Root of Conflict Podcast
Why are some places affected by violence and disorder while others enjoy peace and stability? Root of Conflict analyzes violent conflict around the world, and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. Harris Public Policy students meet with leading experts and key stakeholders to discuss what can be done to create more peaceful societies.
This series is produced by University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts, (UC3P) in partnership with The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts.
Root of Conflict
11.07.24
Does Counterterrorism work? | Richard English
Isabella Nascimento:
Hi, this is Isabella and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You're listening to the Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world.
Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict. Our research institute housed within the Harris Global Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
Today's guest is Professor Richard English. He's a professor of politics at Queen's University Belfast, where he's also director of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. Professor English's research focuses on the history of political violence, terrorists and nationalists with a particular focus on Ireland and Britain. His most recent book is called, Does Counter-Terrorism Work?, and it was published in 2024 by Oxford Academic.
Hello, everybody. So my name is Isabella Nascimento. I'm a second year Master of Public Policy student at the University of Chicago, and I'm also a Pearson fellow here.
Raul Leon:
Hi, I'm Raul Leon. I'm a second year MACRM student at the University of Chicago at the Harris School of Public Policy.
Natalia Zorilla:
Hi, I'm Natalia Zorilla. I'm also a second year Master's in Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and I'm also a Pearson fellow.
Richard English:
Hi, I'm Richard English. I'm director of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen's University Belfast.
Raul Leon:
I don't know if you could tell us a bit on why you got interested in the literature behind terrorism and counterterrorism and what brought you to that specific topic inside history.
Richard English:
It was my mother's fault, Raul. So I was born in Belfast. My mother was from Belfast, but I grew up in England. When I was a student at Oxford in the 1980s, I was very left-wing and I had a sense that Marxists had underappreciated the problem that nationalism represented for them. I was a history student, so I looked for a case study to look at in detail and because of my Irish background, because we went to Costumil in Ireland to see my mum's relatives and the rest of Ireland too, because the violence of the Irish Republican Army was in the news, this was a vibrant and to some extent and interesting at a personal level case for me. So I began studying the IRA and this tension between nationalism and Marxism, particularly in the early 20th century. I then got hooked. I got hooked on studying the IRA, on studying Irish history, Irish nationalism.
I did a PhD about Marxists within the IRA in the 1930s. And then I got interested in studying more recent things and then it developed because as often in academic careers, things that have nothing to do with you and are out of your control make a big difference to your decisions. So when the atrocities of 9/11 happened, people around the world became far more interested, including many more universities, became much more interested in terrorism and why it happens, and how you explain you're for violence and also in how it comes to an end that I'd been working on stuff to do with the IRA. The IRA were moving into a peace process phase where they were coming to an end in their violence. And so I then began working on terrorism, not just in relation to Ireland, but in case studies and different settings around the world.
So really it was because of the contingencies of my personal background, of my own idiosyncrasies as a student at Oxford and then historical developments elsewhere propelled an interest which has meant that I've kept developing a way in which with different non-textual settings, I look at the complexities of terrorism as counterterrorism.
Raul Leon:
So to move forward from here, I would like you to provide us various definitions of terrorism, counterterrorism and maybe classification of different strategies that you use so our listeners have a guide for the rest of our following questions.
Richard English:
Thank you. Yes. The definition of terrorism is always inescapable. In my work I use a 93-word definition, which listeners can you look up and I won't inflict it on them now, though I could do having studied it for so long, but essentially with terrorism, I'm looking at deliberately terrorizing, politically-motivating violence, which has a psychological component to its offense that the communication through violence involves more of just the impact of the violence, but the wider audience is watching it and I see it as a subspecies of law.
I don't see it as something which is only done by non-state groups that many scholars do, and I don't see it as something which only targets civilians or non-colonists, as some people do. I think we probably need a more capacious definition, which then subdivides within it.
Counterterrorism, I use in my most recent book, Does Counter-Terrorism Work? I look at counterterrorism there as state's efforts to thwart defeat to contain, constrain, defend against and all the state terrorist actors.
Now these definitions necessarily involve endless dispute because you never get a definition or consensus through our terms like terrorism or counterterrorism particularly because terrorism is such a pejorative term. If I say, "You are the terrorist," and then hopefully people assume I'm saying you're the villain, you're the bad guy, you're the illegitimate one. And I understand it has an enormous punch.
But a lot of the time in history and social science in academic study, we have terms which are both pejorative and contentious, imperialist, fascist, colonialist, revolution, Marxist. There's a whole series of terms which are either pejorative and/or contentious in their multiple definitions and it doesn't get in the way of our having meaningful conversations. So, for example, the person who is the university president at St. Andrews University when I worked there was a brilliant terrorism scholar, Louise Richardson, and went there well into his work, it's wonderful.
She and I have somewhat different definitions of terrorism. I've never found it a problem in terms of discussing terrorism and counterterrorism with her because there's so much shared ground between the differences that there are in definition.
But broadly speaking with terrorism, I see it as personally motivated, deliberately terrorize and violence are subspecies of war and with a psychological component to its mechanism, there are certainly overlaps in terms of figuring out we would assume to be involved in terrorism and in terms of the organization's movements and context which would be discussed, it's disgusting.
So for people with a definitional issue I tend to say, "Find the definition which you find most compelling. Stick to it consistently and don't let it immobilize you in the discussions of this word."
Isabella Nascimento:
Richard, let me ask you something. Are there successful anti-terrorism strategies?
Richard English:
Thanks, Isabella. I think there are some things which work better than others. I argue in my work that counterterrorism tends to work better if it doesn't exaggerate what Military means alone can achieve.
I argue that counterterrorism tends to work better if it's attending to the root causes of which the terrorist violence is an appalling symptom.
I argue that counterterrorism tends to work better when intelligence is accurately and expertly gathered, carefully interpreted and acted on in lifesaving ways.
I argue that counterterrorism tends to be most effective, particularly when it's [inaudible 00:07:47] democracies engaging in it. When those democracies adhere to the democratically established rule of law and to the things which distinguish them from the enemies they're combating, how do we treat suspects, how do we treat prisoners, how do we treat the laws which govern all of us in terms of our freedoms and our civil liberties?
And I argue that counterterrorism tends to work best when there is a credibility of public argument. If you say things as a state against terrorist opponents which are incredible, these people are just gangsters. They're probably not... These people are all psychopaths. They almost certainly aren't. These people have no political support. If they didn't, you wouldn't be talking about them. In other words, if you are credible in your public analysis as a state, you're more likely to be successful.
Do those things mean that counterterrorism is easy? No, it's incredibly [inaudible 00:08:30] and it's very hard to do. You can't predict who will become involved with any certainty. You can't predict the contingencies of which movements are going to go in which direction, but those things are just adumbrated there. If you look at the long history of counterterrorism seem to me to be intuition's guidelines which will make it more likely that counterterrorism will be effective in terms of maintaining normal conditions of life within society.
