racial and financial cleavages, often leaving the people who have contributed the least to global climate change paying the highest price: loss of their homes, loss of their lives, or loss of a general ability to pursue their well-being and a “good” life. While conceptions of justice vary greatly in scope and depend on what the respective theorists perceives to be a “good” or “fulfilling” life, I find that Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s capability approach to justice is a partial theory of justice that is the most relevant to the type of harms that are being suffered by the victims of the climate crisis. In this conception, justice demands that all humans find themselves in a position to develop or attain core capabilities, some of which include the right to live a life of normal length, the right to bodily health and integrity, and the right to have control over one’s environment politically and materially (Robeyns and Byskov 2021). I will first outline the mathematical mechanism by which the collective end of climate change is attained, which is a series of aggregate, uncoordinated actions that each contribute to, or participate in, a devastating externality. To understand how individuals participate in the injustice of climate change, we must first understand how the process was first triggered and how individual actions perpetuate the imbalance. The emission of carbon dioxide, among other gases, has a net warming effect because it is molecularly predisposed to trapping heat in the atmosphere. CO2 is an input in plants’ carbon cycle and the greenhouse gas is thus removed from the atmosphere by carbon sinks, like forests. As the Earth gradually increases in temperature, glaciers have melted at unprecedented rates, which has caused sea levels to rise and detrimental flooding in metropolitan areas and islands. The loss of the large expanse of white ice and snow also contributes to warming given that these areas once served as “cooling” areas off which long-wave radiation reflects to the atmosphere. Understanding these atmospheric processes is key to explaining how humans have deregulated precious regulatory mechanisms and triggered positive feedback mechanisms that are causing unprecedented levels of global warming. Before the onset of industrialization, Earth’s environmental system was largely self-regulating, and a wide range of negative feedback mechanisms fostered a livable climate. Beginning in the 19th century, however, with the advent of industrialization and the burning of coal, a disproportionate amount of carbon began being emitted. Since then, the human experience has been dominated by carbon-heavy industrial processes and modes of life.
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Attributing Responsibility to the Individual How Responsibility is Deduced Through Intention or Causation: The Complicity Model There are two main methods by which Kutz attributes responsibility to individuals in collective contexts: intention and causation. Kutz refers to the Dresden bombing at the end of the WWII to explain how moral accountability of individuals for harms was deduced because this event constitutes a jointly intentional action. At the tail end of the Second World War, thousands of combat flyers and conducted a lethal bomb raid, leaving over an estimated amount of 35,000 civilians killed, primarily by intense heat and asphyxiation (Kutz 2000, 117). As Kutz emphasizes, each pilot’s causal contribution to the conflagration of Dresden “was marginal to the point of insignificance,” which implies that the Dresden bombing fails to meet the threshold of causation to assign responsibility to the individual pilots. Had one pilot opted out of the raid, the result would have still been lethal, and that pilot’s nonparticipation would have not affected the outcome: “the firestorm was already raging before many crews dropped their bombs” (Kutz 2000, 118). Kutz thus assesses the cooperative structure of the bombers’ interaction and introduces his complicity principle, which holds that one should be held accountable for what others do when they have intentionally participated in the harm they cause, and that they should be held accountable for the harm done together, “independently of the actual difference” that the individual has made” (Kutz 2000, 122). The question is, then, how do we deduce a nonconsequential relationship between one act (one pilot’s causal insignificance) and a set of acts (the conflagration) as attributable to an individual? The key, Kutz argues, is that these pilots were not acting in a parallel fashion in pursuance of a private end, but a cooperative fashion in pursuance of a collective goal. The consequence of this collective endeavor, the conflagration of Dresden with over 35,000 civilians dead, is thus a result of the intentional participation of each pilot. The case of climate change presents a series of difficulties for this model. If an individual learns about the negative impacts of meat consumption and private transportation and decides to abandon both of those methane/carbon-heavy practices, their contribution to the mitigation of climate change is causally insignificant. Similarly, an individual’s persistent financial support of carbon-heavy industries is not single-handedly causing the Earth’s regulatory mechanisms to break down and trigger a fatal warming pattern. Thus, people could argue that if their participation in the climate crisis does not make a perceptible difference to the externality or outcome that is brought about together, then they should not be held accountable for the collective act (Kutz 2000, 6). While any emission of carbon inevitably contributes to the warming of the atmosphere, this minute increase in temperature is morally negligible and may be “too small to be morally relevant” (Polkamp 2019, 59). Given that the case of climate change fails to meet the threshold of causation to attribute responsibility to the individual, we must now evaluate whether it meets the threshold of intention. Can it be said that the individuals who participate in the externality of global warming by eating meat, funding carbon-heavy industries, or driving their car to work every day, are doing so with the intent of producing this externality and, thus, this harm? Unlike the Dresden bombing case, wherein Kutz found that the individual pilots were acting cooperatively, the individuals who participate in producing climate change are acting in a parallel, yet unconcerted fashion. There is no clear organization that is coordinating the actions of many individuals to
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intentionally achieve the collective end of climate change. Participants are not acting with the intention of producing an unlivable climate, for that would be against their rational self-interest. Climate change and its widespread impacts on the human condition are all negative and will make meeting the threshold of simply surviving exponentially more laborious and difficult. Present participants in the collective harm are prioritizing their private short-term interests for convenience, like buying cheap clothing to put on their backs and carbon-intensive foods to feed their children. In doing so, individuals put their long-term interests, like a sustainable climate and a habitable future for their children, on the backburner. The case of climate change, thus, fails to meet either the intentional or causal threshold of attributability of responsibility to the individual. Accepting this theoretical finding would imply that the link between a collective act and the mathematical mechanism by which it comes about (individual participation and, thus, accountability) disappears. Yet, the grave harms caused by climate change are nonetheless a reality and suffered by a growing majority of the population. Since individuals are, as Kutz argues, the “ultimate loci of normative motivation and deliberation,” however, “only forms of accountability aimed at and sensitive to what individuals do” can successfully mitigate collective harms (Kutz 2000, 7). Thus saying, we must find a theory that does not rely solely on causal significance, nor intent, to attribute to individuals the responsibility for the collective harm of climate change. Quasi-Participatory Basis of Accountability With the absence of causation and simple intention, Kutz’s theory of quasi-participation can attribute responsibility to the individual by conceptualizing the agents of harm as members of a group that “depend on one another for the maintenance of the infrastructure that allows their way of life” (Kutz 2000, 186). Further, Kutz argues that there are sets of individuals who share similar values and perpetuate the very infrastructure that may be causing an external harm, for the sake of continuing to live their particular way of life. While this may not be a goal-oriented collective, per se, it can instead be considered a collection of collectives that benefit from and perpetuate similar infrastructure and social, economic, and cultural processes that each have a devastating externality. Instead of perceiving individuals as isolated units, Kutz recognizes the interconnectedness of agents and recommends identifying the groups within which participants find themselves to generate the necessary “sense of accountability” (Kutz 2000, 187). Individuals are each intimately engaged in cooperative ventures that rely on each other’s participation to perpetuate the system/infrastructure from which they benefit. These individuals should, thus, be held responsible for the externalities that may result from the explicit perpetuation of this system/infrastructure. While the mechanism by which responsibility is attributable to the individual in the complicity model is an intention to participate in the collective harm, an individual’s intention to perpetuate these socially conditioned desires/habits, Kutz argues, constitutes a quasi-participatory intention. By drawing a line from the externality in question to the dominant values that tend to perpetuate this externality, individuals can more easily realize the mechanism by which they may be appropriately held accountable for that externality. This phenomenon can be clearly identified in the United States, particularly regarding the manifestation of the seemingly integral values of self-sufficiency, individualism, privacy, and property. These values, which can be partly attributed to the country’s history and its revolutionary experience, have grown to become an intrinsic part of the American identity. The success of an American is largely dependent upon their eventual acquisition of a private vehicle, a home, and an autonomous, self-sustaining family unit. These, as Kutz calls them, “unreflective confluences of habit and sentiment” and “tacit agreements” are then manifested in the socioeconomic structures, which are shaped by public policy choices and private behaviors (Kutz 2000, 188). The manifestation of these individual values and ideals on an institutional scale can help explain why a random American’s set of emissions will almost certainly be 36 times higher than a French person’s emissions, for example. A typical European city is compact and has dense,
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convenient public transportation networks which work to disincentivize citizens from using their private vehicles. An average American city, however, is typically characterized by long distances between establishments and little to no public transportation options, which incentivizes the use of private vehicles. If a middle-class American family allocates funds to provide each teenager with a private vehicle when they turn 16, then they are valuing private transportation highly despite the cost of the carbon that the extra cars emit and thus, engaging with the harm via quasi-participatory intention. In his article titled “Climate Change and Individual Responsibility,” Hiller discusses the moral implications of an afternoon pleasure ride in a gas-guzzling car and refers to the “system of driving” as a higherorder entity to which individuals contribute and uphold. Further, the aggregate of casual Sunday pleasure rides in gasguzzling cars “creates and maintains the system of driving, such as building roads, drilling for oil, etc” (Hiller 2011, 354).[17] Indeed, these drives, considered in isolation, would be inconsequential, but the reality is that they are contribute to the normalization of private vehicle ownership and gratuitous, unnecessary activities. These trends demonstrate how values that are propagated at the individual level are then amalgamated at the institutional level to legislate relevant public policies. By framing the climate crisis within these value systems, individuals can more easily identify their participation in the externality, for these values often form parts of their identities. This theory of individual responsibility rules out those “purely institutional approaches to the problem” because it assumes that the harmful social structures and systems are upheld by individual values (Kutz 2000, 123). The contemporary environmental movement often pins responsibility for climate action on major corporations, as they emit most greenhouse gasses. Corporations are, however, funded by individual demand for products and services that require carbon-intensive production. Once an individual can identify the social structures/systems with which they are intimately engaged and the subsequent role they play in participating in the harmful externality, they can begin to find ways to disengage. Addressing the individual values that provoke dirty production may be a more sustainable and effective approach to mitigating the climate crisis over the long term. Top down, institutional changes that are aimed at incentivizing “green energy” rather than fossil fuels, for example, tend to overlook the individual, socialized values that have played a role in inducing the climate crisis. Without addressing the predominantly western values and habits, such as overconsumption, which have inevitably incentivized cheap, dirty production, the climate crisis, and the human rights abuses/injustices that it subsequently amplifies, will inevitably persist. Considering the Appropriateness of the Liability Model and the Role of Agency Some scholars, particularly Iris Marion Young, argue that it is inappropriate to label these individual agents who are complicit with a harm as morally blameworthy, when individuals who have actively planned and directed harms have also been deemed complicit with a harm. Further, Young struggles to find that individuals can be found liable for a harm they did not necessarily have the intent to produce. Young recommends that we should conceptualize “responsibility” differently and reserve individualized criminal or tort liability for individual agents who “can be specifically identified as causing the harm” (Young 2011, 104). The social connection model works to recognize that individuals participate in the harm of perpetuating social structures in which injustice occurs and claims that individuals should, thus, be held responsible, which implies behaving in a morally appropriate way to increase the likelihood of obtaining a certain outcome (Young 2011, 104). A distinguishing characteristic of the social connection model is that, as the name implies, background conditions are evaluated and responsibility for the injustices produced by structural processes are shared by the collective, rather than attributed to each contributing individual (Young 2011, 105). Essentially, Young is arguing that the foundation off which liability is attributed to the individuals participating in the creation of climate change is not solid enough. While Kutz finds that the individuals who are contributing to some sort of externality are each complicit and responsible for mitigating this harm, Young argues
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that this theory fails to recognize that some individuals may contribute to the harm differently and could be responsible in a different way (Young 2011, 106). Within the liability concept of responsibility, the harm that is committed by a clear liable agent is typically perceived as a “deviation from an acceptable baseline” (Young 2011, 107). The redress provided by the liable agent is an attempt to restore that initial baseline or equilibrium of morally acceptable background conditions. The social connection model, on the contrary, attempts to identify and absolve structural injustices by bringing those morally “accepted” background conditions under consideration and evaluating the extent to which they may contribute to morally unjust outcomes. By participating in, and thus perpetuating, these structural processes that may have morally unjust outcomes, individuals are, Young argues, responsible in relation to that injustice. This responsibility stands in stark contrast to individuals being judged as morally or legally blameworthy for injustices that result from structural processes in three distinct ways. Firstly, given that the outcome or externality of parallel, uncoordinated actions is not the goal of the participating individuals, Young argues that we cannot attribute liability to these individuals. Secondly, these individuals operating within socially accepted structures are often conditioned to perceive their actions as right and warranted. Finally, acting outside of the constraints established by these social structures is often perceived as impossible or costly by the contributing individual agents (Young 2011, 108). To develop a more detailed account of how these contributions to collective harms should not fall under a liability model, Young considers a school zoning scenario in the United States. While some parents are aware that their bidding on houses in desirable neighborhoods solely to send their children to a well-equipped and funded school perpetuates inequality “in schools between neighborhoods and districts,” they nonetheless insist that there is no other option. When presented with the difficult choice of perpetuating a structural injustice and sending one’s child to a good school that will help their child succeed, parents will value the outcome that is most directly related to them. This unwillingness to sacrifice individual benefit is mainly due to the conventional theory of collective action, which is very closely related to the climate crisis. This theory prescribes that the socially optimal outcome could be attained if most individuals cooperated and paid a cost, but individuals have no incentive to do so because of conflicting individual interests and the dwindling confidence that other individuals will cooperate too. In the case of the school zoning scenario, parents are reluctant to fight against the structural injustice and send their child to a poorly funded school, and instead choose what they “hope is best for their children in the belief that others are doing the same” (Young 2011, 108). Given their lack of confidence that their noncompliance with the injustice will actually make any perceptible difference, combined with the set of constraints within which the individuals are operating, they continue to participate in the harmful collective harm. Young’s apprehension to blame individuals for structural injustices that they are participating in because of the constraints within which they are operating is well-placed and valid. Different incentives combined with information asymmetries foster an environment within which individuals prioritize egotistical, strategic behavior, which is always compliance with the social structures that may have negative/unjust externalities. The case and fate of climate change hinges on individual constraints and the limited opportunity they may have to radically change their behavioral dispositions. In reference to the American middle-class family that is putting money aside to obtain another car for their 16-year-old is operating within a set of constraints that make behaving in another, more environmentally friendly manner, next to impossible. The family may live in a city characterized by urban sprawl, which is often plagued with meager public transportation options and long distances between business establishments, schools, and other essential forms of infrastructure. Similarly, poor consumers are more likely to consume traded goods, like canned foods and other cheap clothing, which tend to have remarkably high carbon prices, given the vast transportation network required for its arrival in the importing country. These
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instances demonstrate very well why Young is apprehensive to hold individual agents “liable” for climate injustices, for their persistent participation in these structures are largely outside of the individual agent’s control. Another element of Young’s critique of Kutz’s liability model is that it is far too backward looking and seeks to hold agents accountable for restitution for an isolatable event that has reached a terminus (Young 2011, 109). Young holds that the social connection model rests on the assumption that structural injustices are ongoing and composed of varying levels of participation that make attributing proportionate liability impossible. Rather than attributing responsibility to individuals for the purpose of redress, Young argues that individuals should thoughtfully reconsider their roles within the structural actions, policies, and practices, and their subsequent structural outcomes. The final, important distinction between the two models, Young claims, is that the social connection model requires a shared notion of responsibility. Only through mass mobilization and collective action can we begin to alter the harmful social structures by which we are constrained. Given that individuals are often socially and economically limited in their capability to oppose the harmful structures around which their lives are built, Young recommends discharging individual political responsibility to begin changing the structure (Young 2011, 112). This political responsibility can be discharged in a range of ways, including directly engaging with one’s surrounding community and helping others draw the link between our participation in social structures and the harms that result from their existence, as well as making claims upon government agents to pursue justice. Response to Young’s Criticisms and Adjusting Kutz’s Quasi-Participatory Account of Individual Responsibility Young’s most substantive reproach of Kutz’s quasi-participatory account of individual responsibility is that attributing liability to an individual whose contribution to the collective harm is neither intended nor causally significant is morally unjustifiable. Additionally, Kutz’s assigning of responsibility to individuals given their participation in the collective leaves little room for exclusive and different attributions of responsibility, which may very well be warranted, for some individuals contribute more or less intensely to the collective harm of climate change. Kutz attempts to respond to these anticipated criticisms in chapter seven of Complicity by admitting that the western justice system is largely ill-equipped to deal with liability within the context of collective harms to which many people contribute. Young's concern that Kutz’s liability model applied to structural injustices is too punitive is misplaced, given that Kutz’s proposal to extend the scope of criminal and civil liability is primarily to hold agents who have either participated intentionally or causally to collective harms. In the case of climate change, and other externalities/structural harms that are the product of uncoordinated actions, the legal rule associated with assigning individual liability would not be normatively defensible, given that it could not be “fairly operationalized” (Kutz 2000, 208). As both Kutz and Young have argued, the types of actions that contribute to the structural injustices, such as climate change, are intimately connected with embedded social structures, as well as the costs and limitations that these structures present to individual agents. While the epistemic constraints may be and have been overcome, albeit difficultly, in the case of structured collective harms to which individuals have either intentionally or causally significantly contributed, instances that fall under the quasi-participatory account of responsibility within unstructured collective harms do not fall under the potential scope of criminal or civil liability. Kutz sharply pivots from a discussion regarding clear cases of individual moral accountability to one regarding relations in which “collective harms arise from the independent acts of many marginal participants,” which may account for an association of criminal and civil liability with the quasi-participatory account of individual responsibility (Kutz 2000, 208). Given the embeddedness of social behavior/values, the narrow constraints within which individuals are operating, and the blurred lines between
