Journal of International Affairs 2017

THE UBC JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

THE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

THE 2017 ISSUE OF THE UBC JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

The Annual Publication of the International Relations Student Association The University of British Columbia Vancouver, B.C.

Cover Design: Katelyn Roberts Cover Photograph: Morrell Andrews Back Cover Photograph: Philippe Roberge

The cover photograph is titled "Shabbat Dance" and was taken by Morrell Andrews during her time in the city of Hebron.

The back cover photograph features the early morning sky at Zion National Park.

Photographer Philippe Roberge writes: "I was awoken to a drop of water splashing on my face. With my neck properly jammed from my unorthodox sleeping position in the front seat of the 2001 ford focus, I managed to groan enough to wake up the others. It was 3am and the sun would soon be rising. We were leaving Zion National Park at sunrise, so we decided to make the most of it. Setting up on a bridge over the river, we pressed our shutters and were subsequently amazed at the serene beauty of the scene."

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CONTENTS Contributors Foreword Introduction Five Million Angry Men Delphine Ho Thanh A Tentative Peace Daniel Jacinto Death and the Free Market Alice Gorton The So-Called 'International' Discipline Nicholas Babey Illegal Deforestation Aviaah Shanaz Randhawa Multinational Corporations and Armed Conflict Bridgitte Taylor Paper References Contributor Biographies Sponsors

IV VI VII 1 20 31 42 51 63 74 86 89

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CONTRIBUTORS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Queena Lau

MANAGING EDITOR Maahin Ahmed, Paul André Narvestad

SENIOR EDITORS Peter Bennet-Koufie,Tristan Bobin, Akshay Iyer, Jacob Medvedev

EDITORS Tammy Chu, Muhtadi Faiaz, Jake Harms, Emil Støvring Lauritsen, Aviaah Shanaz Randhawa, Kiera Schuller, Verna Yam

HEAD CREATIVE Katelyn Roberts

AUTHORS Delphine Ho Thanh, Daniel Jacinto, Alice Gorton, Nicholas Babey, Aviaah Shanaz Randhawa, Bridgitte Taylor

PHOTOGRAPHY Morrell Andrews, Philippe Roberge

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FACULTY REVIEWERS Dr. Arjun Chowdhury

Department of Political Science

Dr. Robert Crawford

Department of Political Science

Dr. Peter Dauvergne

Department of Political Science

Dr. Colin Green Dr. Augustin Goenaga Dr Kurt Huebner

Department of History Department of Asian Research Institute for European Studies and Department of Political Science

Dr. Philippe Le Billon Dr. Kai Ostwald

Department of Political Science Institute of Asian Research and Department of Political Science

Dr. Jenny Peterson

Department of Political Science

SPECIAL THANKS Bridgitte Taylor Claire Ping

International Relations Student Association UBC Outside-In

Dr. Steven Lee

International Relations Program

Andrea Reynolds

International Relations Program

Emma Saddy

UBC Journal of Political Studies

Gregg Iftody

MET Fine Printers

2017 UBC International Relations Student Association | All rights reserved.

313 – 6476 NW Marine Drive | Vancouver, BC | Canada | V6T 1Z2 The UBC Journal of International Affairs is a publication of the International Relations Student Association of the Alma Mater Society of the Unitversity of British Columbia.

All articles published in the Journal of International Affairs represent the opinions of the authors and do not reflect the policies or opinions of the University of British Columbia, the staff of the Journal of International Affairs, or the International Relations Student Association. The University of British Columbia does not assume any responsibility for errors or omissions in this journal.

THE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

FOREWORD Dear Reader, On behalf of the International Relations Students Association and the Journal’s editorial team, we are pleased to present the 2016/2017 edition of the UBC Journal of International Affairs (JIA). As a publication that has been in circulation for over 30 years, the JIA has become one of UBC’s oldest, and most distinguished undergraduate academic journals. Through its rigorous peer and faculty-review process with some of the University’s top students and accredited scholars, the Journal has once again upheld its commitment to excellence, and dedication to exploring critical international issues.

As an internationally distributed journal, each year the JIA showcases among some of the best undergraduate writing that the academic world has to offer. In addition to soliciting top quality research papers from the University of British Columbia, the JIA is an active member of the Universitas 21 network — a network of twenty-six research intensive universities, spanning seventeen countries and territories. This allows the Journal to highlight cutting edge pieces which are written from a diverse range of academic and global perspectives; rendering it truly international in scope.

With this, I would like to extend my sincere congratulations to the 2017 JIA team and its authors. This year’s edition has come to fruition as a result of the countless hours which they have poured into the Publication. I would like to thank this year’s Editor-in-Chief, Queena Lau, for her diligence and commitment to ensuring another successful year for the Journal, as well as the entire editorial and production team. In addition, our sincerest gratitude to the Liu Institute for Global Issues, the UBC Sustainability Fund, and UBC’s International Relations Department for their ongoing support for the Journal.

Without further ado, I present to you the 32nd edition of the Journal of International Affairs.

Featuring an exciting range of undergraduate papers, the pages enclosed will provide readers with important insights and perspectives on the various international issues which shape the world as we know it.

Sincerely, Bridgitte Taylor President, UBC International Relations Students Association

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INTRODUCTION Dear Reader, Welcome to the 2017 edition of the UBC Journal of International Affairs!

As UBC’s oldest undergraduate publication, the Journal of International Affairs has, for over three decades, provided students with the invaluable opportunity to have their work published early on in their careers. This is our 32nd year of publication, and we have continued our dedication to high editorial standards and the display of exceptional undergraduate research.

The Journal of International Affairs received an impressive number of submissions this year from both UBC and the Universitas 21 research network. The field of our submissions prove the journal’s audience to be diverse, critically engaged, and passionate; our issue will thus be digitized in order to reach this broad audience. Through this act, we hope also to preserve the journal’s rich history.

The six papers published in this year’s edition were selected because they stood out for their level of saliency, skill of composition, nuance, and argumentative strength. Ho Thanh conducts a quantitative study on the systematic relationship between demographic factors and political unrest, on a larger time scale, in order to identify the future political state of the MENA region. Jacinto examines how social-congruence theory applies to the tentative peace between China and Taiwan. Gorton connects globalized capitalist systems with the world of social and political art, and Babey reorients the practice of International Relations theory. Using Indonesia as a case study, Randhawa addresses rising carbon levels as a result of illegal deforestation, and how policies to curb this environmental concern can be implemented. Finally, Taylor investigates the role multinational corporations have in Latin American conflicts and whether the region’s political environment will be reminiscent of its Cold War period.

I would like to express my gratitude to all students, faculty, and staff who contributed to this year’s edition. Our editorial and production staff have invested immeasurable dedication in order to make this year’s publication of the Journal of International Affairs possible. I would like to thank UBC faculty for their timely and productive feedback, without which we would not have been able to maintain such high academic standards. Our continued partnership with the UBC Outside-In: International Photojournal has also allowed us to source our front and back covers from their photographers; I thank all the staff and photographers of the photojournal for their contribution. Lastly, I would like to thank our readers for their continued support and interest. Without you, there would not be a Journal of International Affairs.

Sincerely, Queena Lau Editor-in-Chief 2017 UBC Journal of International Affairs

HO THANH

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Five Million Angry Men DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE, EDUCATION, AND UNREST IN THE MIDDLE EAST DELPHINE HO THANH

INTRODUCTION The outburst of unrest that has shaken the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) since 2011 may have seemed

sudden, but it was precipitated by decades-long social

change. The region’s youth have been singled out as the key instigator of mass protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen due to their cohort size and the specific socioeconomic challenges which faced them.1 The relationship between a consistently increasing youth bulge—a result of the region’s ongoing demographic transition—and education levels with protest therefore needs to be thoroughly investigated.2 The literature indicates that grievance and political opportunities are two main channels of unrest that are mirrored by two main dimensions of state capacity; economic and repressive. However, while a wealth of studies have retrospectively traced the recent wave of protests in the MENA region back to youth cohort size, few have yet considered the systematic relationship between demographic factors and political unrest on a larger time scale. This thesis will build upon these major theories in order to analyze the relative strength of the positive (grievances and opportunities) and negative (economic capacity and repression) determinants of unrest with regards to demographic change and improvement in educational attainment. In sum, this thesis tests the following hypotheses: (H1) states with larger youth bulges experience higher protest; and (H2) states with higher education levels experience higher protest; and (H3) highly repressive states experience lower protest.

The findings show demographic change to be positively correlated with the frequency of protest, with education emerging to be the true driver of the relationship. Education has a strong and positive effect on unrest and appears to be the most decisive socioeconomic and political factor tested in this thesis. The state’s economic and repressive capacity dampens, 1

Chloe Mulderig, “An Uncertain Future: Youth Frustration and the Arab Spring,” The Pardee Papers 16 (2013): 2-7.

2

Stephanie Schwartz, “Youth and the ‘Arab Spring’,” United States Institute of Peace, 2011, 4.

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but does not fully constrain, the translation of higher educational attainment into higher levels of protest. Since education is likely to keep increasing and authoritarianism seems to be declining throughout the region, MENA societies might be expected to experience heightened civil unrest for the next few decades.

This study relies on data gathered between 1960 to 2014, on twenty regions: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, West Bank and Gaza, and Yemen.

The first section will analyze existing literature on the sources of unrest in order to identify the gaps that this thesis seeks to address. The second section will describe the methodology, data, and variables used to test the hypotheses. Finally, in the third section, I discuss the findings from the quantitative analyses as well as their potential future implications.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: THE DETERMINANTS OF UNREST The literature defines unrest as a collective and potentially violent action aimed at inducing change in the institutions or policies of the government outside the legal and conventional framework of political participation.3 This thesis will apply this definition to the unrest mainly displayed during the Arab Spring; initial peaceful street demonstrations which, depending on the reaction of the government, can spill into violent confrontation. Existing studies on the roots of unrest acknowledge two main trends: the theory of grievances or relative deprivation—which explains protest by the accumulation of the individuals’ frustrated expectations—and the theory of opportunities, according to which the citizens’ decision to engage in mass mobilization is a rational choice shaped by political structures at the macro level.

Relative deprivation is defined as the discrepancy between the status, as it pertains to socioeconomic welfare (e.g. employment, housing, social mobility) to which individuals and social groups believe they are entitled and the actual welfare with which they perceive the economy and the state to be providing them.4 Within the theory of relative deprivation,

3

Johan Galtung, “A Structural Theory of Aggression,” Journal of Peace Research 1:2 (1964): 102-104; Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University

Press) 1970; Stephen G. Brush, “Dynamics of Theory Change in the Social Sciences: Relative Deprivation and Collective Violence,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 40:4 (1996): 523-527.

4

James C. Davies, "Toward a Theory of Revolution," American Sociological Review 27:1 (1962): 5-9; Gurr, Why Men Rebel, 53-57; Ivo K. Feierabend et al., “The

Comparative Study of Revolution and Violence,” Comparative Politics 5:3 (1973): 393-96.

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particular emphasis is placed on the influence education has on unrest.5 In Ted Gurr’s model, improvement in a society’s educational level—which the Middle East has undergone over the past half-century—causes expectations to rise, thereby increasing the likelihood of either aspirational deprivation (i.e., rising expectations, constant material capabilities) or progressive deprivation (i.e., rising expectations, declining material capabilities).6 Galtung and Huntington conceive one aspect of relative deprivation as “rank disequilibrium,” where the discrepancy between individuals’ high employment expectations due to their high level of education and their lower actual employment prospects create an “intellectual proletariat” that is prone to revolt.7 Indeed, most Middle Eastern states have been unable to maintain their social policies since the economic downturn of the 1980s, thus reducing the scope of redistribution (i.e., subsidies, welfare) and of guaranteed public sector employment.8 Moreover, rising education and urbanization levels as well as growing gender equality have tended to lead the current youth to expect higher payoffs to their improved social capabilities.9 Based on this literature, the demographic bulge can be expected to have an overall positive impact on protest, notably through crowding the labour market.10 Goldstone has quantitatively shown the positive relationship between the presence of a youth bulge (defined as the 15 to 24 age group making up over 25% of the total adult population) and the increased risk of political crises.11 The share of youth in both the total unemployed population and unemployment rates were higher in countries that underwent mass uprisings from 2010 onwards, than in the rest of the region.12 The grievance theory is complemented by the theory of political opportunities, according to which unrest breaks out only if the political context is favourable to both

5

Bilal Barakat and Henrik Urdal, “Breaking the Waves? Does Education Mediate the Relationship Between Youth Bulges and Political Violence?” World Bank

Policy Research Working Paper 5114, 2009, 10; Gudrun Ostby and Henrik Urdal, “Education and Civil Conflict: A Review of the Quantitative, Empirical Literature,” UNESCO Education for All Global Monitoring Report, 2011, 16.

6

Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

7

Galtung, “A Structural Theory of Aggression,” 96; Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 12-18.

8

World Bank, "Unlocking the Employment Potential in the Middle East and North Africa. Towards a New Social Contract" (Washington, DC: World Bank,

2004), 21-30.

9

Navtej Dhillon and Tarik Yousef, Generation in Waiting. The Unfulfilled Promise of Young People in the Middle East (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2009),

37-44.

10

Henrik Urdal, “A Clash of Generations? Youth Bulges and Political Violence,” International Studies Quarterly 50 (2006), 607-612; World Bank, "Youth - An

Undervalued Asset: Towards a New Agenda in the Middle East and North Africa" (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007), 16.

11

Jack A. Goldstone, “Demography and Social Movements,” in The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements, ed. Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2015), 162-169.

12

Filipe Campante and Davin Chor, “Why Was the Arab World Poised for Revolution? Schooling, Economic Opportunities, and the Arab Spring,” Journal of

Economic Perspectives 26:2 (2012): 167-178.

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mobilization and its expected payoffs.13 Political opportunities include the structure of the party system, the openness of the regime, the availability of information and coordination resources (e.g. freedom of the press and of assembly), and state repressiveness.14 Olson and Granovetter argue that individuals decide to take part in collective action only if its expected benefits exceed its costs.15 Education, a key factor of unrest according to the relative deprivation theory, also plays a crucial role in political opportunities. Education positively affects individuals’ behaviour with regards to protest by increasing their awareness of the issues at stake, consequently strengthening their adherence to civil liberties and making them more critical of government action.16 Education is also associated with social group membership, social capital, and the mastery of communications resources; all factors widely acknowledged as necessary to collective mobilization.17 Hence, the increase in educational attainment that has characterized the Middle East since the 1960s suggests an association with increased civil unrest by enhancing socioeconomic expectations which, if not met by actual economic achievements, will generate relative deprivation and provide individuals with mobilization resources and opportunities. Similar mechanisms have been described in the literature with regards to urbanization, another key feature of modernizing societies.18 In particular, if education stimulates protest, then urbanization is likely to amplify this relationship by facilitating access to education, especially given the larger concentration of the students in cities.

State attitude in the face of bottom-up frustration is widely acknowledged to be a critical element of the grievances and political opportunity structure.19 State capacity is broadly defined as the ability of the state to effectively exercise its authority over its population and territory, to control its economic activity, and to extract resources.20 The two main 13

Anthony Oberschall. “Theory of Social Conflict,” Annual Review of Sociology 4:1 (1978): 291-294; Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective

Action and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 72.

14

John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82:6 (1977): 1212-1221;

Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1978), 21-26.

15

Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 44-56; Mark Granovetter,

“Threshold Models of Collective Behavior,” American Journal of Sociology 83:6 (1978), 1420-1425.

16

Robert L. Hall et al., “Effects of Education on Attitude to Protest,” American Sociological Review 51:4 (1986): 564-569.

17

McCarthy and Zald, “Resource Mobilization,” 1214-1217; Goldstone, “Demography and Social Movements,” 161.

18

Huntington, Political Order, 28; World Bank, “Youth – An Undervalued Asset,” 36-41.

19

Peter Eisinger, “The Conditions of Protest Behavior in American Cities,” American Political Science Review 81 (1973): 11-16; Herbert P. Kitschelt, “Political

Opportunity Structures and Political Protest: Anti-Nuclear Movements in Four Democracies,” British Journal of Political Science 16:1 (1986): 57-65.

20

Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States. State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 13-25.

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components of state capacity defined by political theorist Daron Acemoglu are economic capacity (measured notably by the state’s taxation power and ability to regulate the economy) and political capacity (coercion for the sake of the stability of the institutions and their resilience in the face of “challenges from non-state actors”).21 If unrest is largely stimulated by citizens’ frustrated expectations with the state’s socioeconomic performance, the economic dimension of state capacity should have a negative relationship with the likelihood of protest.22 High levels of GDP per capita and GDP growth may indeed reduce incentives for citizens to engage in unrest.23 Consequently, if an economic downturn — combined with an increased demand for public goods due to a growing young population — causes the socioeconomic capacity of the state to deteriorate, (as in the recent decades of Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen), the main conditions for grievancesbased unrest are arguably met.24 Finally, the opportunity dimension of unrest — the citizens’ ability to mobilize, and the expected payoffs from mobilization — is largely shaped by the degree of state repressiveness.25 The literature distinguishes between two aspects of repressive state capacity: pre-emptive coercion aimed at deterring any disruptive behaviour from the population and reactive violence from the state as a response to contestation.26 Since this thesis focuses on the occurrence of unrest rather than on its consequences, only the first form of repression will be considered. Coercive capacity is defined as the limitation of civil liberties and rights by the state in order to curtail incentives for collective mobilization.27 State capacity can, therefore, be seen as pertaining to both explanations of unrest. On the one hand, the state’s ability to provide satisfactory economic conditions (notably through public goods provision and employment) is likely to temper potential grievances. On the other hand, its ability to overcome challenges to its rule may imply reducing the opportunities and increasing the costs of collective mobilization.28 21

Daron Acemoglu, “Politics and Economics in Weak and Strong States,” Journal of Monetary Economics 52 (2005): 1219-1226.

22

Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson, “The Origins of State Capacity: Property Rights, Taxation, and Politics,” American Economic Review 99:4 (2009): 1218-

1224.

23

Patrick M. Regan and Errol A. Henderson, “Democracy, Threats and Political Repression in Developing Countries: Are Democracies Internally Less

Violent?” Third World Quarterly 23:1 (2002): 119-126.

24

Davies, “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” 7.

25

Eisinger, “The Conditions of Protest Behavior in American Cities,” 15-19; Karrie J. Koesel and Valerie J. Bunce, “Diffusion-Proofing: Russian and Chinese

Responses to Waves of Popular Mobilizations Against Authoritarian Rulers,” Perspectives on Politics, American Political Science Association 11:3 (2013): 753-758.

26

Christian Davenport, “State Repression and Political Order,” The Annual Review of Political Science 10:1 (2007): 1-13.

27

Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution, 42.

28

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 26-31.

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CASE SELECTION AND METHODOLOGY This thesis is based on cross-national time-series analysis of the following twenty countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, West Bank and Gaza, and Yemen. The 1960-2014 timeframe reflects the demographic transition of the region, which began in the 1960s with the fall of death rates. It reached its peak with the highest population growth between 1980-2000, but started to near completion over the past decade with the slowdown of population growth and the lower level of birth rates.29 The 1960s and 1970s, post-independence, also represent the starting point of the region’s socioeconomic modernization through the rise of education and urbanization levels. The time scale is quinquennial, composed of eleven five-year periods (from 1960 to 2010) whose first year summarizes the data for the five following years (e.g. the value for 1980 is the mean or the sum of the data from 1980 to 1984).

The demographic data used in this analysis are drawn from the UN Population Division database. The main independent variable is the youth bulge, a cohort of the population comprised of persons aged 15 to 34. Three alternative independent variables measuring the demographic transition — fertility (average total number of children per woman), birth rate (share of the new-borns in the total population by year, in per thousands), and death rate (share of the deceased in the total population by year, in per thousands) — will be used for robustness tests. The decline of these three indicators over time characterize the demographic transition in a similar manner to the increased youth bulge.