Isabella Nascimento:
And how to be credible as a state.
Richard English:
Not an easy task and not easy either to be credible or to communicate credibility. States tend not to be very agile at their narratives. They tend to be somewhat mechanistic.
How to be credible as a state? I think you should be honest in terms of terrorism about what's really going on, why is this happening? I don't think you should confuse symptoms with causes.
So, for example, if you're looking at terrorist violence, and I live and work in Belfast in Northern Ireland where there has for a long time been terrorist violence pro and anti-state, I don't think any of it was justified. I'm sure all of it had not happened, but you cannot explain it unless you recognize that there's a profound conflict over the legitimacy and fairness of the state, Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom.
The same would be true in terms of mass separatist violence in Spain. The same would be true in terms of violence in Colombia. The same would be true in terms of the ongoing appalling conflict in Israel and Palestine. The same is true of jihadist violence of the late 1990s and the early 21st century. It's not a comfortable thing for politicians to say, "There are root causes which are serious here," but in order to be credible in your analysis, in order to be persuasive in your arguments and in order to be adept and agile in your counter terrorist response, credibility is a resource and the lack of credibility gives gifts to states' terrorist opponents.
Isabella Nascimento:
And do you see something that becomes repetitive in all this terror complex, let's say like this?
Richard English:
Tragically, I think there's much that's very repetitive in ways that make life much worse.
One thing is that terrorist organizations tend to exaggerate the degree to which violence is going to produce strategic action. Overwhelmingly historically, that tends not to be the case.
In terms of achieving central primary goals, terrorist organizations are overwhelmingly unsuccessful that the violence endures.
In terms of counterterrorism, there's very often an overreaction, very often a Militarized overreaction, which often makes things worse. We've seen that in terms of French response to Algerian terrorism, repeatedly UK responses to anti-state terrorism in Ireland, I think repeatedly indeed at the moment as well what's been happening after the terrible attack by Hamas in October last year, much of what's happening from the Israeli response seems to be to exaggerate what Military needs to achieve and to cause human suffering, which is both wrong and counterproductive. Those are repeated lessons.
Those are repeated patterns in much counter terrorist experience. You can explain why they happened when something happens, which is an awful terrorist atrocity, states want to show that they're going to do something dramatic, something decisive, something muscular. It often makes the problem worse before you even make it better in the longer term. It's a difficult thing to learn from previous mistakes rather than from your own.
But all of those areas that I've just described cost people's lives. All of those areas cost people's lives normally on all sides of the conflict in ways which could be avoided if we listened more attentively to the things which we can learn as intuitions and from the complexities of a historical record.
Natalia Zorilla:
And, Professor Richard, you mentioned the psychological component in the definition of terrorism and counterterrorism. What role does ideology play in both the motivation of terrorist groups and in shaping counterterrorism policies? Is ideology sufficiently addressed in current strategies?
Richard English:
Thanks, Natalia. I think ideology is one component part of serious terrorisms. In other words, many terrorist actions are by French groups, tiny groups that don't get off the ground and states don't tend to be that worried about them. The ones that states are worried about are the more substantial, durable, well-cemented groups.
With those groups in whatever part of the world they emerge some kind of ideological motivation seems almost always to be significant. It's not sufficient. In other words, people can have a strong ideological motivation but not feel that terrorism is the thing they want to do although it seems to be the most effective. So I don't think because you have a strong ideological commitment to an independent Basque state or an independent Islamic Palestinian state or a United Independent Ireland, that's enough for you to become involved in violence. But it is one thing which is part of it.
In terms of states, I think it's less well studied, but of course the ideology of states is every bit is important in counterterrorism as the ideology of non-state terrorist is for those movements that nationalism at the heart of many states becomes intensified as counter terrorist strategies become more intense. You saw that after the atrocity of 9/11 when in the early phase in particular there was a very strong American nationalism, which became part of the response of the United States, that awful attack.
I think also the ideology of states plays a part in terms of thinking about who's not part of the state. And quite often it's easier for states to identify as terroristic those movements which they can ideologically see as being other.
So, for example, if you look at the period since 2001 in the United States where I was speaking, jihadist violence of a terrorist kind in the USA since then has killed very few people. It's a terrible tragedy when it has. But very few people. Violence, which comes from a Christian heritage, right-wing source is more likely to be lethal, but until comparatively recently has been seen less as the terrorist problem, which you look at if you arrived from another planet in the United States in the early 21st century and said non-state violence by people with political motivation are they're going to kill or rape or threaten you, you wouldn't pick as the big threat the awful violence done by jihadists. You'd be looking at Christian heritage terrorists.
And I think in the United Kingdom, again, there have been ways in which jihadist terrorists, which is Irish terrorism, it's easier for the state to see it as something which is to be focused on because of the ideology against you. Even in North Ireland, pro-state terrorist groups like the Ulster Defence Association, the Ulster Volunteer Force carry out appalling levels in terroristic violence, pro-state violence. The state did oppose them, but saw the anti-state terrorists as the main opponents you dealt with. So ideology plays a part both in terrorism and in counterterrorism.
And implied in your question, and this is where the psychological aspect of it comes in again, terrorism and counterterrorism are strangely mutually reinforcing phenomena. They engage in a back and forth that shapes each other. So strangely what we find is that the ideology of one and the ideology of the other can have an antiphonal relationship, which can reinforce sometimes misunderstandings of what the other side's really about. So I do think that the ideological aspect of it is important and I think the psychological aspect of it is crucial also because it's very hard to deal with these things calmly because the emotions of the reactions are so strong.
Natalia Zorilla:
Right. And now that you mentioned, obviously you have studied quite a lot, 9/11, war on terror, and Northern Ireland. What are the most significant lessons that policymakers can learn from this historical experiences when designing counterterrorism strategies today?
Richard English:
I'll pick two. I mean my recent book has a list of things towards the end, which is much lengthier, but let me pick two.
One is you need to set realistic goals and pursue that consistently. Don't set goals which are unrealistic. Don't say you're going to stamp out all terrorism, don't say you're going to rid the world of terrorism of international which you won't. Set realistic goals and assume them consistently. Don't say you're going to do something in Afghanistan and then change your mind and give up on it, okay?
The second thing I would look at is that I think you do need to think about long-term as in not short-term. That's one of the problems particularly for liberal democracies is the short-term framework of governmental thinking. Terrorist struggles tends to come from very deep roots and the effects of counter terrorist policies will have a very long shadow into the future. Think about long pasts and long futures that is more likely that would be effective.
Raul Leon:
So now I would like to turn the topic to civilian harm mitigation and response, like counterterrorism in densely populated areas like Gaza presents immense challenges for protecting civilians while conducting Military operations.
What policies or strategies or philosophy should the Military have or would you recommend to minimize civilian harm in such scenarios while still us achieving Military objectives?