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perpetrators and victims, however, this quasi-participatory account of individual responsibility should be understood as a paradigm through which individuals can assess their participatory role within structural injustices, rather than a formal, judicial method of attributing criminality or liability to individuals. If Kutz’s quasi-participatory account of individual responsibility is not aimed at assigning criminal or civil liability, then what role does it play in answering questions regarding the extent to which, and how, individuals are responsible for the structural injustice of climate change? If the harm is, innately, a product of parallel, yet uncoordinated actions, then we must identify and understand what values and subsequent social structures incentivize individuals to act in similar, harmful ways. Addressing large-scale collective harms thus requires individuals to internalize “collective-oriented motivations of complicity and solidarity” and adopt a profoundly grassroots and bottom-up approach to the collective harm of climate change. This will inevitably require a powerful understanding of how certain values actively perpetuate injustice on a massive scale and a subsequent shift of values to address the harm at hand. Ideally, these reformed attitudes would be more sensitive to harmful patterns and, thus, more likely to mobilize politically for an alteration or cessation of those harmful social structures that constrain the possibilities for individuals to non-comply with injustice. In Responsibility for Justice, Young also expressed concern that Kutz’s quasi-participatory account of individual responsibility fails to differentiate morally significant differences among individuals. Surely, individuals contribute to the collective harm of climate change at varying degrees and might have more intention or causal weight compared to other participants. This criticism is valid, yet Kutz recognizes that individuals make very different contributions to the realization of a collective harm because of “differences in power, knowledge, or causality” (Kutz 2000, 257). Individual agents within an unstructured collective are heterogenous and this should be central to any individual’s assessment of their quasi-participatory role in a collective harm and the way mitigation of climate change is addressed by international governments. The actions taken by an individual after their assessment of their own role within a collective harm is dependent upon their power, knowledge, and causality. Power, in this context, can be understood in two parts: a.) the constraints within which an individual is operating and b.) the influence that they have over the potential behavior of others. As Young reproached in her book, some individuals have a limited capacity to non-comply with the injustice to which they are contributing. Those in more privileged positions, for example, have a greater level of responsibility to align their actions against the structural injustice in question because they are more likely to causally impact or deviate the trajectory of the injustice. This is where Young’s criticism and recognition of differing power capabilities in mitigating structural injustices is particularly helpful and has the potential to strengthen Kutz’s quasi-participatory account of individual responsibility. A more detailed and explicit recognition of how different levels of privilege should inform the way individuals see themselves as participants in the structural harm would render the theory more applicable and useful. Individuals in Western countries who lead carbon-heavy lives and have excess financial/temporal resources should play a disproportionately larger role in mobilizing for the alteration of those harmful social structures. The second component of power is the influence that an individual may or may not have over the potential behavior of others. An individual’s personal responsibility may vary depending on the influence they have on a local, national, or international scale. Those employed in public office, for example, have a greater chance of influencing the trajectory of the injustice, due to increased access to resources and their proximity to the social structures that incentivize individuals to comply with the injustice. The extent to which an individual is knowingly or unknowingly participating in the injustice at hand should also prescribe the level of responsibility the individual has to mitigate the harm. Without the knowledge of the external harm of their participating in a social
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structure, an individual cannot properly evaluate and alter their behavior. If an individual is, however, well-aware of the implication of their actions within the greater climate crisis, then they have an increased responsibility to reevaluate their behavior. The causal significance of an individual’s actions also carries varying levels of responsibility, for some individuals inevitably contribute more to the climate crisis. For example, individuals who hire private jets for domestic/international flights, own several properties, and engage in other carbon-heavy actions have a greater responsibility to mitigate the harm because an alteration of their practices and a reflection on their values have more of a chance to impact the trajectory of the injustice. When we focus on the individual and, subsequently, community-level values that may or may not contribute to a collective harm, we can avoid prescribing broad-brush climate solutions for a wide range of people, without considering the individual/communal motivations for actions that might be looked down upon. Historically, the global environmental movement has poorly recognized the heterogeneity of the global community and has advocated for legislation, aimed at environmental preservation, without considering the cultural implications of such top-down legislation. A striking example is when we witnessed a severe population collapse of whales due to the growth of commercial whaling in the mid 1800s, which led to widespread legislation aimed at regulating the environmentally harmful industry. In the early 1990s, however, the Makah tribe in the United States began engaging with national and global forums on whaling to regain their right to whale. The Makah people have a unique relationship with whales and view the species as essential to preserving their culture, identity, and tradition. As the Makah tribe began mobilizing to restore their right to whaling, they faced severe backlash from international environmental organizations, which insisted that whales had a right to live, notably because they share certain biological and social traits with humans. In this specific case, we can see two profoundly different sets of values that manifest in unique ways on a global scale. While the Makah tribe have a largely integrated view of nature and see themselves as part of it, Western culture often perpetuates the trope of the natural sublime and/or the trope of frontier-environmentalism. This is often characterized by distinguishing humans from nature, which normalizes nature as an “other,” and inevitably creates a distance that can lead to nature’s commodification and exploitation. Another contemporary example of how we each belong to collectives, composed of differing values and contributions to collective harms, is the recent alignment of veganism with moral righteousness in the context of mitigating climate change. Primarily western environmental movements have advocated for the removal of meat, dairy, and fish from the individual’s diet to reduce one’s emissions. This broad-brush solution to the collective harm of climate change focuses on the object of exploitation and emissions, like the cow that emits methane, rather than the individual/collective values, like overconsumption or overproduction, that perpetuate the social structures that produce a glaring externality, like climate change. While Western values manifest in the form of large-scale farming techniques, massive amounts of food waste, etc., several indigenous communities’ relationship with nature allow members to consume animals and their byproducts in a sustainable and respectful manner, which often leads to more fruitful land and resource management. Consumers of fish in Kentucky, where there is little local fishing, for example, are participating in a fundamentally different cooperative system of fishing than consumers of fish within the Kwakiutl coastal First Nation cooperative system of fishing. This example demonstrates how a reconsideration of or reflection on individual values can profoundly impact the trajectory or occurrence of a collective harm. Conclusion Using Kutz’s quasi-participatory account of individual responsibility, the individual has been found to play an integral role in the result of climate change and should thus be held morally responsible for its mitigation. While individual responsibility cannot be attributed using a liability/criminality model because the case of climate change is
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an unstructured collective harm and there lacks causal significance or intent of individuals, the importance of individual behavior cannot be discounted and a theory that prescribes appropriate individual actions is paramount. Kutz argues that while individuals are not participating in a goal-oriented collective with the aim of climate change, they are, nonetheless, participating in and, thus, perpetuating social structures that cause injustice. These social structures should be understood as cooperative collectives in which individuals each play a participatory role and should thus be held accountable to varying degrees. It serves as a helpful tool of reflection for individuals to evaluate their individual moral responsibility for mitigating the grave injustice of climate change.
Climate Change as a Collective Harm: Evaluating the Mechanism and Extent of Individual Responsibility
References Hiller, Avram. 2011. “Climate Change and Individual Responsibility.” The Monist 94, no. 3 (July): 349-368. Isaacs, Tracy. 2011. Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts. New York: Oxford University Press. Kutz, Christopher. 2000. Complicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parks, Bradley C. and Timmons Roberts. 2006. “Globalization, Vulnerability to Climate Change, and Perceived Injustice.” Society and Natural Resources 19, no. 4: 337-355. Polkamp, Anne. 2019. “Individual Contributions to Collective Harm: How Important is Causation.” Ethics & Global Politics 12, no. 1 (2019): 52-60. Robeyns, Ingrid and Morten Fibieger Byskov. 2021. “The Capability Approach.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter). Young, Iris Marion. 2011. Responsibility for Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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Designing Dominicanidad: The Social Construction of Race and Identity in the Dominican Republic Rachel J. Ernest-Cohen Edited by Matthew Molinaro
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ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the social construction of race and identity in the Dominican Republic. It draws on the theoretical framework elaborated by Anthony Marx by borrowing his logic of the construction of race as a crucial component of the state-building and nation-consolidation process. In the case of the Dominican Republic, the unique relationship between race and Dominican conceptions of “blackness” has been shaped by the historical binary between the Dominican Republic and its sister nation, Haiti. At various points in the Dominican historical narrative, notions of “Dominican-ness” and “antiHaitianism” have interacted to produce a distinct conception of what “Dominican” implies as both a racial category and a national identity. Specifically, the author contends that the construction of race in the Dominican Republic was negotiated and undertaken through a state-sponsored ideology that privileged the nation’s Spanish, Catholic and largely European heritage (with some attention paid to indigenous ancestry as well) while eclipsing from view the “undesirable” legacies of African and Haitian migration. Introduction In the past two decades, Latin American racial dynamics and the mechanisms through which race is constructed and delineated have been the subject of much academic inquiry. The fields of Afro-Latin and AfroCaribbean Studies have experienced a boom in scholarly output as attempts are made to shed light on the historical processes and geographically specific factors that determine how a given population develops systems of racial identification. For instance, Telles notes the emergence of a “black movement” in mid-20 century Brazil, which encouraged racial classification along a binary of negro (black) and branco (white). Telles argues that the reclamation of the term negro is rooted in a desire to “diminish ambiguity and destigmatize blackness” and that the movement generates opportunity for mobilization “in response to shared discrimination and exclusion” (“Race in Another America” 2014b, 85). In Brazil, the Black movement coexists with other competing systems of classification, including the official census categories and the racial identifiers that exist in popular discourse. th
Distinct patterns of racial classification exist in nearly all Latin American nations. In fact, Telles’ work Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America presents a systematic examination of ethnoracial classification, inequality, and discrimination based on data collected through the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (“Pigmentocracies” 2014a, 2). Curiously, Telles excludes the Dominican Republic from the purview of his study; this may owe to the fact that Dominicans routinely deny Blackness and African ancestry rather than uphold them as symbols of racial and cultural diversity. Indeed, the unique relationship between race and Dominican conceptions of Blackness has been shaped by the historical binary between the Dominican Republic and its sister nation, Haiti. Blackness as is it is understood in the Dominican Republic “evokes an African past, dark skin color, poverty, and other negative associations,” elements that have been consciously effaced from the Dominican collective imagination and attributed instead to the Haitian racial Other (Simmons 2009, 4). Haiti and its inhabitants are therefore positioned as the historical, cultural, and racial antithesis to Dominican national identity, such that this rhetoric has been consistently and strategically deployed as a mythmaking and nation building technology. This paper draws on the theoretical framework elaborated by Anthony Marx in his seminal work, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil, by borrowing his logic of the construction
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of race as a crucial component of the state building and nation-consolidation process. At various points in the Dominican historical narrative, notions of “Dominican-ness” and “anti-Haitianism” (henceforth referred to by its Spanish name, antihaitianismo) have interacted to produce a distinct conception of what “Dominican” implies as both a racial category and a national identity. Specifically, I argue that a state-sponsored program carried out the construction of race in the Dominican Republic, particularly under the Trujillo regime, that privileged the nation’s Spanish, Catholic and largely European heritage while eclipsing from view the “undesirable” legacies of African and Haitian migration. Popularized understandings of Dominican identity are further complicated by the manipulation of Indigenous heritage as a source of “noble” ancestry. In addition, my claims echo those of Tillis who contends that “mythologized for national and global consumption is the idea that the Dominican Republic is a white nation infiltrated by blacks, or in today’s context, Haitians” (Tillis 2011, 7:44). My analysis departs from that of Marx as Haitians continue to have limited political agency in the Dominican Republic to resist state discrimination; it is therefore difficult to formulate an argument that emphasizes “race making from below.” In sum, the state’s political elites formulated and legitimized race and national identity “from above” such that their specific economic and geographic interests could be catered to through the elaboration of a persistent and exclusionary antihaitianismo ideology. Theoretical Framework According to Marx, states “make race” by enforcing racial distinctions or refraining from doing so. He asserts that “[s]pecific state policy is historically embedded, reflects ideology, is constrained by dominant political and economic claims, and responds to protests” (2). In keeping with this line of argumentation, I argue in favour of the view that antihaitianismo, operating in tandem with its twin ideology, Hispanidad, was a key component of the Dominican nation-building project. More specifically, the articulation of a Dominican national identity steeped in its Hispanic and Indigenous roots––and one that is diametrically opposed to that of neighbouring Haiti––was a crucial component in the process of nation-formation and state image building in the 19 and 20 centuries. This practice of national image-building was commonplace among newly formed nations wherein state elites made measured and concerted efforts to project upon the global stage a carefully manufactured political and economic identity. Beginning with the historical moment of Dominican independence from Haiti and sharpened under the Trujillo regime, a racially sanitized discourse was strategically disseminated to render the Dominican Republic more palatable to the global community. According to Tillis, “in their attempt to evade the truth of their miscegenated African heritage, the Dominican Republic as nation has engaged in psychological projection whereby the burden of its disdain has been cast upon those deemed to be the ‘true’ blacks of Hispaniola, these being Haitians” (17:44). th
th
This paper acknowledges race as a historically contextualized and geographically specific social construction - in other words, race ought to be understood through the lens of national history. Interpretations must consider the geographic specificities of individual cases; in this instance, the division of Hispaniola into two historically and culturally differentiated nations. As Simmons asserts, racial identities “are constructed, learned and internalized,” even as they are collectively imagined as fixed and immutable (2009, 10). As such, individual and collective understandings of “who I am” and “who we are” in terms of racial identity are “rooted in history, place and experience” (Simmons 2009, 10). For example, most Dominicans reject Blackness as a racial identifier but will frequently refer to other people as “black” using the terms negro and negra. These terms are not intended to specify one's pigment or racial category; rather, they are common terms of endearment that are “very similar to the usage of the n-word among African Americans to connote a
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history, connection, and relationship between people” (Simmons 2009, 10). Interestingly, the non-transferability of homeland social categories within diasporic communities provides meaningful evidence in favour of the claim that race is historically and geographically situated. Dominicans in the United States who, despite clearly having African ancestry, attempt to metaphorically whiten themselves through the ways in which they identify racially will likely raise eyebrows and potentially, provoke resentment among Black Americans (Simmons 2009, 4). Finally, in terms of the theory pertaining to language and identity, this paper also draws on Nobles’ logic of the census as a crucial actor in the production and dissemination of racial identity as a meaningful social category. As she states in Shades of Citizenship, “[r]acial membership and racial boundaries are actively created and recreated through language, thought, social interactions, and institutional processes” (Nobles 2000, xi). Censuses, which are inevitably political in nature, are thus key agents in the creation of race by the state. Even beyond the context of the census, the racial identifiers employed in popular discourse to categorize and classify people contain valuable information about what they choose to highlight of their identity and what they choose to conceal. Mentions of the Dominican cédula as well as terms like indio, mestizo and mulato throughout this paper will help to elucidate this point. Colonial Perspectives of Race The Dominican Republic, originally Santo Domingo, was one of the first European settlements in the New World. Following the conquest of Hispaniola by the Spanish Crown in the late fifteenth century, the colonists rapidly depleted the island’s gold reserves and eradicated the Taíno Indigenous population. This prompted an economic “crisis [that] was temporarily palliated with the introduction of sugarcane cultivation and slavery” (“Race and Politics” 2000, 22). By the seventeenth century, driven by a desire to “expand its colonial possessions in the New World,” the French Crown had firmly established the permanent settlement Saint-Dominguein in the Western portion of Hispaniola (“Black—but Not Haitian” 2012, 2). This marks the beginning of a highly antagonistic relationship between the two colonial establishments and later, between the modern nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Early in the colonial rule of Santo Domingo, the administrative elite formulated racial prejudices by virtue of the importation of African slaves to address the colony’s labour shortage. According to Sagás, even after Santo Domingo’s sugar plantations were abandoned in the late sixteenth century, “the racial prejudices and racist social structures created by the colonial administration remained in place for centuries, particularly among the white colonial upper classes” (“Race and Politics” 2000, 23). Moreover, the balance of economic power and global prestige at the time leaned in favour of Saint-Domingue, which enjoyed impressive growth due to its large slave population and its strong agro-exporting economy. As such, a nascent Dominican nationalism flourished in the eighteenth century as Dominicans sought to construct a collective identity to distinguish themselves from the Black and French Other (“Race and Politics” 2000, 24). These nationalist sentiments brought about “the development of a dual prejudice against the people of the West: a national-cultural prejudice against ‘French’ culture and civilization (which were considered alien and different), topped by a racial prejudice against the nonEuropean population of the West (which was considered twice as inferior – culturally and racially)” (Howard 2001, 27; “Race and Politics” 24-25).