The frequency of protest has been coded as an event count variable. The two main sources for protest data are the Social, Political, and Economic Event Database (SPEED) and the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) database. The year-specific values provided by these databases have been summed into the total number of protest events for each five-year period. Twenty percent of cases (country per five years) show no protest event, and three-quarters fall within 20 events over the five years (Figure 1). Among the variety of forms of political expression recorded by these databases, I selected protest events according to the following criteria: the actors involved (general civilian population initiators and government targets), the motives (presence of anti-government sentiment, demand for policy or leadership 29

Alan Richards and John Waterbury, A Political Economy of the Middle East (Boulder: Westview Press, 2008), 38-42.

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change), and the methods (demonstrations, riots, or violent protest).

FREQUENCY OF PROTESTS30

The socioeconomic intervening variables are GDP per capita (USD), GDP growth (average of the five annual growth rates in each period), urbanization rate (share of urban dwellers in the total population), mean years of schooling, and tertiary education enrolment ratio (share of young people enrolled in tertiary education in the total corresponding age group). Due to limited data availability for the chosen time frame, other key indicators of economic capacity, such as public expenditure, oil benefits, (youth) unemployment, and inequality, will not be as thoroughly analyzed.

Finally, the degree of repressive state capacity is primarily measured by each country’s negative mean Polity IV score over five years; a higher score denotes a higher degree of authoritarianism, which is a proxy of repressiveness. The sample clearly leans towards high repressiveness, with a mean of 5. A third of all cases present a maximal repression score (9 or 10), and only four cases, all in Israel, have a minimal score of -10 (Appendix B). The other two main repression indexes used in the literature, the Political Terror Scale (PTS) and the Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Index (CIRI), assign each country a score proportional to the level of government disrespect of civil rights and liberties, and will be used for the purpose of robustness checks.

ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION: THE KEY ROLE OF EDUCATION ON UNREST The contemporary Middle East is characterized by a young and educated population, declining repression, and heightened civil unrest. Figure 2 illustrates the 30

Figure 1: Protest Frequency. Cline Center for Democracy. “SPEED Project Civil Unrest Data 2012.” Accessed January 12, 2016. DOI: http://www.

clinecenter.illinois.edu/data/speed/event/.

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evolution of the variables of major interest. The region underwent a sudden surge in unrest starting in the 1990s. The youth bulge indeed appears to have a positive relationship with the frequency of protest. Education, however, presents a considerably stronger and more robust positive effect on protest, which is mitigated but not fully suppressed by indicators of economic and repressive state capacity.

EVOLUTION OF THE KEY SOCIOPOLITICAL FACTORS31

Table 1 provides the results of the multivariate regression with the youth bulge as the main independent variable. It presents the basic relationship between the demographic transition and the frequency of unrest, and the direct and conditional impact of economic capacity (measured by GDP per capita), repressive capacity (measured by the negative Polity IV score), and modernization (measured by the level of education and rate of urban population) on the relationship between demographics and unrest. The results indicate a significant positive correlation between the share of the population aged 15 to 34 (the youth bulge) and the number of protests, supporting Hypothesis 1. A 1% increase in the share of the young population leads, on average, to twenty more protest events over five years. Appendix B shows that the relationship between the youth bulge and protest is stronger for larger youth bulges (a steeper slope denoting a stronger effect on protest), which confirms the assumption that countries with large young populations are more prone to unrest. Appendix C shows that this relationship is robust when considering other demographic variables as proxies for the demographic transition.

31

Figure 2: Evolution of population, edication, and respression variables. Cline Center for Democracy. “SPEED Project Civil Unrest Data 2012.� Accessed

January 12, 2016. DOI: http://www.clinecenter.illinois.edu/data/speed/event/.

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RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE YOUTH BULGE AND PROTEST

Table 1:

The results presented in Table 1 suggest that education, rather than the demographic bulge itself, has the most decisive effect on unrest. Since the region’s youth bulge has increased by seven percentage points since 1960, the effect of the youth bulge on protest predicts an increase of 140 protest events between 1960 and 2014. The observed increase for this time frame is in reality 500 protests, far larger than the impact of the demographic transition alone. Hence, the youth bulge does not seem to hold substantial explanatory power by itself on the increased level of protest when dissociated from education. The positive effect that the youth bulge has on protests is most likely due to its covariance with educational attainment as part of the modernization process, rather than to the sole propensity of the youth to engage in protest.

Indeed, Table 2 shows that education has a stronger relationship with unrest than the youth bulge, supporting Hypothesis 2. For each additional mean year of schooling, a country would be expected to experience on average 81 more protests over five years. The effect of educational attainment predicts an increase of 360 protests between 1960 and 2014, which is closer to the observed 500 than the effect the youth bulge predicts. Therefore, even though a sizeable share of the increase in protests over the past half century remains unexplained by this model, education appears to have been a key factor in driving this increase.

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RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EDUCATION AND PROTEST

Table 2:

As the grievances theory suggests, GDP per capita and GDP growth are associated with lower unrest. However, the scale of this effect is limited, since only one additional protest per year (about 6 per period) would occur if GDP per capita was not taken into account.

Moreover, while higher levels of wealth are likely to reduce incentives to engage in protest (notably through the provision of better standards of living and employment prospects), GDP per capita has a weak and insignificant conditional effect on the extent to which education translates into protest (Table 2, Figure 3). GDP growth has a stronger negative effect on unrest itself, but an insignificant conditional effect on the basic relationship (Figure 4).32 Similarly, Appendix D shows that oil rents have a negative conditional effect on the relationship between education and unrest. If redistributed, they enable the state to supply welfare and employment and reduce potential grievances. Interestingly, youth unemployment, at least in the past three decades seems to have no conditional effect on the relationship between education and unrest (Appendix D). While higher unemployment is associated with 32

Gurr, Why Men Rebel, 65-67.

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higher unrest for the same education level, increased educational attainment will have the same marginal effect on unrest regardless of a society’s youth unemployment level.

IMPACT OF EDUCATION ON PROTEST AS CONDITIONED BY GDP PER CAPITA ($)33

IMPACT OF EDUCATION ON PROTEST AS CONDITIONED BY GDP GROWTH34

Surprisingly, urbanization has a strong negative effect on unrest, both direct and conditional (Figure 5). This result is likely attributed to the presence of the Gulf states in the sample, their urbanization levels being far above and protest frequency far below average.

Indeed, in the oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf, where approximately 80% of the population 33

Figure 3: The impact of education on protest, as conditioned by GDP per capita ($). Gurr, Ted. Why Men Rebel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.

34

Figure 4: The impact of education on protest, as conditioned by GDP growth ($). Ibid.

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have resided in cities since 1960, high levels of GDP growth and GDP per capita as well as low unemployment have provided citizens with virtually no grievances in the first place.

IMPACT OF EDUCATION ON PROTEST AS CONDITIONED BY URBANIZATION35

The predominant impact of education on unrest over all other socioeconomic variables tested in this study provides support for the modernization theory developed by Huntington.36 Indeed, Huntington argued that as societies develop and industrialize, young citizens formulate growing expectations whose frustrations may increase their propensity to engage in unrest.

Appendix E shows that tertiary education enrolment is exponentially associated with protest, and strengthens the relationship between protest and the demographic transition. In turn, unmet rising expectations, specifically due to improved educational attainment and larger tertiary education enrolment, is one of the major forms of relative deprivation on which the grievance theory of unrest is built.37 For example, the literature argues that in the MENA region, highly educated individuals face a higher risk of unemployment.38 Finally, repressive state capacity is unexpectedly shown to have a positive relationship with unrest (Table 2), since the original relationship loses strength when controlling for it. However, it does have a strong negative conditional effect on the relationship between education and protest (Figure 6). Moreover, while repression has a considerable negative 35

Figure 5: The impact of education on protest, as conditioned by urbanization (%). Gurr, Ted. Why Men Rebel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.

36

Huntington, Political Order, 26-32.

37

Davies, "Toward a Theory of Revolution," 14.

38

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani and Navtej Dhillon, “Stalled Youth Transitions in the Middle East: A Framework for Policy Reform,� The Middle East Youth Initiative

Working Paper 8, 2008, 16-17.

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effect on unrest, its conditional effect is hardly statistically significant (Table 2). Figure 6 nonetheless illustrates the clear difference in protest levels between minimally and maximally repressive states. As a result, Hypothesis 3 can be confirmed, though without a large degree of confidence. It is worth noting that even the strongest level of repression (a score of 10 out of 10), which occurs in 20% of cases, is not sufficient to entirely prevent education from fuelling unrest.

IMPACT OF EDUCATION ON PROTEST AS CONDITIONED BY REPRESSION39

CONCLUSION The demographic transition and the subsequent youth bulge have had a significant positive impact on the frequency of protests in the Middle East and North Africa. However, the relationship between the youth bulge and protests seems to be mainly driven by education, which appears to have the most decisive impact on unrest. This effect is observed through the growing stock of education in the total population (i.e. mean years of schooling), and also through the increasing share of individuals receiving higher-level education (i.e. tertiary education enrolment).

39

Figure 6: The impact of education on protest, as conditioned by repression. Gurr, Ted. Why Men Rebel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.

14

FIVE MILLION ANGRY MEN

Another key finding is that despite repressive states’ potential capacity to deter unrest, the impact of education on unrest is ultimately stronger than that of repression.

Given that states with higher educational attainment are also among the most repressive, the confrontation of educated individuals with repressive governments, particularly in contexts of unsatisfactory economic achievement, can be expected to continue in the future. Algeria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia illustrate this point. Interestingly, in 2011 all three of these countries started to undergo protests, which were quickly thwarted by government coercion and institutional concessions.40 Jordan, and in particular Algeria, have shown a clear decline in authoritarianism since the early 1960s. Furthermore, Algeria possesses the republican regime type that has been overthrown or critically destabilized in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, and Yemen.41 Hence, Algeria, and to a lesser extent Jordan, are among the states that may expect increasing civil unrest in the future.

This thesis has qualified the claim that demographic transition is the underlying cause of unrest in the MENA region, with educational improvement emerging as the true driver of social conflict. Even when the demographic transition reaches completion and the youth bulge starts decreasing — as is the case in the region’s wealthiest nations — the Middle East’s future generations will be increasingly educated in a decreasingly authoritarian environment.

This unique context may encourage further demands for institutional change in the future.

40

Rabah Ghezali, “Why Has the Arab Spring Not Spread to Algeria?” The Huffington Post, March 6, 2011, 1-2; Nermeen Murad, “Here is How Jordan Escaped

the Arab Spring.” Al Jazeera, September 02, 2014, 1; Caryle Murphy, “Saudi Arabia’s Youth and the Kingdom’s Future,” Middle East Program Occasional Paper Series, Winter 2, 2011, 3.

41

Russell E. Lucas, “Monarchies and Protests in the Arab Uprisings: Path Dependencies or Political Opportunities?” Journal of Arabian Studies 4:2 (2014): 197.

HO THANH

15

APPENDIX A: SUMMARY OF THE VARIABLES

APPENDIX B: DISTRIBUTION OF THE MAIN VARIABLES

16

FIVE MILLION ANGRY MEN

Countries from left to right: Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, West Bank and Gaza, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen. Each dot represents one five-year period.

HO THANH

17

APPENDIX C: IMPACT OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION ON PROTEST AS CONDITIONED BY GDP PER CAPITA (ROBUSTNESS CHECKS FOR HYPOTHESIS 1)

Fertility, birth rates, and death rates are alternative measurements of demographic change and all decline as part of the demographic transition. Consequently, if the demographic transition is indeed correlated with higher unrest, these three indicators should be negatively correlated with the number of protests. The mitigating impact of GDP per capita on this relationship is shown by the stronger negative correlation of each of the three variables with protest for low GDP per capita levels, and by the considerable mitigation, if not reversal, of this relationship for high GDP per capita levels.

18

FIVE MILLION ANGRY MEN

APPENDIX D: IMPACT OF EDUCATION ON PROTEST AS CONDITIONED BY OIL RENTS AND UNEMPLOYMENT

APPENDIX E: RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EDUCATION AND PROTEST Protest to tertiary education enrolment ratio:

Relationship between fertility and protest, conditional on tertiary education enrolment ratio:

HO THANH

19

APPENDIX F: RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EDUCATION AND PROTEST WITH REPRESSION CONTROLS

20

A TENTATIVE PEACE

A TENTATIVE PEACE

TAIWANESE NATIONALISM AND ITS CHALLENGE TO THE ONE CHINA PRINCIPLE DANIEL JACINTO

INTRODUCTION On February 24, 2016, Tsai Ing-wen, who represents the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was elected President of Taiwan. In response to her election, a spokesperson for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office stated that “no matter which party or group, no matter what they have advocated in the past, as long as they are willing to recognize the 1992 Consensus and acknowledge the fact that both the Chinese mainland and Taiwan belong to one and the same China, we are willing to negotiate with them.”1 The 1992 Consensus refers to the contested agreement between both parties that there exists only one China, which can be interpreted as desired by either party—a compromise of sorts to quell decades of tension between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing and the Republic of China (ROC) in Taipei.

On May 21, The China Post noted that President Tsai had recognized in her inaugural speech a “joint acknowledgment and understanding across the Taiwan Strait,” yet made no explicit mention of either the 1992 Consensus or the long-standing One China Principle.

Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office responded four days later, urging Tsai Ing-wen to “without any equivocation, clarify her stance on cross-Strait ties.”2 By June 25, the Taiwan Affairs Office had suspended cross-strait communications in response to the new leader’s failure to recognize the 1992 Consensus.3 This episode marks a drastic turn in China-Taiwan relations, which had seemingly flourished under the presidency of the Kuomintang’s (KMT) Ma Yingjeou from 2008 to 2016. During Ma Ying-jeou’s presidency, the adherence to both the One China Principle and the 1992 Consensus had formed a status quo, one that was maintained with a sense of peace and cooperation. However, the shift in power from the largely pro1

“Taiwan policy unchanged after elections: mainland,” Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council PRC, February 24, 2016, accessed March 5, 2017, http://

www.gwytb.gov.cn/en/SpokespersonRemarks/201604/t20160408_11429779.htm.

2

“Taiwan’s attitude towards cross-Strait ties nature must be clarified: mainland spokesman,” Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council PRC, May 25, 2016,

accessed March 5, 2017, http://www.gwytb.gov.cn/en/SpokespersonRemarks/201605/t20160525_11466478.htm.

3

“Mainland spokesman says cross-Strait communication mechanisms in suspension,” Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council PRC, June 25, 2016, accessed

March 5, 2017, http://www.gwytb.gov.cn/en/SpokespersonRemarks/201606/t20160627_11492214.htm

JACINTO

21

Chinese KMT to the DPP has called this peace into question.

This paper suggests that this apparent warming of ties between China and Taiwan during the Ma Ying-jeou presidency was, in fact, nothing more than a tentative peace. I argue that the absence of active conflict across the Taiwan Strait indicates a state of prolonged latent violence; the Taiwan Strait may be incited into active conflict if one or both sides betray the One China Principle. I contend that the primary obstacle to peace is the inherent incompatibility between the immutable One China Principle, and the challenge posed to it by rising Taiwanese nationalism.

I will begin with a brief description of the current state of cross-strait relations, post-2008. I will then examine how attempts to work within the context of the One China Principle have, thus far, failed to address the PRC and ROC’s unsuccessful reconciliation of competing claims over Taiwan. The paper will illustrate how changing trends in Taiwanese policy preferences and perceptions of self-identity may increasingly challenge the tentative stability of cross-strait relations; drawing from a brief comparison to Hong Kong, I will present the concept of ‘social-political incongruence’ as a conflict-inducing mechanism behind this challenge to Taiwan’s stability.

FALSE CALM ON THE STRAIT Three major military crises have occurred on the Taiwan Strait since the founding of the divergent PRC and ROC governments. The first crisis (1954-1955) involved PRC’s shelling and seizure of ROC-held offshore islands, and a retaliatory nuclear threat to the PRC by the United States of America (USA). The second (1958) also featured the shelling of offshore islands, along with the deployment of US nuclear-capable weaponry.4 The third and most recent crisis occurred from July 1995 to March 1996, with numerous live-fire tests off the coast of Fujian province (nearest to Taiwan), and missile tests fired within fifty to one hundred miles of Taiwan’s coast.5 Despite these historical crises, twenty-first century developments indicate flourishing exchange and rapprochement between the PRC and ROC. This includes cooperation in 4

Jean-Marc F. Blanchard and Dennis V. Hickey, “Introduction: More than two “sides” to every story: an introduction to New Thinking about the Taiwan

Issue,” in New Thinking about the Taiwan Issue: Theoretical insights into its origins, dynamics, and prospects, eds. Jean-Marc F. Blanchard and Dennis V. Hickey (London; New York: Routledge, 2012), 5-6.

5

Andrew Scobell, “Show of Force: Chinese Soldiers, Statesmen, and the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis,” Political Science Quarterly 115, no. 2 (2000): 232.

22

A TENTATIVE PEACE

areas of policing, medical exchanges, and currency use—all based on the 2009 Cooperation Agreement on Crime Fighting and Judicial Cooperation, the 2010 Medical and Health Cooperation Agreement, and the 2013 Cross-Strait Currency Settlement Memorandum of Understanding, respectively.6 Moreover, Ma Ying-jeou’s presidency witnessed the creation of agreements on various cross-strait affairs such as direct flights, cultural exchanges, and notably, the 2010 Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement.7 Furthermore, bilateral trade between Mainland China and Taiwan have risen steadily since the start of the millennium; data from the ROC’s Mainland Affairs Council reveal that bilateral trade has consistently increased between 2001 and 2016, with the total value of bilateral trade increasing from just under US$11.0 billion to US$117.9 billion.8 This developing relationship between the PRC and the ROC has raised questions on whether the Taiwan Strait is still constituted as a so-called flashpoint—acknowledging that while there has been a downward trend in crossstrait conflict, the dynamics of cross-strait relations vis-à-vis the status of Taiwan and mutual recognition remain largely unchanged.9,10

TWO GOVERNMENTS, ONE CHINA A key underpinning for potential future tensions is the inability to reconcile the One China Principle with the existence of two separate government entities: the Republic of China, and the People’s Republic of China. Following years of mounting dissent and armed uprising, the ROC was officially established on January 1, 1912 with the election of the KMT’s Sun Yat-sen as provisional president of the Chinese republic.11 Shortly after the death of Sun and his successor, as well as a brief period of warlords competing for de facto control of China,12 Chiang Kai-shek reunified the country by re-establishing the authority of the KMTled government in 1928.13 However, facing defeat at the hands of the Chinese Communist 6

David G. Brown and Kevin Scott, “China-Taiwan Relations: Relative Calm in the Strait,” Comparative Connections 15, no. 1 (2013): 75-76.

7

Barthélémy Courmont, “Engaging with the Enemy: China-Taiwan Economic and Strategic Relatoins After 2008 and Beyond,” International Studies Review 14,

no. 1 (2013): 10-11.

8

Mainland Affairs Council, Republic of China, “Table 1 – Trade between Taiwan and Mainland China,” Cross-Strait Economic Statistics Monthly No. 286, last

modified March 1, 2017, accessed March 5, 2017, available from http://www.mac.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=116581&ctNode=5934&mp=3.

9

Dennis V. Hickey, “Wake up to Reality: Taiwan, the Chinese Mainland and Peace Across the Taiwan Strait,” Journal of Chinese Political Science 18, no. 1 (2013):

1-20.

10

Scott L. Kastner, “Is the Taiwan Strait Still a Flash Point?: Rethinking the Prospects for Armed Conflict between China and Taiwan,” International Security 40,

no. 3 (2015/2016): 84-85 11

Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 2nd ed. (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 257-263.

12

Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (London; New York: Routledge, 2005), 83-84.

13

Spence, The Search for Modern China, 346.

JACINTO

23

Party (CCP) during the Chinese Civil War, the KMT-led government was forced to retreat to Taiwan in 1949, where it remained and is currently the ROC.14 With the mainland under its control, the CCP proclaimed the founding of the PRC in 1949, and received diplomatic recognition from the USSR, several Eastern and Central European states, Scandinavian countries, and a number of non-aligned states.15 The founding of these two government bodies complicated jurisdiction over the geographical territory of Taiwan. Following China’s loss to Japan in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, China’s Qing Dynasty and Japan signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Article 2(b) of which stipulated the cession of “the island of Formosa,16 along with all islands appertaining or belonging to said island of Formosa”,17 to Japan. The end of the Second World War saw the San Francisco Peace Treaty (1951) stipulating Japan to renounce “all right, title and claim to Formosa and the Pescadores.”18 However, the treaty did not specify which political entity gained sovereignty over Taiwan after Japan’s renunciation—resulting in conflicting opinions on the topic of sovereignty over Taiwan.