Richard English:
It's a really difficult area, Raul, because clearly in the case that you mentioned, it seems to me perfectly legitimate that Israel would want to protect itself against terrorist attacks of the kind that happened appallingly in October 2023. And it's also very difficult because for obvious reasons, Hamas has embedded itself in the community. If it didn't do it would've been wiped out very, very quickly indeed. But that means that you have a very difficult terrain to work in. Even if you do only want to attack people who are terrorist actors, it's very hard to do so without civilian harm.
That said, there are two points that I'll stress. One is that civilian harm is something which should be a really, really high priority to avoid, both in terms of the ethics of how we behave towards each other and in terms of the efficacy of counterterrorism. Quite often ethics and efficacy are aligned in counterterrorism. The more civilians you harm, the more damage you do not only to human life that's flourishing, but also to the cause in which you are doing the counterterrorism.
The second thing is that I think that it is possible for states over time to devise ways through intelligence-led containment in counterterrorism, less Militarized responses which do contain a constraint. Interestingly, in the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which you're referring to, it now does appear that pre-7 October, there were a considerable bits of information suggesting there was an imminent attack and that normally rather adept and agile Israel counter terrorist community decided to ignore them because they thought Hamas was not up for a fight and was not going to do it. The whole thing could perhaps have been avoided, had an intelligence acquisition been edged down in ways you prevented that atrocity and then you wouldn't have find the response. That's not to minimize the difficulties there are for Israel to go to Hamas or [inaudible 00:18:51] or their neighbor Iran who is significantly threatening them. But I don't diminish those at all. It's a very difficult thing to deal with.
I do think in the long-term what's happening now, what's happened over the past year in Gaza is likely to do immense damage to Israel's international opinion and therefore to any counter terrorist efforts that they engage in. But the main thing, as I say, is not the efficacy of counterterrorism in these circumstances and it's human suffering, it's human flourishing and it's protecting humans from all sides. So yeah.
Raul Leon:
So now I have maybe a really broad question, but maybe as a historian you could give us some patterns.
But why do you think individuals usually turn to terror? Why do these groups form in certain specific places in some countries sometimes and not in all the countries, in not in all the space of a country?
Richard English:
It's a really difficult question, but two things on that.
The first is the normal most salient aspect of it is that normal people decide that something which is a precious, urgent necessary goal can only or best be achieved through this violence. In other words, they feel nothing else is going to work and nothing else has worked. This is such a precious thing, whether it's a question of national independence, whether it's a question of a particular religious integration of society, whether it's an economically construction of society, it's something incredibly precious and the only thing that's going to work is this and that's why we must do this awful thing. I think they're normally wrong in that conception. I think it's not likely to achieve the goals of the violence it's pursuing, but that's the main reason. So it's a sense of necessity, urgency, and importance.
I think that why it happens in some places and why it doesn't happen in others? If I could answer that question persuasively, I wouldn't need the danger of as a university academic because I'd have made so much money selling it to governments. But I think that one of the difficulties is that in the blizzard of complexities that you get in each of these different settings, you do sometimes find there are terrorisms that don't emerge.
So, for example, if you look at things which are appalling oppressions historically where there has been repeated mistreatment of humans, the treatment in many societies of women by men, in most societies of gay people by heterosexuals are appalling. And yet gay terrorism and feminist terrorism have been non-emergent over women. So there are things which don't emerge.
There are some patterns which are more common. One is that around questions of national separatism and national independence, you often find terroristic violence being used. For example, in the struggles to end the British Empire, the anti-colonial struggles often had some terroristic violence and many of those movements derive quite a lot of support from populations of nationalism as well.
The other thing is that the behavior of states in a heavy-handed way, in a way which seems to close down other routes towards momentum, can be a trigger for people thinking, "If they're not going to allow us to do this politically, to do this to organizations, which is peaceful, to do this through civil resistance, we'll need to turn to violence." So states have a way of shaping the avenues of possibility, and that's one of the things which can be a predictor, but there's no neat map for it. But my advice to states should be, try to present there as being ways that people without violence can meaningfully pursue precious political change that will diminish the likelihood that most people who were involved will turn to violence.
Raul Leon:
So this is my reading from your own book, but I feel it suggests that counterterrorism strategies should focus less on warfare and combat and more on building pathways that lead to dialogue.
I think from your perspective as historian, could you provide some historic examples that try to support this argument, this approach?
Richard English:
Yeah. Your reading of what I'm arguing is exactly right, Raul. I think counterterrorism should technically try to contain violence in ways which both save life and also persuade terrorist groups that they're not achieving their central goals through violence and therefore they'll look for an alternative route. But then you need some way of producing a political momentum that's going to give them a plan B, if you like.
Let me give one example where I think this works comparatively well and one where it hasn't and I'll talk very briefly about each. In Northern Ireland at the end of the conflict, the main terrorist organizations would be not defeated, not crushed, but contained and constrained, and their leadership's decided there was a stalemate which was unproductive. Was there a plan B? Yes, there was an inclusive political dialogue, the talks which ended up producing in 1998, Belfast Good Friday Agreement were chaired by Senator Mitchell after the Institute I direct in Belfast is named.
And that meant there was an opportunity not for people to get all they totally wanted, but to get enough to feel that it was more from they were getting through violence. And I think in that context, counterterrorism tied in with political processes was comparatively successful. In Northern Ireland a very small place, only 1.9 million people in Northern Ireland even now, but over the time since the Good Friday Agreement, I think it's fair to claim that around 3,000 lives have been saved in that tiny setting and many, many more injuries would've happened. So it's a huge contribution.
The counter-example is Israel-Palestine, where in the early-1990s there was a peace person. You took that time seemed to be going very well. And then for reasons which we all know, which complicated to that actors on all sides fell apart. We're now in a situation where counterterrorism is being interpreted by the Israeli state in a more combative manner. You can understand and explain why that is, but I don't think it's producing the result which they want it to produce.
Isabella Nascimento:
Richard, a follow-up question. How do you think counterterrorism and terrorism changes by region as well? Because we were talking before starting to record this podcast that we are three Latin Americans with three different perspectives of Latin America as well and what of terrorism and counterterrorism. And you come from another perspective and we are all also talking about what is happening in Israel. So could you briefly guide me on understanding this?
Richard English:
Thank you, Isabel. Yeah, I mean three points on that briefly.
One is, it's always terrorisms rather than terrorism we're talking about, and as a historian I would say people should start with the specific context first. There are unique complexities about each conflict, which make it its own conflict. Having said that there are family resemblances between them, and I think we need to learn from those. But I think the uniqueness each will explain why there is a varied setting in different Latin American settings as opposed to Western European as opposed to Middle Eastern.
I think the second point I would make about it is the type of regime that's in governmental power and state power will make a difference. So more autocratic regimes will tend to have a different response to terrorism than the more liberal democratic ones. The constraints on the latter are not always there or the former. And there are certain methods that autocratic regimes will think necessary or legitimate or possible, which liberal democracies will not, and that makes a difference.