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In 1795, Spain ceded the eastern portion of Hispaniola to the French; this agreement was formally articulated in the Treaty of Basel and enforced by Toussaint Louverture, “general-in-chief of the armies of SaintDomingue and former slave leader” (Howard 2001, 27). Louverture formally abolished slavery at the beginning of the 19 century, and Saint-Domingue forces occupied Santo Domingo under the prominent leader’s command. Only a few years later, in 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint’s successor, successfully led the Haitian Revolution, and the nation was declared independent from France (Howard 2001, 27; “Race and Politics” 2000, 27). Haitian independence and its hold over Santo Domingo revived the early Dominican nationalism of the eighteenth century, or Hispanidad, that championed the Spanish cultural heritage, Catholic religion, and “white,” civilized population of the former Spanish colony (Tillis 2011, 11:44; “Race and Politics” 2000, 28). This stood in stark contrast to the image Dominicans held of Haitians: “they were black, they practiced voodoo, and they had an African culture with a thin French veneer” (“Race and Politics” 28-29). Because the elites of Santo Domingo clung so tightly to its Spanish roots, the colony was voluntarily returned to the Spanish Crown in 1809 – this arrangement lasted until Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer annexed Santo Domingo and incorporated it into the Republic of Haiti in 1822 (“Race and Politics” 2000, 28-29). th
The 22 years of Haitian rule extending from 1822 to 1844 marks a significant point of contention in the Dominican national imaginary. The period of Haitian occupation continues to act as a “historical referent for anti-Haitian sentiment” among Dominicans; it is regarded as “a persistent threat to Dominican sovereignty and has served as a basis for what has become a nationalized racialized discourse that continues to separate the two sister island nations” (Howard 2001, 28; Tillis 15:30). According to Sagás, the unification of Hispaniola failed to promote a sense of brotherhood and foster amiable relations between the two nations––if anything, animosity increased to an all-time high and Dominican elites sowed seeds of resentment towards their Haitian sovereigns (“Race and Politics” 2000, 31). Curiously, Torres-Saillant departs from the more conservative view that Dominicans were extremely resistant to Haitian rule and claims instead that Boyer’s abolition of slavery in 1822 actually brought the two feuding nations closer together (Howard 2001, 28). Nonetheless, the political ineptitude and economic decline of the Haitian administration, in addition to irreconcilable cultural differences between Haitians and Dominicans, culminated in rebellion against Haitian authorities on February 27 , 1844. At this point, the Dominican Republic declared its independence from Haiti. Paradoxically, support for Dominican independence among Santo Domingo’s Black population was contingent upon the struggle’s inclusion of Black political figures such as Francisco del Rosario Sánchez and José Joaquín Puello, as well as a firm stance against slavery, as the prospect of separation from Haiti had sparked fears over the reestablishment of slavery in the newly sovereign nation (“Race and Politics 2000, 31”). th
Constructing the Racial Other Immediately following the Dominican Republic’s claim to independence, state elites began to use antihaitianismo to “cloak their annexationist ideas” (“Race and Politics 2000, 32”). These elites had a vested economic interest in annexation and perceived it as a viable trajectory to political stability. Dominican officials regarded Spain as the most feasible guardian against Haitian encroachments, a concern that would linger long past 1844; as such, the Dominican Republic was reannexed to Spain in 1861. However, this “ill-fated annexation” would quickly come to an end by 1865 as it “crashed against the nationalist feelings of the majority of the population, who feared a return to the aristocratic inequities of the Spanish colony” (Howard 28; “Race and Politics” 33-34). Thus, the Dominican Republic of 1865 was a nation grappling with its newfound liberty and its desire to redefine itself in the eyes of the global community. It is within this context of a fledgling nation and the quest for a unifying national
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identity that mythmaking and revisionist history in relation to the construction of a racial past became instruments for the state to suppress those elements of the country’s historical narrative that were deemed undesirable. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, “intense economic changes and political infighting” (“Race and Politics” 34) characterized the political climate of the Dominican Republic. Coupled with the growing recognition of a distinctive Dominican culture and national conscience detached from its Spanish colonial roots, these circumstances prompted concerted efforts among the Dominican intelligentsia to draw upon new currents of thought in order to consolidate the nation. Indigenismo was one such ideology; it encompassed a highly romanticized and blatantly ahistorical view of Dominican genetic makeup as the product of mixture between Spanish colonists and the indigenous Taíno, as well as “mythic celebrations of the noble Indian” who bravely resisted the Spanish colonial invasion (Mayes 2014, 7). There is clear scholarly debate over the extent of indigenismo’s influence in the process of Dominican nation-formation. Mayes and Sagás, for example, appear convinced that indigenismo was a leading contender among competing ideologies of nationhood at the time, while Howard perceives the impact of this movement to be limited (“Race and Politics” 2000, 34; Mayes 2014, 7; Howard 2001, 44). Irrespective of the merits of these conclusions, it is clear that post-independence conceptions of Dominican identity deliberately obscure the nation’s history of Black and African migration and slavery in keeping with the historical practice of blancomiento, or “whitening” (Tillis 2011, 6:40–6:55). According to Sagás, this largely factitious ancestry “created a mythological national past with deep roots in the prehistory of the island, which gave the Dominican nation a sense of continuity and helped it repress its traumatic colonial history” (“Race and Politics” 2000, 35). In this sense, it was a psychological mechanism through which the Dominican collective imagination could rid itself of the stigma of enforced servitude, which called for the “forging of a contemporary identity [that] marginalized negritud,” or Blackness (Howard 45). By 1916, the Dominican Republic had come under American occupation as a result of an unfulfilled debt repayment agreement. Indeed, in the post-independence period, the Dominican government had been challenged by a variety of rebellions and revolutions which contributed to exponential growth in national debt. With the Dominican government in no position to repay these massive debts, which by 2016 had swollen to over thirty million dollars, the United States took ownership of the customs operations at Dominican ports in an attempt to recuperate the losses it had sustained. In addition to reviving Hispanidad, the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic once again reshaped and renewed the exclusionary ideology of antihaitianismo. Moreover, economic growth bolstered by the intensification of industrial sugar production prompted an expansion of the merchant class (thereby reconfiguring the Dominican social order), generated “new avenues for social mobility,” and pointed to a clear shortage of labourers that could be satisfied by Haitians (“Race and Politics” 2000, 40; Howard 2001, 59). As large numbers of Haitian migrants crossed the border into the Dominican Republic, antihaitianismo found its new footing among the Dominican population. Employers and the local population harshly regarded the workers, who provided a steady supply of inexpensive labor to fuel the booming sugar economy This was especially true of the Dominican elite, who believed that “the Dominican people’s traditional enemy was now returning, this time not as a conqueror but as a stealthy infiltrator” (“Race and Politics” 2000, 41).
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By the time mass Haitian migration began towards the end of the nineteenth century, Dominicans had exchanged fear and apprehension towards Haiti and its people for a sense of racial pride and national superiority. The Haitian state had experienced severe economic decline and the decay of its political system; as such, it no longer posed the same threat to the Dominican Republic as it had in the years immediately following the latter’s independence (“Race and Politics” 41). Restricted to the confines of the batey––the rural communities of migrant Haitian labourers located near the Dominican Republic’s borderland sugar mills––and having limited social interaction with local Dominicans, Haitians who crossed the border in search of employment were “increasingly stereotyped as poor, illiterate migrants who had to sell their labour for starvation wages, doing slavelike work in a foreign country” (“Race and Politics” 2000, 41). Within this context, antihaitianismo renewed the Dominican tendency to position themselves in contrast to the Black, Haitian Other and redefined Blackness not as a marker of pigment or genetic makeup but as an epithet reserved exclusively for the reviled Haitian migrant (Simmons 4; “Race and Politics” 2000, 41). While Dominican elites made attempts to regulate migration from Haiti in order to preserve the racial homogeneity of the country’s population, their aspirations went unfulfilled. The need for labour in the sugar industry was virtually limitless and the stigma and racialized stereotypes attached to the nature of this labour were too salient for Dominicans to willingly involve themselves. This gave rise to what Sagás describes as the “Haitian problem”, a dilemma the Dominican government would grapple with for decades to come. The 1924 withdrawal of the United States military forces, the establishment of the first official border between Hispaniola’s two sister nations in 1929 (which nonetheless did little to curtail Haitian migration across the border) and the emergence of a “ruthless nationalist dictator”, General Rafael L. Trujillo, would set the stage for the “bloodiest period of confrontation in almost a century” between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (“Race and Politics” 2000, 43). The Trujillo Era: 1930-1961 In tracing the development of racial identification in the Dominican Republic, Simmons identifies two major periods where state leaders constructed, negotiated, and institutionalized the notion of a collective Dominican identity. The first, spanning from 1900-1930, encompasses the era of U.S. occupation and the preTrujillo years during which Dominicans rejected any semblance of Blackness as part of their collective identity but still perceived themselves as being mixed, or de color (“of color”). Conversely, the trujillato––the duration of Trujillo’s regime from 1930 to 1961––marked a departure from this system of identification and involved a repackaging of antihaitianismo ideology, itself intimately linked to the Hispanidad movement of the colonial period (Simmons 2009, 26).
Throughout the trujillato years, the state recast its racial discourse to reflect Trujillo’s fervent attachment to Hispanidad, which treated Hispanic culture, Catholicism, and a largely European ancestry as sources of great esteem to Dominican national identity (“Race and Politics” 43; Simmons 2009, 26). Trujillo, affectionately known as the “Padre de la Patria Nueva” or Father of the New Fatherland, was seen as a messianic figure who bore the ability to steer the Dominican nation towards prosperity and international prestige. Trujillo elevated antihaitianismo to a “dominant, state-sponsored ideology” that positioned Haitians as enemies to the Dominican state and as “blacks with an Afro-French culture, an alien and pernicious presence in the Dominican Republic” (“Race and Politics” 45).
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According to Simmons, state attempts at “whitening” both Dominican history and people through Hispanidad coexisted with the recognition of intermarriage and procreation between Spanish and Indigenous ancestors. As such, Trujillo “gave social currency to the term indio as representing Dominican mixture”; this is reflected in the language of the cédula at the time, which privileged the racial category indio, and mestizo, which was not institutionalized within the census, over mulato, as the former made no direct reference to African ancestry (Simmons 2009, 26- 27). During trujillato leaders systematically suppressed, even erased, even the slightest hints at a common African heritage from Dominican history. Trujillo and his ideologues, notably Manuel Peña Batlle and Joaquín Balaguer, launched an extensive campaign aimed at sanitizing the historical narrative and purging the state of Haitian “intruders.” Moreover, the intellectuals associated with the Trujillo regime were instrumental in developing a state sponsored brand of Dominican nationalism and a corresponding propaganda machine premised upon anti-Haitian attitudes (“Race and Politics” 2000, 46). In the early 1930s, the Dominican Republic enjoyed cordial relations with Haiti, whose government had signed a border delimitation agreement in 1929. Later amendments in 1935 and 1936 followed that “establish[ed] a permanent, fixed border” between the neighboring island nations (“Race and Politics” 2000, 45). By 1937, what had previously been an amicable arrangement quickly turned sour. Trujillo recognized that these formal borders were only loosely enforced and that Haitian and Haitian-Dominican frontizeros continued to move freely across established perimeters in order to find work or to engage in economic exchange. In response, he resorted to violence: in October of 1937, ordering Dominican troops to execute a mass killing of Haitians living both in the northwestern borderland regions and well within the country’s confines. According to Turtis, the massacre involved the slaughter of over 15 000 ethnic Haitians by machete, hence the incident’s nickname of el corte, or “the cutting.” Other scholars provide estimates ranging from 1 000 to 35 000 casualties (Turtis 2002, 590; “Race and Politics” 46). This was Trujillo’s “draconian way of securing his domains and eliminating what he considered a pernicious influence on the Dominican nation” (“Race and Politics” 2000, 46). Notably, Mayes highlights that many scholars belonging to the post-Trujillo nueva ola (“new wave”) generation identify the massacre as a crucial starting point for modern anti-Haitian attitudes, with it being the result of “state consolidation and the imposition of a modern regime onto an area traditionally regarded as neither Dominican nor Haitian” (Mayes 2014, 4). Following the Parsley Massacre of 1937, Trujillo re-oriented the regime’s focus in order to draw attention away from the incident and shift public opinion in favour of the Dominican Republic. Trujillo welcomed the mass arrival of white, mostly European, foreigners as part of a “targeted immigration policy to promote blanqueamiento or whitening in the Dominican Republic” (Simmons 2009, 27). Trujillo also hosted international fairs that advanced a highly inaccurate and “whitened” image of the Dominican past by displaying photographs of the country’s “light-skinned” pioneers. Race in public discourse continued to emphasize mestizo and indio as the official and all-encompassing racial identifiers for the Dominican population, such that mulato was ousted from common parlance at least as it pertained to Dominicans themselves (Simmons 2009, 26). Indeed, Hispanidad under Trujillo “not only meant a cultural affiliation with Spain but also a phenotypic one” (Simmons 2009, 29). Trujillo, in keeping with this mentality, ordered the mass erasure of African ancestry and cultural influences from both history textbooks and the national imaginary (Simmons 28). In sum, Trujillo’s regime embedded antihaitianismo in its apparatus; it was omnipresent and infiltrated popular discourse, oral tradition, and official channels of information, such as the state media and educational content. Bueno cites a textbook from the Trujillo era that so aptly illustrates this point:
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“Haiti is inhabited by a mob of savage Africans. […] The Haitian is an enemy. […] The Dominican race and civilization are superior to that of Haiti. Haiti has no importance to the world.” (1992, 45) Intersections of Class and Race In the Dominican Republic, as is the case across much of Latin America, social class and race tend to coincide or at the very least are interconnected. In the Dominican Republic especially, class cleavages exist along racial lines, with white or light-skinned individuals largely occupying the top rungs of the social ladder while those who are darker skinned or of Haitian extraction are situated at the bottom (“Black—but Not Haitian” 2012, 2). With this in mind, antihaitianismo can more easily be conceptualized as a political tool through which elites have maintained their relative social standing and camouflaged their economic interests. In fact, many scholars regard antihaitianismo “as a function of the efforts of the dominant classes to remain firmly at the top of the hierarchy” (Martínez-Vergne 2005, 98). Antihaitianismo has come to define Haitians as culturally and racially antithetical to Dominicans but has also established Haitians as a veritable underclass of poor, illiterate and stateless labourers within the Dominican nation. Howard, referring to Cox’s 1970 class analysis based on race, explains that capitalism bred racism by reducing the racial Other to their labour and productive capacity (Howard 2001, 56). Thus, racial inequality ought to be regarded as “an outcome of the interests of the capitalist class in exploiting sections of the working class” (Howard 2001, 56). This is certainly the case in the Dominican Republic, where Haitian migrant workers in the sugar industry continue to be exploited by both the commercial class and the government as they generate massive revenues for the state economy. Howard describes the Haitian experience in the Dominican Republic as “one of internal colonialism” wherein Haitians are “marginalized individuals in a society that demands their labour but refuses to accept their presence beyond that as units of labour” (30). Furthermore, antihaitianismo provides a convenient scapegoat for economic instability and the “backwardness” of the Dominican borderlands, and in doing so, precludes the opportunity for mobilization along class lines (Howard 2001, 30). What is striking about the Dominican sugar industry is that the racial composition of its workforce today is virtually identical to what it had been over a century ago. The cycle of exploitation has also persisted into the present day in the form of neo-slavery with abysmally low wages and inhumane living conditions (Tillis 2011, 27:22). The balance of power remains unchanged as Haitian workers continue to be exploited in a dynamic which Tillis describes as “[b]earing numerous similarities to the chattel slave system” (2011, 26:55). Batey workers are restricted to the confines of small rural settlements; they are severely underpaid for their work and are at much greater risk of contracting health issues such as malnutrition, hypertension, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (Denesha 2021). In a contemporary context, the Dominican batey has been reconfigured as “the locus where Dominican race and national performativity morphs into a national and racial discourse that has at its core anti-black and antiHaitian sentiments” (Tillis 35:33). The Dominican cédula––the national identification card that specifies citizens’ racial category generally ascribed by the issuing clerk rather than by the individual––provides racial data for the census; as such, it is an active participant in the construction of race by means of state institutions. While applicants may request to select their own cédula label, this is a rare occurrence––generally, affluent Dominicans regardless of any visible racial
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markers will be classified as one of the two “lighter” categories, Blanco/a and Indio/a, while the opposite is true of the poor. In fact, Blanco/a and Indio/a “accounted for 86% of the cédulas issued to upper-, upper-middle and middle-class” individuals (Howard 2001, 69). In contrast, very few Dominicans choose to self-identify as mulato, and the overwhelming majority of those who are identified as such on the cédula belong to the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. There is tacit yet widespread recognition that “money whitens” in the Dominican Republic, and similarly, people who are lighter in pigment have greater access to education, employment and other socioeconomic opportunities (Howard 2001, 68). Conclusion It has become clear from the above that, in line with Marx’s reasoning, the construction of race in the Dominican Republic was a protracted and complex project that responded, at various points in the historical narrative, to the state’s need to consolidate the state and develop the national image it would project on the global stage. In so doing, Dominican elites recast “blackness” as synonymous to “Haitian” and encouraged the Dominican people to embrace an exclusionary identity that suppressed their African heritage. Consequently, Haitians inDominican Republic, including those who are not involved in the production of sugar, have been deemed the enemy Black Other (to the benefit of the indio or mestizo Dominican) while also acting as the object of blame, contempt, and even fear to the average Dominican citizen. This paper also demonstrates that the construction of race is not an arbitrary, spontaneous or apolitical process; rather, the need to define race in specific and strategic ways arises at distinct moments in history and responds to a broad variety of elite priorities and interests. A pattern discernible through the above narrative is that Hispanidad and antihaitianismo as state and elite individuals and institutions promoted complementary ideologies most adamantly at times when the Dominican Republic was most vulnerable to Haitian “encroachment” or influence. To invite Dominicans to rally around a common national identity positioned in stark contrast to that of Haiti was to ensure the integrity and security of the Dominican state, while also distracting from the exploits of those who controlled the levers of power. The topic of race, class, and anti-Haitian prejudice remains salient to this day, as Haitians in the Dominican Republic have limited, if any, political rights and mobilizational capacity. Though racial antagonism is not quite as pronounced as it once was, it remains a force that permeates most social interactions and perpetuates both official and unofficial systems of injustice and discrimination. The Dominican Republic has not experienced a surge in the reclamation of Blackness, and it is unlikely in the near future as antihaitianismo remains firmly entrenched in the country’s social and political ethos. It is only if the Dominican Republic were to shed its anti-Black and anti-Haitian attitudes that it could be considered a veritable racial democracy.
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References Bueno, R. A. Estudio Del Prejuicio Hacia Los Haitianos En Tres Escuelas Intermedias Con Diferentes Niveles De Interraccion Social. Santiago de los Caballeros, Santiago: Universidad Católica de Madre y Maestra Press, 1992. Denesha, Kylee. “Dominican Republic Batey Health Initiative Continues Addressing Health Care Needs of Haitian Migrant Communities.” UMass Chan Medical School, April 9, 2021. https://www.umassmed.edu/news/news-archives/2021/04/dominican-republic-batey-health-initiativecontinues-addressing-health-care-needs-of-haitian-migrant-communities/. Howard, David John. 2001. Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic. Oxford, U.K.: Signal Books. Martínez Vergne, Teresita. 2005. Nation & Citizen in the Dominican Republic, 1880-1916. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/v2/oclc/69679054. Marx, Anthony W. 1998. Making Race and Nation : A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Mayes, April J. 2014. The Mulatto Republic : Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/v2/oclc/869736066. Nobles, Melissa. 2000. Shades of Citizenship : Race and the Census in Modern Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sagás, Ernesto. “Black—but Not Haitian: Color, Class, and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic.” Edited by Kwame Dixon and John Burdick. Comparative Perspectives on Afro-Latin America, 2012, 1–19. Sagás Ernesto. 2000. Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Simmons, Kimberly Eison. 2009. Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic. New World Diasporas. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Telles, Edward Eric, and Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America. 2014a. Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/v2/oclc/895772878. Telles, Edward E. 2014b. Race in Another America : The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (version Course book.) Course book ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.23943/9781400837434. Antonio Tillis, “Contextualizing Race in the Dominican Republic,” YouTube Video, 1:07:29, April 11, 2011, https://youtu.be/MJZJPv3FLic.
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Turits, Richard Lee. 2002. “A World Destroyed, a Nation Imposed: The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic.” Hispanic American Historical Review 82 (3): 589–635.