John F. Copper, professor emeritus of international studies at Rhodes College and China specialist, suggests that the ROC maintained and derived its legitimacy and sovereignty over Taiwan from several factors, other than its de facto occupation of Taiwan: meeting the criteria of a modern nation state based on territory, population, government, and diplomatic recognition, and the mainland’s failure to stake claim on the ROC’s territory.19 In contrast, Phil C.W. Chan, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Security and Development Policy, claims that the ROC’s de facto control of Taiwan did not constitute statehood or sovereignty. Based on legal precedent from the Nuremberg Trials and International Court of Justice, which stipulate that territory must be terra nullius, i.e. belonging to no one, for occupation to produce legal sovereignty, Chan argues that when the KMT occupied Taiwan it was Japanese territory as per the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki; it did not satisfy the terra nullius condition. Moreover, 14

Peter Chen-main Wang, “A Bastion Created, A Regime Reformed, An Economy Reengineered, 1949-1970,” in Taiwan: A New History, expanded edition, ed.

Murray A. Rubinstein (London; New York: Routledge, 2015), 321.

15

Spence, The Search for Modern China, 413, 499.

16

Originally Portuguese in origin, the term Formosa referred to the island of Taiwan as it was called under European colonial occupation.

17

“Treaty of peace—April 17, 1895,” in Treaties and Agreements with and concerning China: 1894-1919, comp. and ed. John V. A. MacMurray, vol. 1, Manchu Period

(1894-1911) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1921), 19.

18

Treaty of Peace with Japan, San Francisco, September 8, 1951, United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 136, no. 1832, p. 48, accessed March 5, 2017, available from

http://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume_136/volume-136-i-1832-english.pdf.

19

John F. Copper, “The Origins of Conflict across the Taiwan Strait: The Problem of Differences in Perceptions,” in Across the Taiwan Strait Mainland China,

Taiwan, and the 1995-1996 Crisis, edited by Suisheng Zhao (New York: Routledge, 1999), 48-52.

24

A TENTATIVE PEACE

he asserts that by the time Japan relinquished control of Taiwan, the PRC, through its victory in the Chinese Civil War, had inherited sovereignty over Taiwan.20 These simultaneous claims over Taiwan are enshrined in the two governing bodies’ respective constitutions. The preamble to the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China states: Taiwan is part of the sacred territory of the People’s Republic of China. It is the inviolable duty of all Chinese people, including our compatriots in Taiwan, to accomplish the great task of reunifying the motherland.21

Likewise, Article 4 of the Constitution of the ROC states: The territory of the Republic of China according to its existing national boundaries shall not be altered except by resolution of the National Assembly.22

The ROC Constitution noticeably does not specify what the “existing national boundaries” are. However, the ROC’s existing control over the island of Taiwan is most pertinent to this paper. Whether the phrase “existing national boundaries” is meant to include the Chinese mainland, as argued by Chiang Kai-shek in the early Nationalist rule, is beside the question because both the PRC and the ROC claim sovereignty over the territory of Taiwan.23 By the late 1970s, the notion of “one country, two systems”, attributed to Deng Xiaoping, had emerged as a sort of compromise wherein the two government systems exist separately under the auspices of the PRC.24 This idea’s applicability to Taiwan was later redeveloped through the 1992 Consensus. Put forward by Taiwan’s KMT government, and later negotiated with China, the 1992 Consensus stipulated the notion of “One China, different interpretations” wherein the two parties could individually discern the definition of ‘one China’.25 Above all else, this model of interpretation is an “agreement to disagree” between the PRC and the ROC because it has never resolved the fundamental inability to reconcile two separate political entities’ claims on Taiwan.

20

Phil C. W. Chan, “The Legal Status of Taiwan and the Legality of the Use of Force in a Cross-Taiwan Strait Conflict,” Chinese Journal of International Law 8,

no. 2 (2009): 459-465.

21

Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, full text after the amendment on March 14, 2004, accessed March 5, 2017, http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/

Constitution/2007-11/15/content_1372962.htm.

22

Article 4, Constitution of the Republic of China, accessed March 7, 2017, http://english.president.gov.tw/Default.aspx?tabid=1107.

23

Chengxin Pan, “Westphalia and the Taiwan Conundrum: A Case against the Exclusionist Construction of Sovereignty and Identity,” Journal of Chinese Political

Science 15, no. 4 (2010): 377.

24

Ibid., 58.

25

Yu-Shan Wu, “The evolution of the KMT’s stance on the One China Principle: National identity in flux,” in Taiwanese Identity in the Twenty-first Century: Domestic,

regional and global perspectives, eds. Gunter Schubert and Jens Damm (London; New York: Routledge, 2011), 53-54.

JACINTO

25

THE STATE OF LATENT VIOLENCE Arguably, the greatest threat for future conflict is noted in Article 8 of the AntiSecession Law passed by the PRC’s National People’s Congress on March 14, 2005. The law explicitly states: In the event that the "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces should act under any name or by any means to cause the fact of Taiwan's secession from China, or that major incidents entailing Taiwan's secession from China should occur, or that possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted, the state shall employ non-peaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.26

Thus, the concept of “one country, two systems” has been built into China’s policy response to Taiwanese independence. However, Taiwan's ability to respond to this policy is complicated by the fact that any future conflict is by definition purely hypothetical given the absence of active conflict at present. Johan Galtung, a Norwegian scholar regarded as the founding father of peace studies, provides a typology of violence that is useful for analyzing the nature of these tensions. Galtung’s conception of violence suggests that “violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations,” and that violence itself is “the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual.”27 Galtung draws a distinction between manifest violence and latent violence; manifest violence is that which is observable, whereas latent violence is that which is present “when the situation is so unstable that the actual realization level ‘easily’ decreases.”28 In the case of Taiwan, the actual realization being measured is the level of Taiwanese people’s political realization, a form of mental realization as noted in Galtung’s definition of violence. This political realization refers to the degree political aspirations of the pro-independence camp are fulfilled, as well as those wishing to reunify under the PRC. If Taiwan were to declare independence, the political realizations of those wishing for reunification would obviously decrease. Paradoxically, the political realizations of those wishing for independence would also decrease in case of military backlash from China, as implied by Article 8 of the Anti26

National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China, “Anti-Secession Law adopted by NPC (full text),” March 14, 2005, accessed March 5, 2017,

http://www.gwytb.gov.cn/en/Special/OneChinaPrinciple/201103/t20110317_1790121.htm.

27

Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 168.

28

Ibid, 172.

26

A TENTATIVE PEACE

Secession law. Thus, a flare-up of tensions could in theory drastically reduce the actual political realizations of both sides, which would satisfy the definition of manifest violence noted above.

It is crucial to qualify the probability of this actually occurring. First, it is unclear whether China would proceed with any “non-peaceful means” because, as demonstrated by historical crises, the US continues to counterbalance Chinese aggression in the Taiwan Strait.

Furthermore, both states mutually benefit from trade with each other; with total bilateral trade in 2015 worth US$188.2 billion, Taiwan is one of China’s largest trade partners.29 Despite these considerations however, and regardless of whether it acts on the Anti-Secession Law, China’s threat of physical violence implies a state of latent violence.

TAIWANESE NATIONALISM AND THE CHALLENGE TO THE STATUS QUO If the One China Principle underpins the precarious state of latent violence between the two parties, then rising Taiwanese nationalism and growing support for independence within Taiwan, has the potential to catalyze outright conflict. Latest data collated by the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University, illustrates several trends in two main variables: Taiwanese stance on independence, and Taiwanese identification as ‘Taiwanese’ or ‘Chinese’. In terms of future policy regarding Taiwan’s independence, Table 1 shows overwhelming and increasing support for the maintenance of the status quo.30 It is possible that this support is simply pragmatic; those who show preference for the status quo may be attempting to minimize Taiwan’s strategic risk, or preserve the advantage of a more reactionary approach to China’s diplomatic behaviour.31 Given Taiwan’s recent era of stability and beneficial economic relations with China, this pragmatism makes sense—provoking China might be an irrational choice.

29

Mainland Affairs Council, “Table 1 – Trade between Taiwan and Mainland China.”

30

Election Study Center, National Chengchi University, “Taiwan Independence vs. Unification with the Mainland Trend Distribution in Taiwan

(1992/06~2016/12),” last modified January 12, 2017, accessed March 5, 2017, http://esc.nccu.edu.tw/course/news.php?Sn=167.

31 (2014): 672.

Chin-Hao Huang and Patrick James, “Blue, Green or Aquamarine? Taiwan and the Status Quo Preference in Cross-Strait Relations,” The China Quarterly 219

JACINTO

27

STANCES ON INDEPENDENCE BY TAIWANESE

Table 1. Source: Adapted from Election Study Center, N.C.C.U., important political attitude trend distribution.32

Despite overall support for maintenance of the status quo however, Table 1 shows that the desire to eventually move toward independence has undeniably increased in the prostatus quo demographic. Conversely, the desire to eventually move towards unification has declined within the same demographic. This development suggests a steady but increasing challenge to the tentative stability on the Taiwan Strait.

The second dataset in Table 2 tracks Taiwanese and/or Chinese self-identification changes. Content analysis of television advertising by Taiwan’s major political parties during the 2001, 2004, and 2008 legislative elections suggests that identity was certainly a major topic, but major political parties placed greater emphasis on broader policy appeals.33 Despite this, Table 2 shows that in each year since 2000, except in 2016, the number of those who identify exclusively as Taiwanese has increased steadily. Conversely, the number of those who identify as exclusively Chinese has declined steadily in each year after 2000, except in 2016. The number of survey participants who identified as both Taiwanese and Chinese also declined from 44.1% in 2000 to 33.3% in 2015, with the most recent data showing only a slight increase to 34.3% in 2016.34 This prolonged overarching trend, coupled with the success of the pro-independence DPP in the 2016 elections, suggests that growing Taiwanese 32

Election Study Center, National Chengchi University, “Taiwan Independence vs. Unification with the Mainland Trend Distribution in Taiwan

(1992/06~2016/12),” last modified January 12, 2017, accessed March 5, 2017, http://esc.nccu.edu.tw/course/news.php?Sn=167.

33

Dafydd Fell, “More or less space for identity in Taiwan’s party politics?” in Taiwanese Identity in the Twenty-first Century: Domestic, regional and global perspectives, eds.

Gunter Schubert and Jens Damm (London; New York: Routledge, 2011).

34

Election Study Center, National Chengchi University, “Taiwanese / Chinese Identification Trend Distribution in Taiwan (1992/06~2016/12),” last modified

January 12, 2017, accessed March 5, 2017, http://esc.nccu.edu.tw/course/news.php?Sn=166.

28

A TENTATIVE PEACE

nationalist identity could increasingly push the boundaries of the tentative peace as Taiwan edges closer to a pro-independence political agenda.

CHANGES IN THE TAIWANESE/CHINESE IDENTITY

Table 2. Source: Adapted from Election Study Center, N.C.C.U., important political attitude trend distribution.35

THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS The apparent stability in cross-strait relations remains precariously dependent on adherence to the One China Principle, a symptomatic solution that does not address the root cause for conflict; the inability to reconcile the division between the PRC and the ROC. Moreover, the consistent rise in Taiwanese nationalism continues to challenge the increasingly uncertain status quo. A key concept to analyzing and understanding the factors which may tip the precarious balance of the current tentative peace is social-political incongruence, i.e. a mismatch between the potential political realizations of the governed society and the real political circumstances often codified in policy, law, and government structure. The phenomenon of social-political incongruence is not isolated to cross-strait relations: the case of Hong Kong is a useful example of this concept in action. Hong Kong, like Taiwan, is characterized by a gap between potential and actual political realizations, seen in a mismatch between expectations of political freedom, as enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law, and the reality of the PRC’s interference in local governance structure and democratic process.36 This social-political incongruence has acted as a conflict inducer, for example, in the Occupy Central Movement in 2014, which protested against the restrictions imposed on 35

Ibid

36

Daniel Garrett, Counter-hegemonic Resistance in China’s Hong Kong: Visualizing Protest in the City (Singapore: Springer, 2015), 12-14.

JACINTO

29

autonomy in Hong Kong’s 2017 Chief Executive elections, and resulted in clashes between protesters and police.37 Political tensions were also evident in the Hong Kong Legislative Council (LegCo) oath-taking controversy in 2016, where several elected LegCo officials sported pro-democracy banners, clothing with political slogans, and/or inserted insults to China in their mandated oath-taking ceremony.38 This led to the PRC’s National People’s Congress issuing a ruling on the interpretation of the Basic Law, which sparked a six-hour standoff between police and protesters, and a silent lawyers’ march in further protest to the PRC intervention.39,40 In this case example, the mismatch between the potential political realizations of the citizenry and the actual political situation led to an increase in various forms of conflict and resistance.

Returning to Taiwan, the trends of growing Taiwanese nationalism demonstrate the widening gap between the political expectations of the Taiwanese population, and the real political circumstances prescribed by the One China Policy. One could already see traces of social-political incongruence in the so-called ‘Sunflower Movement’ in 2014, where violent protests against the attempted adoption of a KMT and PRC-backed cross-strait trade deal were held, as well as a 24 day student occupation of the Taiwanese legislature.41,42 Another incident in 2015 involved the storming of the Ministry of Education building by students protesting pro-Chinese revisions to school textbooks.43 As in Hong Kong, these examples support social-political incongruence as a force that sustains—if not exacerbates—conflict.

37

“Clashes at Hong Kong Occupy Central protest,” BBC News, September 28, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29399188

38

“Declaration of war as Hong Kong’s newly elected lawmakers plunge opening session into chaos,” South China Morning Post, October 12, 2016, last updated

October 13, 2016, http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/2027526/declaration-war-hong-kongs-newly-elected-lawmakers-plunge.

39

Joyce Ng and Raymond Yeung, “Hundreds of Hong Kong lawyers in silent march against Beijing oath ruling,” South China Morning Post, November 8, 2016,

accessed March 14, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/2044122/hundreds-hong-kong-lawyers-silent-march-against-beijing-oath.

40

Venus Wu and James Pomfret, “Hong Kong police, protesters clash over Beijing crackdown,” Reuters, November 16, 2016, accessed March 14, 2017, http://

www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-politics-idUSKBN1310NC. 41

Minnie Chan and Adrian Wan, “Taiwan activists peacefully exit parliament after weeks-long occupation,” South China Morning Post, April 10, 2014, accessed

March 17, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1473317/taiwan-president-insists-trade-pacts-benefits-student-activists-prepare.

42

Sophie Brown and Zoe Lie, “Taiwan police clash with students in protests over trade deal,” CNN News, March 25, 2014, accessed March 17, 2017, http://

www.cnn.com/2014/03/24/world/asia/taiwan-trade-student-protest/.

43 asia-33731411.

“Taiwan students storm education ministry in textbook protest,” BBC News, July 31, 2015, accessed March 17, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-

30

A TENTATIVE PEACE

CONCLUSION The One China Principle needs to be reworked in a way that espouses the peaceful co-existence of the PRC and ROC. However, such an undertaking requires the deconstruction of entrenched political and nationalist identity. Reimagining the Chinese political community would have ramifications for other contested regions, such as Hong Kong, and likely challenge the legitimacy, security, and sovereignty of the PRC. However, should an acceptable solution be found, it could provide a model for reconciliation not only for Hong Kong and China’s autonomous regions, but also for other split states that arose from ideological contestation.

As demonstrated by this paper’s examination of Taiwan, the concept of ‘social-political incongruence’ as a conflict-inducing mechanism and challenge highlights how cross-strait relations remain an influential nexus of political identity and national sentiment. On a theoretical level, Taiwan’s case can be used to examine how political realizations promote conflict and/or hinder conflict resolution. However, more research will undoubtedly be necessary to provide successful resolutions to latent violence, in the absence of active violence, and its relationship to social-political incongruence.

GORTON

31

Death and the Free Market: TERESA MARGOLLES, GLOBALIZATION, AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN MEXICO ALICE GORTON

INTRODUCTION In 2009, Teresa Margolles raised a mahogany-coloured flag on the exterior of the Rota Ivancich Palace in Venice, Italy. Infused with blood collected from Mexico’s borderlands, the artwork, Bandera/Flag, was flanked by two other flags, one European Union flag, and a Venetian flag.1 Pictured together, these three flags are emblematic of how globally integrated the world had become by 2009 - but Margolles’s blood-soaked banner implicitly critiques the conditions that make such symbolic combinations possible. Using blood extracted from execution sites in Mexico, Margolles’s materials are rooted in the local and the specific, while the flag format speaks to the nationalist fictions that fell apart with the global spread of capitalist systems in the late twentieth century. Ironically this work, a critique of globalization and Mexican sociopolitical realities, found expression at the 53rd Venice biennale, an event which draws art lovers from all over the world to the international city. Implicated as they are in such global networks, questions arise about the critical potentials of artworks like Bandera/ Flag. Are these politically charged pieces capable of producing real change, or are they simply a part of the globalized free market systems they seek to challenge?

Taking up these questions, I argue that although Margolles’s art remains embedded in globalized capitalist systems, her focus on death, corporeality, and mourning transgresses the competition and commodity fetishism inherent to neoliberalism, globalization, and globalized art production. To make this point, I start by broadly examining the concept of globalization and its impact on late-twentieth-century and contemporary Mexico. I then address Margolles’s response to these social and political circumstances through close visual readings of her key artworks. I conclude by considering both the shortcomings and possibilities of these pieces, suggesting that the formal and thematic choices which inform her practice make her a socially effective political artist despite her position in the market-oriented fine art system.

1

Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? Edited by Cuauhtemoc Medina, Barcelona Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2009.

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THEORETICAL CONTEXTS

Figure 1: Teresa Margolles, Bandera/Flag, 2009, Fabric, blood and earth. Venice, Venice Biennale. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/what-elsecould-we-speak-about-teresa-margolles-at-the-mexican-pavilion/.

Teresa Margolles is a contemporary conceptual artist who works out of Mexico City.

A founding member of SEMEFO, an art collective that takes its name from the Mexico City morgue (the Servicio Médico Forense), Margolles produces primarily performance, video, and installation pieces that use bodily materials to evoke themes of death and mourning.

Her works represent the widespread sense of loss that has characterized Mexican society since the global expansion of Western capitalist systems in the 1970s and 1980s.2 Specifically, Margolles’s work comments on the uncertainty of contemporary Mexican society by critiquing the neoliberalist and neocolonialist policies that have, since the late 1970s, increased crime 2

Amy Sarah Carroll, “Muerte Sin Fin: Teresa Margolles’s Gendered States of Exception” The Drama Review 54, no. 2 (2012): 104.

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rates in urban centres, disrupted rural labour practices, and produced an increasingly stratified society in which rich resource magnates benefit while working classes suffer.3 Margolles, who situates herself as a feminist artist, remarks on these historical realities by creating art that emphasizes the sublimity and materiality of death.

In order to understand the critical capacity of Margolles’ oeuvre, I analyze her work through a combination of art historical and International Relations lenses, focusing specifically on globalization and capitalism. As such, it is essential to outline a working concept of globalization, especially as it relates to society and cultural production in Mexico.

According to art historian Angela Dimitrakaki, globalization is a term applied to the late capitalist condition in which market relations “achieve planetary domination.”4 Frederic Jameson, known for his path-breaking writings on late capitalism, similarly understands globalization as an “untotalizable totality,” a ubiquitous world system that is characterized by the transnational expansion of channels linking information, markets, and bodies.5 In this paper, I situate globalization as the external social and economic forces that impacted Mexico and Mexico City in the late twentieth century. By and large, globalization refers to the latetwentieth-century spread of capitalist relations across the world which reconfigured social, economic, and political relations through the framework of the free market.