I think the third thing which I would stress about is that when you are looking at these different contexts, levels of violence have a self-reinforcing effect. So some of the culprits that we've been mentioning have much higher levels of awfulness in terms of violence. The numbers of lives lost, the numbers of people made, the destruction of community and of society with normal life is much greater. When you get beyond a certain point it becomes much more like a full-scale war than like a containment of a comparatively image, but awful threat.
So I think in terms of scale, in terms of regime and in terms of the complexity of regional historical context, there are great differences. Having said that, the points that I've been trying to make in this conversation about what I think is going to work best in counterterrorism, providing alternatives for people to produce political change without violence, try to align your behavior as a state with the ethical and the moral rather than the unethical immoral. Trying not to exaggerate what image or methods you'll achieve. I think those are as appropriate in those different geographical settings, those different regime settings, even though of course the way it works out historically will vary by those factors.
Natalia Zorilla:
I think you slightly touched on this topic, but I would like for you to elaborate a little bit more.
What are some of the most significant ethical dilemmas that arise in the field of counterterrorism, specifically when balancing civil liberties with security measures?
Richard English:
It's a big problem, Natalia, and it's one which keeps coming up because obviously in the wake of a terrorist atrocity, people will often think, "No, something must be done, something drastic must be changed," and so forth. I think states and populations exaggerate the need to change some of the things. In a lot of cases, there are laws on the books already which will enable you to do if you need to do. And there are things I've argued, which we know from the past, which will enable us to do things which are going to be effective. And if you look at some of the famous cases where those tensions have existed, I think it's less of a tension that people fear.
So, for example, people in the wake of 9/11, famously some people argued the scale of terrorism changed and therefore we needed to rethink how we approach the possibility of torturing terrorist suspects. Actually, the overwhelming body of evidence from a variety of different sources, academic and practitioner, suggests that torturing people is not a very effective way of producing reliable, actionable, fast, and trustworthy intelligence. It's actually a case where ethics, it's wrong to torture people, and effectiveness, how do you get information online?
And similarly with civil liberties, I think the more sophisticated counter terrorists tend to argue that the whole point of counterterrorism is to produce a kind of maintenance of normality of life. And part of that liberal democracies is that we're free to have this conversation without someone listening to it. We're free to pick up our phone without having [inaudible 00:28:18] access. I think in those ways, I think probably though there are ways in which you can make counterterrorism proportionate, accountable, not entirely transparent or it wouldn't be effective simply if it were, but I think you'd make it sufficiently transparent and accountable and sufficiently proportionate to maintain that balance.
So I would see there's probably more room for civil liberties and ethics to align with effective counterterrorism that is sometimes assumed. The media doesn't always help us. And interestingly with torture, people's perception of things through films they watch also in dramas on television or on Netflix, torture tends to work. When you interview people who've actually done interviews with terrorists, it tends not to work. And I think there's a sense that people strangely derive lessons from old sources and they're also political rules. Sometimes the politicians sounding the match or terrorism and torture in ways that are not doing anywhere any favors.
Natalia Zorilla:
Right.
Raul Leon:
So I would say that this come a bit from my experience from Peru. We had shining pasts in the 80s, 90s, so I really saw this public sentiment that often leaned toward the hard line position that says, "Fight the terrorists. These guys are bastards. They cannot be side to side to us." We cannot incorporate them into a system. So they defer that other approach recommend to seek a middle ground and find dialogue. Maybe in the region, Colombian pacification process is an exception, but even there it's highly debated both domestically and international.
So how do you see this tension between public support for Military solutions and the long-term potential of dialogue in counterterrorism efforts?
Richard English:
They are both really crucial cases, Raul, in Peru and Colombia are two of the instances where very high levels of violence meant there was appalling loss of life and also a degradation of state and society.
In the Peruvian case, it seems to me that there's an understandable desire to do something drastic against them [inaudible 00:30:19] and often in the end, partly through what happened to the leader, there was a disintegration of it.
In Colombia for all of the flaws that have been in the lengthy and jagged peace process, it does seem to me that over the long term, if we're thinking about the next 75 years, what will be the effect on different regions in Colombia? What will be the legacy of that? And I don't think in those settings, whether in Peru or in Colombia that a primarily Military response is going to be long-term satisfactory. I think in both of those cases, something which addresses the anger, which produced the awful violence in the first place is part of it.
So while it's a different set of regime norms and different levels of violence, I would still stand by my board argument that when we're thinking about long-term counterterrorism, it has to involve conceptions of politics, of society, and to some degree of respecting the diverse views that people will have, whether it be in terms of left of right, whether it be in terms of certain regions and in terms of certain voices being raised for interests that are not as they see it being addressed by the same.
Isabella Nascimento:
I now want to focus on today's world. I wanted to ask you, do you think there are specific characteristics of the world today that makes it more or less challenging to face counterterrorism as a state? I'm thinking here about social media for instance, high speed internet access, and there are places that actually have the opposite, right, that they don't have any access at all?
Richard English:
It's a good question, Isabella. In some ways, it seems to me clearly that technological changes are always going to be something which present new challenges, whether it'll be the invention of dynamite in the 19th century, the widespread access through television in 1960s, 1970s changed the capacity of people to do things against the state through violence and the enormity and the speed of change now technologically in terms of what you could do through the phone, what you could do in terms of the web means there is a very different world.
Having said that, first, none of those changes I've mentioned, now dynamite, TV, travel meant that terrorists ended up winning strategically. And I don't think that will happen with the new technology which we have courtesy of the extraordinary technological shift at the moment.
Second, over the longer term states tend to have greater capacity to use technological developments and the non-state actors. If I was running a terrorist organization, I'd be completely offline. Because once you're online and people get access to one of your people, you can see use me to you, you will see why I track you.
In other words, there are ways in which long term the state has a capacity always to use technology with greater effect because it has greater capacity, has more personnel, has more money, has more sophistication. So while people are often alarmed about the internet and when there were those awful things where ISIS beheadings were being broadcast and people could watch them on their phone, of course it's terrible. In fact, for the most part, most people observing that found that this gave high publicity for something that they found absolutely repellent, it actually worked against ISIS in the main for most popular opinion. Similarly, for the most part, if you have people who are too active in terms of communication via their phones or via email or via TikTok or whatever, the state is going to get access to the device which will enable it to be monitored. So yes, things are changing, but I think they always have.
Where I think your question hopped on something really important is that the danger that I see at the moment with some liberal democracies in terms of the freeing of a shared sense of purpose around how you organize politics and saw this to a degree with Brexit in the United Kingdom, we see this also in terms of some Western European states in mainland Europe in terms of the rise of great anger about immigration and the polarization in politics, there's a different version here in the United States with a deep polarization in political life. The more that democracies become polarized, the more difficult it is for them to see what's precious and distinctive about their democratic quality. If you lose that, the counterterrorism I'm talking about becomes much more difficult to do use of.
Isabella Nascimento:
And how do you think governments and international organizations, international NGOs can cooperate to tackle these challenges?