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La Belle Enfance: The Influence of the Quebec Model in 21st Century Federal Child Care Debates and Policy Charlotte Reed Edited by Lucy Truong
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ABSTRACT This paper examines the question of how the Quebec model of child care has influenced similar debates at the federal level since its implementation. In analyzing the discussions and policy actions taken by the successive Martin, Harper, and Trudeau governments, it becomes evident that they mainly differ in their treatment of universality as a guiding principle of child care policy. This paper argues that their treatment of universality is critically influenced by their respective economic contexts and ideological agendas, manifested in inconsistent federal child care policy over this period. A serious reconsideration of universality in this policy context is necessary in order to ensure a just recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past two decades, discussions on the affordability and availability of child care in Canada have been garnering a significant amount of attention. This issue only became more urgent as COVID-19 exposed the underlying flaws of the child care system in Canada. Child care debates and initiatives over the past two decades have fluctuated and been reignited since the COVID-19 pandemic, but the centrally contested issue has remained the same: the role of universality in child care policy. Nonetheless, the question remains the same: Should child care be universal? The question of whether the government should universally provide a child care space to each Canadian child at a uniform cost or enable parents to decide how their child is cared for in their early years is one that has distinguished the Martin, Harper and Trudeau governments from each other. The principle of universality has guided the provision of child care in Quebec, whose government has since 1997 provided the service at an affordable, uniform cost to its families, and has since reaped the benefits. The universal nature of the Quebec model has been its primary influential power in federal debates and initiatives since the time of Prime Minister Martin—yet, the same economic and ideological oppositions to the creation of the Quebec model remain influential in these contexts. The Harper years were characterized by a kind of shallow universality, reflective of conservative ideology, while the Martin and Trudeau governments embraced the Quebec model, yet adapted it to the federal context of the time. I contend that the trend of universality remained central to the Martin, Harper, and Trudeau governments, while their respective political agendas and economic motivations provide explanation for their treatment of the principle in federal child care initiatives. The Quebec Model Quebec’s distinct child care system has long stood out as a guiding example of what such universal policy could look like nationwide. In 1997, under the provincial leadership of Lucien Bouchard, the Parti Québecois implemented a plan to offer spaces in les centres de la petite enfance (CPEs). Access to CPEs would come at a cost of $5 per day for every child under four years old, regardless of their families’ income (Cleveland, Mathieu, and Japel 2021). Additionally, cash benefits would be offered to low-income families to supplement the cost of the universal $5-perday program (Barril 2000, 4). The 1997 plan promoted familial care in a child’s first year, before subsequent participation in educational child care. This favouring regulated and subsidized centre-based care as well as familybased care under the supervision of not-for-profit centres over private provision (Lefebvre et al. 2012, 3). One major obstacle of the program was the lack of space sufficient to meet demand. Upon the program’s introduction, only four-year-olds were eligible, though eligibility was gradually extended to three and then two year olds by 2000 (Lefebvre et al. 2012, 3). The program aimed to improve the daily experiences and development of the youngest Quebeckers by making early education more accessible provincewide, thereby increasing their equality of opportunity. However, it also had underlying motivations critical to its establishment which similarly influenced child care policy at the federal level in the years that followed.
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Robust child care programs have long been heralded as critical tools of just economic progress (Department of Finance 2021). This was an argument influential to the creation of the Quebec system and was also vocalized within federal child care efforts. Scholars Barril, Lefebvre, and Gaudel assert that the program aimed to increase the participation of mothers in the workforce, fight child poverty and underdevelopment, improve the incentive for work among low-income families, and close the provincial deficit by 2000 (2000, 4; 2012, 2-3; 2006). These objectives certainly have ethical imperatives, but also appeal to potential opponents and the general public who may only be swayed if child care programs can be shown to be economically beneficial, rather than a burden. Quebec’s strong centre-left political tradition, as well as prominent, sustained, and ingrained activism on behalf of feminist and labour organizations viewed robust, universal child care as a positive economic tool. As such, they were ultimately successful in their mobilization to implement the 1997 plan. Any such system, like that found in Quebec, requires a high degree of intervention on behalf of the government which must be authorized politically and publicly within its jurisdiction. This was made possible by Quebec’s unique political culture. Quebec’s welfare state is distinct from the rest of Canada not only by the way that it carries a more paternal tendency but also by the role it plays in the Quebec nation-building project. The Quebec government intervenes to a higher degree in economic and societal matters than other provincial governments. Indeed, its welfare state is perceived by the public as a kind of personal defender of their interests, and the province’s governance is significantly influenced by left-wing organizations (Daigenault et al. 2021, 240). Further, this distinct welfare state, as Béland and Lecours find, is inextricably tied to Quebec’s nation-building project; the development of a robust yet distinct welfare state, like the expansion of a durable child care system is a concrete manifestation of Quebec’s ability to pursue sovereignty (2008, 2). This understanding of the role of the state, shared among the public and the political sphere, was the dominant ideological force underlying the development of Quebec’s universal child care program. The same economic and ideological factors have shaped federal debates under differing circumstances, contributing ultimately to the lack of a successful national universal child care policy. The Evolution of Federal Childcare: the Martin Years Prime Minister Paul Martin, in power from 2003-2006, took great strides to implement a universal federal child care policy inspired by that created in Quebec. By the time he took office, the cost of childcare per day in Quebec had been indexed to $7— a model of payment which Martin wanted to expand nationwide. Called “Moving Canada Forward”, the federal Liberals under Martin wanted to allocate $5 billion over five years for the creation of 300,000 licensed child care spaces (Campbell and Fagan 2004). The administration and regulation of early childhood education would be left up to the provinces, who would receive federal funding so long as they met established standards (Campbell and Fagan 2004). Martin failed to reach a national multilateral agreement, but achieved a bilateral agreement with each province (Child Resource and Research Unit 2012). Martin’s proposal clearly mirrored the situation in Quebec given its basis on universality and framing as an economic imperative. Martin and his party appealed to the economic logic of creating a universal child care system nationwide, claiming to be the only party to provide realistic estimates of the cost such a system would incur. This framing instrumentalized Martin’s previous successful role in fiscal management as Finance Minister, adding credibility to these claims. Further, the proposal emphasized how it would cultivate a better home-work balance, enabling women to enter or re-enter the workforce (Campbell and Fagan 2004), which would be socially and economically beneficial. This economic appeal proved to be useful in reaching bilateral agreements with provinces who lacked the left-leaning political culture found in Quebec.
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Martin’s plan plainly reflected the principle of universality found in the Quebec model as it aimed to provide affordable universal child care on a cost-per-day basis. It explicitly outlined four central principles of quality, universality, accessibility, and development (Campbell and Fagan 2004) — themes on which the Quebec model was also created. Martin’s model carried this principle of universality by advocating for the uniform cost of child care nationwide, regardless of the significant geographic discrepancies in this cost: a parent in Toronto under Martin’s plan would pay the same daily rate as one in Saskatoon, whose cost of child care is estimated at half of the former (Paperny 2015). In other words, low-income children in higher-cost areas would not be punished for that high cost, while those in areas with lower costs of living would be offered care according to federal standards at an affordable daily rate comparable to or less than their current costs. Evidently, while Martin’s plan was heavily shaped by the principle of universality as manifested in the Quebec model it was also similarly framed as an economic benefit rather than a burden, which contributed to its success in achieving bilateral agreements nationwide. However, it was not enough to win over the later Harper Conservatives, who cancelled the program upon winning the 2006 federal election. Reactive Universality: Harper’s Turn Upon his election as Prime Minister, Stephen Harper of the Conservative party swiftly cancelled the Martin government’s bilateral agreements which established a universal child care system based on that which already existed in Quebec. In 2006, the Harper government introduced the Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB), a direct income supplement which awarded each family a $100 per month cash transfer per child under six years old as a taxable benefit (Mahon and Prince 2019, 86-87). This transfer was the first federal universal income program in over two decades, and imposed no constraints on how the money could be spent: families were urged to use it towards child care as they saw fit. Mahon and Prince argue that the UCCB was —as a consequence of and in contrast to Martin’s Foundation Program— guided by a kind of reactive universality, implemented to replace the truly universal and accessible initiative to provide nationwide child care and early learning (2019, 86). Even though the UCCB doled out uniform cash transfers to all Canadian families with eligible children, its impacts were not universal in nature. The ideological motivations of the Conservative party differed greatly from those which generated the Quebec model and were reflected in their child care policy. The UCCB promoted the traditional, nuclear family structure involving a male breadwinner and stay-at-home mother who eliminates the need for childcare, thereby supporting the ideal of limited government intervention. This can be understood as an effort on behalf of the Harper government to appeal to social conservatives within their party, advancing their political ideology within concrete policy. The UCCB also appealed to the more libertarian, ‘true-blue Tories’ within the party as it emphasized ‘personal choice’ over mandated government intervention. Indeed, it asserted that families should choose how to spend the benefit according to their needs rather than be subjected to state-administered child care in exchange for a more affordable price. This role of ‘choice’ and reliance on parental decision making stands in stark contrast to the Quebec model, which intervenes in order to strive for equality of opportunity. While the Quebec model was motivated by its distinct left-leaning political culture, the UCCB similarly reflected the conservative ideologies held by those who held power to implement it. The resulting shallow universality through equal payments of the UCCB did not mirror the success of the truly universal Quebec model: its implementation had negative consequences both social and economic in nature. Contrary to the goals of universality as well as the rhetoric of the Harper Conservatives, the UCCB exacerbated reliance on welfare programs and otherwise had a negative impact on the Canadian economy. Because it qualified as
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a taxable benefit, the UCCB created inequities between families based on their structure and income: working poor families kept a smaller amount of the benefit through taxation than if they were to rely on social assistance, creating a disincentive for work. The UCCB also favoured single-earner couples because it was taxable to lower-income spouses (Mahon and Prince 2019, 86). These economic realities further discouraged women’s participation in the workforce by providing material incentive for the rhetoric spouted by the Harper Conservatives. The UCCB reinforces the fact that the au courant political and economic contexts dictate how those in power at the federal level view and treat universality as a guiding principle of child care policy, a dynamic also seen in the following Trudeau Jr. years. Turning the COVID Corner with a New Chapter in Childcare The election of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2015 brought another chapter in Canada’s child care policy, specifically one which marked a temporary shift from universality. The Liberals under Trudeau ran on a campaign promise to enact a new, tax-free federal transfer program in place of Harper’s UCCB. The Canada Child Benefit (CCB) assigns transfers according to progressive selectivity (Mahon and Prince 2019, 87); it targets low- and middleincome families, typically with incomes lower than about $120,000, while those high earners over about $150,000 receive no cash transfer. While marking a shift from universality, it appears that in effect the CCB more closely mirrors the success of the Quebec model than the Harper government’s ‘universal’ family policy. Trudeau’s CCB had similar economic and ideological motivations and consequences to those which formed the foundation of the Quebec model. The tax-exempt and progressive nature of CCB resulted in an average increase of $2,300 in benefits per family in the 2016-2017 fiscal year compared to those families were awarded under the UCCB. In contrast, it is estimated that the CCB contributed to a 40% reduction in child poverty (Mahon and Prince 2019, 87). This benefit aimed to increase women’s participation in the workforce, especially women unable to afford child care under the UCCB. Moreover, like the universal Quebec model, the CCB strives to foster equality of opportunity among Canadian children, for their benefit and for the economic and social benefit of Canada as a whole. The CCB works to achieve equity among Canadian children by indexing the transfers according to income, so that families, relative to each other, have about the same financial capacity to pay for child care. Like the Quebec model, the Trudeau Liberals’ family policy is universal in its nature: by awarding benefits according to each family's capacity to afford childcare, they are able to foster increasingly equal opportunities, and eventually outcomes. Still, the CCB does not account for nor eliminate altogether regional discrepancies in the cost of child care as described by Mehler Paperny (Global News, 2015), nor is it used to subsidize public provision of child care as it would if it truly took a universal approach like that found in Quebec. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the gendered effects of Canada’s insufficient child care system, placing the burden of closed educational facilities and economic hardship resulting from the health crisis on women, who are expected to provide childcare despite the circumstances. Women have returned to the home, and those who didn’t work outside before have been discouraged from entering (Boesveld, Uppal, and Ferns 2021). Canada’s housing crisis is also ongoing, requiring families to spend a greater portion of their income on shelter, and inflating the overall cost of living, particularly in Canada’s major cities (Department of Finance 2021). Sarah Boesveld, Pamela Uppal, and Carolyn Ferns (2021) contend that cash benefits alone cannot fix these systemic issues. Rather, the very way in which child care is provided must change if we are to move in a positive direction for Canadian children, women, and society as a whole. The 2021 federal election, occurring in the ongoing health, economic, and
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social crisis of the pandemic, functioned as a referendum on the government’s response to the crisis, with family policy as a consolidation of the compounding issues of the pandemic. Considering this critical contemporary situation, child care defined the 2021 election: did Canadians want direct financial assistance from the Conservatives à la Harper era, or were they ready to embrace the first truly universal national program proposed by the Liberals? In the 2021 Federal Budget, the Liberals outlined their new plan for child care, which would implement a “Canada-wide, community-based system of quality child care” (Department of Finance 2021), setting the cost for parents at $10 per day on average over the next five years. They pledged to first reach a 50% reduction in early learning and child care fees outside of Quebec by the end of 2022. Moreover, they are also committed in the continued creation of new child care spaces especially within the not-for-profit sector (Department of Finance 2021), who will be subject to certain standards in order to be eligible for funding (Child Care Now, 2021). Modelling shows that the Liberals’ plan would have a life-changing impact for eligible families, who would spend less than 5% of their after-tax income on child care, as opposed to the Conservatives’ tax credit plan which would leave families burdened with 20% or more of their income going towards child care (Cleveland 2021). Interestingly, the proposal explicitly sources inspiration from the universal Quebec model two decades its senior, praising its success in increasing the participation of women and those with young children in the labour force, as well as its 1.7% increase in GDP since the program was implemented (Department of Finance 2021). However, the budget recognizes how the implementation of a universal system like that found in Quebec will pose challenges in a federal context, given the heterogeneity among Canada’s vast and diverse provinces, regions, and distinct urban and rural areas, as well as the need for specialized care for certain populations. While the CCB signified a shift from universality, focusing on fostering equity as the driver of equal opportunity, the Liberals’ 2021 child care plan shows a return to the Quebec model as the gold standard, with universality being the guiding principle. Conclusion Evidently, the Quebec model has maintained its status as a guiding light of the possibilities of child care in Canada, illustrating what such policy can look like based on the principle of universality. It arose out of certain economic and ideological contexts which contributed to its establishment and success. These same factors have since influenced the debates and initiatives surrounding child care at the federal level. Yet, they have not come together in the right combination to allow universality to underlie child care in the national system. Since the Martin years, the successive federal governments have embraced, rejected, and finally turned back towards child care policy based on the principle of universality. The contemporary context of the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the existing issues of the mosaic of systems nationwide, but simultaneously presents an opportunity to create an unprecedented national system which ensures accessible child care for all Canadian families at an affordable price. The Liberal party has proposed a universal system modelled after that found in Quebec which presents a plausible means to reinvent Canadian child care policy. They must make good on this promise for Canada to emerge from the pandemic stronger than we entered.