Theories of globalization are inextricably tied to neoliberalism, an ideology premised on individualism, privatization, and deregulation, which gained prominence in the late 1970s through advocates such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.6 The consequences of neoliberalist policies in Mexico and Latin America created much of the violence and consequent sense of loss that Margolles draws from in her work. In the late 1970s, slumping oil prices pushed Mexico into a recession. Faced with economic and social instability, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Mexico’s leading political party from 19292000, embraced a governing model that buttressed business people and elites by advancing outward-looking policies that benefited foreign interests.7 At this critical juncture, American and international organizations became increasingly entangled in Mexican governance, with 3

David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 100-103.

4

Angela Dimitrakaki, “Gendering the Multitude: Feminist Politics, Globalization, and Art History” in Women, the Arts, and Globalization: Eccentric Experience ed.

Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy C. Rowe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 18.

5

Frederic Jameson, “Preface” in Cultures of Globalization ed. Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, Duke University Press, 1998), xi.

6

Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.

7

Ibid, 98.

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institutions such as the World Bank granting the country a loan in exchange for “structural neoliberal reforms.”8 Pressured by economic decline and rising American involvement, the PRI took up these neoliberal reform policies that reorganized the financial system according to Western capitalist precepts. As a result of these structural changes, real wages dropped by nearly half, public education and healthcare declined, and many agricultural workers were pushed into urban centres in search of work.9 According to scholar David Harvey, the effects of this neoliberal restructuring were especially unsettling in Mexico City, transforming the peaceful city into one of the most unsafe metropoles in Latin America by 1984.10 Throughout this paper, I view the expansion of these neoliberalist policies in Mexico through a Marxist theory of globalized capital. Drawing from Karl Marx’s seminal nineteenthcentury writings on historical materialism, labour, and capitalist social organization; pioneering theorists such as Anthony Brewer have outlined the linkages between imperialism and capitalism, arguing for the inextricability of economic motives and colonial conquest.11 According to political scientist Mark Rupert, although Marx did not outline a concept of globalized capitalism, he laid the foundations for understanding the expansion of bourgeoisie modes of production across the world.12 Anthony Brewer built upon Marxist theory by applying these economic lenses to examinations of imperialism.13 During the late 1970s, the neocolonial spread of capitalist systems in Mexico restructured the country’s social and political climate in terms of the free market. This resulted in an increasingly stratified society and a heightened governmental focus on commodity production, both characteristics that Marx described in his theorization of capitalist economies.14 As an artist, Margolles comments on the effects of this capitalist restructuring and its corresponding inequalities; consequently, this analysis of Margolles’ oeuvre is framed by critical Marxist theories of globalization and capitalism.

8

Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 100.

9

Ibid.

10

Ibid.

11

For an overview see: Mark Rupert, “Marxism.” In International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, Third Edition, ed. Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve

Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 153.

12

Ibid, 160.

13

Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey. 2nd ed (London: Routledge, 2002).

14

Ibid, 12.

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CRITICAL CONTENT These theoretical approaches take on greater significance when considered in relation to Margolles’ output and artistic trajectory. The performance collective SEMEFO first exhibited together in 1994, a year marked by the leftist anti-globalist Zapatista rebellion, the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Ciudad Juarez femicide, a term used to describe the murders of hundreds of women and girls in Mexico’s borderlands.15 These national crises and political changes had tangible effects on Mexico City, where the morgue came to symbolize rising death rates, intensifying the political implications of Margolles’s work and the SEMEFO collective.16 The large number of bodies received by the morgue testifies to its prominent public position. For instance, Mexico City’s mortuary received 5,855 bodies in 2000, many of which were never claimed.17 Since the 1990s Margolles has attempted to come to terms with this violence and death by transferring abject materials into gallery spaces, exposing the processes that have served to neutralize death in late-twentieth-century and contemporary Mexico.18 As Margolles’s art grapples with the ongoing legacies of these political and social circumstances, her work presents tensions between genuine social activism and implicit acceptance of global capitalism. In one sense, Margolles produces politically important work that responds to increased death rates in Mexico, taking a stance against the economic systems that render human lives disposable commodities in globalized systems. In addition, Margolles revives the corpse by focusing on mourning and death, allowing it to live on in the gallery, while simultaneously producing a cutting critique of the naturalization of death in Mexico City and Latin America more broadly. However, Margolles is also a practicing artist who works within a market-dominated art world, exhibiting at biennales and major international shows.19 For instance, her work has been shown in countries across the world including Australia, New York City, Frankfurt, and Zurich. Close visual readings of Margolles’ oeuvre illustrate aspects of her practice that could be read as either market-based exploitation or as viable means of effecting change on a local, national, and even global scale.

15

Carroll, “Muerte Sin Fin,” 105.

16

Cuauhtémoc Medina, “SEMEFO,” in The Mexico City Reader ed. Ruben Gallo (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 315.

17

Ruben Gallo, New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 121.

18

Coco Fusco, The Bodies that Were Not Ours: And Other Writings (London: Routledge, 2001), 75.

19

Key exhibitions include Muerte sin fin in Frankfurt (2004), Forget Fear in Berlin (2009), and the Venice Biennale (2012). Teresa Margolles Muerte sin fin,

ed. Udo Kittelmann and Klaus Görner (Frankfurt: Museum fur Moderne Kunst, 2004); Forget Fear, ed. Artur Zmijewski and Joanna Warsza (Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2012); Teresa Margolles, What Else Could We Talk About?.

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Margolles’ Entierro/Burial (1999) raises questions about her position as both a socially progressive artist and a commodity producer in a global art market. In the piece, Margolles entombed a stillborn fetus in a cement slab.20 The work is redolent of the industrially-informed practices of pioneering American Minimalist artists like Carl Andre or Donald Judd; but in fact the piece serves as a tomb or crypt, responding to historical contingencies and political circumstances in turn-of-the-century Mexico.21 The fetus was donated to Margolles by a low-income mother who could not afford a proper burial for the stillborn baby. Given this relationship, the work functions as a feminist meditation on the struggles of motherhood in free market societies that marginalize women and low income families.22 By treating the body with respect and working closely with the mother, the work could also be read as a feminist commentary that encourages critical engagement and social change insofar as it exposes the conditions of infant mortality and motherhood in Mexico City.23 At the same time, however, art historians such as Gabriela Juaregui have taken issue with what they see as the commoditized nature of artworks like Entierro/Burial. Juaregui argues that Margolles’ piece is entrenched in exploitative capitalist systems and institutions.24 According to Jauregui, the piece does not benefit the dead but the living as it furthers Margolles’ career while offering spectators an uncanny reminder of their own human fragility.25 In this sense, Jauregui suggests that the work highlights the “exchange value” underscoring Margolles’ art practice, an especially sinister consideration in view of the fact that Entierro/Burial presents a fetus’ corpse.26 In addition, Entierro/Burial was exhibited internationally in major cities around the world.27 By showing these pieces internationally, Margolles risks diminishing the tangible, local relevance of the work. Instead, the artwork becomes implicated in a globalized capitalist system – the fine art world – while it attempts to comment on the consequences of globalization in Mexico. Read in this way, Jauregui’s critique, which connects Margolles to these global neoliberal processes, is central to understanding and situating the artist’s practice.

20

Gabriela Jauregui, “Necropolis: Exhuming the Works of Teresa Margolles,” in Teresa Margolles Muerte sin fin, ed. Udo Kittelmann and Klaus Görner (Frankfurt:

Museum fur Moderne Kunst, 2004), 183.

21

In particular Andre’s Magnesium Square and Equivalent VIII. David Hopkins, After Modern Art 1945-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 144.

22

Nochlin, Global Feminisms, 63.

23

Ibid.

24

Jauregui, “Necropolis: Exhuming the Works of Teresa Margolles,” 181.

25

Ibid.

26

Ibid.

27

Ibid.

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Figure 2: Teresa Margolles, Entierro/Burial, 1999, concrete and fetus. Zurich, Museum für Moderne Kunst. http://www.artmagazine.cc/media.html?mediaId=35002&conten tId=38726.

These criticisms are crucial to contextualizing Margolles’s work, but in general she attempts to thwart such characterizations. She does so in three important regards: producing body, performance, and video art; drawing on ethereal and transient corporal forms such as bubbles and blood; and invoking themes of mourning and remembrance. In using these forms, Margolles speaks to the disposability and commodification of human life in globalized markets through an active refusal to move forward in the face of death.

Influenced by the conceptual legacies of body, video, and performance art, Margolles’ work problematizes the commoditized nature of globalized art production. First, Margolles’ use of base, bodily materials generates a sense of revulsion that negates some of the key tenets of free market society: consumer pleasure and desire. Using water from the morgue, blood, and human fat, Margolles’s work questions capitalist art production in a manner similar to Piero Manzoni or Marcel Duchamp, both of whom commented on capitalist commodification by reimagining base or everyday materials as art objects.28 Likewise, Margolles places restrictions on which parts of her practice are salable, refusing to sell artwork made of human material and instead distributing photographs and videos of her work. These decisions, as well as her inclination to use postmodernist techniques from performance and video art, place Margolles’s practice within artistic traditions reputed for their challenges to commodity fetishism and free market competition.

28

Hopkins, After Modern Art, 84.

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Figure 3: Teresa Margolles, En el aire/In the Air, 2003, morgue water. Lower Hutt: Dowse Art Museum. http://dowse.org.nz/exhibitions/detail/teresa-margolles-so-it-vanishes.

Examples of her performance and video work demonstrate the fleeting, noncommodity nature of her practice. In En el aire, Margolles fed morgue water used to wash corpses through a bubble machine, interweaving ideas about the lightheartedness and childishness of bubbles with the omniscience of death in postcolonial Mexico City.29 The work functions as a comment on capitalist art production as it creates a disquieting sense of repulsion in the spectator who, upon reading the didactic panels, learns that the bubbles are made from water previously used to wash corpses. The ethereal quality of bubbles in En el aire reflects on the disposability of lives and consumer goods in late capitalist societies: the bubbles are produced, left to burst, and then replaced by new bubbles, subtly addressing neoliberalism’s 29

Udo Kittelmann, “Muerte sin fin,” in Teresa Margolles: Muerte sin fin (Frankfurt: Museum fur Moderne Kunst, 2004), 43.

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ability to render bodies interchangeable objects in capitalist frameworks. Margolles produces videos alongside these kinds of installations. For one 2005 video, Margolles filmed a road in Ciudad Juarez where gangs have abducted and murdered hundreds of women and girls since 1993.30 The film does not depict figures but instead silently traverses the road, moving slowly as it takes in the still, eerie environment of a space charged with meaning and tragedy. These formal techniques draw on precedents from feminist video art production that used film to critique art’s material and commodified nature

COMPELLING OR COMPLICIT? The methods invoked in Margolles’s video and installation works are conceptual attempts to create distance between her practice and the market-oriented exchange dynamics underlying the fine art world.31 Although Margolles’s use of bodily materials, installation, and video do not entirely efface the contradictions between her social stance and her place within the neoliberal global market, I read her invocations of these forms as attempts to position herself critically as a local producer influenced by artistic movements that have historically transgressed the commodity nature of art. Considered in relation to globalization, this is an essential subversive technique as neoliberalism and global capitalism are predicated on their commitment to commodity fetishism, emphasis on exchange, and ability to transform people and goods into consumer items and chattel.

Like her formal and material techniques, the thematic content of Margolles’s work transgresses the exploitative conditions of late capitalism. By focusing on mourning, Margolles draws on a common theme in Latin American literary and artistic expression.32 In the majority of her artworks, Margolles memorializes marginalized women and men who died violent deaths in Mexico’s borderlands and urban centres. According to cultural theorist Idelber Avelar, mourning defies the passive acts of forgetting inherent to neoliberal globalized societies.33 The market, writes anthropologist Nestor Garcia Cinclini, is underpinned by its ability to render objects and bodies obsolete; replacing old goods with new ones, old bodies

30

Virginia Perez-Ratton, “Central American Women Artists in a Global Age” in Global Feminisms, ed. Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly (New York: Brooklyn

Museum, 2007), 139.

31

Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 2.

32

See, for example, Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present, 4-5.

33

Ibid.

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with new ones.34 This emphasis on exchangeability requires the consumer’s, or the spectator’s, ability to forget - to move forward in accordance with ever-changing market values. By employing themes of mourning, Margolles creates “a moment of suspension of exchange value,” in which the spectator must engage in an act of willful remembering, a refusal to keep pace with the transactional nature of the globalized market.35 Expanding on this point, Margolles’s corporal materials and funerary themes promote acts of remembrance. If we accept that a key premise of neoliberal globalization is its effort to position people as interchangeable competitors in free market systems, then Margolles decision to focus on bodies acknowledges the sacrosanctity of individual human lives.36 In public exhibitions, Margolles “spectralizes” the gallery, creating spaces infused with death that allow the corpses to live on, refusing them a quick, anonymous passage through the private spaces of the morgue and back into the environment.37 These thematic and material decisions reject the possibility of idly accepting silent death and neutralized violence in Mexico. In this way, her work calls attention to the significant rupture created by the end of a single life, protesting against economic policies that seek to transform individuals into insignificant, replaceable bodies that wordlessly pass from life into death, through the morgue, and back to the land.

Although it is crucial to consider Margolles’s position as an art maker in a highly competitive global capitalist system, these material, thematic, and formal considerations underscore Margolles’s attempts to situate herself locally and to distance her work from the most ruthlessly market-based elements of the art world. By creating performance, video, and body art that evokes themes of death and corporeality in local contexts, Margolles evades certain critiques associated with her participation in international art production. These formal choices challenge the commodity-nature of the fine art world, invoking post-modernist techniques that have sought to undermine the capitalist underpinnings of the art market. At the same time, however, it must not be denied that her work is informed by globalized systems as it responds to a broad array of ideas – ranging from western science to Minimalism – and exhibits in international markets. While casting a critical gaze on Margolles’s relation to capitalist competition is essential, to deny her art social import because of its association with the free market is imprudent. Given the pervasiveness 34

Nestor Garcia Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 16.

35

Avelar, The Untimely Present, 4.

36

Fusco, The Bodies that were Not Ours, 75.

37

Cuauhtemoc Medina, “Materialist Spectrality” in Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? (Barcelona: Institutio Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2009), 19.

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of globalization, the possibilities of entirely circumventing its confines are difficult, if not impossible to imagine. This impossibility is illustrated even by recent trends in contemporary art which focus on networks, databases, and informational exchanges distinct from the gallery or studio. According to art historian Lane Relyea, these approaches, while attempting to critique the free market nature of museum-based practice, are simply manifestations of capitalism’s contemporary contexts.38 When considered from this perspective, to disregard the social significance of Margolles’s work because of its association with globalization risks marginalizing artists from developing countries as well as generating complete creative and political stasis.

CONCLUSION Through close readings of Margolles’s contextual circumstances and art practice, it is clear that international artists whose work problematizes the effects of globalization and neoliberalism face considerable challenges as they attempt to define themselves and their practices in relation to these concepts. Even so, while Margolles’s art balances precariously between the poles of globalized capitalism and social activism, her thematic, formal, and material choices position her as a transgressive artist whose body of work issues a cogent critique of neoliberalism and globalization, responding to political conditions both local and transnational.

38

Lane Relyea, Your Everyday Art World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 9.

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THE SO-CALLED 'INTERNATIONAL' DISCIPLINE

The So-Called ‘International’ Discipline

ELITE STRATIFICATION AND THE LIMITING OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE DISCIPLINE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS NICHOLAS BABEY

INTRODUCTION Academic disciplines are social institutions by nature. Scholars interact and create knowledge within a system of institutions—such as journals, book publishers, and schools— which all function within a given field of study. International Relations (IR) does not evade the inherent social aspects of a discipline, and its structure is not benign. It is organized in a way that allows the scholarly elite to determine what is studied, and further, what counts as ‘knowledge.’ Since IR, as its name suggests, is meant to be an international discipline, this concentration of power inhibits it from properly and effectively studying its subject matter i.e. ‘international politics.’ Beneath the discipline’s elite one can find a teeming plurality of theories from around the globe. A reframing of the discipline is thus necessary to capture the potential within this variety of theoretical perspectives, which would expand and enhance our knowledge of the world, of the world’s peoples, and of global affairs generally. By reorienting the practice of theorizing in a way that embraces IR’s existing theoretical diversity, the discipline’s leading institutions would foster the creation of scholarship that increases the value of IR theory to researchers in IR, actors in international politics, and the social sciences.

To make this argument, this paper will first examine data to determine what IR looks like today, and which group of IR scholars, journals, publishers, and schools make up the top hierarchy of the discipline. Next, an examination of the discipline’s power structures will illuminate how a scholarly elite limits what is called ‘knowledge’ in academic output, which is approved only by a narrow elite. This paper will conclude by breaking down the basis of elite stratification within IR and offer an alternative approach to theorizing through what David A. Lake calls “mid-level theory.”1 This paper ultimately seeks to foster a culture of critical self-reflection in the discipline in order to deconstruct the limitations on what is 1

David A. Lake, “Theory is Dead, Long Live Theory: The End of the Great Debates and the Rise of Eclecticism in International Relations,” European Journal

of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2013): 567-587. Though the terms used for this form of theorization in this paper will follow Lake, “mid-level theory” may also be known as “analytic eclecticism.” For a full discussion of analytic eclecticism, see Rudra Sil and Peter J. Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

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deemed ‘knowledge’ and allow IR to become more pragmatic in its study, and more capable of utilizing the existing plurality of theoretical perspectives to better understand world politics.

THE DISCIPLINE AND ITS ELITE IR has famously been called “an American social science,”2 a claim compounded by authors who posit that American schools of thought maintain a stylistic “omnipresence” in theory, globally.3 However, this discourse is frequently carried on with hyperbole and overgeneralization, homogenizing American IR into one cohesive entity even while there are and have been clear trends of pluralization.4 Indeed, a multinational survey of IR scholars found that there is no distinctive “American school of thought” that penetrates IR globally.5 Instead, the structure of IR is subdivided into “distinct research communities” both inside and outside the US,6 primarily by issue area, methodology, epistemology, and geography.7 In the US, despite the widely-held perception of hegemonic realism, a great deal of published research is non-paradigmatic and theoretically diverse.8 The appearance of a powerful, dominating, and monolithic American school comes in part from framing the discipline in terms of ‘Great Debates’ and ‘paradigm wars,’ which create the illusion of absolute coherency within, for example, realism or idealism.9 In reality, these positions are far more diverse than they are made to appear.10 For example, “positivists” and “post-positivists” are both diverse groups with a plurality of epistemological positions, though the former may be more united than the latter.11 Yet, there is a dominant and simplistic picture of IR painted by the disciplinary elite that is reinforced by the sheer number of American IR scholars and students, many of whom tend to teach and study from American texts that often repeat and exaggerate Americancentric views.12 This, in turn, bolsters intellectual primacy, theoretical stereotypes and, most 2

Stanley Hoffman. “An American Social Science: International Relations.” Daedalus 106, no. 3 (1977): 41-60.

3

Ole Wæver, “Still a Discipline After All These Debates?” in International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, Third Edition, eds. Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki, and

Steve Smith, 306-327 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 314.

4

Daniel Maliniak et al., “International Relations in the US Academy,” International Studies Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2011): 444.

5

Richard Jordan et al., “One Discipline or Many? TRIP Survey of International Relations Faculty in Ten Countries,” Teaching, Research, and International

Policy (TRIP) Project, The Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations (Willamsburg, VA: The College of William and Mary, 2009), 8.

6

Jordan et al., “One Discipline or Many?” 10.

7

Wiebke Wemheuer-Vogelaar et al., “The IR of the Beholder: Examining Global IR Using the 2014 TRIP Survey,” International Studies Review 18, no. 1 (2016):

23-27.

8

Maliniak et al., “International Relations in the US Academy,” 460.

9

Lake, “Theory is Dead, Long Live Theory,” 549.

10

Ibid.

11

Ibid., 579.

12

Maliniak et al., “International Relations in the US Academy,” 441.

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THE SO-CALLED 'INTERNATIONAL' DISCIPLINE

importantly, restricts the access of theories that do not fit within the Great Debate narrative.