Richard English:
So I think states need to cooperate with each other where they share. And it isn't often the interstate collaboration is one of the main technical aspects of success rather than failure. Very many terrorisms now speak true to a degree historically have transnational identities and therefore different states have to collaborate. That's one part of it.
Often the siloing between different wings of the same state makes it more difficult. If the FBI and the CIA are not talking to each other, it's more difficult for them to do the same job effectively. So I think there are ways in which states can collaborate.
I think NGOs, businesses, civil society, need to be engaged with the state. Sometimes people, because of their understanding or concerns about some counter-terrorist policies of the state are wary of getting involved with it. On the other hand, you're not going to change what the state does if you're not in conversation, if you're not trying to be involved in dialogue with influence.
So where I receive things as being valuable, the way you've got something which you think you can meaningfully and expertly contribute to a dialogue on counterterrorism that affects how states operate, you should get in the room however uncomfortable that might be for you. And in the end, if all of the effects of international bodies, states remain the main vector of historical political power and change in the world. And I think you've seen that with the way that the United Nations often tries to affect behavior in ways that actually come up short. States still have an enormous amount of capacity for decision-making. I think it's at the level of the state that people primarily need to direct their attention to win narrative, to win people's understanding of it is in the state's interest to do what you know to be best.
Isabella Nascimento:
Fantastic. We are walking to the end of our program today, and I wanted to ask you, what is something you wish we would have asked you?
Richard English:
Goodness, you've covered a lot, Isabella, already so you've worked me hard already.
I think one thing is that I live and work in Belfast where thankfully now things are very peaceful, are much safer. City of Chicago, for example, where we're having this conversation, studying and analyzing terrorism and counterterrorism in a city and society where it's been all around you is different. Not necessarily better, not necessarily worse, but it's different from studying it in a place where you're looking at it as something that's far away. And I think conversations between people who understand these things in terms of Raul mentioned Peru, the understandings that people have from the context of Peru and living through that kind of conflict as well as studying here from a distance, I think we need people in both of those settings to be in dialogue. Quite often there is not enough conversation between people whose experience of studying it as being, studying it from afar and studying it kind stuff.
And there are advantages to both. There are deep advantages to both. If you study it from afar, you're not always thinking about everybody's in a bar or the room or the classroom, you're in the room having conversations. If you're studying it close up, you know absolutely everyone who's in the room and in the bar, and therefore you know the things that are their in industries and you know that it's something which is embedded in society. So what I would look for would be that as many of us from as many different parts of the world, for as many different contexts can end in a conversation.
One of the tragedies in the field of studying terrorism is this, most of the terrorism literature that's influential is produced by people who are living in states where there's not much terrorism. And most of the places where over the last 50, 60 years there have been high levels of terrorism, Peru, Colombia, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, who for reasons we can clearly understand, have not been as prominent in the literature. And I think we need to correct that because for all of the enormous work that can be done and brilliantly done from places like the United States or the UK or other places, which thankfully have experienced comparatively the terrorism set against those other places, there is also an intimacy of understanding from people who've even worked in the place where the violence is immediately happening. The more that places including the University of Chicago, the more that places can get into dialogue where there's a multi-locational conversation, the more we all [inaudible 00:38:35] by listening to each other's expertise.
Isabella Nascimento:
Thank you for listening to this episode of The Root of Conflict featuring Professor Richard English.
This episode was produced and edited by Isabella Nascimento and Nishita Karun. Thank you to our interviewers, Natalia Zorilla, Raul Leon, and Isabella Nascimento.
A special thanks to UC3P and The Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series.
For more information on The Pearson Institute's research and events, visit their website, thepearsoninstitute.org.
Root of Conflict
10.03.24
Wealth in People | James Robinson
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Hi. This is Isabella, and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast. You're listening to the Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Welcome.
Welcome. Today's guest is Professor James Robinson, a distinguished economist and political scientists at the University of Chicago. He also directs the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, he has conducted extensive field works in countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, and Colombia. Robinson is currently working on his next book, which aims to shed light on African history and its modern realities.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
My name is Mario Venegas. I am a second year Master of Public Policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy and a Pearson Fellow.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Hey, my name is Isabella Nascimento. I'm also a Pearson Fellow and a second year Master of Public Policy at the Harris School of Public Policy.
James A. Robinson:
Hello, my name is James Robinson. I'm a Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Okay, nice. James, so I would start with the first question and an introduction. So we know you have been working a lot on research in Africa and writing a new book about it. Could you share a broad picture of your work in Africa and what inspired you to continue to work there and write these articles and research on it?
James A. Robinson:
What's inspired me to work on Africa? I suppose because I find it fascinating. I have a long relationship with Africa. My father worked in Africa. He started working in the British Colonial Service in Nigeria in the 1930s, so I grew up in... He worked all over Western and Eastern Africa, so I grew up in a house full of African art and books and maps of Africa. But I never really studied it when I was younger because I just found it too complicated.
I remember when I was a PhD student, these people would go off and be studying developing countries. And I used to think, "How on earth can you study? That's so complicated. I don't know anything." I remember one of my classmates went off to Brazil to do research, and I started asking him, "So what are you going to do in Brazil? What goes on in Brazil?" And he didn't know anything about Brazil, and I remember thinking, "How can you study Brazil if you don't know anything about Brazil?" So it was too overwhelming for me. I was just focused on understanding social science and economics and economic theory and all the technical things.
But then when I finished, I realized that actually, my real passion was just trying to think about the world, and that's what really fascinated me about why the world was so different and different parts of the world were so different from each other. I guess in those days, I was very fixated on the question of why some parts of the world were more successful economically than other parts of the world. But I guess that's a question I'm less and less interested in as I get older. And I've come to appreciate much more the uniqueness of different parts of the world and the way that different parts of the world flourish in different ways, which may be different from the way that the United States flourishes or thinks of flourishing.
And I think that's one of the things that I find so interesting about Africa. I probably said this in my lecture, but when I used to... I've been teaching about Africa for 25 years. And of course, when you start, you are drawn to all of these dysfunctions. Because of my background as an economist, I was thinking about poverty and political instability and autocracy because I was very interested in the political foundations of economic underdevelopment. But actually, when you hang out in Africa, of course that's all there, but then the other stuff comes into focus, which is the vibrancy of African society and the way that the place is different from Western society. And I just found myself much more drawn to thinking about the ways in which there was different sorts of flourishing. I'm keeping using that word.
If I looked at my research trajectory, working in Africa, that goes back the first thing I did, which was sort of serious, which was 25 years ago, which was trying to work on why Botswana had been so successful economically. Again, focused on Botswana as an economic success. But what I learned from that is you couldn't even start to think about that without thinking about traditional African society in the way traditional Tswana polities were organized institutionally, and how that mapped into the post-colonial state.