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References Paperny, Anna Mehler. 2015. “How much does child care actually cost in Canada?”. Global News, July 20 2015. https://globalnews.ca/news/2120861/what-does-child-care-actually-cost-in-canada/ Barril, R., Lefebvre, P., and Merrigan, P.. 2000. “Quebec Family Policy: impact and options.” Choices Family Policy, 61. Institute for Research on Public Policy. Béland, Daniel, and André Lecours. 2008. "Canada: Nationalism, Federalism, and Social Policy." In Nationalism and Social Policy: The Politics of Territorial Solidarity, Chapter 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, C., Fagan, D. 2004. "PM Plans $5-Billion in Daycare: Left-Leaning Liberal Platform Would Add 500,000 Child-Care Spaces Across Canada." The Globe and Mail (1936-), Jun 03, 2004. https://proxy.library.mcgill.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/pm-plans-5billion-daycare/docview/1356883108/se-2?accountid=12339 Childcare Advocacy Association of Canada, and Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC. 2011. “A Tale of Two Canadas : Implementing Rights in Early Childhood.” Childcare Advocacy Association of Canada. Child Care Now. 2021. “Canada’s Roadmap to Affordable Child Care for ALL.” https://timeforchild care.ca/2021/07/06/canadas-roadmap-to-affordable-child-care-for-all/ Child Resource and Research Unit. 2012. Canada’s history of the never-was national child care program Know thy history: Looking back on child care. Childcare Canada. https://child carecanada.org/documents/researchpolicy-practice/12/02/canada%E2%80%99s-history-never-was-national-child-care-program Daigneault, Pierre-Marc, Lisa Birch, Daniel Béland, and Samuel-David Bélanger. 2021. Taking Subnational and Regional Welfare States Seriously: Insights from the Quebec Case. Journal of European Social Policy 31, no. 2 (May 2021): 239–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0958928721996651. Department of Finance Canada. 2021. “Budget 2021: A Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Plan”. Government of Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2021/04/budget-2021-acanada-wide-early-learning-and-child-care-plan.html Gaudel, Muriel. "Quebec Family Policy." 2006. Canadian Encyclopedia. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/quebec-family-policy Cleveland, Gordon, Mathieu, Sophie, and Japel, Christa. 2021. “What is “the Quebec model” of early learning and child care?” Policy Options. Institute for Research on Public Policy. February 18, 2021. https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/february-2021/what-is-the-quebec-model-of-early-learning-andchild-care/ Cleveland, Gordon. 2021. “Which political party has the best child care plan?” Policy Options. Institute for Research on Public Policy. September 10, 2021. https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/septembe2021/which-political-party-has-the-best-child-care-plan/ Government of Canada. 2014. “Universal Child Care Benefit.” https://www.budget.gc.ca/efp-peb/2014/uccbpuge-eng.html
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Kelley, Mark and Mansbridge, Peter. 1997. “Quebec’s $5 daycare plan.” The National. CBC News, September 17 1997. https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/quebecs-5-daycare-plan Lefebvre, Pierre, Merrigan, Philip, and Roy-Desrosiers, Francis. 2012. “Quebec's Childcare Universal Low Fees Policy 10 Years After : Effects, Costs and Benefits.” Working Paper, 11-01. Childcare Resource and Research Unit. Livingston, Gillian. 2021. "Child Care at $10 a Day would be a 'Game-Changer' for a Young Family's Finances." The Globe and Mail, April 27 2021. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personalfinance/household-finances/article-childcare-at-10-a-day-could-change-would-be-a-game-changer-for-ayoung/ Mahon, M., and Prince, M.J.. 2019. “From Family Allowances to the Struggle for Universal Childcare.” In Universality and Social Policy in Canada, 83-102. University of Toronto Press. Piano, Michelle. 2014. “Are We Ready for Universal Childcare in Canada : Recommendations for Equality of Opportunity through Childcare in Canada.” Analytical Commentary / Canada 2020, No. 6. Boesveld, Sarah, Uppal, Pamela, and Ferns, Carolyn. 2021. “Child care will be the defining issue of the election.” Globe and Mail, Opinion. August 21, 2021. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-child-carewill-be-the-defining-issue-of-the-election/
The Covexit: Instabilities in the European Union caused by COVID-19 Alyssa Di Genova Edited by Alexandra Holgren
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ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic, as it hindered parts of the world, also hindered parts of the European Union (EU). One core political concern that has emerged during the pandemic is the instability that the global crisis has sparked within the EU. The dominant explanation for this issue that came about within the EU lies in the unprecedented nature of the pandemic. This paper therefore explains how COVID-19 both caused and demonstrated instabilities within the EU’s policymaking areas, economy, and politics. Contrary to the EU’s slogan, ‘Being a United Europe,’ the union’s unity was lost at the beginning of the pandemic, demonstrating instabilities within policy responses. This paper also demonstrates how, depending on EU member states’ national economic structures and their COVID-19 regulations, their economies have suffered greatly. Lastly, this paper found how the pandemic caused a political fallout for the EU due to member states taking advantage of this state of emergency. This essentially leads to concerns about whether the EU will ever be able to fully recover from COVID-19. Introduction In 2019, COVID-19, the coronavirus disease caused by theSARS-CoV-2 virus, first made its mark in China before spreading around the world (Kubicek 2020, 319). On January 30 , 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a worldwide health emergency (World Health Organization 2020, 7). Following this declaration, WHO announced a pandemic on March 11 (World Health Organization 2020, 20). As the world has previously struggled with the Second World War and the Great Depression, this pandemic has taken its place as another one of humanity’s most serious, and most universally felt, global crisis (Bandeoglu 2021). Even in March 2022, the virus continues to leave its mark on every aspect of life, causing global anxiety. th
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Given the unprecedented nature of this virus, concerns spread quickly throughout Europe and across the globe. At this point, the sole aspect of this virus that remain certain are its ability to test government’s legitimacy, cause high levels of unemployment, and lead to millions of deaths (Kubicek 2020, 319). Although the lingering uncertainty of pandemic has caused instabilities throughout the world, this paper will examine those pertaining to the EU in particular. Namely, has the pandemic demonstrated issues within the EU’s policy response area? How has the pandemic had a negative impact on the EU’s economies? And finally, how has COVID-19 led to concerns surrounding political fallout within the EU? The EU has clearly struggled to manage this crisis. In response to the first question posed above, this paper will argue that the unprecedented nature of COVID-19 demonstrated cracks in the EU’s ability to coordinate policy responses in a timely manner. Secondly, it will investigate the negative spill-over effects from the issues in policy responses, lockdown, and social distancing measures have hindered member states’ economies. Lastly, this paper will argue how the public distractions, the limitless power, and the fast-tracking policy deals caused by COVID-19 have led to the rise of authoritative regimes. As for the coming years, what is to come is unknown; however, lasting instability within the EU can certainly be guaranteed. The EU’s policy responses to COVID-19 The unprecedented nature of COVID-19 revealed an instability within the EU’s policy agreements. At the beginning of the pandemic, the EU’s crisis response was nonexistent, leaving member states to fend for themselves
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(Kubicek 2020, 319). Given this lack of response on the part of the EU, European countries began unilaterally making decisions according to their respective contingency regulations (Kubicek 2020, 323). As these European countries pursued their own solutions, their strategies proved to be incompatible with one another (Pacces & Weimer 2020, 290). Member states were autonomously deciding to close borders to protect their citizens from the virus, inadvertently leading to the disruption of supply chains across the continent (Kubicek 2020, 323). Every country needed their own exit strategy to keep their citizens safe; however unilateral decisions led to negative spillover effects into the economy (Pacces & Weimer 2020, 290). The convergence of European countries therefore did not occur quickly enough (Pacces & Weimer 2020, 290). The pandemic has proven that when faced with a crisis, the EU is unable to keep up (Serhan 2020). The EU, previously known for setting the rules and implementing the standards, risked losing its status as an established and efficient global player (Serhan 2020). As the pandemic progressed, the EU attempted to regain this status by becoming a more prominent force on the global stage. Seeing the unilateral decisions being made, the EU felt obligated to protect the single market and remind member states of their values (Bandeoglu 2021). Thus, the EU began providing immediate support to the most affected countries: Italy, France, and Spain (Kubicek 2020, 324). All member states were provided with medical materials as well as protection for citizens and health care workers (Bandeoglu 2021). In addition, on April 23rd, 2020, EU leaders began moving forward with establishing recovery funds (European Council 2021). The proposal for the plan was presented to the commission on May 27th, 2020 (European Council 2021). Member states that were not going to benefit much from this, such as Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, suggested that countries present plans to strengthen their growth in order to receive such funds (Sapir 2020, 2). On July 21st, after some negotiations, the EU agreed on the Next Generation EU package (Watzka & Watt 2020, 2). In this agreement, “the European Commission is authorised to raise up to 750 billion euros on capital markets and disburse the funds in the form of loans (360 billion euros) and grants (390 euros)” (Watzka & Watt 2020, 2). The core of this package was the Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) of 750 billion euros (Watzka & Watt 2020, 2; European Council, 2021). This fund was put in place to commence a national recovery and is intended to end in 2026 (Watzka & Watt 2020, 4). Despite the EU’s initial instability, they still provided a total of 2.3643 trillion euros for recovery (European Council 2021). Although the EU ended up intervening, their absence in the first stages of the pandemic proved to be detrimental and faced heavy criticism. Through the analysis of policy responses, it is plausible to state that the EU’s policy area and their crisis management methods demonstrate a large amount of instability. The first stages of COVID-19 were arguably the most critical, given that not much was known about the virus and how to effectively treat or protect against it. Therefore, this was the time for the EU to step in. According to the Treaty of Lisbon, “The Union can carry out actions to support, coordinate or supplement Member States actions in the protection and improvement of human health” (Bandeoglu 2021). This mission was widely disregarded in the initial stages of COVID-19, as the EU failed to be of much help. In a time where Europe desperately needed to be united, the EU turned a blind eye. Considering this, many critics stated that this pandemic demonstrated the discordance of the EU (Bandeoglu 2021). Given these flaws, some critics have even gone as far as to pose if the EU is still relevant (Bandeoglu 2021). These criticisms are quite plausible through this analysis of the EU’s intervention strategies. For instance, the WHO declared a national health emergency in January 2020, the EU only launched their recovery funds in July of 2020 ( Watzka & Watt 2020, 2). From January to July, the EU watched as member states crumbled. This proves how the EU’s absence had gone on for a long duration of time. Consequently, there continues to be a lot of instability within all aspects of the EU. Simultaneously, during these policy negotiations, COVID-19 weakened economies.
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COVID-19’s impact on the EU’s economy This public health crisis quickly transformed into an economic crisis (Kubicek, 2020, 322). Given the deadly nature of this virus, policies rightfully prioritized social distancing regulations. The shock of this virus combined with the measures put in place greatly affected certain sectors of the economy (Kubicek 2020, 322). Depending on lockdown measures, national economic structures, and government’s fiscal capacities, some countries struggled with their economy more than others (OECD 2020, 4; Sapir 2020, 1). For instance, Italy, Spain, Croatia, France, and Portugal’s economies are experiencing the most instability out of all member states (Sapir 2020, 3). Overall, the EU experienced a shock that it was not necessarily prepared to deal with thus, leaving their economy fragile and unstable. Now that dealing with COVID-19 has become the norm, some sectors of the economy have been able to succeed more given their ability to adapt to new regulations. Accelerations and boosts in the economy are currently occurring through the digitization of several industries (Bandeoglu 2021). Online sales, for instance, have been doing extremely well in regulating the EU’s economy (Bandeoglu 2021). Additionally, the healthcare system has been doing very well economically (Kubicek 2020, 323). Aside from the medical industry, sectors that rely on human contact are still experiencing difficulties moving away from the instability that COVID-19 caused. For instance, air travel, textile industries, automotive industries, and food industries are still far below pre-COVID levels (OECD 2020, 4). More specifically, European air traffic currently only accounts for approximately 51 per cent of the 2019 pre-COVID levels and may only see an effective recovery no earlier than 2024 (Bandeoglu 2021). COVID-19 has also severely affected member states whose revenues are dependent on tourism such as Greece, Spain, Italy, and Croatia (Kubicek 2020, 322). This is where the negative spillover effects from the member states' unilateral decisions to close borders become visible. As distinctions have been made between industries struggling the most versus those struggling the least, in all cases, there has been a sharp decline in the EU’s investment and international trade (OECD 2020, 1). As the EU’s economy has become unstable, there is still a hope for recovery given the prosperity of certain industries. As the world begins to know more about this virus, there is an effort to bring life back to normal. The European economy has been slowly recovering but it will certainly remain unstable for some time (Kubicek 2020, 326). In a time of crisis, it became difficult for the EU to quantify the magnitude of impacts on its economy; however, expected recovery dates have been made (OECD 2020, 1). For both the EU and the Euro area, it is predicted that their real GDP is to return to pre-covid levels by mid-2022 (Bandeoglu 2021). Therefore, this date of return indicates a hope for the EU’s economy to make a comeback. However, Europe has been experiencing a rise of COVID-19 cases, thus their substantial social distancing measures could further destabilize their economy (Bandeoglu 2021). As Europe has become the epicentre of this multidimensional crisis, it has also become an epicentre for authoritative regimes. Essentially, the combination of these factors can further destroy the economy. Any potential economic comebacks ultimately rest in the hands of the EU and the government’s ability to help industries adapt to COVID19. Given that authoritative regimes are on the rise, this path to recovery may not be as linear as predicted. Political implications of COVID-19 Amid all the devastations that COVID-19 brought, a strong government is needed to help with the recovery process (Hadjimichalis 2020, 12). With the public distraction that this pandemic created, corrupt leaders had an opportunity to consolidate their powers, thus allowing them to present themselves as the strong leader their country needs (Kubicek 2020, 326). This pandemic can be seen as the window of opportunity that permitted the rise of
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oppressive regimes (Hadjimichalis 2020, 12). Corrupt leaders cracked down on democracies to further strengthen their ties to the country (Spirlet 2021). For example, the Hungarian Prime Minister advanced their government's platform by advocating how their government is best suited to manage this crisis given that democracies are too messy (Bandeoglu 2021). In using such propaganda, regimes target an international audience to further gain support (Bandeoglu 2021). Therefore, there are concerns that European citizens will lose faith in democracy and opt for these more extreme forms of government (Hadjimichalis 2020, 12-13). This trend is not limited to Hungary and can also be seen in Poland and Slovenia (Fernandez 2020, 1405; Spirlet 2021). Essentially this poses a threat to the solidarity and democracy of the EU. Not only does the rise of authoritative regimes undermine the EU’s values, but it has also caused political tensions across Europe (Fernandez 2020, 1405). Ironically, the dictators that are promising stability are causing more instability in going against the core values of the EU. With these rising trends, the European government’s tactics to mitigate COVID-19 have varied. During a state of emergency, governments are typically granted limitless ruling power to be able to solve the crisis in a timely fashion. By enabling these forms of power, authoritarian tendencies are utilised more frequently because it is possible for them to enact new laws (Kubicek 2020, 327). As some governments attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19 through useful policy implementations, others advanced their own agendas. Consequently, there has been a growing temptation for certain leaders to restrict civil rights (Bandeoglu 2021). For example, Poland’s government has placed limits on all freedoms of expression (Board 2021). This government also used its state power to make abortion illegal (Board 2021). Poland’s Prime Minister is using this state of emergency to transform their country into a Catholic dictatorship (Bandeoglu 2021). Similarly, the Hungarian parliament offered their Prime Minister limitless ruling power for an indefinite amount of time. With this power, he enacted illiberal policies that restrict freedoms of speech and nonprofit organizations (NGO) (Serhan 2020). Both Poland and Hungary’s laws permit authorities to imprison those who violate any of their new regulations (Spirlet 2021). This leaves the EU with an existential crisis to deal with, given that Europe is still suffering from the ongoing pandemic (Serhan 2020). Of course, extreme times call for extreme measures, but there is a difference between proactively using emergency powers and abusing them. However, this is not to say that all European leaders have succumbed to the greediness of power. On the other hand, other countries have remained true to their people. For example, Italy, Spain, and Germany continued to guarantee freedom of assembly to their citizens, thus preserving their right to democracy (Bandeoglu 2021). Technically, governments can restrict fundamental human rights if there are threats to their citizens' health. However, if rights are restricted, it would need to be for a limited time and it would need to be justified both scientifically and legally (Bandeoglu 2021). For example, curfews and travel restrictions have been justified both legally and scientifically to stop the spread of COVID-19 (Bandeoglu 2021). Given such restrictions, citizens in France would need a declaration to be able to travel, whether it be for work or other obligations. (Bandeoglu 2021). At one point, British citizens were not able to go abroad for vacations (Bandeoglu 2021). As it can be noted, there are a lot of diverging politics currently between the member states which ultimately weakens the EU (Fernandez 2020, 1401). As there have been many concerns regarding the weakening and fragmentation of the EU, political tensions have also arisen due to fast-tracking policy deals made under the use of limitless power. The COVID-19 pandemic requires governments to respond quickly; so issues arise as they come up with policies and restrictions. For example, British lawmakers have been concerned with the powers granted to the government given that many policies have been passed without any parliamentary debates (Bandeoglu 2021). Due to this pandemic, this accelerated process to pass deals makes it extremely hard for citizens to exercise their right to democracy (Kubicek 2020, 327). Additionally,
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this also does not allow for any consultation with NGOs, creating less political transparency (Bandeoglu 2021). Given that COVID-19 has granted governments full decision-making authority, the EU’s values of democracy are being lost. With this rise of authoritative regimes, the substantial abuse of power, and the issues regarding fast-tracking policy deals, it will be extremely difficult for the EU to recover. For example, the duration of the limitless power granted to the Hungarian Prime Minister can only expire if there is a two-third majority in Parliament and an approval from the Prime Minister himself (Serhan 2020). Otherwise, the Prime Minister can continue to abuse his power until they declare the state of emergency to be over (Serhan 2020). Similarly, Poland’s government was also able to push back presidential elections given the lockdowns, therefore prolonging their powers (Bandeoglu 2021). The EU’s foundational pillars of democracy and solidarity are clearly under attack (Hadjimchalis 2020, 9). In sum, this has caused a great deal of rifts between member states and has led to discussions of the end of the EU. Conclusion In 2019, the regular functioning of every country around the world came to a screeching halt. Companies required their employees to remain at home, educational institutions taught remotely, and governments scrambled to respond to the crisis. As the 21 century was never prepared for such a turn of events, citizens awaited governmental responses. Governments were therefore put under the spotlight as their every move determined the state of their citizens' health. At the beginning stages of COVID-19, parts of Europe were hit extremely hard. In a time where Europe needed to unite, the EU watched as their member states weakened. st
This paper analysed how COVID-19 caused instabilities within the EU regarding their ability to form policies, their economy, and their politics. Needing to be dealt with in a timely fashion, this crisis demonstrated how the EU struggles to act under pressure; therefore, leaving member states to act unilaterally. As proven, these unilateral actions created issues that spilled over into sectors of the economy. Considering these spillover effects and COVID-19 prevention regulations, the EU was left with an unstable economy to rebuild. The attempt to rebuild from these instabilities may however be difficult given that corrupt political leaders have used COVID-19 as a means of advancing their own agendas. Therefore, any opposing explanations as to what the lead cause of the EU’s current instability is can now be refuted. Other factors may have also contributed to the weakness of the EU, however COVID-19, is most certainly the leading cause. As this pandemic is still ongoing, research on COVID-19 and the EU’s instability does not end here. Will the EU be able to withstand COVID-19? If these issues cannot be withstood, will the 21 century witness more countries plotting a ‘covexit’ from the EU? Whether the EU will remain fragmented or be able to heal from this state of emergency, only future research would be able to tell. After all, uncertainties have become the new norm.