Having noted the relative trend of decentralization within American (and global) IR, there remains evidence supporting US hegemony and scholarly dominance.13 A disciplinary elite does exist, and it is made up of top American scholars at top American universities, who publish in top American journals. Most IR scholars only have access to the discipline as it is mediated and restricted by those at the top. Although a similar mechanism is at play in other intellectual centres such as Britain, where highly influential scholars influence the limits to ‘knowledge’ within British IR, American scholars dominate the discipline as a whole.

In any discipline, intellectual novelty must be valued and recognized as “good work” by the established academic institutions, and adhere to the standards of knowledge of those who hold power over such institutions.14 Those who wish to advance in the field must meet the criteria of the field’s elite schools, journals, publishers, and practitioners.15 These “elite networks” in IR maintain a level of “stratification and inequality” by limiting and mediating the production of knowledge within the discipline – meaning that novel thought either falls on deaf ears or is only heard by few.16 A recent study found that, as a result, scholars widely perceive IR’s most influential theorists to be decidedly Western, and “even non-Western scholars tend to identify Western sources as consisting the most influential scholarship.”17 Paradigmatic boundary drawing via the Great Debate narrative is one phenomenon that reinforces stratification within IR. Being framed as a field of warring paradigms effectively “[shapes] the direction of inquiry” and sets the acceptable criteria for the creation of knowledge.18 Thus, doing work within the bounds of one of the dominant paradigms carries a certain premium that improves one’s academic standing and grants them more access to leading journals and publishers than others.19 That the capacity to publish in a recognizable journal is dependent on its capacity to fit within the bounds of what the elite deems acceptable knowledge has clear implications. Wæver notes that post-colonial, feminist, or green theory scholarship would be far more prevalent if those at the top of the disciplinary hierarchy recognized it as acceptable 13

Jordan et al., “One Discipline or Many?” 11; Kristensen, “Revisiting the ‘American Social Science,’” 247.

14

Wæver, “Still a Discipline After All These Debates?” 312.

15

Steve Smith, “The United States and the Discipline of International Relations: ‘Hegemonic Country, Hegemonic Discipline,’” International Studies Review 4, no.

2 (2002): 68.

16

Kristensen, “Revisiting the ‘American Social Science,’” 248.

17

Wemheuer-Vogelaar et al., “The IR of the Beholder,” 28.

18

Lake, “Theory is Dead, Long Live Theory,” 572.

19

Waever, “Still a Discipline After All These Debates?” 311.

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‘IR theory.’20 Instead, this scholarship is more often resisted as something that does not count as IR or even as knowledge. The cost of the concentration of power in IR is the narrowing of our research agenda and the stifling of novel theoretical thought.

The IR elite reside in the discipline’s leading journals, book publishers, and schools.

Though all of these academic institutions are relevant, journals are the most important because they publish more frequently and in higher volume, which allows their editors and leading contributors to directly sanction what counts as IR.21 Within IR, there are a few highly visible journals that clearly hold a higher level of social importance than others, such as International Organization, International Security, and World Politics.22 The power of leading journals is particularly clear in IR. In the US, for example, leading journals publish quantitative work most often despite the fact that 68% of US scholars prefer qualitative methods.23 Thus, all IR scholars depend on the “controllers” of these major journals to gain the prestige and respect that comes from publishing in them.24 Generally, leading journals tend to stray from publishing new theories, as those in control of article acceptance and editing limit the production of theories to those that, in their opinion, uphold intellectual primacy.25 For example, the Great Debate narrative is upheld by the almost complete limiting of articles engaged in theoretical synthesis; instead, preference is given to “competitive theory testing,” which reinforces the paradigm war by pitting theories against one another.26 The lasting outcome of theoretical limitation is that it allows disciplinary elites to maintain their positions “while silencing dissenting perspectives.”27 The adoption of these dissenting perspectives can arguably enhance IR by making it capable of providing a more comprehensive view of international politics, and by giving researchers access to more theoretical inputs in each issue area.

Second to journals, book publishers contribute to elite stratification as well. One survey found that “major university presses enjoy the highest level of prestige and greatest familiarity” in the discipline, and that scholars actively alter their work in an effort to publish 20

Waever, “Still a Discipline After All These Debates?” 312.

21

Kristensen, “Revisiting the ‘American Social Science,’” 250.

22

Ibid., 255. See source for the full list of leading journals. Maliniak et al. also provides a list of 12 leading journals.

23

Maliniak et al., “International Relations in the US Academy,” 450-454.

24

Gerard van der Ree, “Saving the Discipline: Plurality, Social Capital, and the Sociology of IR Theorizing,” International Political Sociology 8, no. 2 (2014): 220;

Waever, “Still a Discipline After All These Debates?” 314.

25

Wæver, “Still a Discipline After All These Debates?” 319.

26

Maliniak et al., “International Relations in the US Academy,” 448.

27

Steve Smith, “Debating Schmidt: Theoretical Pluralism in IR.,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 36, no. 2 (2008): 310.

46

THE SO-CALLED 'INTERNATIONAL' DISCIPLINE

in them.28 Knowledge is limited by these publishers in the same way that it is by journals—the discipline’s elite determine what constitutes knowledge, and scholars must comply in order to be academically successful.

Publishing in leading journals and with prestigious book publishers not only gives the individual scholar social capital, but also publications are increasingly used to rank schools and to determine funding allocation.29 The most recognized individuals, schools, and journals are likely to publish more frequently and widely than anyone else, and as an effect of that, the scholarly power that comes from publishing in leading journals tends to be concentrated in certain geographical areas, schools, and individuals.30 Peter Kristensen finds that the majority of articles published in leading journals come from elite institutions in Europe and North America.31 This general Western power is concentrated specifically within the US, where the most elite journals and scholars are located in the major cities of northeastern states, in Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Yale, with the addition of some geographical outliers such as Stanford.32 Scholars from this elite group publish almost a quarter of all work in IR’s leading journals.33 The result of this is that IR suffers from “a tyranny of place,” whereby knowledge creation is only possible through the “courts” of IR’s leading institutions.34 As an effect, “the rest of the world is barely present” in major journals,35 and although IR theory communities in non-Western countries continue to grow to sizes equaling those in the West,36 their voices continue to be marginalized. Scholarship from outside of the West that could, in synthesis with Western scholarship, increase our ability to understand and analyze international politics, does not have the opportunity to make an impact on the discipline.

Some have argued that the concentration of disciplinary power in America’s northeast is an effect of the American school’s relative size: “there simply are many more IR scholars in the United States than in any other country in the world.”37 Although this may 28

Larry P. Goodson, Bradford Dillman, and Anil Hira, “Ranking the Presses: Political Scientists’ Evaluations of Publisher Quality,” PS: Political Science and Politics

32, no. 2 (1999): 258.

29

Kristensen, “Revisiting the ‘American Social Science,’” 254.

30

Ibid., 252.

31

Ibid., 265.

32

Ibid., 262.

33

Ibid.

34

Peter Vale, “If International Relations Lives on the Street, What is it Doing in the Classroom?” International Relations 28, no. 2 (2014): 142.

35

Kristensen, “Revisiting the ‘American Social Science,’” 261.

36

Wemheuer-Vogelaar et al., “The IR of the Beholder,” 28.

37

Jordan et al., “One Discipline or Many?” 8.

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47

be true, concerns about power concentration are made acute when one notes how insular the American school is, where almost all American IR scholars receive their doctorates from within the country.38 Continual education within their own intellectual realm causes scholars to reproduce and reinforce elite dominance given that one’s education has “a massively conditioning effect” in how he/she will frame the discipline and approve of knowledge.39 As a result, elites are less likely to challenge the kind of knowledge that has been set as the criteria for practicing IR.40 In turn, the paramount effect of this has been the reification of the Great Debate/paradigm war narrative of IR,41 which has tended to lead scholars and students to perceive realism as the most influential school of thought. Indeed, despite a low publication rate of realist articles compared to other theoretical articles, the paradigm is addressed as an important “competing explanation” in most theoretical work.42 Regardless of American IR’s size, its top scholars, departments, journals, and publishers remain deaf to genuine theoretical challenge, or to the theoretical plurality that exists around the world and even within the US.43 The top tier of the discipline continues to approve only of the type of knowledge that they deem acceptable, restricting the entry of novel thought into the mainstream of IR. However, the problem goes beyond the restriction of knowledge by disciplinary elites.

IR is closed at the most basic level by an insurmountably high language barrier. Studying IR presupposes studying in the English language,44 especially when it comes to the kind of IR that is accepted by leading institutions. Given the structure of the discipline, the language barrier limits the production of knowledge in IR to those who are proficient enough in English to be published in English-language journals. The use of only English in a so-called ‘international’ discipline puts “profound limitations to our understanding of the social world,”45 and allows for an understanding of international politics through only English-speaking, Anglo-American lenses, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to properly understand valuable perspectives from around the globe through their own languages, cultures, and customs.

The concentration of power in the discipline allows the IR elite to limit, through 38

Jordan et al., “One Discipline or Many?” 8.

39

Lake, “Theory is Dead, Long Live Theory,” 578.

40

Smith, “Debating Schmidt,” 309.

41

Maliniak et al., “International Relations in the US Academy,” 442.

42

Ibid., 448.

43

Smith, “Debating Schmidt,” 308.

44

Vale, “If International Relations Lives on the Street,” 153.

45

Ibid.

48

THE SO-CALLED 'INTERNATIONAL' DISCIPLINE

various means, what constitutes knowledge in IR. Intentionally or not, they effectively silence voices that do not coincide with their ideas about theory and knowledge. This compromises the ability of the discipline to study international politics. One cannot rely predominantly on any particular perspective in such a field, and given the kind of theoretical limitation that currently takes place in IR, it is hardly a truly ‘international’ discipline.

REFRAMING IR What might solve the problems that arise from the concentration of power in IR? We can reframe the way we look at IR to more accurately capture the reality of this intellectually and theoretically diverse discipline. Acknowledging theoretical diversity within IR should lead us to investigate what new types of knowledge can be produced with a plurality of theories.46 International (or global) politics are far too complex to be studied through only one approach.

We can benefit from embracing multiple approaches that will allow us to get multiple answers to one question,47 for multiple answers do not mean less comprehension, rather a fuller understanding of the phenomenon being studied. By conceptually reframing the discipline to reflect its reality (rather than framing it as a state of warring paradigms), scholars and researchers can utilize plurality to progress the discipline to a place where it can help us better comprehend global politics and provide actionable alternatives. By adopting such an approach, IR’s leading institutions would be able to produce a higher caliber of scholarship, increase the applicability of IR theory to researchers and political actors, and thereby address the long-lasting debate about the usefulness of IR theorizing.48 The concern that IR theory is inapplicable and unrecognized by those who do not study IR is well founded;49 however, by embracing the approach presented here, IR’s institutions would arguably make themselves more valuable to the social sciences as a whole. As IR’s elite control this potential for change, their recognition of these incentives is the first step to changing their approach.

The processes for developing and implementing ‘mid-level theory’ hold lessons that can be applied to the development of theory in IR.50 A mid-level theory endeavours to 46

Waever, “Still a Discipline After All These Debates?” 311.

47

Smith, “Debating Schmidt,” 308.

48

Chris Brown, “The Poverty of Grand Theory,” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2013): 483-497.

49

Ibid., 484-485.

50

For further discussion of this kind of approach and its implications for the discipline of IR, see Amitav Acharya, “Global International Relations (IR) and

Regional Worlds,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2014): 647-659. In that article, the mid-level or eclectic approach is applied in order to formulate what Acharya calls “Global IR.” This reframing is similar to what is done in the present paper.

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49

study a particular phenomenon closely to understand it as thoroughly as possible. Because it is anchored by a particular phenomenon, it “does not inflame the passions like allegiance to this or that paradigm.”51 Each theory develops “distinct theoretical structures, research methods and modes of practice” that may not fit into the dominant paradigmatic frame of the discipline.52 Rather, the theorist will be happy using any theory that allows him/her to develop a fuller understanding. The adoption of perspectives and assumptions other than his/her own is favoured because it allows a given theory to become more nuanced, and thus more precise in its ability to capture complexities and to provide viable options for political actors. These kinds of theories are more placatory and theoretically open, as they allow for progress through the sharing and synthesis of all kinds of knowledge.53 Applying this approach to IR is far more practical than theorizing through the Great Debate narrative practiced by the IR elites. Learning from the methods of developing midlevel theory, grand theory in IR should be formulated by adopting any approaches that help a theory advance its explanatory capacity and provide realistic options to agents in international relations. Further, by emphasizing openness to other theoretical perspectives, the approach of mid-level theorizing allows for the additions of new, diverse, and valuable inputs of knowledge.54 If the goal is to create “a more productive and searching discipline”55 that can provide a more effective analysis of world politics and increase the value and applicability of IR theory to social studies broadly, adopting the processes and principles of mid-level theory provides a far more dynamic and applicable approach for the creation of grand theory.

It may seem like the mid-level theory approach is in direct conflict with grand theory, but this is an incorrect assumption. Applying the strategies of mid-level theory, such as the ready utilization and synthesis of relevant, existing theories, supplements and reconfigures our ways of thinking about and using grand theory, and allows the researcher to explore answers provided by a variety of high-level theories rather than analyzing world politics through only one lens or another.56 What this approach does supplant, however, is the elite hold on the ability to set the criteria for knowledge and dictate the agenda of IR, creating instead a 51

For further discussion of this kind of approach and its implications for the discipline of IR, see Amitav Acharya, “Global International Relations (IR) and

Regional Worlds,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2014): 647-659. In that article, the mid-level or eclectic approach is applied in order to formulate what Acharya calls “Global IR.” This reframing is similar to what is done in the present paper. 568.

52

Michael Gibbons et al., The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies (London; Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE

Publications, 1994), 5.

53

Lake, “Theory is Dead, Long Live Theory,” 580.

54

Vale, “If International Relations Lives on the Street,” 154.

55

Wæver, “Still a Discipline After All These Debates?” 316.

56

See Michael Gibbons et al., The New Production of Knowledge, 14.

50

THE SO-CALLED 'INTERNATIONAL' DISCIPLINE

climate within the discipline where the largest variety of knowledge is sought after rather than shut out. Following the practices of developing mid-level theory, gate-keepers such as leading journals should seek the widest variety of theoretical perspectives available to address their particular subject matter. They may benefit from doing so, as leading the development of theory shaped by a much larger diversity of intellectuals and forms of knowledge, arguably results in the formulation of theory that is more capable of capturing the complexities of international politics and of providing actionable alternatives for political actors as well as tools for social science researchers. For such a change to come about, however, the IR elite are required to act by including a broader set of perspectives in published work. This may prove a difficult task, but incentives exist in making IR theory more applicable to other areas of social science, which, in turn, would increase the recognition of and desire for work done

by IR scholars. Should the IR elite recognize those benefits, they may exercise their agency to create a field of IR that makes far more use of intellectual diversity.

CONCLUSION As Wæver puts it, “the challenge is not to achieve knowledge, but … to understand the multiplicity of it.”57 By understanding the power dynamics of IR itself, it is possible to make the discipline more reflexive.58 Reframing the discipline’s mainstream to reflect the existing diversity of thought allows scholars to do away with limits on knowledge, to embrace the theoretical resources at their disposal, and to cast away the unnecessary paradigm wars that continue to bar progress in making IR theory more applicable to political actors and researchers throughout the social sciences.59 Surveys of the discipline show that IR is already far more diverse and plural than it is made out to be.60 Recognizing this will break down the harmful self-image of “an American social science” rife with paradigmatic conflict, and theoretical and social exclusivity.61

57

Wæver, “Still a Discipline After All These Debates?” 324.

58

van der Ree, “Saving the Discipline,” 232.

59

See Gibbons et al., The New Production of Knowledge.

60

Jordan et al., “One Discipline or Many?”; Kristensen, “Revisiting the ‘American Social Science.’”

61

Hoffman, “An American Social Science”; Kristensen, “Revisiting the ‘American Social Science,’” 265.

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Illegal Deforestation

DIFFUSING INDONESIA’S CARBON BOMB AVIAAH SHANAZ RANDHAWA

A GLOBAL ISSUE, A NATIONAL SOLUTION A global demand for palm oil, combined with vague land rights and weak enforcement policies, have created the right conditions for illegal deforestation in Indonesia. This involves private companies, most prominently palm oil corporations, slashing and burning massive plots of rainforest to clear land for cultivation. The environmental effects of slash-andburn forest clearing is an international issue that transgresses Indonesia’s borders. Despite being outlawed, the high frequency of slash-and-burn cultivation is a grave issue for global climate change since burning peat-based rainforests releases large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Peat—the buildup of partially-decayed, carbon-rich organic matter—is a carbon bomb for the climate, and Indonesia has more peatland than any other country in the world.1 To put things into perspective, for every hectare (ha) of rainforest burned, Indonesia’s rainforests release 2,700 tons of carbon compared to the Amazon rainforest, which releases 400 tons/ha.2 In 2015 alone, the country lost an estimated 2.1 million ha of forest compared to 530,000 ha in Brazil.3 It should come as no surprise then that Indonesia is the world’s third-worst greenhouse gas emitter.4 Not only is Indonesian deforestation an acute concern for global climate change, but this destructive practice has also taken a toll on human health in the region. Land-clearing forest fires regularly produce a haze that suffocates not only Indonesia, but Singapore and Malaysia as well, causing 15,000 deaths from respiratory illness in Southeast Asia each year.5 Furthermore, this number jumped following the 2015 Indonesian forest fire crisis, which was responsible for 100,300 premature deaths in the region.6 In 2011, the Indonesian government introduced a moratorium on forest licenses, which unofficially banned new industrial concessions on primary (old-growth) rainforests 1

Belinda Arunarwati Margono et al., “Primary Forest Cover Loss in Indonesia Over 2000-2012,” Nature Climate Change 4 (2014): 731.

2

Ibid.

3

J. Indarto et al., “Do Forest Permits Cause Deforestation in Indonesia?” International Forestry Review 17 (2015): 172.

4

Margono, “Primary Forest Cover Loss,” 732.

5

S. Jayachandran, “Air Quality and Early-Life Mortality Evidence from Indonesia’s Wildfires,” Journal of Human Resources 44 (2012): 957.

6

Shannon N. Koplitz et al., “Public Health Impacts of the Severe Haze in Equatorial Asia in September–October 2015: Demonstration of a New Framework

for Informing Fire Management Strategies to Reduce Downwind Smoke Exposure,” Environmental Research Papers 11 (2016): 2.

52

ILLEGAL DEFORESTATION

and peatland, both reservoirs of soil carbon.7 While this presidential instruction symbolizes a significant step towards suspending haphazard forest exploitation, it has not had its intended effect.

Figure 1. Graph displays total primary forest cover loss over the span of 11 years. From the origin, the highest solid line represents lowland primary forest loss, followed by wetland primary forest loss, and then montane primary forest loss. The dashed lines represent the data’s linear fits.

Figure 1 displays that the total primary forest deforestation rate spiked in 2012, a year after the moratorium’s launch.8 In this regard, the moratorium’s inadequacy in reducing deforestation necessitates change in the country’s forest conservation policy. However, while the Indonesian government has several regulations that are supposed to protect its forests and peatland, these rules are habitually sidestepped by large corporations and local officials. This paper therefore argues that corruption among local/regional officials can be curtailed by supplementing Indonesia’s existing forest policies with a payments-for-performance program.

This would situate local communities at the forefront of monitoring illegal deforestation practices in their regions by incentivizing ‘good behaviour,’ thus allowing the government to put policy to practice via improved detection of criminal deforestation. To unpack this argument, this paper begins with a brief overview of Indonesia’s existing forestry policies, a review of dominant solutions to improving Indonesia’s deforestation monitoring, followed 7

Miriam E. Marlier et al., “Future Fire Emissions Associated with Projected Land Use Change in Sumatra,” Global Change Biology 21 (2015): 345.

8

Belinda Arunarwati Margono et al, “Primary Forest Cover Loss in Indonesia Over 2000-2012,” Nature Climate Change 4 (2014): 732.

RANDHAWA

53

by a cross-analysis between these dominant solutions and the merits and practicality of a payments-for-performance program in checking illegal deforestation in Indonesia.