I don't know what you want me to talk about, but I think I could talk for a long time about this stuff. But if you thought about the bigger trajectory, I think in many contexts, in Sierra Leone where I worked for many years, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, more recently in Nigeria, it's been unlearning a lot of the preconceptions and ideas I entered into studying Africa, dragged in by this fascination and curiosity. And trying to build a of alternative and, I think, more... I don't know what the right word is, more empowering or something, vision of Africa.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Yeah. Isa and I both had the opportunity to do an internship in Africa during the summer. I was in Sierra Leone and Isa was in Zambia. I think we both agree with what you first said about being something really complex. So personally, when I was there, I was trying to understand all of it, and it was so hard. And something that really calls my attention about your work is how you've been able to work in the whole continent, right? Understanding one country is complex enough, trying to understand the whole continent is way more complex. And as you say in most of your work, it's multicultural and cosmopolitan. And this is, in part, what will make Africa flourish. But how do you address this complexity, this multiculturality and cosmopolitan-ness in your work?
James A. Robinson:
Well, it's social science, and social science is superficial by definition. Social scientists don't have the attention span of historians or anthropologists, and so we chase after different questions. My work is very question-driven. I think if you look at all of my projects in Africa, they're always driven by a question. Botswana was driven by a question. Sierra Leone was driven by a question, which was how on earth could it be that Sierra Leoneans in their right minds voted back into office the APC, the political party of the one-party state? My work in Congo started with this question, which was about the history of the Kuba Kingdom and this comparison that Mary Douglas and Vansina made between the Kuba and the Lele. So I always start with very concrete questions, and you go wherever the question takes you.
So I think, of course, that has the benefit of recognizing that Africa is extremely diverse and there's enormous differences. And there are similarities, but there are differences. But obviously, that comes with enormous costs. I don't speak African languages the way an anthropologist would, although my Igbo friends tell me that no white person ever speaks Igbo properly, so it doesn't matter how much you try, you can never master it.
So I think there's just trade-offs and I think that's why you need lots of people at the table with lots of different skills. You need anthropologists, you need historians, or people with much more, much deeper knowledge than I have. I think I have something to offer, but I think it's very much the social science package. Relative to most social scientists, I'm much more interested in details. But still, there's enormous limitations.
When I used to teach at University of California at Berkeley, I had a friend, David Freedman, who was a very distinguished statistician, and he passed away now unfortunately. But he used to have this thing about scientific methodology and the methodology of social science. And he said, "Actually, what happens in science is you just muddle through." So that's a image I always have in the back of my mind, muddling through and just hopefully getting some insights and understanding. But everything is complicated, as you say. Very complicated.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Through our interactions with you, at least mine, I got in touch with the concept of wealth in people, that you bring a lot in your classes. When I went to Zambia, I think this resonated a lot with me. Once I was there, it was two weeks that I was living there, they already got a Zambian name for me. They started calling me Conguani, that means happiness. And everybody started calling me Conguani, and Isabella didn't exit anymore, it was only Conguani.
And I also noticed how the connections are important. It was much easier for me to get contacts in the government or in other international agencies, or even outside this world of international development, once I knew someone. So I wanted to understand... Actually, I wanted for you to explain a little bit more about this concept of wealth in people and why do you think it's important to also think about this when implementing a policy, let's say, in the international development scenario?
James A. Robinson:
Yeah. That's not a terminology I invented. It goes back to these anthropologists in the 1970s in attempt to create a kind of rubric for saying what was different about African society. That somehow personal relations and personal connections were valued above other things, above material objects. And I think I adopted that terminology just because it seemed to capture something that you just said it yourself, you just experience in Africa. There's this density of life, of social life and connections and people.
I think that's one of the things that make Africa so fun and different at a personal level. And very rewarding at a personal level compared to the isolationism, individualism of Western society. I don't know, I can't speak to Brazil or whatever, Brazil may be different, but at least in that kind of Anglo-Saxon culture where I grew up, that's extremely different. So there's that, at the human level, but I think the way I understand it is that affects the value of people, affects the way many institutions work. It affects the way you think about structuring political institutions, the way you think about structuring economic institutions.
And I think for operating as foreigners, you run into that all the time. I remember working in Sierra Leone, one of the first times I work in Sierra Leone, trying to delegate something, asking somebody to do something for you. That never actually works the way it works here because that person is in the social network, with all sorts of obligations and responsibilities, and so that person wouldn't... Somebody else would end up doing it. And I was like, "Look, I asked you to do that." And the answer would be, "I am doing it." "But you're not doing it. Your cousin is doing it." "No, no. I'm doing it." And for them, they couldn't understand what was my problem. "I am doing it. Yeah, my network's doing it."
So there's a lot of challenges you have to navigate to just collect data or just implement research projects because you have to accept that's how it is, and you have to go with the flow instead of imposing yourself on that. You have to go with the flow and you have to... But I think that's true with the outsiders coming. I don't talk too much about that because I always feel... If you look at any kind of country that's flourished, let's say, they've always done it on their own terms and under their own speed and momentum.
Nobody created South Korea or Singapore or whatever, or Mauritius, they did it themselves. That'll be true in Africa. And it won't be thanks to the World Bank or the UN or anybody else, it'll be the Africans. That's true in Botswana, it's true in Somaliland. Some of the success stories that you have, they've all done it themselves. They figured out how to do it and they reached a kind of social contract where they could move ahead. So that's true in Africa as well.
But the first lecture I give in that class, I give these examples of how you can't really help. Of course, everyone needs help, we all need help. But you can't help people unless you understand the culture and the context and how people operate. I love that example of James Ferguson's book, the Anti-Politics Machine in Lesotho. Where the World Bank come with all these stereotypes about what the problem must be based on their understanding of Western economic development, which turns out to be completely irrelevant in Lesotho because of the way that society functions. The reasons for owning cows, for example, and the role that cows play in Basotho society. And their social roles and their political roles and their financial roles, which turn out to be completely different from those roles that you think about them in Western society.
So if you want to help, or my good friend Paul Farmer used to say, accompany, if you want to accompany people, then you have to understand their society and the way things work and their values. And so little effort is put into that. That, I just find breathtaking.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
And I think that this concept of wealth in people is absolutely necessary to understand Africa in general. I also had a couple of experiences. I think the second day I was there, the car got stuck on the road, and me and the driver tried pushing the car for half an hour. And suddenly, I don't know, maybe 30 people that were just passing by got off and tried helping us. And that's something that probably wouldn't have happened in Mexico, where I'm from, and I don't think it would have happened in the US either. So it's key, trying to understand this concept of wealth in people, for me, in order to understand Africa.
I would like to touch on this thing that you said, that Africa is always a reference point or we tend to mention Africa in the West when we're talking about development and underdevelopment. But I would like to ask you, what are some common misconceptions that people in the West tend to fall into when talking about development or underdevelopment in Africa?
James A. Robinson:
I think the biggest misconception, which is a central argument in my book, is that in Western society, you kind of look at the world as if everyone was trying to achieve the same thing that you were trying to achieve, it's just that you succeeded and they failed. If you take a development economics class and they talk about Africa, it's like, "Well, we succeeded and you failed."