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References World Health Organization. 2020. “Archived: WHO Timeline - Covid-19.” https://www.who.int/news/item/2704-2020-who-timeline---covid-19. Bandeoglu, Zeyyat. 2021. “COVID-19 & Europe’s Economy” (Lecture, POLI 328, McGill University). Editorial Board. 2021. “Opinion | Poland steps up an assault on free expression. The U.S. response will be crucial.” The Washington Post, February 17, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/globalopinions/poland-steps-up-an-assault-on-free-expression-the-us-response-will-becrucial/2021/02/16/44877f08-6d5c-11eb-ba56-d7e2c8defa31_story.html. European Council. 2021. “COVID-19: The EU’s Response to the Economic Fallout.” Consilium, November 3, 2021. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/coronavirus/covid-19-economy/. Fernandez, Jonatan Echebarria. 2020. “A Critical Analysis on the European Union’s Measures to Overcome the Economic Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” European Papers 5, no. 3, 1399-1423. https://doi.org/10.15166/2499-8249/437. Hadjimichalis, Costis. 2021. “An Uncertain Future for the Post-Brexit, Post-COVID-19 European Union.” European Urban and Regional Studies 28, no. 1: 8–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776420968961. Kubicek, Paul. 2021. “European Democracies.” (3 ed.). Abingdon: Routledge. rd
OECD. 2020. “Evaluating the Impact of COVID-19 Containment Measures on Activity and Spending.” OECD Economic Outlook, no. 1, 1-5. https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/evaluating-the-initialimpact-of-covid-19-containment-measures-on-economic-activity-b1f6b68b/. Pacces, Alessio M., and Maria Weimer. 2020. “From Diversity to Coordination: A European Approach to COVID19.” European Journal of Risk Regulation 11, no. 2: 283–296. https://doi.org/10.1017/err.2020.36. Sapir, André. 2020. “Why has COVID-19 Hit Different European Union Economies so Differently?” Policy Contribution 18: 1-13. https://euagenda.eu/upload/publications/pc-18-2020-22092020-final.pdf.pdf. Serhan, Yasmeen. 2020. “The EU Watches as Hungary Kills Democracy.” The Atlantic, April 2, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/04/europe-hungary-viktor-orban-coronaviruscovid19-democracy/609313/. Spirlet, Thibault. 2021. “European Democracies Must 'Revitalize' Amid Authoritarian Rise: Report.” Politico, November 3, 2021. https://www.politico.eu/article/european-democracies-must-revitalize-amidauthoritarian-rise-report/. Watzka, Sebastian, and Andrew Watt. 2020. “The Macroeconomic Effects of the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility. Macroeconomic Policy Institute 98: 1-16. http://reparti.free.fr/imk982020.pdf
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The Spectacle of Political Purges: Clientelism, Illiberalism and Belonging Narratives in Thailand Thalie Emond Edited by Juliet Morrison & Kennedy McKee-Braide
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ABSTRACT This piece discusses the root causes and normalization of state-sanctioned civilian killings in Thailand, delving into the elite factionalism, clientelism, and illiberalism endemic in its domestic institutions. Aiming to unravel the intricacies of authoritarian structures suffocating Thai civil society, the article begins by exploring theoretical frameworks on electoral politics and patronage in polarized democracies, before proposing that the institutionalization of old, feudal social structures strain Thai party-voter relations. Undemocratic political structures incur widespread public grievances that spark protest movements with tragic endings, as Thai officials abruptly instigate political purges to maintain a semblance of political order, aggravating public trust. Additionally, the conception and manipulation of Thai nationhood by state officials has facilitated a repressive political climate conditioning the act of self-censorship, presenting political activism as a double-edged sword in the Land of Smiles. In that respect, political purges have become cautious and grim displays of loyalty to the Thai monarchy, the backbone of Thailand’s authoritarian regime. Introduction Mass protests in Thailand are often associated with simmering public frustration against ruling elites which comprise the monarchy, the wealthy, and the military. Stuck in an unfortunate cycle of political strife and social polarization, the country remains as divided and unequal as ever (Sombatpoonsiri 2020). Any public rebuke of political repression and government failures has often been shut down in seeming political purges––such as arbitrary executions of activists––instigated by state officials. The military, hired mercenaries mostly known as “men in black,” and vigilante groups have carried out deadly crackdowns of protesters, electoral opponents, political dissidents, or any individual who is considered obtrusive to social harmony (McCargo and Thabchumpon 2014, 387; Rojanaphruk 2016). The purpose of these violent campaigns of repression is to eliminate any alien element that is perceived detrimental to social order within the nation—or rather, as means to maintain the status quo. Mainly driven by long-standing inequalities, counter-hegemonic social movements—against the status quo—that gain enough prominence are met with a repressive and violent response by ruling elites, perpetuating a large disconnect between governing institutions and the population. Calculated acts of senseless violence have been routinized by the Thai government to maintain antiquated power structures. By engaging outside of formal political channels to denounce the status quo, Thai activists put themselves in dangerous positions. Overall, communication failures between political parties and civil society stem from structural flaws and inequality that translate to a perpetual cycle of illiberal politics normalizing mass political assassinations embolded by impunity and belonging narratives. So, what exactly causes this disconnect between the Thai electorate and the national government? And why are political purges common responses to counter-hegemonic movements in Thailand? This article will tackle these questions by exploring theories of party competition in multiethnic democracies with endemic clientelism, arguing that political purges in Thailand result from alienating politics. I will first examine and contrast two political theories brought forward by renowned political scientists Paul Frymer (1999) and Kanchan Chandra (1994), who theorize respectively the concepts of electoral capture with respect to party systems and of patronage democracy in multiethnic countries. Then, I will question the compatibility of Frymer and Chandra’s theoretical frameworks in the context of Thailand, considering the clientelistic and factionalist nature of Thai sociopolitical organization and
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party-voter dynamics. Lastly, I will explain the normalization of political killings against civilians by means of maintaining social order, intently trapping Thai society in a climate of fear and apathy. Theorizing Electoral Politics in Polarized Societies Frymer’s work on American politics and Chandra’s on Indian politics provide useful theoretical foundations to make sense of electoral processes and outcomes in societies with levels of polarization comparable to those in Thailand. The authors both consider the impact of institutional configurations on the relationship between political parties and voters that exist in democracies with a high level of social polarization. On the one hand, Frymer assumes that the American two-party system induces competition between the Democrats and Republicans for the majority of congressional seats, shaping their responsiveness to the minority voter groups other than their natural support base. In comparison to the United States,Thailand has a multi-party system in which electoral victory necessitates building coalitions with minor parties to secure the majority of seats. In the 2019 election, the winning party led by the military junta formed a coalition with 18 other parties to secure 254 seats out of 500, whereas the opposition coalition comprising seven parties earned 246 seats (McCargo and Alexander 2019, 99). So, the notion of electoral capture can help pinpoint the disconnect between parties and the electorate in the Thai case on the basis of party competition. Alternatively, Chandra observes the formation of patron-client relations between Indian political candidates and voters by evaluating the effect of caste membership, ethnic identity, and distributive mechanisms of patronage resources, such as government jobs, by elected officials on electoral and voting strategies. India and Thailand share a few similarities, including having deeply entrenched religious worldviews that shapes their sociopolitical organization; legacies of caste distinctions that still linger to this day; and mobilization tactics that echo narratives of belonging. Ultimately, Frymer and Chandra offer good frames of reference for understanding the conditions that align political parties and voters or drift them apart. Frymer on Electoral Capture In Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America, Frymer conceptualizes the phenomenon of electoral capture wherein electoral incentives prompt parties to instrumentalize the demands of certain interest groups for electoral fortunes. In fact, Frymer advances that the interests of marginalized groups are elevated in electoral platforms by parties seeking to capture their vote. In doing so, political parties may realize substantial electoral gains at low electoral costs if the demands of marginalized groups do not alienate their voter base. The conscious decision to incorporate minority interests in their electoral agenda hints at a relational interdependence between political parties and voters. For instance, opposition parties may try to capture votes from underprivileged groups by entertaining their demands, intently forming a “coalition of minorities” that could challenge the incumbent party (Frymer 1999, 18). As party objectives guide voter choice, the policy preferences of the specific interest groups within the electorate shape electoral platforms. In a two-party system like the United States, intense rivalry seeps through the electoral arena. In brief, party competition becomes much fiercer insofar as actuating an electoral capture strategy of parties. Moreover, Frymer posits that structural incentives such as the type of party system have an effect on the party-voter dynamics. Notably, he suggests a two-party system that introduces electoral incentives that prompt parties to become more cognizant and receptive to issues that marginalized groups face. That implies political parties must align their objectives with those of voters outside of their natural support base. According to him, “uncompetitive single-party system [...] den[ies] voters a choice and allow the ‘haves’ to obstruct electoral
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accountability, [whereas] two-party competition provides the necessary organization and the ability to mobilize the public around programs more beneficial to the ‘have-nots’” (13). In some places where the ‘haves’ majority outnumbers the marginalized ‘have-nots,’ creating even less incentive to instrumentalize minority demands when needed for electoral gains. For instance, the Republican Party during the Second Reconstruction had an overwhelmingly white voter base that was solid and consistent enough to allow it to remain indifferent on Black franchise, a contentious issue at the time. As such, the Republican Party did not pursue votes from Black people nor did they try to pander to white supremacists who formed a fringe minority of voters. In sum, Frymer argues that the adversarial nature of two-party systems generate electoral incentives for political parties to cast aside the needs of underrepresented minority groups to sustain the majority of votes, notably in the case of relations between the Republican Party and Black voters in the Second Reconstruction. Chandra on Patronage Democracy Meanwhile, in Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India, Chandra unpacks patronage politics in a multiethnic democracy where institutional and party structures dictate redistributive powers which entice political candidates and voters, shaping electoral strategies. She primarily describes a patronage democracy as a special type of democratic system characterized by “[t]he individualized distribution of benefits at the disposal of those who control the dominant state” (Chandra 1994, 116). Notably, the discretionary powers of elected officials––and their scope––rests on the institutional structures, which also define the rules of party governance, party membership, and electoral processes. In other words, decentralized political parties and electoral candidates tend to have more discretion over the control of their operational and organizational means in contrast to centralized ones. Consequently, such a difference in party governance equally impacts voting choices and party organizations in multiethnic democracies, either incentivizing or minimizing the usage of patronage practices. Chandra asserts that Indian voters base their voting strategy on the social and economic benefits that they will reap through patronage. This means that decentralized parties devolving considerable discretionary powers to elected representatives are more likely to receive support from particular interest groups irrespective of ethnicity, occupational status, cultural and regional identities (199). Thus, in patronage-democracies, voters expect patronage resources in return for their support of a political candidate if elected, creating a patron-client relationship. As an illustration, when institutional rules place discretionary powers in the hands of the government as a whole, then patronage resources are not guaranteed. That pushes interest groups, such as anxious marginalized communities, toward centralized parties with great electoral prospects, despite candidates having a different social background from them (200). Taking India for example, voters belonging to lower castes, namely Dalit people, consider electoral and patronage prospects when voting for parties. Assuming that electoral success is ascertainable for a particular decentralized party, then ethnic or caste representation in leadership becomes a more decisive factor in voters’ decision. In centralized parties, however, individualized discretionary powers are curtailed and the social identity of candidates matters less to voters because patronage gains are unlikely. Any benefit that centralized parties offer must accommodate a diverse voter base, adding ethnic- or caste-neutral tones to their redistributive policy agenda (171). In brief, state institutions in patronage democracies, such as India, establish important rules of party governance that shape electoral strategies and voter choice with concerns to candidates and party leadership.
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Critical Assessment In retrospect, Frymer’s and Chandra’s respective theoretical approaches to framing party-voter dynamics in multiethnic societies differ in focus. Chiefly, the two authors focalize different aspects and layers of institutions that form electoral incentives. On the one hand, Frymer presupposes the strategic capture of underprivileged group votes by electoral parties, by emphasizing the role of institutional design in electoral politics. In two party systems, for instance, parties become more receptive to the social demands of underprivileged groups, while paying careful attention as to not alienate their natural voter base, compromising their electoral prospects. The effort to avoid internal tensions in the voter base also manifests itself at the party level because political candidates with divergent beliefs can potentially undermine coveted party cohesiveness. As such, coalitions with minorities appear to be temporary, transforming pressing social issues into policy positions for political clout rather than actual problems to be solved. In assuming that a certain type of party system bears an effect on presumed interdependent party-voter relations, Frymer places emphasis on the design of institutions in shaping electoral processes and, by extension, electoral incentives. Conversely, Chandra grounds her argument in the idea that institutional rules determine the capacity of state officials to allocate patronage resources which form electoral incentives and prospects that influence party and voter strategies respectively. She assumes that the allocation system of patronage resources determines the electoral success of certain types of parties over other types, namely decentralized and centralized parties (Chandra 1994, 166). The rules dictating party governance impact party-voter dynamics, as they determine the viability of patronclient relationships between political candidates and voters who share similar social backgrounds. To put this in perspective, Chandra mostly argues that the rules of state institutions and party rules delimit individualized powers of resource redistribution. In conclusion, both Frymer and Chandra share the belief that institutional structures prompt parties to either reach out or ignore underprivileged voters in polarized societies under a democratic system. However, they differ on defining what institutional layer creates those electoral incentives: party system and party governance, respectively. Making Sense of Electoral Dynamics in Thailand
Putting into practice Frymer and Chandra’s concepts, along with other academic literature on Thai politics, can help disentangle Thailand’s peculiar brand of electoral processes, which are deeply affected by lingering traditional sociopolitical structures. This can explain the continuity of communication gaps between Thai parties and the electorate, examining factional party competition, unequal clientelist relations and social organization, and state policies in Thailand since its inception as a country.
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Factionalism, Corruption, and Uncertainty When applied to the Thai case, the notions brought by Frymer and Chandra overlook the possibility of having another set of actors, namely the monarchy and the military, shaping electoral processes and outcomes in multiethnic democracies. The presence of additional state institutions as monopolizing and influential as Thai monarchs and the military heavily distort the relationship between and among parties and voters. For one, Duncan McCargo (Year) brings to the table the idea of ‘network monarchy’ to explain illiberalism in Thai electoral and policy making processes. McCargo created this compound phrase to refer to deeply entrenched networks of ruling elites that monopolize political offices. Electoral capture and patronage democracy notions barely address the illiberal tendencies of governments that significantly impairs voting choice. In particular, McCargo asserts that frequent interventions of the Thai monarch in domestic politics to legitimize elected governments and military juntas breeds instability more than the party system does. Network monarchy embodies royal interventions, “pragmatic compromises with sleazy politicians, [...] structural violence, and [...] politics of alliance building” (McCargo 2005, 505). In essence, political participation in Thailand is a sport reserved for the powerful, those holding the reins of their own branch of society. Political participation then becomes competitive displays of loyalty fishing for the royal stamp. Despite having a constitutional monarchy with a multi-party system, the country remains incredibly anti-democratic due to incessant royal interference trying to reinvigorate the frail legitimacy of the supposedly democratic institutions when social order is under threat. A notable example of royal intervention is the appointment of military junta leader Prayuth Chan-o-chan as Prime Minister after the 2014 elections to quell clashes between pro-democracy and pro-monarchy activists that threatened social harmony in the country (Chachavalpongpun 2015, 1205). To summarize, McCargo’s article on the consequentiality of royal approvals is evident of a total disconnect between the Thai electorate and political parties, engendering relative uncertainty regarding political processes. From another standpoint, in relation to Frymer’s point on party systems, Erik Martinez Kuhonta (2011) notes that the instability of Thailand’s party system, among other factors, encourages factional wrangling between parties obsessed with financial gain and fighting for royal approval. The multitude of parties that exist solely on the basis of patronage hinders the formation of a consistent voter base and weakens parties’ resolve to follow through with their electoral promises. Kuhonta proposes that the degree of institutionalization and “social rootedness” of parties determine their commitment to either act in the best interests of the public or become “vehicle for elite interests” (Kuhonta 2011, 28). Although American parties are far more institutionalized than Thai parties, they are both similar in terms of lacking the institutional capacity to satisfy the demands of marginalized groups (Frymer 1999, 90). For example, the catastrophic handling of the 2011 floods exposed that business interests override public safety. Swayed by lobbyists, politicians had invested more effort and money to build residential and commercial areas on flood-prone lands, destroying critical flood protection infrastructure that could have mitigated the worst floods to date in Thai history (Poapongsakorn and Meethom 2013, 6). To summarize, due to the short-lived incumbencies and political uncertainty, elected Thai officials implement myopic policies with short-term benefits, such as monetary gain, and lower risks of inducing a parliamentary deadlock (Kētthat et al. 1990, 59).