INDONESIA’S EXISTING FORESTRY POLICIES The Indonesian government permits industrial concessions on its forests as a way of aiding local economies that have long relied on logging and, more importantly, palm oil production.9 Granting concession is permitted under the Basic Forestry Law of 1967, which broadly stipulates that the State is responsible for “determining, organizing, and planning the purpose, supply and use of forests… as well as managing legal activities.”10 The government gives forest concessions in designated production areas to state and private Indonesian corporations for a maximum of 20 years, and this agreement can be renewed if the concessionaire exhibits satisfactory conduct as determined by annual, governmentconducted impact assessments. The Basic Forestry Law was supplemented over time by legislation aimed at sustaining Indonesia’s old-growth rainforests. The most recent of these legislations is the 1990 Law on Conservation of Natural Living Resources, which expanded government protection of all primary forest.11 Despite reducing deforestation rates of primary forest by 30.8% during the 1990s, this policy was largely ineffective in the long-run.12 Between 1990-2005, Indonesia lost 24.1% of its total forest cover and saw a 0.30% spike in its annual deforestation rate from 2000-2005.13 Furthermore, these policies failed to address the actual reason for Indonesia’s steadily increasing deforestation rates: deliberately-set forest fires.

In 2001, the Indonesian government enacted Law No. 4 on the Management of Environmental Degradation and/or Pollution, forbidding all forest and land fires.14 However, this legislation was ineffective in decreasing slashing and burning. This is explicated in Indonesia’s 2009 State Environment Report, which reveals that the number of man-made forest fires jumped from approximately 19,192 in 2008, to 32,416 in 2009.15 In 2009, the Indonesian government introduced Law No. 32 on the Protection and Management of Environment and Government Regulation, which stipulated that breaching Law No. 4 would 9

World Growth, “The Economic Benefit of Palm Oil to Indonesia,” World Growth; Palm Oil Green Development Campaign (February 2011): 10-14.

10

Luke Lazarus Arnold, "Deforestation in Decentralised Indonesia: What's Law Got to Do with It?” Environment and Development Journal 4 (2008): 79.

11

Colin Hunt, “The Costs of Reducing Deforestation in Indonesia,” Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 46 (2010): 189.

12

Ibid, 192.

13

Christopher Elliott, Forest Certification in Indonesia (Jakarta: Center for International Forestry Research, 2007), 74.

14

Colin Hunt, “The Costs of Reducing Deforestation,” 194.

15

Luke Lazarus Arnold, "Deforestation in Decentralised Indonesia,” 87.

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lead to ‘harsh penalties’ ranging from fines to prison terms.16 Yet, despite these legislations, corporations continue to evade this red tape.

Enter the 2011 moratorium, which—with its recent revisions—represents Indonesia’s latest policy on reducing deforestation and fire clearing practices. It restricts new development licenses on primary forest and peatland, preventing corporations from cultivating land that would discharge vast carbon stores into the atmosphere if burned. In 2015, Indonesian President Joko Widodo attempted to strengthen the moratorium by barring corporations from cultivating newly burned areas, and instead mandated that they restore their lands.17 Despite this revision; however, the moratorium lacks adequate enforcement measures and continues to authorize existing industrial concessions on primary forest and peatlands.

This is evidenced by the fact that Indonesia has experienced an “average annual increase of 47,600 ha of primary forest cover loss since 2011."18 The moratorium also exempts the protection of wetlands, which is problematic since wetland deforestation releases significant carbon stores if burned.19 Much of the prohibition's infirmity is attributed to its status as an informal presidential instruction. This designation prevents it from effectively curtailing national deforestation rates because it lacks binding legal authority, which correspondingly permits large corporations and local officials to overlook its stipulations. The moratorium’s implementation and enforcement is further stifled by the Indonesian legislature’s stagnancy in mandating the presidential decree, thus undercutting the government’s legal basis to restrict peatland development.20 Although Indonesia’s existing forestry legislation is promising on paper, the lack of coinciding enforcement measures makes it difficult for these policies to foment meaningful change. Indonesia must therefore bolster its policies on forest conservation.

Failure to do so would risk the unsustainable depletion of the greatest resource upon which their economy depends and, not to mention, incur greater environmental damage nationally and internationally.

16

Luke Lazarus Arnold, "Deforestation in Decentralised Indonesia,” 87.

17

J. Indarto et al., “Do Forest Permits Cause Deforestation in Indonesia?” International Forestry Review 17 (2015): 173.

18

Belinda Arunarwati Margono et al., “Primary Forest Cover Loss in Indonesia Over 2000-2012,” Nature Climate Change 4 (2014): 731.

19

Susan E. Page et al., “The Amount of Carbon Released from Peat and Forest Fires in Indonesia During 1997,” Nature 420 (2002): 62.

20

Sean Sloan, “Indonesia’s Moratorium on New Forest Licenses: An Update,” Land Use Policy 38 (2014): 38.

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55

DOMINANT SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE POLICY ENFORCEMENT There are currently two popular solutions to improving the Indonesian government’s current forest conservation policies: (1) according to scholars of environmental policy,21 revising the 2011 moratorium to make it more actionable; and (2) expanding the country’s strategic command-and control capabilities by adopting a Remote Sensing System (RSS), which would help reduce deforestation rates, as seen in the case of Brazil. While these solutions seek to rectify the issue of forestry policy enforcement in Indonesia, they are nevertheless underscored by notable drawbacks, which are explored in this section.

Revising the existing 2011 moratorium involves implementing a legally-binding replacement moratorium to formally ban future peatland development; revoking existing industrial concessions on primary forest and peatlands; and restricting concessions to only secondary forest (forest that has regrown after degradation).22 Since the current moratorium only prohibits new concessions on primary forest and peatland, it still allows for existing concessions to impinge on these large carbon stores. Thus, a revised moratorium should not just revoke existing concessions for land on which development has yet to take place; it should also restrict concessions to secondary forest only, since this would protect vital primary forest while simultaneously allowing the palm oil industry to continue fueling the country’s economy.23 Furthermore, a revised moratorium should also seek to expand protection of primary forest to include wetlands. According to a recent study examining Indonesia’s deforestation rates between 2000-2012, “Indonesia surpassed Brazil in area of primary forest cover loss, with the highest proportion of loss having occurred within wetland formations.”24 This is a pertinent problem since neither Indonesia’s existing moratorium or its Law on Conservation of Natural Living Resources extend any sort of protection over Indonesian wetlands, which are vital to the rainforest ecosystem and hefty carbon stores.25 The benefits of revising and expanding the existing moratorium hinge on the fact that it would not require a complete policy overhaul; rather, the process would involve incremental decision-making. It is also more likely that a revised and expanded moratorium would pass 21

Kemen Austin et al., “Indonesia’s Forest Moratorium and Next Steps,” World Resources Institute 12 (2014); D. Murdiyarso et al., “Indonesia’s Forest

Moratorium: A Stepping Stone to Better Forest Governance?” Center for International Forestry Research 76 (2011).

22

Kemen Austin et al., “Indonesia’s Forest Moratorium and Next Steps,” World Resources Institute 12 (2014): 2-4.

23

D. Murdiyarso et al., “Indonesia’s Forest Moratorium: A Stepping Stone to Better Forest Governance?” Center for International Forestry Research 76 (2011): 9-12.

24

Belinda Arunarwati Margono et al., “Primary Forest Cover Loss in Indonesia Over 2000-2012,” Nature Climate Change 4 (2014): 730.

25

Sean Sloan, “Indonesia’s Moratorium on New Forest Licenses: An Update,” Land Use Policy 38 (2014): 39.

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through the legislative process since the Indonesian government accepts it as having a certain amount of legitimacy. For example, the current moratorium was renewed for two years in June 2013, and for another two years in June 2015.26 However, there are more drawbacks than merits associated with revising the existing moratorium. For instance, revoking existing primary forest concessions, sorting out concessionaires’ legal rights, and relocating their permits onto secondary forest would not only take considerable time, but would also prove costly because corporations must be compensated. Moreover, should it become law, there is no guarantee that the moratorium will be obeyed, since Indonesian legislation on forest conservation has often proven difficult to translate over to local governments. This is attributed to the country’s corrupt political system, part of which is perpetuated by weak ties between national and local governments versus closer, monetary-based ties between the local and land-clearing corporations.27 Finally, while a binding moratorium would allow for legal action and punitive measures, it would ultimately lack a concrete regulation method to prove which corporations started which fires, or whether certain fires are natural versus man-made.

This is important because illegal deforestation and forest burning have become incredibly widespread and frequent, making it difficult and costly to monitor nationwide.28 This makes providing adequate evidential support for legal prosecution onerous because criminal onus for illegal burning is difficult to verify.

A second potential solution to strengthen Indonesia’s weak law enforcement measures is to adopt more rigorous command-and-control capabilities, most notably a Remote Sensing System (RSS). This regulatory system uses numerous fast-processing satellites to collect geophysical data and regional temperature inflation.29 In 2003, Brazil’s adoption of RSS technology—the ‘Real Time System for Detection of Deforestation’ (DETER)—granted Brazilian law enforcement the ability to better detect, screen, and quickly act upon areas rife with illegal deforestation and forest-clearing fires. More specifically, RSS was responsible for nearly 60 percent of the 101,000-square kilometer-drop in Brazilian deforestation between 2007-2011.30 Following Brazil’s example, the Indonesian government could use this 26

Miriam E. Marlier et al., “Future Fire Emissions Associated with Projected Land Use Change in Sumatra,” Global Change Biology 21 (2015): 347.

27

Osama Eldeeb et al.,“Causes for Deforestation in Indonesia: Corruption and Palm Tree Plantation,” Asian Social Science 11 (2015): 121-123.

28

R.A. Dennis et al., “Fire, People, and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science to Understand Underlying Causes and Impacts of Fires in

Indonesia,” Human Ecology 33 (2005): 478.

29

Woody Turner, et. al., "Remote Sensing for Biodiversity Science and Conservation," Trends in Ecology & Evolution 18 (2003): 307-308.

30

J. Assunção et al., “DETERring Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: Environmental Monitoring and Law Enforcement,” Climate Policy Initiative 4 (2013):

2-4.

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57

technology to monitor production on concessional land and ensure that corporations are not expanding beyond their concessions. Current monitoring efforts in Indonesia rely on voluntary and often anonymous reports of areas under threat, which prevents law enforcement from detecting and accessing these areas quickly.31 RSS technology would mitigate this problem by enabling state authorities to effectively keep track of the abundance of fires which spring up at alarming rates, both on concessional land and protected forests. Additionally, institutional changes would have to accompany the command-and-control capabilities of an RSS. As of this year, Indonesia’s Forestry Ministry has a team of approximately 1,000 law enforcement officers, but this is nowhere near enough personnel to monitor the country’s vast forests, which span over 98 million ha.32 Thus, increasing the number of qualified law enforcement officers would ensure better regulation and greater stability in investigating deforestation crimes and upholding forest conservation policies.

Implementing RSS would allow the government policies to achieve results by utilizing a monitoring system that keeps track of deforestation practices. This monitoring system would enhance law enforcement’s ability to locate active hotpots and quickly reach them, increasing the likelihood of catching corporate culprits red-handed and resolving the State’s current issue of not having enough evidence to prosecute deforestation crimes.33 This would further enable the Indonesian government to compile information on audited corporations to share with Singapore and Malaysia. Doing so would empower these states to take legal action against corporations responsible for forest fires under the 2002 ASEAN Transboundary Haze Pollution Act, which aims to mitigate haze pollution in the Southeast Asian region.34 In sum, the higher likelihood of getting caught and subsequently being prosecuted by multiple states would discourage corporations from engaging in environmental crimes, which can be achieved by implementing high-profile monitoring and law enforcement measures.

While there is great potential for RSS to effectually reduce Indonesia’s deforestation and carbon emission rates, the development of such a system—as well as employing and training more law enforcement officers—would expend a significant portion, if not all, of Indonesia’s forest conservation budget. In this sense, the cost of installing an RSS system 31

J. Indarto et al., “Do Forest Permits Cause Deforestation in Indonesia?” International Forestry Review 17 (2015): 172.

32

Ibid.

33

Osama Eldeeb et al.,“Causes for Deforestation in Indonesia: Corruption and Palm Tree Plantation,” Asian Social Science 11 (2015): 123.

34

Paruedee Nguitragool, "Negotiating the Haze Treaty: Rationality and Institutions in the Negotiations for the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze

Pollution," Asian Survey 2 (2011): 356.

58

ILLEGAL DEFORESTATION

would likely necessitate redirecting much of Indonesia’s funding away from current smallscale conservation efforts, such as environmental awareness and forest rehabilitation programs, thus weakening normative efforts to curb climate change from the bottom-up.

And while buttressing current law enforcement may not take long to organize, implementing technology like RSS would be a long-term endeavour to invest in; something that is unlikely to outcompete the palm oil industry's short-term fiscal benefits for the national economy.

CURTAILING CORRUPTION: LOCAL/REGIONAL PAYMENTS-FORPERFORMANCE While a revised moratorium builds on Indonesia’s existing forest policy, it is not likely to halt illegal corporate practice nor regulate just practice if the State lacks adequate law enforcement. Furthermore, implementing RSS technology presents a possible solution as well, however such a technical monitoring system would be extremely ineffective in terms of cost and time when considering that the driving force behind illegal deforestation is shortterm, monetary gain. Most importantly, though, is that neither of the potential solutions directly address a critical issue: local/regional officials often encourage forest clearing and support corporate permits that exploit these areas for palm oil—regardless of their injurious ecological impacts—since it aids the local economy and provides for the local government’s public spending budget.35 Political corruption fuels Indonesia’s deforestation and carbon crises since these corporations often buy local officials’ support in circumventing national forestry policies, bans, and regulations.36 In this sense, enforcing legal restrictions on large companies is difficult given the arbitrary dispersal of responsibility across government levels and a lack of accountability between local and national decision makers.

Corruption among local/regional officials can potentially be mitigated by supplementing Indonesia’s existing forest policies with a locally-situated and government-managed paymentsfor-performance program to incentivize “good behaviour” in local officials. Such a program would work by having the national government conduct annual assessments detailing every corporation that has concessions within a region; the number and size of each concession; the type of forest concession they have been granted (whether primary, secondary, or wetland); the 35

Eva Wollenberg, et al., “Between State and Society: Local Governance of Forests in Malinau, Indonesia,” Forest Policy and Economics 8 (2006): 422-428.

36

R. A. Dennis et al., “Fire, People, and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science to Understand Underlying Causes and Impacts of Fires in

Indonesia,” Human Ecology 33 (2005): 479.

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59

total forest area within the region that is protected; and regional forest cover and deforestation rates. Through these assessments, the national government can keep a year-to-year record of the success or failure of local governments in managing the forest within their jurisdiction.

Should a district’s annual assessment indicate that: (1) deforestation rates have decreased; (2) concessionaires have remained within their granted parameters; and (3) protected forest area has been sustained, then the national government—invoking this policy option—would provide the local government with performance payments.

A major benefit of a payments-for-performance program is that it would help mitigate Indonesia’s structural weakness of political corruption, which is an underlying reason for why existing policies and law enforcement are largely ineffective in reducing the country’s deforestation rates. These payments would work as 'a carrot to augment the stick'; that is, to reward local governments for upholding conservation policies with payments that take the place of corporate bribes. Ideally, these payments would be used by local governments for public spending to develop local institutions and services, such as local policing and monitoring that enforce national policies and check corporations. Payments could also be directed to fund development in the local economy and relinquish local economic reliance on environmentally-exploitive corporations. In turn, this would reduce the necessity of having so many palm oil corporations operating in Indonesia as well, then decreasing their overall impact on Indonesian forests. Hence, in severing the bond between corporations and local government officials, performance payments would reinforce local accountability to the State by garnering responsibility in local officials to support state legislation, while failing to do so would be reflected in poor annual assessment records.

In addition to the benefits of implementing this policy, there are also some foreseeable drawbacks that must be noted for practical reasons. The fact that annual assessments may not immediately exhibit turn around in regional deforestation rates is an issue since implementing measures at the local level and having the effect radiate outwards takes time. In this sense, local officials may be dismayed by these slow results and fall prey to the temptation of immediate corporate bribes. Another issue worth noting is that this policy option assumes that the interests of corruptible government officials can be easily changed through incentivizing ‘good behaviour’. While piloting a local payment-for-performance program sounds effective, this policy option can be viewed as idealistic in hoping that bad habits can be easily changed

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with a pat on the back and a gold star. Not to mention that the cost of this policy option is a concern when accounting for whether the Indonesian government’s wallet is any match for the big budgets of multiple corporations. This is a matter of determining the amount and frequency of these payments local governments, and if these payments are—in the eyes of local authorities—even worth working towards in the long term for compared to fulfilling short-term interests by accepting corporate bribes. To address this concern, an ideal paymentsfor-performance program could offer local officials further payment increases depending on their performance in reporting illegal forest fires, deforestation, and land-grabbing.

Comparing the feasibility of a payments-for-performance program with either a revised moratorium or long-term RSS technological development, however, the former outweighs the costs associated with the latter two solutions. This is because the program delves down to resolve the very root of Indonesia’s deforestation crisis: corporations circumventing national deforestation and conservation policies due to local-level corruption. Regarding cost, local payments-for-performance is a more economically ‘smart’ option than the previously mentioned solutions. This is attributed to the fact that the program requires implementation through data collection and assessments before payments are granted. Thus, the Indonesian government will not find itself throwing large sums money at a policy before realizing if it is effective. The only funding that would precede the results of the program would go towards compiling government-conducted assessments to monitor each locality’s progress in holding local corporations accountable to state policies. Even more, the task of law enforcement would be entrusted to local officials within each jurisdiction, who would better be able to monitor, track, and mitigate illegal deforestation than national forest conservation efforts, who have proven ineffective in regulating the expansive rainforest scattered across the Indonesian archipelago.37 The drawbacks of the payments-for-performance program are comparatively easier to mitigate than the other two solutions. To compel local officials to commit to the payments-for-performance program, the Indonesian government would have to make public the performance payments. In this way, local officials are not only accountable to the national government in upholding its policies but also to their constituents to justly regulate corporations. Hence, public awareness of the payments would ensure that they go directly 37

J. Indarto et al., “Do Forest Permits Cause Deforestation in Indonesia?” International Forestry Review 17 (2015): 181.

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to improving local people's services, institutions, and infrastructure instead of remaining in the hands of local officials. Finally, funding this payments-for-performance program would be supplemented—in time—by the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) Programme, which is a negotiation settlement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).38 This programme aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by enhancing developing countries’ management of their forests.39 Indonesia is in line to receive its own payments-for-performance from negotiated REDD agreements. One such agreement involves Norway, which pledged to give $1 billion (USD) to Indonesia should its government prove that it has reduced the country’s deforestation and carbon output rate, however this has not yet been achieved.40 By piloting a local paymentsfor-performance program, the Indonesian government can incentivize local adherence to conservation policy and regulate illegal corporate deforestation in efforts to decrease national rates and eventually prove that the country is ready for REDD funding that could go towards furthering the local payments program in the long term.

CONCLUSION To identify the link between corruption and ineffective conservation policy is not to say that Indonesia’s existing forest regulations are pointless. Rather, the 2011 moratorium stands as a testament that there is a push on the part of Indonesia’s executive government to increase their management of illegal land-clearing and forest degradation. It is the hope that corruption among local/regional officials can be assuaged by supplementing Indonesia’s existing forest policies with monitoring schemes, such as a payments-for-performance program, that situates local communities at the fore of checking illegal deforestation practices in their regions. In this way, monitoring capabilities allow local authorities to work with their communities and the national government to put existing policies to practice as opposed to undermining them.

While revising the existing 2011 moratorium and implementing RSS monitoring technology are potential solutions to the aforementioned issue, a payments-for-performance program presents itself as a more feasible solution by comparison because it seeks to directly counter local-corporate corruption that perpetuates deforestation on the ground amidst the 38

“About the UN-REDD+ Programme,” UN-REDD+, accessed November 19, 2015, http://www.unredd.net/about/what-is-redd-plus.html.