I used to teach in Bogota for many years, in Colombia, and I used to just antagonize the Colombian students in my first lecture by saying, "Okay, here's the way to think about the political economy of Colombia, which is you are basically just a failed version of the United States." And I put up a list of all the things. United States, good. Colombia, bad. United States, good. Colombia, bad. Just to kind of like, "Yeah, there's something wrong with this."
But that's actually how people think in political economy and [inaudible 00:18:14]. That really is not a caricature. It's actually how people think. There's something completely wrong with it, but it's not articulated. So then I used to get them to read this essay by Jose Martí, the Cuban intellectual, called Nuestra America, which is Our America, and it's all about, okay, yeah, we need to do something different. We need our own way of doing things. He never elaborated that as a constructive project or he never gave it a institutional elaboration or whatever. But I think that's a inspiring agenda. You can think in Mexico, Vasconcelos, La Raza Cosmica, or Octavio Paz. There's echoes of that.
I think for me, the biggest misconception is in the African case, let me not get on to Latin America too much, but on the African case, the Africans were not trying to achieve what the Western countries were trying to achieve, so they didn't fail at anything. In fact, they succeeded in their own terms. Meaning they succeeded in terms of creating political institutions that preserve their values, that's my argument, that were based on these notions of wealth in people and the value of the local community. And so they succeeded in doing that, so that's not a failure. They were just trying to achieve something different from Western countries.
The problem for the Africans was the way they did that and the nature of that equilibrium made Africa incredibly vulnerable to Western commercial and colonial expansion in some sense. So most of the mess that's in Africa is because of that collision with Western expansion. Nothing to do with the way that Africa itself organized itself historically. So I think if you could get away from that way of thinking, then that would give you a very different basis to start thinking about how to help Africa or how to engage with Africa.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Yeah, exactly. And I would just like to ask a follow-up question, because this, for me, is a really interesting topic. But in Freetown, in Sierra Leone, there's a lot of work from NGOs and foreign organizations, but I didn't feel like they were taking into account these common misconceptions when designing their work. So what would you recommend for an aid agencies and NGOs to do in order to actually take into account this factor of success in Africa? And also, what are the challenges they could face in order to achieve that?
James A. Robinson:
Well, I don't think that whole NGO industry is organized to take this on board. People don't have the right incentives, they're just kind of rotated in and out. There's no incentive or... I don't understand... I don't know much about the NGO world, but the World Bank or people that I have interacted with, I think it's full of extremely well-meaning, intelligent people. It's not the people, but the system is not set up to work in any real way. It's not set up to solve any of the problems. It's not organized to address the real problems.
I don't know how you do that exactly. My point, as I said earlier, is that probably doesn't really matter anyway, because it's going to be the Sierra Leoneans that solve this problem, not outsiders or not NGOs or not the World Bank or anything else. I guess that's, for me... I'm not sure it matters that much. And I think it's very difficult given my sense of the incentives and the way those organizations work. They're just not organized to cope with that because there's no incentive to engage. What they should be doing is giving resources to people like John Corker, or Sierra Leoneans who can function in the environment. And they do have the right incentives, and they do have the local knowledge-
Mario Venegas Wignall:
And they know how it works.
James A. Robinson:
Yeah, exactly.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
They understand Africa.
James A. Robinson:
Yes. Yes, absolutely.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Well, changing a little bit, but I'm still thinking about your work in progress, in the book. I have read the manuscript of your book, and I know that there is a chapter called Prosperity: What if Adam Smith had been African? Could you give a taste of this chapter to our audience and tell us about your argument on this matter?
James A. Robinson:
That's about how parochial economics is in some sense. What you learn in an economics class, it's wonderful and everything, but it's describing a particular institutionalization of an economy. There's individuals, there's markets, there's competition, there's whatever. There's private property rights. I just do this thought experiment to say, "Well, Adam Smith was sitting in Kirkcaldy, in Scotland, in the 18th century, and he looked out his window and that's what he saw. He saw markets and private property." He elaborated that into a generalization of here's what an economy looks like in all times and all places and all parts of the world, et cetera.
But if he'd been living in Makurdi, in Eastern Nigeria, and he'd looked out the window of his house, he'd have seen something completely different. He'd have seen different systems of property rights. He'd have seen markets, yeah, but lots of things were not marketized. And he'd have described a very different type of economy. And who would've been right? Adam Smith in Nigeria or Adam Smith in Scotland? They'd both have been right. They were both describing institutionalizations of... But neither of them would've had a general theory. Neither the Nigerian nor the Scotsman would've had a general theory.
So I just think the idea that the economy is like Newton's laws of gravitational motion, force is equal to mass times acceleration, in Nigeria and in Scotland, the economy's not like that. The economy is a cultural construction; property rights, markets, all of that. So that's my point.
And I think that's very important for thinking about the history of Africa and why... Again, because the way economists tend to think is, "This is the right model. And you're organizing your economy differently, so that's because of frictions or market failures, and so you need to make your economy look more like our economy." It's a bit like I was talking earlier, it's just a specific example. But no, actually, the economy was completely rationally organized, it was just trying to achieve something different. And that's something that economists don't understand.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Yeah, absolutely.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Actually, a follow-up question on research in Africa, I really wanted to understand what you have learned in terms of making research in this time, on the ground in Africa. I ask this because I know that it's totally different of making research in the UK, for instance. You face other types of challenges, you face different languages that you have never heard of, and you also have a difficulty of learning from these people that do not know you. This is for the researchers, actually. I wanted to know your ideas on this matter.
James A. Robinson:
There's always challenges. I think, yeah, there's challenges to understanding a cultural context which is so different from the one you grew up with, or there's challenges if you don't speak the language. But for me, that's just like, "Okay, great, you work with locals." Work with local academics, work with local people in civil society. I work a lot now with all these academics at the University of Nigeria, and that's a fantastic thing for me. So the collaboration is... Yeah, okay.
We were discussing earlier, obviously there's always limits to what you can understand, but I don't think that stops you having insights. You have something to bring to the table, they have something to bring to the table. You learn from each other. So yeah, it would be easier to do research in England, but you go where your passion is or what you want to try to understand.
For me, everything is always enlightening, and it's always an opportunity to understand something that you never understood before. And I think, you grew up in a society like England, you take for granted so many things that other people in the world can't take for granted about security and order and legitimate political systems. And so if you want to understand England better, you need to work in a place like Nigeria or Colombia because then stuff doesn't work, and maybe you get some insight into how it does work in some places and not in others. I don't know, was that an answer your question?
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Yes. I think basically, it's to work with people, local NGOs, and local research institutes, local researchers. I think it's a way of doing research.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
And what I found, I think this last thing that you said is very interesting, because when I first got there, my impression was nothing works here. But then as you start learning a bit about the-
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Everything works.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Exactly. They somehow make it work. Maybe not the way we're used to in Latin America, us or in the US or in Europe, but somehow people just employ themselves, find a way to make things work, and they do it, right?