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Paradoxical Dynamics in Patron-Client Relations Like factionalism, clientelism is an important feature present in modern Thai political processes that, as Kuhonta (2011) posits, traces back to the “feudalistic social structure” bequeathed from the sakdina system in the Siamese period between the 14th and 20th century (129). In spite of the abolition of sakdina, which equates to a juncture between slavery and the corvée system in feudal Europe its legacy is reflected in today’s party-voter dynamics. Present day relations between Thai parties and the electorate are analogous to those between the landlord class and servants, who were regarded as forced labour tasked with agricultural, domestic, and construction work lasting months (Reynolds 1987, 101). Functioning as a “property rights system,” the legacy of sakdina connected social status to one’s amount of profitable assets, namely land and servants (99). Contrary to European feudalism, sakdina centers both ideologically and geographically around the monarchy, establishing a three-stratum social hierarchy. As the monarch constitutes an immovable fixture on top of this sociopolitical structure, tensions over influence and resources create uneasiness among status obsessed landowners that foster factional conflict. The ideological foundations of this sakdina regime associates power with “the control over manpower,” insofar as encouraging landowners to accrue power and wealth through coercive means (128). Some elements of the sakdina have permeated modern Thai sociopolitical institutions, allowing the continuation of a pre-existing unequal dynamic between landowners and servants, such as the precursory taxation and conscription systems. Policy Artefacts Reinforcing Factionalism and Clientelism For the purpose of understanding the reinstitution of exploitative and coercive institutions, it is important to consider the state-legitimizing endeavours of the Thai elite class during threatening European expansion in Asia in the late eighteenth century. Efforts to resist colonization necessitated emulating Western ideals of a modern state that, ironically, repudiated exploitative sakdina practices that had ensured centuries of sociopolitical order within the Siamese polities. King Chulalongkorn, the last monarch of Siam and the visionary behind Thai nation building, enacted taxation regimes, while transitioning out of sakdina. Notably, the head tax policy of 1902 served to contain the affluence of the landlord class and, more subtly, to quell regional sovereignty movements (Kuhonta 2011, 131). Another policy artefact converging Thai-Western ideals is the 1905 Conscription Act mandating compulsory military service for all Thai subjects, forming the basis of the present-day military (132). In an attempt to create a level playing field remedying economic and social disparity, universal conscription mixes the landowning class and peasants. It also consolidated the supremacy of the monarch and mobilized manpower in a calculating way to protect Thai sovereignty from external and internal threats. In brief, statebuilding policies predating the inception of Thailand were carefully crafted so as not to uproot the ingrained social structures on which Thailand was built. Reevaluating Electoral Capture and Patronage Democracy Given that modern institutions still grew out the roots of sakdina, it is no surprise that there exist resemblances between patterns of governance and social stratification, namely a total disconnection between the Thai electorate and the elected officials. By revisiting the origins of patronage in Thailand, the incompatibility becomes clearer when considering Thai political processes and the theoretical frameworks proposed by Frymer and Chandra respectively. The alienation of the electorate from government affairs by political officials, including elected candidates, lies in several layers of exclusion. First, a prime example is ever-present social hierarchy inherited
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from the sakdina regime, predefining a one-sided party-voter relationship that proves no sign of interdependence, suggesting the impracticality of Frymer’s electoral capture in the Thai case. Second, unlimited discretion of wealthy candidates over the allocation of electoral fortunes to often underprivileged voters weakens Chandra's assumption that mainly patronage prospects weigh in voter choice. In the Thai case, exploitative and coercive fears may also factor in. Third, Chandra’s (1994) point on how salient narratives of belonging are in multiethnic democracies, such as India, overlooks countries like Thailand where belonging narratives are grounded in allegiance to the nation and, more specifically, the monarchy (206). Ethnic affiliation in Thailand became more ambiguous through “intermarriage and assimilation [produced] a distinct mestizo social stratum,” (Anderson 1998, 302). Thus, Thai political discourse mainly consists of ‘othering’ narratives as conscientious tools to alienate those that do not fit the mould carved out by the normative concept of Thainess, which embodies Thai qualities. As mentioned previously, the Thainess doctrine was transplanted into Western policy models to legitimize but also sustain exploitative and coercive measures allowing the containment of manpower within land area and elite hands. Coupled with antiquated sociopolitical structure, the unstable and unpredictable nature of Thai party institutions introduced electoral incentives that encouraged equally short-sighted political enterprises and voter decisions. Shallow party-voter relations explains why Thai parties lack a solid and consistent voterbase and, more importantly, points out to the ways Thai citizens display their political allegiance (Kuhonta 2011, 30). At times uniting, and others divisive, narratives of belonging to the Thai nation are used to cunningly justify political purges. Conceptualizing the Normalization of Political Purges Finally, the normalization of factional violence in repressessing prominent public demonstrations points to an indifference toward unnecessary bloodshed from Thai elites and the poor state of democracy in Thailand overall. This can be seen in three critical political movements, all of which resulted in fatal outcomes. Illiberalism and Alienation First, simmering Buddhist-Muslim tensions in Southern Thailand ignited legitimacy issues that escalated into approximately 850 state-sanctioned killings between 2004 and 2005 to contain Malay Muslim insurgents. In the early 2000s, the popularity of the newcomer Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party in the capital and Northern regions did not extend to Southern provinces, except Phang Nga which was in dire need of government assistance after the 2004 tsunami (Nishizaki 2018, 14). Though ethnic and religious underrepresentation in the electoral arena could be branded as catalysts for Malay Muslim insurgency tendencies, it is not the case in Southern Thailand. In fact, the TRT formed a coalition with the Malay Muslim party Wadah that instantiates factionalism. Rather, tensions brewed because of a disconnection between TRT and Wadah politicians disillusioned with illiberal pollitics and an electorate aggravated by Thai-Malay and Buddhist-Muslim inequalities (McCargo 2015, 56; Horstmann 2006). The TRT’s violent attempts to restore order in the region through extrajudicial killings casted a bad light on the Thai government, displeasing the network of old elites that already disliked the party. In final, TRT led purges of insurgent elements in the South and disturbed Thai socio-political structures privileged by a network monarchy, causing its dissolution in 2006 by the Constitutional Court (Sombatpoonsiri 2020; McCargo 2005). Second, the 2010 Red Shirt protests in the cosmopolitan capital of Bangkok shook the core foundations of that social structure predicated on the sakdina system, resulting in political assassinations affecting both anti- and pro-establishment activists. In detail, 92 people were killed in those public demonstrations in response to a state-led
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crackdown on remaining TRT supporters in 2009 (McCargo and Thabchumpon 2011, 993). Factionalism seeps into every state institutions and instruments, such as the Truth for Reconciliation Commission of Thailand (TRCT). Following the recommendations proposed in the 2011 TRCT, blatant partisan treatment is exemplified by the uneven distribution of financial compensation to victims of the 2010 Red Shirt movement, with a few prominent, elite families receiving more money than a thousand of victims (401). Also, “men in black” perpetrating political killings targeting yellow shirt activists supporting the monarchy were overstated in the TRCT, othering redshirt activists as enemies (McCargo and Thabchumpon 2014, 390). As a matter of fact, growing social polarization due to illiberal politics which exclude the population hint at a grim future for Thailand. Senseless violence against civilians to either protect or end the antiquated Thai establishment does not contribute in any way to restoring harmony. Third, the state-led 1976 Thammasat massacre of more than 90 university students is symptomatic of a rising anti-academia movement seeking to purge any element threatening the balance provided by illiberal Thai institutions (Haberkorn 2017, 274; Rojanaphruk 2016). In particular, democratic ideas born out of Thai-based academic institutions are more difficult to discredit as ‘un-Thai’ compared to European ideas, which have long been a source of contention among the Thai public. There exists a debate that has polarized Thai society since the inception of Thailand. It pits those thinking that the country belongs to the ‘people’ against those who think that the country belongs to the monarchy, which forms one of the three pillars of Thai society alongside Buddhism and the people (Fong 2009). The latter conception of Thailand has been adopted by the ruling class to legitimize illiberal institutions that allow it to sustain power. That explains state efforts to silence student grassroots movements that can weaponize uninformed Thai citizens against a visibly uncompetent and despotic government. Despite instigating the Thammasat massacre, the Thai regime resorted to othering Thai students as holding itself accountable would severely undermine its own legitimacy and image. In retrospect, as electoral and governing patterns alienate Thai voters from a government dominated by detached elites, rancour lingers in the mind of an unheard population. To illustrate, entrenched political repression and intimidation deters dissent against the Thai regime. When anti-establishment activists, full of restless yearning for a freer and more equal country, step out of the mould to make their voice heard, arbitrary borders quickly shut them out. Now, as outsiders shunned by their neighbors, friends, and even family, they are deemed enemies of the whole country—alien elements that need to be purged from the Thai nation. National Self-Preservation The violent instrumentalization of Thai nationhood by the ruling class and the citizenry to mitigate internal crises highlights the perceived threat political movements pose to the legitimacy of traditional governing institutions. This leads to the generation of violent crackdowns in an attempt to restore a false order of peace, isolating both ruling elites and the population in a state of apathy and indifferent to political murders. To start, mainstream electoral discourse in Thailand revolves around the importance of sustaining the three pillars of Thai nationhood, namely the monarchy, Theravada Buddhism, and the people (Chotpradit 2018; Fong 2009). The conception of nationhood forms the basis of Thainess, delimiting what is and is not Thai (Winichakul 1994, 4). For example, as national and ethnic signifiers help parties enter and stay relevant in the electoral arena, party competition is characterized by displays of Thainess (Tanabe and Keyes 2002, 216) rather than actual electoral platforms attuned to the needs of constituents, as expected by Frymer . In this view, an unattended electorate bears the brunt of antiquated social issues, instilling apathy within those who have learned to be content with their
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precarious living conditions. Additionally, this obsession with Thainess alienates people who do not support the monarchy or its overinvolvement in domestic politics, those who do not follow Theravada Buddhist and Buddhist teachings, and those who are not considered Thai. This category of Thai people ranges from individuals that do not conform to widely-held beliefs, including pro-democracy interests, and those without a Thai heritage like Karen and Hmong tribes in northwestern regions, Lao groups in the Northeast, and Malay and Maniq peoples in the south. And thus, people are conditioned to abandon their convictions to avoid ‘standing out’ and, more importantly, to give the impression of ‘standing against’ the three pillars of the nation. As adhering to dominant beliefs emphasizes one’s Thainess, people engage in self-censorship as means of survival, rendering political participation to a public ritual of proving one’s Thainess. Violent responses to counter-hegemonic movements exemplify the pervasiveness of that ritualistic act in the country. That way, the instrumentalization of Thainess by detached elites enables them to discard civil society as mere pawns in their electoral games and to justify senseless violence against perceived alien elements Likewise, any attempt to change the current order is heavily frowned upon in Thai society due to social conditioning. An excerpt by the most influential monarch in Thai history, late King Bhumibol Adulyadej showcases the instrumentalization of Thainess against counter hegemonic beliefs and movements: At a time when our country is being continually threatened with aggression by the enemy, our very freedom and existence as Thais may be destroyed if Thai people fail to realise their patriotism and their solidarity in resisting the enemy…. Accordingly, the Thai military has the most important role in defence of our country at all times, ready always to carry out its duty to protect the country (Winichakul 1994, 168). With their rhetoric, the long established Thai regime and its elite class have nurtured “cultural violence,” impeding the grassroots efforts to consolidate democracy and promote social justice (Galtung 1990, 295). So, political purges are not considered problematic because they maintain the legitimacy of an overpowered Thai regime. In effect, a deeply divided society is left unequipped to dismantle authoritarian institutions, the normative doctrine of Thainess, and that culture of violence. In hindsight, Frymer’s electoral capture and Chandra’s patronagedemocracy fail to consider the omnipresence of entities above the legislature, such as the monarchy and the military, explaining illiberal and patronage practices in modern Thai politics. Conclusion This piece mainly discussed the root causes of political purges, which have yet to be addressed in Thailand and conspicuously trap citizens in a climate of fear, forcing a culture of apathy. I first dissected the modus operandi of Thai state institutions, exploring theoretical arguments from a range of scholars, such as Paul Frymer and Kanchan Chandra, surveying electoral processes, as well as the intricacies of Thai politics. Then, I critically assessed the presented theories in relation to Thai political processes which mostly result in the exclusion and severe repression of citizen participation in the government. Specifically, I mentioned the anachronistic taxation and conscription policies that prolonged the existence of an unequal social hierarchy from the feudal era. In the final section, I delved deeper illiberalism, factionalism, and patronage politics that have pervaded the Thai political landscape and have normalized political murders with impunity. As I outlined mass public demonstrations that were silenced by politically motivated purges, my aim was to showcase the political and emotional disconnect between political parties and the electorate in Thailand, deepened by long-standing elitist networks and factionalist tendencies.
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While Thai society is stuck in a cycle of desperation and violence, the King is a spectator to his nation’s social and democratic struggles. The fate of the country is entrusted in the Kings’ hands rather than a government expressing the general will of the population. Despotic authority will remain as long as the avenue to government positions remains politically and socially inaccessible for all citizens of Thailand.
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References Anderson, Benedict R. 1998. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World. London: Verso. Chachavalpongpun, Pavin. 2015.“Neo-Royalism and the Future of the Thai Monarchy: From Bhumibol to Vajiralongkorn.” Asian Survey 55, no. 6: 1193–1216. www.jstor.org/stable/26364332. Chandra, Kanchan. 1994. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chotpradit, Thanavi. 2018. “Countering Royalism with Constitutionalism: The People’s Party’s Visual Culture after the Boworadet Rebellion.” South East Asia Research 26, no. 3: 235–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967828X18792635. Fong, Jack. 2009 "Sacred nationalism: The Thai monarchy and primordial nation construction." Journal of Contemporary Asia 39, no. 4: 673-696. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472330903077030 Frymer, Paul. 1999. Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Galtung, Johan. 1990. “Cultural Violence.” Journal of Peace Research 27 no. 3: 291–305. https://opev.org/wpcontent/uploads/2019/10/GALTUNG-Johan.-Cultural-Violence.pdf Haberkorn, Tyrell. 2017. “The Anniversary of a Massacre and the Death of a Monarch.” The Journal of Asian Studies 76, no. 2: 269–81. doi:10.1017/S0021911817000018. Horstmann, Alexander. 2002. Class, Culture and Space: The Construction and Shaping of Communal Space in South Thailand (version 1. Aufl.). Kultur Und Soziale Praxis. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783839400517/html Kētthat, Sippanon, Robert B Textor, and William Klausner. 1990. The Middle Path for the Future of Thailand: Technology in Harmony with Culture and Environment. Honolulu, Hawaii, USA: Institute of Culture and Communication, East-West Center. Kuhonta, Erik Martinez. 2011. The Institutional Imperative: The Politics of Equitable Development in Southeast Asia. Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Stanford Scholarship Online. McCargo, Duncan. 2005. Network monarchy and legitimacy crises in Thailand. The Pacific Review 18, no. 4: 499519. https://doi.org/10.1080/09512740500338937 Thabchumpon, N., and Duncan, M. 2011. “Urbanized villages in the 2010 Thai Redshirt Protests.” Asian Survey 51, no. 6: 993–1018. https://doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.1525/as.2011.51.6.993 McCargo, Duncan, and Naruemon Thabchumpon. 2014. Wreck/Conciliation? The Politics of Truth Commissions in Thailand. Journal of East Asian Studies 14, no. 3: 377–404. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1598240800005531
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McCargo, Duncan. 2015. Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7591/9780801463624/html McCargo, Duncan. and Saowanee Alexander. (2019). Thailand's 2019 elections: a state of democratic dictatorship? Asia Policy, 14(4), 89–106. https://doi.org/10.1353/asp.2019.0050 Nishizaki, Yoshinori. 2018. Political Authority and Provincial Identity in Thailand: The Making of Banharn-Buri. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. https://www-degruytercom.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/document/doi/10.7591/9781501732553/html Poapongsakorn, Nipon, and Pitsom Meethom. 2013. "Impact of the 2011 floods, and flood management in Thailand." ERIA Discussion Paper Series 34 (2013). Reynolds, Craig J. 2018. Thai Radical Discourse : The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7591/9781501718885/html Rojanaphruk, Pravit. 2016. “The Will to Remember: Survivors Recount 1976 Thammasat Massacre 40 Years Later.” Khaosod English, 5 October 2016 www.khaosodenglish.com/politics/2016/10/05/will-remembersurvivors-recount-1976-massacre-40-years-later/ Sombatpoonsiri, Janjira. 2020. “Two Thailands: Clashing Political Orders and Entrenched Polarization.” In Political Polarization in South and Southeast Asia: Old Divisions, New Dangers, edited by Thomas Carothers and Andrew O’Donohue. 67-79. https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/08/18/two-thailands-clashing-political-ordersand-entrenched-polarization-pub-82438. Tanabe, Shigeru, and Charles F. Keyes. 2002. Cultural Crisis and Social Memory: Modernity and Identity in Thailand and Laos. Anthropology of Asia Series. London: RoutledgeCurzon. ProQuest Ebrary. Winichakul, Thongchai. 1994. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. EBSCOhost.
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The Grey Zone: Assassinations as a Tool for the Russian State Jayden Robinson Edited by Claudia George
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ABTRACT As the Russian state has moved into a “grey zone” where authoritarianism overshadows hopes for democracy, it has continued to rely on assassination as a means of suppressing insurgent threats and silencing dissent. Though this is not a new phenomenon, the strategy by which these assassinations are carried out has changed significantly; Russian intelligence services operate with increasing independence and assassinations are now privatized or conducted through extremely opaque channels. This paper argues that by rebranding assassinations as randomized killings, the regime is able to distance itself from responsibility and maintain plausible deniability, while simultaneously benefitting from the eradication of perceived threats. To illustrate this phenomenon, this paper inspects several cases of assassination of prominent critics, in which there is extensive evidence, though circumstantial, that the Russian state played a major role. Introduction The modern Russian state builds on a long history of population surveillance and covert security mechanisms that stretch back to Tsarist Russia and increased in strength and influence during the era of the Soviet Union. Now, the modern Russian state is left in a “grey zone,” where there are elections and increased civil society activity, but serious democratic deficits persist (Carothers 2002, 9). Vladimir Putin’s leadership has largely stalled progression toward a more open and democratic society, and the spread of modern communications technologies has strengthened the Russian surveillance apparatus, with several investigative security agencies having been granted the right to intercept emails and phone calls (Borogan and Soldatov 2013, 24). The Federal Security Service (FSB), one of the main successor organizations to the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB), is permitted to eavesdrop on phone calls without having to show their court order to Telecom companies in the country (Borogan and Soldatov 2013, 25). The ability of various Russian authorities like the FSB to spy on private communications with legal legitimacy and endorsement from top officials strongly suggests the use of this information to target dissenters or individuals deemed subversive or influential. With reference to the unique ways the surveillance apparatus operates in Russia, the main goal of this article is to explore assassination as a tool used by the state to control dissent and the spread of information. While there may be specific direction from top officials, this is not necessary to facilitate assassinations, and killings may be carried out with the knowledge that these elites have conferred legitimacy over these actions and that they will likely not face punishment. The state, and its prominent decisionmakers, are then able to deny involvement and maintain their own legitimacy due to lack of evidence incriminating them. They also tend to meddle in investigations to ensure plausible deniability. They are, in a sense, able to enjoy the fruits of political assassinations without having to be directly connected to the events. I argue that this has become the main strategy to carry out assassinations, seeing as how the Russian state has entered this aforementioned “grey zone”—the brutal tools of the Soviet government have not disappeared, but instead have been rebranded as randomized killings. To illustrate this argument, I will cover several cases of assassination that have taken place under the current regime. Each demonstrates how orthodox explanations of assassinations no longer satisfy the complexities of the Russian case. There is an increasingly murky landscape of assassination surrounding the Russian state, and it continues to strive for plausible deniability.
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Literature Review Much literature on the topic focuses on how non-state actors use assassination to target elite political actors or rivals, rather than how the state can use assassination in this way. Nachman Ben-Yehuda (1990) takes a more sociological approach to assassination, by which the term “political assassination” is used as a rhetorical device to interpret, and often to justify a certain type of killing (334). However, Ben-Yehuda differentiates between cases of political assassinations, which he asserts are directed from the periphery, and political executions, which he defines as targeted killings directed by states (338). He notes that states are highly secretive about political executions, and also have a different basis of legitimacy for these types of killings (338). While I agree that there may be more than one way of interpreting assassinations by the state, and that these assassinations may be seen as more or less legitimate based on the perceived legitimacy of said government, this definition does not effectively reflect the current situation in Russia. The line between state directed executions and political assassinations emanating from the periphery has become blurred, seeing as how the Russian state has progressed from Sovietstyle totalitarianism to a mixed-style of governance. As I will note, the state intelligence services have been granted a greater degree of independence, meaning assassinations may or may not be connected directly to state officials. In contrast to Ben-Yehuda’s approach, Kevin A. O’Brien (1998) problematizes the general definition of assassination as extralegal killing with political impact, maintainig that this explanation does not provide sufficient depth to differentiate between assassinations and killings by the state in context of low intensity conflict or counterinsurgency operations (88-89). The combination of motivation behind the act of assassination, the importance of the target in effecting a political outcome through their removal, and the specific singularity of their targeting constitute his criteria for defining assassination as it relates to the state (89). While theoretically this appears to be helpful, it assumes that we can consistently and clearly attribute assassinations to the state, which is not necessarily the case in Russia. Additionally, the increasingly parallel and privatized nature of Russian intelligence organizations dislocates the once explicit links between assassinations and the state. While motivations and actions on the part of the state can be theorized, genuine proof is much harder to secure. I feel that it is also pertinent to include reference to “sharp” counterinsurgency, whereby the state employs a clandestine network of intelligence, military, and police services to offer plausible deniability for its actions (Douek 2020, 7). The Russian case fits the mold of failed security sector reform and increasingly “privatized” violence, which builds on a legacy of explicitly state directed violence. The sharpest tool of counterinsurgency, assassination, remains in the arsenal of the security services and is now used in coercive fashion in advance of an insurgent threat to the state (Douek 2020, 7). With this in mind, I argue that there has been a break in unitary action as Russia has moved from strict totalitarianism to a more mixed regime, especially as it has encouraged the independence of the intelligence services. The lack of successful security sector reform puts dissenters in a continually vulnerable position. Assassination can also be used as a form of revenge for perceived disloyalty. While the action may be initiated within the state, and align with the motives of officials like Vladimir Putin, there is likely far less explicit command and control over these actions as there was in previous Russian regimes. In the case of Russia in the present day, the tool of assassination remains key for controlling dissent, but the direct connection to the state is far more fraught and difficult to prove.