39

Frances Seymour et al., “The Indonesia-Norway REDD+ Agreement: A Glass Half-Full,” Center for Global Development Policy Paper (2015): 3.

40

Ibid, 4.

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absence of effective monitoring and enforcement measures. However, this distinction does not imply that the ideas located in either of the previous solutions are devoid of value. With respect to the merits of RSS technology, if a payments-for-performance program was enacted, the Indonesian government should pass forth all information collected by local officials on corporations guilty of forest-burning to Singapore and Malaysia. As per the 2002 ASEAN Transboundary Haze Pollution Act, this information would further aid these governments in taking legal action against corporations found criminally responsible for contributing to their populations’ haze-related health problems.41 Not only would this practice of information dissemination allow countries affected by fire haze pollution to hold corporations accountable for their actions, but it would further deter illegal and unsustainable deforestation practices in Indonesia.

41

David Roman, “Singapore Aims to Prosecute Indonesian Polluters Under Haze Law,” Bloomberg, June 9, 2016, accessed March 14, 2017, https://www.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-10/singapore-aims-to-prosecute-indonesian-polluters-under-haze-law.

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Multinational Corporations and Armed Conflict PATTERNS OF CORPORATE VIOLENCE ACROSS LATIN AMERICA BRIDGITTE TAYLOR

INTRODUCTION Since the onset of globalization, it is undeniable that multinational corporations (MNCs) have played an increasing role in global affairs, from the effects they have on diplomatic relations to the extent of their influence on global trade and markets. Perhaps lesser acknowledged, however, is the role that many multinational corporations have had in various armed conflicts. This is especially true in cases found throughout Latin America, where multinational corporations have been considerable actors in regional conflicts. The Cold War (1947-1991) is often identified as having experienced the height of this involvement since MNCs showed themselves as strong forces of political power. However, as this paper will explore, many Cold War patterns of corporate political violence continue to prevail. A crossnational analysis demonstrates that multinational corporate violence in the region may be triggered by three perceived threats: left wing political transitions, land reform developments, and labor organization. When faced with these perceived threats, MNCs often turn to the State—be it with State’s government, or military forces—to then legitimize their violence.

This paper proceeds by first discussing Cold War processes whereby agribusiness companies, which constituted some of the largest MNCs in Latin America at the time, became involved in significant conflicts in Colombia and Guatemala. This is followed by a review of multinational extractive companies in Guatemala and México, where these patterns continue into the 21st Century. Through these case studies, this paper will demonstrate that the persistence of MNCs’ controversial roles in armed conflict, thus begging the question of whether Latin America’s political environment will be as volatile as it was during the Cold War in the years to come.

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MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS AND CONFLICT DURING THE COLD WAR The role that MNCs played during the Cold War in either perpetuating or directly assisting armed conflict in Latin America is widely recognized.1 However, less explored are the triggers of MNC involvement in the first place. Why for instance, would multinational corporations risk their public reputations so severely? And how did these conflicts persist?

Some Guatemalan elites and US Senators have framed this discussion as political rivalries between communism and capitalism resulting from geopolitical conditions at this time.2 Yet, an analysis of Colombia and Guatemala suggest that MNCs have instead acted upon three very specific threats to neoliberal values: (1) movements towards leftward political regimes; (2) threats of land reform; and (3) threats of labor organization. For many MNCs, these developments threaten the very core of what drives the free market and corporations’ unrestricted capital accumulation. As this section of the paper will highlight, this pattern is demonstrated by cases of multinational agribusiness involvement in Colombia and Guatemala throughout the Cold War. However, both cases also show that MNCs could not legitimately pursue their interests without the help of state force. Hence, these patterns are illuminated by reviewing these histories, which render Cold War explanations for these events incomplete.

COLOMBIA: ORGANIZATION, MILITARIZATION AND CORPORATE VIOLENCE Cases of MNC violence in Colombia throughout the 1960’s demonstrate the patterns of corporate intervention that this paper is concerned with. Namely, international agribusinesses have reacted to threats of labor organization and leftist politics with violence via the enlistment of state force. Of particular importance to Colombian experience has been the American based United Fruit Company3 and the banana industry, which has transformed Colombia specifically and Latin America more broadly.4 Despite the economic 1

Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Julio E. Moreno, Beyond the eagle's shadow: new histories of Latin America's cold war (Albuquerque:

University of New Mexico Press, 2013).

2

David M. Barrett, “Sterilizing a "Red Infection" Congress, the CIA, and Guatemala, 1954,” Central Intelligence Agency, May 8, 2007, https://www.cia.gov/

library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol44no5/html/v44i5a03p.htm.

3

The United Fruit Company was established in 1899 and became one of the world’s foremost agricultural corporations. United Fruit has had a lasting impact

in Latin America due to its heavy involvement in economic and political developments. The company played a major role in the development of so-called "banana republics", featuring limited export resources and weak political institutions. Information cited from: Steve Striffler, Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas, ed. Mark Moberg and Steve Striffler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

4

Ibid.,193.

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and infrastructural development that agricultural exports can bring, these industries have also been subject to fierce criticism.5 In many cases, multinational agribusiness have been synonymous with environmental degradation, intolerable labor conditions, and forced displacements.6 For these reasons, one might understand large-scale Colombian banana cultivation as being inherently wrapped up in conflict.

As the country with the highest rates of violence against organized labor in the Southern Hemisphere,7 Colombia exhibits particularly concerning patterns of corporate violence. This is especially true for the region of Urabá, where the banana industry developed in the 1960s.8 Here, multinational agribusinesses have frequently reacted to corporate threats such as labor movements by allying with state forces, including military and police institutions.9 These collaborations and their ability to mask corporate violence as state led, have proved vital in legitimizing the violence that has occurred. In 1964, these patterns unfolded when a group of United Fruit employees formed the region’s first ever banana-workers union, Sintrabanano (“without bananas”) with the support of leftist political parties and local employees.10 A clear threat to United Fruit and its interests, the company began to exploit Cold War era political cleavages by framing such actions as Communist threats to the Colombian state. Small-scale conflicts first ensued when United Fruit fired unionized and mobilizing workers, reporting them to local police for allegedly having posted communist flyers and “foreign and subversive” literature.11 This trend ultimately continued in the years to come.

These relatively minor confrontations between United Fruit and unionized workers grew rapidly into violence that extended throughout the agribusiness sector. For instance, during the 1970s, banana estates were frequently militarized by corporate-state collaboration and union organizers were fired or assassinated for refusing payouts from lucrative plantation owners.12 This active suppression of opposition and mobilization stemmed from corporate

5

The United Fruit Company was established in 1899 and became one of the world’s foremost agricultural corporations. United Fruit has had a lasting impact

in Latin America due to its heavy involvement in economic and political developments. The company played a major role in the development of so-called "banana republics", featuring limited export resources and weak political institutions. Information cited from: Steve Striffler, Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas, ed. Mark Moberg and Steve Striffler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 3.

6

Ibid. 4.

7

Aviva Chomsky, "Globalization, Labor, and Violence in Colombia’s Banana Zone," International Labor and Working Class History 72, no. 1 (2007): 109.

8

Ibid., 90.

9

Ibid., 95.

10

Ibid.

11

Ibid., 96.

12

Ibid., 96-98.

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desires to maintain economic and political influence.13 Meanwhile, framing these movements as Communist threats to the State gave MNCs the ability to enlist state forces with relative ease. MNCs could remove themselves from the violence they were indirectly and directly perpetrating, thus maintaining some degree of legitimacy. At one point, United Fruit’s successor had even admitted to paying millions of dollars to Colombia’s infamous right-wing paramilitary squads that went on to commit mass civilian atrocity.14 These legacies of violent corporate involvement haunt Colombia deeply, yet these patterns are hardly isolated within Colombia alone.15

GUATEMALA: POLITICAL TRANSITION, LAND REFORM, AND FOREIGNCORPORATE INTERVENTION Whilst Colombia illustrates the roles MNCs played in armed conflict involving labor movements, Guatemala exhibits the degrees to which multinational corporations will directly perpetrate violence based on threats from leftward political transitions and land reformations.

Guatemala’s history of foreign intervention and state-led violence is largely linked with protecting corporate interests and Guatemala's agricultural and political histories are vital to understanding the origins of these patterns. In the 1950s, the country’s conservative governments campaigned to modernize Guatemala’s agricultural exportation of coffee, bananas, sugar and cotton.16 Subsequent reforms to property law transferred the nation’s most fertile lands away from indigenous communities. 72% of arable land was transferred to just 2% of landowners; dubbing Guatemala home to the least equitable land distribution in all of Latin America.17 In essence, this move heightening the social and economic divisions that underpinned the political movements to come. Meanwhile, American influence increasingly permeated the country in the form of direct Government acquisitions and MNC expansion.

By the mid-1940s, one fourth of all of United Fruit banana production in the region took place in Guatemala, rendering the country an important U.S. asset in a larger, volatile Cold

13

Aviva Chomsky, "Globalization, Labor, and Violence in Colombia’s Banana Zone," International Labor and Working Class History 72, no. 1 (2007): 98.

14

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, “Big Fruit,” The New York Times (March 2, 2008). http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Kurtz-Phelan-t.html

15

Ibid.

16

Carlota McAllister, “Rural Markets, Revolutionary Souls, and Rebellious Women in Cold War Guatemala," in In From the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with

the Cold War, ed. Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 354.

17

Ibid.

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War environment.18 Guatemala’s move towards economic liberalization ultimately spurred immense profits for large entities like multinational agribusinesses. In this sense, MNC interests depended on protecting these gains, even if through violent conflict and foreign intervention. Mounting demands for land reform and the rise of left-wing political movements throughout the 1950s destabilized corporate security and became the basis for companies to act. Furthermore, the election of Guatemalan politician Jacobo Árbenz in 1951 played a key role in this process.19 A self-proclaimed critic of the “modern capitalist state,” Árbenz’s leftist political goals sat in direct opposition to the interests of various multinational corporations in the Country.20 As opposed to embracing the free market, Árbenz ran on a campaign promising rural liberation vis-á-vis land reform, labor restructuring, and redistribution programs.21 Political transformation and land reform quickly took shape with over one million acres of lands redistributed by 1954.22 These actions were not insignificant for they eliminated the United Fruit Company’s monopoly on Guatemalan infrastructure and decreased their land ownership.23 These developments seriously disrupted the interests of MNCs in the region, prompting companies such as United Fruit to advocate for various state forces to intervene on their behalf.

MNC responses to Guatemala’s political transitions and land redistribution took incredibly violent forms. Corporate efforts to re-secure markets and capital looked to enlisting state support, both within Guatemala and abroad. Whilst maintaining their legitimacy in the country, the United Fruit Company ultimately sought to replace the existing Guatemalan regime with one that was more open to their neoliberal interests. Similar to the tactics used in Colombia, United Fruit exploited Cold War ideological anxieties to meet their ends.24 The company published widespread anti-communist propaganda against Guatemala25 and

18

Cindy Forster, "The Macondo of Guatemala: Banana Workers and National Revolutions in Tiquisate, 1944–1954,” in Banana Wars: Power, Production, and

History in the Americas, ed. Steve Striffler et Mark Moberg. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 192-193.

19

Stephen M. Streeter, Managing the counterrevolution: the United States and Guatemala, 1954-1961 (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000).

20

Carlota McAllister, “Rural Markets, Revolutionary Souls, and Rebellious Women in Cold War Guatemala," 355.

21

Ibid.

22

Piero Gleijeses, "The Agrarian Reform" in Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991),

155.

23

Carlota McAllister, “Rural Markets, Revolutionary Souls, and Rebellious Women in Cold War Guatemala," 355.

24

Marcelo Bucheli, "Multinational corporations, totalitarian regimes and economic nationalism: United Fruit Company in Central America, 1899–1975,"

Business History 50, no. 4 (2008).

25

Ibid.

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lobbied Washington to address Árbenz’s policies.26 Meanwhile, upon assuming office in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower promised to end the “flow of Communist ideas into the United States.”27 If United Fruit could capture the support of the United States Government, their goals for regime change in Guatemala could be achieved and their interests re-established.

Thus, the Company played a key role in establishing the CIA mission PBSUCCESS that went on to overthrow the Árbenz Government, and they actively drew on their administrative connections to replace Árbenz with someone more sympathetic to their corporate interests.28 Much to the delight of corporations like United Fruit, Operation PBSUCCESS culminated in Guatemalan opposition forces staging a violent coup d’état against Árbenz, while simultaneously attacking various Guatemalan union workers.29 Both the United Fruit’s active support of the American staged coup and it’s Guatemalan military leader, Carlos Castillo Armas, speak to the willingness of MNC’s to pursue violent conflict as a business strategy.30 The publicized notion that Guatemala’s Coup was enacted exclusively in response to Communist threats ignores evidence that Árbenz’s ideals were often recommended by Western oriented institutions, such as World Bank.31 Instead, United Fruit’s involvement was in response to specific threats of leftward political transition and land reform.

A 1953 report to the National Security Council Bureau of Inter-American Affairs found that land redistribution policies were the main threat to corporate profits, not Árbenz himself.32 Árbenz's presidency marked the last democratic elections until the 1990s, while the succeeding regime was explicitly anti-labour and pro-market. The Administration that followed, under Castillo Armas, was underpinned by bans on political opposition, widespread detainment of workers and civilians, and various State sponsored war crimes.33 Moreover, the land Árbenz redistributed was promptly returned to its previous owners, including United Fruit.34 Hence, interpreting these events as specific outcomes of Cold War ideological competitions ultimately fails to recognize patterns of multinational corporate violence over time. MNC concerns over 26

Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, "The Battle Begins," in Bitter Fruit The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Revised and Expanded (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1982), 18.

27

“Foreign Policy under President Eisenhower," Department of State, accessed Feb. 1, 2016, https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/eisenhower.

28

Nick Cullather and Piero Gleijeses, Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1999).

29

Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1996 (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc, 1997), 161.

30

Nick Cullather and Piero Gleijeses, Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954, 15.

31

Ibid., 355.

32

Piero Gleijeses, "The Agrarian Reform" in Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954, 166.

33

Robert H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 198.

34

Carlota McAllister, "Rural Markets, Revolutionary Souls, and Rebellious Women in Cold War Guatemala," 356.

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land reform, labor movements, and leftward political change prompted them to spur conflict through active lobbying of foreign and domestic State actors.

MULTINATIONAL EXTRACTIVISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY: REPLICATING VIOLENT PATTERNS Onwards into the 21st Century, multinational corporate violence persists at alarming rates. By and large, patterns of MNC intervention in response to labor organization, land reform, leftward political transitions, and the strategic use of state collaboration persist. One notable shift, however, is that multinational extractive industries are increasingly replacing the roles that agribusinesses once filled. Between 2002 and 2013, over 750 people were killed in extraction-related land struggles throughout the region.35 Defining what ‘extractive industry’ is will give better insights into how this industry, in particular, has become so intimately tied to corporate violence. At its core, ‘extractivism’ refers to an economic process wherein a country’s natural resources are simply extracted and sold on the international market without redistributing the industry's profits. In many parts of Latin America, ongoing state weakness has fostered conditions that are enticing for extractivist companies. Companies who operate within this context are not subject to strict regulation, and resource refinement is completed offshore. As a result, multinational corporations can operate within Latin America at very low costs while large importing countries enjoy cheaper resources.36 Canadian economist Naomi Klein captures this relationship well, stating: Extractivism is a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one of purely taking…[Extractivism] is the reduction of life into objects for the use of others, giving them no integrity or value of their own...It is also the reduction of human beings either into labor to be brutally extracted, pushed beyond limits, or, alternatively, into social burden…This toxic idea has always been intimately tied to imperialism, with disposable peripheries…The colonial mind nurtures the belief that there is always somewhere else to go and exploit once the current site of extraction has been exhausted.37

Groups throughout Latin America are increasingly experiencing the violence that Klein refers 35

Michelle Mark, "Canadian Mining Human Rights Abuses: What Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party Win Could Mean For Latin America," International Business

Times, Oct. 21, 2015, http://www.ibtimes.com/canadian-mining-human-rights-abuses-what-justin-trudeaus-liberal-party-win-could-mean-2149201.

36

Hans-Jürgen Burchardt & Kristina Dietz, “(Neo-)extractivism – a new challenge for development theory from Latin America,” Third World Quarterly, accessed

Mar 18, 2016. doi:10.1080/01436597.2014.893488 37

Naomi Klein, "Extractivism," This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014), 169.

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to. This includes the silencing or assassination of activists who oppose extractive industry and the violent oppression of opposition by companies and States.38 To demonstrate these ongoing patterns, the following sections will explore the case studies of México and presentday Guatemala. An examination of both cases reveal that land reform efforts and local political opposition have, once again, prompted multinational and state-supported mining companies to partake in violence. Thus, in Mexico and Guatemala, collaborating with state actors has masked MNC-directed violence, which allows them to safe-guard their legitimacy.

MULTINATIONAL MINING COMPANIES IN THE MÉXICO Since the mid 1990s, foreign investment in México in the form of extractivist industries and mining projects has grown in scope.39 México’s resource - wealth is heightened by various State policies that encourage foreign investment (e.g. the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA) via their embrace of neoliberal free trade policies. However, these conditions have also stimulated internal opposition frequently framed as threats to neoliberal corporate values. One example is the case of Minera San Xavier (MSX)—a subsidiary of the Vancouver-based mining company “New Gold Inc.”40 MSX has frequently responded to left-wing political threats and local calls for land reform with either its own direct violence or indirect violence through its enlistment of Méxican State actors.41 In the 1990’s, MSX’s entry into the city of Cerro de San Pedro prompted ongoing concerns over the mine’s local environmental impacts.42 Critics pointed to evidence of the mine’s ecological destruction and its pollution levels as threats to the livelihoods of the indigenous Chichimeca and Guachichil peoples. At the center of this opposition were particular concerns about MSX’s gold-processing technology and its potential to release poisonous cyanide into the environment.43 As civic opposition grew, local efforts towards

38

Eduardo Gudyanas, "Latin America: Sow Extractivism, Reap Violence," América Latina En Movimiento, Sep. 1, 2015, accessed Jan 26, 2016, http://www.alainet.

org/en/articulo/172095.

39

"Cerro De San Pedro: Mexico," McGill Research Group Investigating Canadian Mining in Latin America, accessed Feb. 3, 2016. http://micla.ca/conflicts/cerro-de-

san-pedro/.

40

Jose Vargas Hernández, "Cerro De San Pedro: Grassroots Movements in Cooperation and Conflict to Stop a Living Community from Disappearing," Social

Science Research Network, (2009): 123.

41

Ibid.

42

"Cerro De San Pedro: Mexico," McGill Research Group Investigating Canadian Mining in Latin America.

43

José Vargas Hernández, "Cerro De San Pedro: Grassroots Movements in Cooperation and Conflict to Stop a Living Community from Disappearing,” in

NGOs and Social Responsibility (Developments in Corporate Governance and Responsibility, Volume 1), ed. Güler Aras, David Crowther (West Yorkshire: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2010), 123-124.

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land reform, legal action, and political transition ensued.44 Cerro de San Pedro’s then mayor, Baltazar Reyes, subsequently investigated the company and refused to grant MSX any municipal permit, which posed a threat to its viability. Even more, company-wielded violence quickly escalated. In 1996, Reyes was suddenly assassinated and his successor and son, Oscar Laredo, later announced that high ranking State-officials threatened to shoot him as well unless the mine’s permits were signed.45 It became increasingly evident that when threatened with land reform, political transition, and civic action, MSX turned to collaborating with violent state forces in order to maintain the integrity of their operations.

The murder of Mayor Reyes and the force used against his successor marked only the beginning of MSX’s corporate violence and its alliances with Méxican State forces. Growing civic opposition to MSX’s operations prompted quick action by the company. In 2006 and 2007, MSX employees brutally beat opposition activists and social movements in Cerro de San Pedro community. Activists were also violently suppressed by the State as police attacked protesters and jailed six.46 These actions not only demonstrate the ongoing strategies MNCs revert to when their operational interests are threatened; it also shows how collaboration with state forces allows violence to persist without widespread opposition. Ultimately, New Gold Inc. maintained its MSX mine through these violent strategies, and their global reach continues to grow today.47

ONGOING GUATEMALAN VIOLENCE: CANADIAN CORPORATIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES Finally, the historical narratives of corporate violence in Guatemala have continued into the 21st Century with a particular connection to Canadian mining corporations. The 1954 coup d’état subsequently spun Guatemala into decades of political violence, allowing MNCs to enjoy an environment of unregulated resource extraction. The notion that MNCs incite conflict based on threats from left-wing political transformation, land reform, and labor organization remains true in the present. In a recent case, the Toronto-based multinational mining company HudBay has been accused of various murders and acts of sexual violence 44

José Vargas-Hernández, Our Common Future. 20 years After, ed. Franco A. Cavalleri. (CSST - Developmental Studies, 2007).

45

Veronica Islas, "A Mining Refugee in Canada,” The Dominion 55 (2008). http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/2146.

46

Jose Vargas Hernández, "Cerro De San Pedro: Grassroots Movements in Cooperation and Conflict to Stop a Living Community from Disappearing,” 125.

47

New Gold Inc., “New Gold Closes US$173 Million Bought Deal Financing,” News Wire (Mar. 10, 2017). http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/new-gold-

closes-us173-million-bought-deal-financing-615869623.html.

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following struggles with a local community over political policies and land occupation.48 Such crimes were not only seemingly committed with help from the State, but with the assumption that Guatemala’s weak state capacity would allow for these atrocities to go unpunished.

The case against HudBay represents two corporate trends in the region. First, it indicates the ongoing willingness of MNCs to incite conflict when the land they operate on is threatened and when the neoliberal policies they rely on are undermined. Second, it draws attention to how MNCs have used the state to carry out violence by exploiting pre-existing conflicts between the State and indigenous groups. An example that highlights this violence arose in the mid-2000’s when “Skye Resources” (purchased in 2009 by HudBay) established the “Fenix” mine in the Guatemalan town of El Estor.49 According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), the project was never approved by the local community nor were mandatory public consultation processes held. However, Skye Resources used the Guatemalan government to bypass regulatory processes and secure the project.50 Conflict ensued as Maya and Q’eqchi’ farmers, who lived there prior, began to reoccupy the area in protest. However, Skye Resources framed the situation as a literal “invasion” in need of a response.51 A series of armed confrontations began in 2007 as hundreds of police and military forces helped the company evict five local communities to allow for the mine’s development.52 This collaboration was the first of many between Skye Resources and Guatemalan state actors. As prices and demand for extractive resources soared, Skye Resources seemed increasingly willing to engage in armed conflict. However, since they did not settle any land agreement with the community, residents organized to demand land reform by asserting their rights and intentions to remain on their ancestral territories.53 In January 2009, residents marching to the Felix mine to denounce illegal evictions were met with open fire by the company security officials, killing one and seriously wounding another.54 Moreover, a combination of the mine’s security officials and Guatemalan police and military

48

Shine Imai, Bernadette Maheandiran, and Valerie Crystal, "Access to Justice and Corporate Accountability: A Legal Case Study of HudBay in Guatemala,”

Canadian Journal of Development Studies 35, no. 2 (2014): 288.

49

Ibid.

50

International Labor Organization, "REPRESENTATION (article 24) - GUATEMALA - C169”, (Document GB.282/14/2, para. 30., N.P., 2007), 1.

51

Shine Imai, Bernadette Maheandiran, and Valerie Crystal, "Access to justice and corporate accountability: a legal case study of HudBay in Guatemala,” 288.

52

Ibid.

53

Jordan Fletcher, "Guatemalan plaintiffs in HudBay lawsuit allege interference,” Globe and Mail (Nov. 7, 2013). http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-

business/industry-news/the-law-page/guatemalan-plaintiffs-in-hudbay-lawsuit-allege-interference/article15058016/.

54

Ibid.

TAYLOR

73

forces allegedly gang-raped eleven Mayan women shortly afterwards.55 Unfortunately, the crimes committed by HudBay are not isolated incidents. Such conflict defines many of the relationships between extractivist MNCs and Guatemalan residents. However, the case of HudBay clearly represents MNCs’ willingness to resort to armed conflict when their core neoliberal policies and resources necessary for profit accumulation are threatened.

CONCLUSION: REPEATED HISTORIES? Following the Cold War’s end, less popular attention has been paid to ongoing events in Latin America, thus making it easy to overlook MNCs’ negative effects in the region. Past and present cases in Colombia, Guatemala, and México illustrate the persistent patterns of MNC involvement in conflict. In this regard, this paper asserts that MNCs do not act in response to Cold War era Communist threats, but rather are willing to engage in conflict if their neoliberal values are threatened by either left-wing political transition, land reform, or labor organization. These three threats have consistently prompted MNCs to use Stateled violence as a means to achieve their ends—that is, safeguarding their interests while maintaining their legitimacy. Hence, it is important to recognize that as Latin American states move increasingly beyond neoliberalism and corporate favoritism, it is possible that histories of foreign intervention, regime change, and multinational corporate violence will repeat themselves.

55 guatemala/.

Melinda Maldonado, "Mining for the truth in Guatemala," MacLean’s (Jul. 8, 2014), http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/mining-for-the-truth-in-

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ILLEGAL DEFORESTATION BY AVIAAH RANDHAWA Arnold, Luke Lazarus. ‘Deforestation in Decentralised Indonesia: What’s Law Got to Do with It?” Environment and Development Journal 4 (2008): 77-100.

Assunção, J., et al. “DETERring Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: Environmental Monitoring and Law Enforcement.” Climate Policy Initiative 4 (2013): 32-41.

Austin, Kemen, et al. “Indonesia’s Forest Moratorium and Next Steps.” World Resources Institute 12 (2014): 1-16.

Dennis, R. A. et al. “Fire, People, and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science to Understand Underlying Causes and Impacts of Fires in Indonesia.” Human Ecology 33 (2005): 465-504.

Eldeeb, Osama, et al. “Causes for Deforestation in Indonesia: Corruption and Palm Tree Plantation.”

Asian Social Science 11 (2015): 120-124.

Elliott, Christopher. Forest Certification in Indonesia. Jakarta: Center for International Forestry Research, 2007.

Hunt, Colin. “The Costs of Reducing Deforestation in Indonesia.” Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 46 (2010): 187-192.

Indarto, J., et al. “Do Forest Permits Cause Deforestation in Indonesia?” International Forestry Review 17 (2015): 165-181.

Jayachandran, S. “Air Quality and Early-Life Mortality Evidence from Indonesia’s Wildfires.” Journal of Human Resources 44 (2012): 916-958.

Koplitz, Shannon N. et al. “Public Health Impacts of the Severe Haze in Equatorial Asia in September–October 2015: Demonstration of a New Framework for Informing Fire Management Strategies to Reduce Downwind Smoke Exposure.” Environmental Research Papers 11 (2016): 1-10.

Margono, Belinda Arunarwati, et al. “Primary Forest Cover Loss in Indonesia Over 2000-2012.”

Nature Climate Change 4 (2014): 730-735.

Marlier, Miriam E., et al. “Future Fire Emissions Associated with Projected Land Use Change in Sumatra.” Global Change Biology 21 (2015): 345-362 Murdiyarso, D., et al. “Indonesia’s Forest Moratorium: A Stepping Stone to Better Forest Governance?” Center for International Forestry Research 76 (2011): 1-13.

Nguitragool, Paruedee. “Negotiating the Haze Treaty: Rationality and Institutions in the Negotiations for the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution.” Asian Survey 2 (2011): 356-378.

Page, Susan E., et al. “The Amount of Carbon Released from Peat and Forest Fires in Indonesia During 1997.” Nature 420 (2002): 61-65.

Roman, David. “Singapore Aims to Prosecute Indonesian Polluters Under Haze Law.” Bloomberg, June 9, 2016. Accessed March 14, 2017. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2016-06-10/singapore-aims-to-prosecute-indonesian-polluters-under-haze-law.

Seymour, Frances, et al. “The Indonesia-Norway REDD+ Agreement: A Glass Half-Full.” Center for Global Development Policy Paper (2015): 1-16.

Sloan, Sean. “Indonesia’s Moratorium on New Forest Licenses: An Update.” Land Use Policy 38 (2014): 37-40.

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UN-REDD+. “About the UN-REDD+ Programme.” Accessed November 19, 2015. http://www.unredd. net/about/what-is-redd-plus.html Turner, Woody, et. al. “Remote Sensing for Biodiversity Science and Conservation.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 18 (2003): 306-314.

Wollenberg, Eva, et al. “Between State and Society: Local Governance of Forests in Malinau, Indonesia.” Forest Policy and Economics 8 (2006): 421-433.

World Growth. “The Economic Benefit of Palm Oil to Indonesia.” World Growth; Palm Oil Green Development Campaign (February 2011): 1-27.

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BY BRIDGITTE TAYLOR Bucheli, Marcelo. “Multinational corporations, totalitarian regimes and economic nationalism: United

Fruit Company in Central America, 1899–1975.” Business History 50, no. 4 (2008): 433-454.

Barrett, David M. “Sterilizing a “Red Infection” Congress, the CIA, and Guatemala, 1954.” Central Intelligence Agency, May 8, 2007. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-ofintelligence/kent-csi/vol44no5/html/v44i5a03p.htm.

“Cerro de San Pedro: Mexico.” McGill Research Group Investigating Canadian Mining in Latin America. Accessed Feb. 3, 2016. http://micla.ca/conflicts/cerro-de-san-pedro/.

Chomsky, Aviva. “Globalization, Labor, and Violence in Colombia’s Banana Zone.” International Labor and Working Class History 72, no 1. (2007): 90-115.

Cullather, Nick, and Piero Gleijeses. Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Accessed Feb. 1, 2016.

Fletcher, Jordan. “Guatemalan plaintiffs in HudBay lawsuit allege interference.” Globe and Mail Accessed Feb 7, 2016. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/thelaw-page/guatemalan-plaintiffs-in-hudbay-lawsuit-allege-interference/article15058016/.

“Foreign Policy Under President Eisenhower.” U.S. Department of State. Accessed Feb. 1, 2016.

Web. https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/eisenhower.

Forster, Cindy. “The Macondo of Guatemala: Banana Workers and National Revolutions in Tiquisate, 1944–1954.” In Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas. Edited by Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 191-228. E-Duke Books. Web. Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Julio E. Moreno. Beyond the eagle’s shadow: new histories of Latin America’s cold war. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013.

Gleijeses, Piero. “The Agrarian Reform.” Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. 193.

Gudyanas, Eduardo. “Latin America: Sow Extractivism, Reap Violence.” America Latina En Movimiento. Sep. 1, 2015. Accessed Jan 26, 2016. http://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/172095.

Hans-Jürgen Burchardt & Kristina Dietz. “(Neo-)extractivism – a new challenge for development theory from Latin America”. Third World Quarterly. Accessed Mar 18, 2016. doi:10.1080/01436597.201 4.893488 Imai, Shin, Bernadette Maheandiran, and Valerie Crystal. “Access to justice and corporate accountability: a legal case study of HudBay in Guatemala”. Canadian Journal of Development Studies 35, no. 2 (2014): 285-303.

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Islas, Veronica. “A Mining Refugee in Canada.” The Dominion 55 (2008). http://www.dominionpaper. ca/articles/2146.

Klein, Naomi. “Extractivism.” This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014. Print.

Kurtz-Phalen, Daniel. “Big Fruit.” The New York Times March 2, 2008. Accessed Feb 6, 2016. http://www. nytimes. com/2008/03/02/books/review/Kurtz-Phelan-t.html.

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Mark, Michelle. “Canadian Mining Human Rights Abuses: What Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party Win Could Mean For Latin America.” International Business Times. Oct. 21, 2015. http://www. ibtimes.com/canadian-mining-human-rights-abuses-what-justin-trudeaus-liberal-party-win-couldmean-2149201.

McAllister, Carlota. “Rural Markets, Revolutionary Souls, and Rebellious Women in Cold War Guatemala.” In From the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War. Edited by Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser. 350-377. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

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Striffler, Steve. Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas. Edited by Mark Moberg.

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CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES | JIA 2016

STAFF EDITOR-IN-CHIEF QUEENA LAU is graduating with a double major in Political Science and English Literature.

While her academic interests revolve around securitization, aesthetics, and critical theories, she is most curious about the human condition. As such, Queena will spend the next year travelling, putting a dent into her (long!) reading list, creating more lists, and interrogating personhood. She has thoroughly enjoyed her time with the JIA and would like to acknowledge all contributors for their dedication, passion, and exceptionality--thank you!

MANAGING EDITOR MAAHIN AHMED is a fourth year student in the International Relations program, with a focus on diplomacy, security, and peace studies. Her research interests include history and cultures of South Asia, contemporary challenges to security in South Asia, and the role of women in conflict and post-conflict reconciliation. Given her newly found appreciation for Urdu literature, she likes to spend her free time decoding the works of Urdu poets such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz, or listening to ghazals (and humming along!).

PAUL ANDRÉ NARVESTAD is a fourth year student in the Honours Program in Political Science and International Relations. His main research interests revolve around Arctic sovereignty, international security, military alliances, and national defence policy. He enjoys skiing and getting distracted by the beautiful views of the Tantalus Range and the North Shore.

SENIOR EDITORS PETER BENNETT-KOUFIE is a fourth year Honours History major. His academic interests include international relations theory as well as the history of imperial decline. Peter plans to attend law school once he completes his undergraduate degree. In his spare time he enjoys reading, wine, and tea.

TRISTAN BOBIN is a fifth year Franco-Canadian student double majoring in International Relations and Geography (Environment and Sustainability). Specializing in geographic information systems after graduation, he seeks to bridge his passions for cartography, geopolitics, and sustainable agriculture through this revolutionary tool.

AKSHAY IYER is a fourth year student majoring in Environment & Sustainability with particular research interests in geomatics, environmental, and geopolitical issues. Specifically, he is interested in the geopolitics and environmental policies of resource development and extraction. He is an avid global traveller and believes that his experiences abroad have shaped his academic interests JACOB MEDVEDEV is a fourth year student in the International Relations program. Jacob is interested in a variety of subjects, including but not limited to languages, Canadian history

THE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

and politics, globalization studies, business innovation, and law. Jacob looks forward to graduating and embarking on the journey that follows. He has enjoyed working with IRSA and JIA over the last two years and is excited to share another remarkable entry in JIA’s catalogue with you. All the best for 2017.

EDITORS TAMMY CHU is a fourth year student in the Political Science program with research interests in foreign policy, securitization studies, and environmental politics. Tammy is also passionate about human rights law upon interning for various legal organizations in Vancouver. When not cuddling with her two bunnies, she spends her time making travel plans and catching up on readings at local coffee shops.

MUHTADI FAIAZ is in his third year of undergraduate studies pursuing a double major in Economics and Political Science. His research interests are focused in political economy, politics of development, democratic challenges, politics of globalization, post-conflict democratization, identity politics, civil conflict, and security studies. In the future he wants to work in academia or in the field of international development/ security policy. He also wants to visit all countries of the world before he turns 50.

JAKE HARMS is a third year student pursuing a double major in History and Human Geography. He enjoys studying patterns of human migration, Great Power conflicts and relations, and the history of the Soviet Union. He hopes to pursue a MA in History, and eventually has plans for a future in academia or teaching.

EMIL STØVRING LAURITSEN is a Danish third year Dual Degree student between UBC and the French university Sciences Po Paris. At UBC, he is in the Honours program in Political Science with International Relations. His interests include political economy, American politics, and public opinion polling. In the future, Emil aspires to get a career in political consulting, getting candidates elected for public office.

AVIAAH SHANAZ RANDHAWA is graduating with a double major in Political Science and History. Her research interests include nationalism, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding in the Middle East and South Asia. She also has an affinity for studying revolutionary histories, especially those with an anti-colonial or Communist flair. Aside from painting and adventuring, Aviaah is especially passionate about minority and women’s rights, and endeavors to build her career with a focus in these areas.

KIERA SCHULLER is a fourth year student completing her second degree as part of the DualBachelor Degree between Sciences Po and UBC, now majoring in International Relations after completing her first degree in Political Science and Law. While her academic interests lie in the global political economy, public international law, and international climate issues, she equally enjoys spending time drinking coffee, dancing, and travelling.

VERNA YAM is a fourth year International Relations Major and Asian Area Studies Minor. Her passion for international affairs began when she discovered the complexities of international diplomacy and agreements. Since then, she has focused her studies on the Asia-Pacific, East Asia, and international cooperation; and supplemented her understanding of these areas with an exchange term in South Korea and co-op terms with the Canadian and American government.

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HEAD CREATIVE KATELYN ROBERTS believes almost as much in the influence of design as she does in the power of love. She’s spent the last twenty-one years fighting against the patriarchy and hopes that one day her English Literature degree will have equipped her well enough to write all about this great odyssey. Her French Bulldog, Stella, is the love of her life and she hopes that eventually she will be spending every day designing more journals like this one and dog treat packaging.

AUTHORS DELPHINE HO THANH graduated last year from the Honours program in Political Science with International Relations as part of the dual degree with Sciences Po Paris. Her research interests mainly lie in global development, state-society relations, the Middle East, and Latin America. She will explore those fields in her graduate studies at the University of Oxford this fall.

DANIEL JACINTO is a fourth year UBC student with an Honours specialization in Asian Studies and a major in International Relations. While his main area of interest is North Korean governance, society, and foreign relations, he has recently begun exploring the roles of selfperception and national identity more broadly in the East Asian geopolitical region. After his time at UBC, he intends to pursue graduate studies in Political Science ALICE GORTON is a fifth year History Honours student. Throughout her degree she has focused on issues of gender, race, and class in the British Empire, with particular interests in British Columbia and the Pacific Rim in the nineteenth-century. When she’s not studying at Koerner library, Alice enjoys reading fiction, swimming, and studying insects. She will begin her MA in History in the fall of 2017.

NICHOLAS BABEY is a fourth year International Relations major at the University of British Columbia. His scholarly interests span conflict studies, terrorism, and Canadian politics, but lie especially in IR theory and political philosophy. Upon the completion of his undergraduate degree he hopes to pursue graduate studies in the field of IR. AVIAAH SHANAZ RANDHAWA is graduating with a double major in Political Science and History. Her research interests include nationalism, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding in the Middle East and South Asia. She also has an affinity for studying revolutionary histories, especially those with an anti-colonial or Communist flair. Aside from painting and adventuring, Aviaah is especially passionate about minority and women’s rights, and endeavors to build her career with a focus in these areas.

BRIDGITTE TAYLOR is a fifth year International Relations major. Her research interests surround informal democratic institutions, social movements and border violence, with a particular focus on Latin America. Upon graduation, she hopes to pursue graduate studies in public policy or law.

SPONSOR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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SPONSORS INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS STUDENT ASSOCIATION UBC has long encouraged global citizenship as a key part of academic development. For many years, the International Relations Students Association (IRSA) has worked to develop co-curricular programs that help achieve this goal. We aim to provide students from a variety of disciplines with a forum for discussing international issues. IRSA membership is available to all UBC students and alumni.

THE STUDENT ENVIRONMENT CENTRE The Student Environment Centre (SEC) is a resource group mandated by the University of British Columbia Alma Mater Society (UBC AMS) to provide environmental and sustainability resources to the UBC community. We are actively involved in promoting various initiatives that critically examine the interactions between humans and the environment.

UBC INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS PROGRAM The UBC International Relations program is a degree granting undergraduate program in the Faculty of Arts. With approximately 300 majors, the program is one of the largest in the Faculty. International Relations is an interdisciplinary major which permits students to take courses in a variety of disciplines including History, Political Science, Economics (the three core disciplines), as well as Geography, Asian Studies, and Sociology, among others. The IR program is a proud sponsor of the UBC Journal of International Affairs.

LIU IR COMMUNITY FUND This program is intended to provide funding and support for undergraduate studentinitiated activities that build community amongst International Relations students and that are aligned with the mandate of the Liu Institute for Global Issues.

OTHER SPONSORS IRSA and the JIA would like to thank the following organizations and departments for their generous support of our programs: UBC Alma Mater Society UBC Arts Undergraduate Society The Liu Institute for Global Issues UBC Global Lounge