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Continuity and Change from the Soviet Surveillance State It is pertinent to examine how the Russian surveillance state has evolved from its predecessor, the Soviet Union. After the fall of the USSR in the early 1990s, there was hope that the state would be rid of its most pernicious and violent elements, and that it would increasingly open up towards the rest of the world. However, as has been described by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan (2011), the security state has had something of a renaissance in Russia, with the KGB’s legacy looming large over the population (4). The KGB was dissolved in December of 1991 and was replaced when the FSB was created in 1995 (Borogan and Soldatov 2011, ix). Boris Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin to the directorship of the FSB in 1998, and by 2000 he was appointed as Yeltsin’s successor (Borogan and Soldatov 2011, ix). The KGB had originally been subservient to the Communist Party, forming a “state within a state,” but its successor agency has become something of a parallel state, in that it answers directly to the president and many former members now control significant elements of the Russian economy (Borogan and Soldatov 2011, ix). As was the case with the KGB, the FSB enjoys a great amount of secrecy from public eyes: Their budget is unknown to the public, and the true number of officers that make up its ranks is undisclosed (Borogan and Soldatov 2011, 3). The FSB also enjoys far greater independence than the KGB ever did under the auspices of the Communist Party (Borogan and Soldatov 2011, 4). The FSB has specifically been tasked with protecting the stability of Putin’s regime, and is not subject to any oversight from other state institutions (Borogan and Soldatov 2011, 4). In addition to this lack of oversight and greater independence, the FSB has also been granted the legal ability to assassinate so called “terrorists on foreign soil” (Borogan and Soldatov 2011, 201). Therefore it is legally and theoretically able to conduct the assassinations of those it deems “terrorists”—who are really journalists, political opponents, or defectors of the intelligence apparatus—without any punitive consequences. The channels through which these assassinations are conducted are often extremely opaque or are subcontracted to private actors. This aids in the state’s ability to distance itself from these happenings, despite how often the victims of assassination are explicit opponents of the regime. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, strict direction from the central governing body has diminished. This alleged privatization of violence is the key difference between the former Soviet Union and today’s Russian Federation––previously, the Soviet Union and the Communist Party were not subject to questioning and scrutiny about their assassination practices. Now, facing increasing scrutiny from Western media, the modern Russian state must distance itself from these actions through legal maneuvering and opaque channels of organizing. What is similar, however, is this pre-emptive approach to counterinsurgency. Assassinations, then, imply a sense of vulnerability and insecurity about the survival of the regime, which in turn justifies eliminating opponents even if outsiders would doubt their ability to form a true insurgent threat to the state. Sharp counterinsurgency has then become embedded in the functioning of the Russian state, allowing it to pre-empt challenges by influential figures or those who possess destabilizing information. In each case of assassination, the risk of challenge or further betrayal must be snuffed before any revolution has even begun. Cases of Assassination To parse through these distinctions and examine how Russia uses assassination as a tool, I examine some specific cases of assassination, namely that of Boris Nemtsov, who was a major figure in the Russian government
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and in the sphere of dissent, as well as Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist known for her opposition to Vladimir Putin and her coverage of the Chechen wars (McLaughlin 2020, 55). The assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and the attempted assassination sof Alexey Navalney and Sergei and Yulia Skripal are also informative cases. The murkiness that surrounds these cases is likely part of a wider strategy to confuse those that wish to find the truth, and encourage dissenters’, or potential dissenters’, fears of an indefinable assassin (McLaughlin 2020, 60). Additionally, these cases speak not only to a level of insecurity within the Russian state, but also a desire to demonstrate power in the form of violence. Whether the targets are journalists, politicians, vocal critics, or former double agents, their assassinations demonstrate a strategy of pre-emptive violence, and an increasing confidence that the truth will be hidden. The involevment of the Kremlin, or even Vladimir Putin himself, is ultimately not necessary for these clandestine groups to perform these assassinations. Though insecure about potential insurgent threats, the regime appears to have reason to believe this privatization strategy will continue to succeed. Few zakazchiks, or those who give the orders, are ever found and convicted (Harding and Roth 2020). As has been recommended by national security expert Clint Watts, to understand the Russian state, we must “follow the trail of dead Russians” (Bergmann 2019). These deaths also have a certain specific symbolic value, especially for those who are former collaborators with the state’s intelligence services (Gioe et. al 2019, 562). The choice of weapon, generally radioactive poison and nerve agents, also hold a strong message for those considering this form of disloyalty: theatrical vengeance will ensue (562). These particularly painful tools of assassination are reserved for individuals deemed most threatening and traitorous to the state, which are those that threaten to expose the clandestine activities of various intelligence organizations in Russia. As previously noted, a law passed in June of 2006 gives the FSB authority to send agents abroad to assassinate “terrorists.” Notably however, this power is only supposed to be exercised with the authority of the president (Dombey 2007). Additionally, given that the use of poisons like Polonium-210 require high-level approval (Dombey 2007), Putin’s involvement cannot be ruled out. However, by permitting these organizations to carry out this work through covert channels, Putin can distance himself from these violent and authoritarian means of control, thereby delegitimizing criticism due to a lack of conclusive evidence. Boris Nemtsov In February of 2015, Boris Nemtsov was shot six times in the back, bringing his life to a premature and violent end (Gioe et. al 2019, 561). He was assassinated mere blocks away from the Kremlin, just before a peace rally he had been planning (McLaughlin 2020, 56). Nemtsov was once a rising star in the Boris Yeltsin administration, and had a history of open opposition to Vladimir Putin (58). At the time of his death, he was preparing a report containing evidence of Russia’s involvement in the conflict in Ukraine, which had been vehemently denied by the state (58). The information he held constituted a major threat to the reputation and strategic position of the Russian state, and his elimination was not only an attempt to maintain control over the spread of this information, but also potentially an attempt to limit protest against the state. Many media accounts have insisted on Vladimir Putin’s involvement in Nemtsov’s death (McLaughlin 2020, 58). The public and visible nature of his assassination, occurring just blocks from the Kremlin and in view of CCTV cameras, is an extremely brazen demonstration of power (Makarychev, Yatsyk, and Zhanna 2018, 13). While it is unlikely that we will ever know the true extent of Putin’s involvement in any of these assassinations, the role of the state can be theorized in these instances, as it seeks to control the accepted narrative. Five Chechen men stood trial for Nemtsov’s death, but the trial was characterized as “unusual” (AJE 2016). They were arrested rather swiftly
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after the assassination, and later claimed their confessions were extracted through torture (AJE 2016). Russian officials have consistently denied involvement, with Putin himself suggesting that Nemtsov was killed by Western forces in a plot to stoke discontent in the country (AJE 2016). The trial was denounced by Nemtsov’s family as a coverup, with key evidence, like the CCTV footage, not revealed in court (Luhn 2017). The unusual trial and Putin’s commentary subtly indicate this desire to control the “truth” and create an acceptable narrative. Several other theories have emerged in response to his death, especially in Western media accounts, which tend to simply name Vladimir Putin as the prime suspect of the case (McLaughlin 2020, 95). What is key for this case, and others, is the necessity of seeing beyond the unconfirmable role of Vladimir Putin and into the broader implications for the relationship of the Russian state to its critics. The lack of direct links to the state and its elites limit the avenues for legitimate criticism and transformative change. The death of Boris Nemtsov further solidifies authoritarian means as the only option for political success. Anna Politkovskaya Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated outside her home in Moscow in October of 2006, during her investigation of abuses by Chechen army officers (McLaughlin 2020, 55). Similar to Boris Nemtsov, she had been a consistent critic of the Putin regime and was well known for her public dissent and investigative journalism into the wrongdoings of the Russian government (57). She had published a number of works on the two Chechen wars, as well as the economic and social injustices that Russians faced in the post-Soviet era (55). Her death cut short the work she had been doing regarding allegations of torture and kidnappings of civilians by Chechen army officers, which she directly connected to Russian-backed Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov (59). Many media accounts remarked that her death seemed like a contract killing, as the gun was left behind at the scene (McLaughlin 2020, 55). Assuming this was the case, her death signals an attempt by the state to privatize violence. Several people were arrested in relation to her death, including several members of a Chechen organized crime group as well as active and retired members of the FSB (Harding 2009). The connection between the intelligence services and organized crime is quite clear in this instance, but it is also important to note the apparent strategy to pin the blame on seemingly “low-level”(Harding 2009) individuals involved in the plot to assassinate Anna Politkovskaya. The individual who ordered her assassination would never be conclusively found at trial (Harding 2009). Similarly to the Nemtsov case, evidence at trial, including key footage, was lost or seemingly contradictory, serving to further muddy the narrative and true facts of her death (Harding 2009). The men were initially acquitted, but in 2014 were convicted during a new trial (Gutterman 2014). Ultimately, by convicting only those who carried out the assassination, the state can wash its hands of the case, and appeal to “justice” having been served. This, again, narrows the avenues for criticism, and allows the Russian state to maintain its innocence by insisting further investigation is necessary given this legal outcome. Alexander Litvinenko Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated just weeks after Anna Politkovskaya and had been quite vocal about the state’s responsibility for her death, even previously urging her to leave Russia as she was under threat (Harding 2016). His assassins, Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitri Kovtun, travelled across international borders to London, where they poisoned him with Polonium-210 (Bergmann 2019). This substance is extremely rare, only produced in
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Russian FSB labs, and heavily regulated by the state (Bergmann 2019). Lugovoy, Kovtun, and Litvinenko are all former members of the KGB, though only Alexander Litvinenko had dared to speak out against the establishment (Mclaughlin 2020, 67). During his time at the FSB, he discovered that corruption was rife in the intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and uncovered their connections with Russian mafia groups (Bergmann 2019). In 1998, Litvinenko approached then-FSB leader Vladimir Putin with evidence of this corruption but was later fired by Putin after holding an unauthorized press conference exposing this behaviour (Bergmann 2019). He fled Russia after Putin became president, fearing retribution for his staunch criticism, and later began informing for MI6 after being granted asylum in the UK (Bergmann 2019). His assassination occurred just before he was set to testify in front of a Spanish judge about the state’s connection to the Russian mob (Bergmann 2019). He would even begin to refer to Russia as the “mafia state,” in which the government and organized crime had merged to the point that the state was run as a criminal enterprise (Bergmann 2019). His betrayal of the intelligence services and his continual criticism of the Russian state made him a prime target. The assassins’ nebulous connections to the intelligence community also denote this notion of privatized and murky sources of violence. While neither were active members, the channels with which the assassination was organized, though opaque to outsiders, were likely to have been related to their previous involvement with the intelligence community. Given his role in the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, It is striking that Andrei Lugovoy is now deputy of the State Duma and enjoys immunity from any prosecution (Harding 2010), meaning that his role in Litvinenko’s assassination will likely go unpunished. Following an investigation into the death of Litvinenko, the United Kingdom began an extradition for Lugovoy but has been unable to finish this process as Russia has claimed extradition would be illegal (The Guardian Staff and Agencies 2007). Lugovoy’s prominence in government is almost flagrant. In a leaked cable to a French presidential advisor, Daniel Fried, a key American diplomat described this as “increasing self-confidence to the point of arrogance” (Harding 2010). He also remarked that it was unlikely that security elements could operate in the UK without the knowledge of Vladimir Putin (Harding 2010). The choice of weapon in this instance, a highly controlled radioactive substance, also indicates that there was state approval. However, the state has positioned itself, and the assassins, in such a way as to obscure proof beyond the circumstantial. The international response to the assassination was quite muted; European Union meetings that included Putin soon after the event failed to even mention the assassination (McLaughlin 2020, 80). The state, and especially Vladimir Putin, are successfully able to sidestep calls for accountability. In some sense, the state is insecure about both information leakage and the power of influential and critical figures, yet simultaneously confident in their ability to eliminate these enemies while facing few consequences in the international community. Their ability to ensure the avenues for investigation and truth seeking are narrowed, in this case by allowing Lugovoy to exercise his immunity from prosecution, allows the Russian state to continue to use assassination as a tool to control dissent both domestically and internationally.
Sergei and Yulia Skripal In March of 2018, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia experienced an attempt on their lives (Gioe et. al 2019, 562). Both were found unresponsive on a park bench in Salisbury, and it was eventually determined that they had been poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok (McLaughlin 2020, 67). Both spent several weeks in the hospital,
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but survived and were transferred to secure locations (68). Like Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal is a former Russian intelligence officer turned British Secret Intelligence Service agent (Gioe et. al 2019, 562). He was recruited as a double agent in 1993, and imprisoned in Russia in 2004 for treason (Farrell 2020, 72). After negotiations, he was freed in a Moscow-Washington spy swap and moved to Salisbury in 2010 (Farrell 2020, 72). Putin was reportedly angered by the decision to engage in this spy swap, considering these men to be traitors, and condemning cooperation with the West (Barry and Schwirtz 2018). Putin remarked at the time that the freed men would have to spend their lives in hiding, living by the rules of the intelligence services despite their departure (Barry and Schwirtz 2018). Skripal’s would-be assassins, Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, were both involved in the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, or GRU (Farrell 2020, 72). Ironically, this is the same agency where Skripal had worked when he became a double agent (72). At the time of the assassination attempt, he had been quietly working as a consultant for the British military, perhaps violating the apparent rules for a freed traitor (Barry and Shwirtz 2018). His attempt at living a quieter life, with little public criticism of the regime, did not save him—in the words of Putin himself, “traitors always meet a bad end” (Barry and Shwirtz 2018). While the extent of Putin’s involvement may never be truly known, his dramatic and ominous rhetoric about regime loyalty speaks to the acceptability of assassination as a tool to punish betrayal and dissent. Skripal’s case also represents the larger trend of theatrical vengeance on the part of the Russian state, especially in response to perceived betrayals of the intelligence community. The use of a rare nerve agent is not particularly novel in the history of Russian assassinations, but is telling in context of how the cases have changed. Despite credible evidence connecting these GRU assassins to the case, including CCTV footage and physical evidence of the nerve agent disguised as a perfume bottle, Russia has continually denied involvement (Gioe et. al 2019, 567). The Soviet regime was rarely, if ever, forced to answer for their assassinations, as most were hidden from the global community until after the regime collapsed. However, in these most recent cases, the Russian state has chosen to employ various forms of media, including Facebook, YouTube, and traditional media outlets to disseminate false stories and conspiracy theories about the assassination, presumably to crowd out fact-based reporting (568). Now that Russia is more “exposed” to global criticism of its actions, it must make use of misinformation to confuse and conceal chains of events. As for the international response, scholars have noted that the action taken after the Skripal incident would have been appropriate many years ago; today, it may have been too little, too late (David 2018, 2). Former British prime minister Theresa May expelled many Russian diplomats in the wake of this incident, alongside support from NATO and 27 other countries—Russia retaliated by expelling foreign diplomats (Farrell 2020, 74). By continually utilizing the tool of assassination, especially beyond its own borders, Russia is also attempting to demonstrate its power in the international arena (Gioe et. al 2019, 569). In denying these occurrences and meddling in investigations, whether by protecting suspects or destroying evidence, Russia delegitimizes not only domestic dissent, but also international retaliation. Alexey Navalney In August of 2020, Alexey Navalney was poisoned with Novichok, which was apparently applied to the inner seams of his boxer shorts, either through infiltration of a hotel laundry service, or by FSB officers sneaking into his room (Harding 2020). At the time of his poisoning, Navalney had been traveling back to Moscow from
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Siberia, where he had been campaigning for independent candidates in the local elections (Harding and Roth 2020). He had also recently written about the Belarussian revolution, stating that a similar situation would soon happen in Russia, sweeping away Putin and his supporters (Harding and Roth 2020). Though this assassination attempt failed, Navalney was arrested upon his return to Moscow after receiving treatment in Germany (BBC 2021). He was arrested for failing to report to police, despite being in a coma due to his poisoning, and has also been accused of setting up an “extremist group” (BBC 2021). He remains imprisoned, and in March 2022 was sentenced to nine years on top of the three-and-a-half he was already serving. Alexey Navalney had previously worked with Nemtsov as part of a Western-facing liberal movement that had been consistently critical of Putin’s domestic and foreign policy (McLaughlin 2020, 56). His work as part of an anti-corruption movement also secured his position as a prime target, as his videos have been viewed by millions and have sparked mass protests across Russia (BBC 2021). In this sense, targeting Alexey Navalney becomes part of the preemptive counterinsurgency strategy of the Russian state; his influential status, in addition to proximate unrest in Belarus, likely unsettled the regime to the point of an assassination attempt. The Kremlin has, predictably, denied involvement, and while limited sanctions have been imposed by the EU in response (BBC 2021), it is unlikely that this will deter the Russian state from pursuing further action. The Bellingcat Investigation Team, an independent international collective of researchers, has revealed that the poisoning attempt occurred after years of surveilling Navalney, which included traveling alongside him on more than 30 overlapping flights from 2017 to 2020 (BIT 2020). Their investigation also points to a clandestine chemical weapons program conducted by members of the FSB, operating under the cover of a unit formally tasked with forensic investigations of terrorism (BIT 2020). This clandestine unit operates despite the official termination of Russia’s chemical weapons program (BIT 2020), which indicates a larger issue of increasingly clandestine and dangerous activities of the intelligence services in Russia. This also speaks to a more lateral approach to intelligence and violence, as opposed to a top-down method. These intelligence groups are highly independent with varying levels of inter-group communication and collaboration, and may or may not receive orders from top-level officials. Conclusion This article has explored how assassination remains a key tool of “sharp” counterinsurgency for the Russian state, though there are some notable distinctions between how it was used in the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union versus the more nebulous, but distinctly authoritarian Russian state. Notably, the state has strategically chosen to privatize this type of violence to distance itself from responsibility. Circumstantial evidence and credible theories are mixed with state endorsed narratives, preventing the truth from emerging and providing plausible deniability for the state. Legitimacy and secrecy for assassinations has been provided by the proliferation of security services with great powers for data collection, with little oversight into how this information is used, alongside legal mandates for preserving Putin’s regime and eliminating supposed terrorists. Those who dare to publicly speak out and investigate the crimes of the Russian state are penalized with death, which also functions to threaten others who wish to do the same. The assassinations also serve a vengeful purpose, especially for those considered to have betrayed the prized intelligence services. Though assassination remains a key tool for controlling dissent, it represents only one of the many outcomes of the vast security apparatus in Russia. In essence, as the state has been transformed under the influence of Vladimir Putin, Russia has entered a “grey zone” of cloudy authoritarianism and violence that is seemingly connected to the state, but unable to be proved conclusively.
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