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Yes.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
And in this sense, how would you see Africa in the next, I don't know, 20, 30 years to come? How do you see it thriving? How do you feel these strengths can be used, and assets, to continue promoting development maybe?
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Oh, yes. I shared with Mario that really good article of yours, Africa's Latent Assets, I think. So I think he's thinking about that.
James A. Robinson:
Yeah, that was an attempt to think about some of the latent strengths in Africa. Because I think what you see, just talking about economic growth, economic development, I think what you see is that most of these success stories are extremely surprising.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
That's true.
James A. Robinson:
I start with that example of China. I'm old enough to know, when we were taught as an undergraduate at the London School of Economics in the early 1980s, China was a kind of technologically backward economic disaster under the sway of this pre-modern ideology. And all of these other cases, Korea, Mauritius, you name it, nobody ever predicted any of them. Botswana, for example. That's something we should be humble. We should be humble. We are never good at predicting stuff like that.
And many of these... A lot of my work has been on institutions and relationship between institutions and economic development. But it's also true, in many of these cases, that growth starts or development starts with a lot of problems, institutional problems. That's certainly true in China. It's certainly true in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s.
So I think what I'm saying in that paper is you don't have to solve all these problems. There's lots of problems in Africa, but you don't have to solve all the problems for things to get moving. And if you ask me, is there one country in the world that you could see growing at 10% a year for the next 50 years? I'd say straight away, Nigeria. It's just so much... Not Sierra Leone, sorry. And I don't know Zambia. But there's so much energy and talent and entrepreneurship in Nigeria. You just feel like if someone could just nudge this in the right place. I don't know how Deng Xiaoping figured out how to do that in China, but the place is going to explode.
There's other places like that too. Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa. Not everywhere, but China is not everywhere too. There's parts of China today that are very sleepy. So there's a lot of heterogeneity. Any kind of these experiences, also, there's a lot of heterogeneity. The US industrialized with the slave economy in the South, for heaven's sake.
What I was trying to identify in that paper was how would you possibly believe that was possible in Africa? And what kind of advantage could they have in the global world? And I was just pointing to this social mobility, this immense social mobility, which I think you experienced that firsthand. Everyone wants to make a connection. Everyone wants to know you. You can create networks, you can create... And you're not held back by caste or social class. There's that fluidity that you don't have, even in many Western societies.
And you mentioned before, this cosmopolitan nature of African society, also, which I find... Who's going to succeed in the modern, global world? Some Nigerians who speak five languages or English people who have to get out of the European Union because they can't stand the French? The Nigerians are going to flourish, not the English.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
And just one comment, I think this... Well, it happened to me. I used to imagine Africa almost like a country, but it's huge. So when Professor Robinson is talking about Nigeria, it's totally different than Sierra Leone, and they're not even that far away. And then there's Ethiopia all the way on the east, and Kenya. And on the south, South Africa. So I think that people should be more conscious about this, right? Africa is not only a country, it's a huge and very cosmopolitan region, continent.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Continent.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Right? Yeah.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
If there was one paper or book that you could recommend for a policy student, which one would it be?
James A. Robinson:
Apart from my own, you mean?
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
No, no, no, no. Yeah, exactly. Otherwise, it will be a full list. You all read Why Nations Fail, right?
James A. Robinson:
I don't know. To learn about what? To learn about Africa? To learn about... I don't know.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Maybe about these concepts that we've been mentioning. I feel like people in the West or outside of Africa feel far from Africa. And right now, we've been talking about wealth in people, about the complexity of Africa as a continent, about the richness in Africa, about it being really cosmopolitan and multicultural. So what would be a good book or paper, as Isa said, to try to get a little bit closer to all these concepts that we mentioned, and try to begin to understand Africa?
James A. Robinson:
I'm not sure there is such a book. That's why I'm so keen to-
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
To produce yours.
James A. Robinson:
Yeah, to write it. I think I probably said this, African society is better written about in novels, almost, than in academic literature or social science. Like I always say in Colombia, if you want to understand Colombia, actually, you have to talk to journalists, not academics. The best books about Colombia are actually written by journalists, not academics. I think in Africa, it's more novelists for some reason.
I think all this wealth in people, the best thing I know about wealth in people are this novella, the money order. The money order, which is Ousmane Sembene, which is this Senegalese writer, about the guy gets a money order from his relative in France, and he has to cash the money order. And to cash the money order, you have to trigger all of these social networks and contacts, and he has to solve this problem of cashing the money order. And you see the whole thing of wealth in people in action.
I don't know, I'd have to think. There are good books about bits and pieces of specific things. But that communicates what I would like to communicate, I'm not sure.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Only your book then. We'll have to refer-
James A. Robinson:
I don't even know if that's going to do it actually, because I'm a little anxious that I spend too long talking about some of these more historical... There's different... I'm very interested in talking about these historical dynamics and trying to explain how Africa ended up the way it did today, and what explains the variation. And why is Botswana different from Congo or Tanzania, whatever. And that's probably too nerdy and too much detail and too academic. There's probably a role for something much more fun and accessible and contemporary.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Yeah, of course. I think that's good advice. Maybe start with literature and all of that besides. I think a book, it's hard to put everything what Africa is in a single book.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
And I remember you told me to read Things Fall Apart as well, so this is also a good recommendation.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Yeah. I think we are almost reaching the end of our talk.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Yeah. What was something that you would liked us to you have asked you?
James A. Robinson:
I'm not sure I know the answer from that. I think one of the things that intrigues me also, is about what we can learn from Africa or Africans. We're so busy telling Africans how to do things or how to be more like us. A couple of years ago, I went to this World Bank Africa conference. It was called the World Bank Africa Fest. And I assumed we'd be just talking about Africa and everything. And I had my little speech, I was going to talk about Africa's latent assets, actually.
And then it was just a bunch of World Bank people talking about how they'd done all these great things in Africa, and they built this project and they did that project. And I threw away my PowerPoint slide and I said, "Look, I'm not going to talk about that. I don't know that any African learned anything from me, but let me just tell you about stuff that I learned from Africans, about life and about humanity and-"
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Community in general, right?
James A. Robinson:
Yeah. So here's an example. So just to give you an example, here's something I learned, I told them, which I think is extremely different from Western society or at least American society. So there's an Igbo proverb which says, "When hanging the roof of a house, the tall man is needed. If you're looking for something on the floor, the short man is required." So there's this idea in Igbo culture that everybody's good at something, everybody can contribute something.
And this idea of what the philosopher, Michael Sandel would call contributive justice, that's very different from the United States. United States, there's winners and there's losers, basically. And if you're a loser, tough. You didn't work hard enough, you didn't study hard enough, you didn't try hard enough. But that is very different in... There's no winners and losers in Africa, in that sense. There's something, philosophically, we could learn from Africans, it seems to me.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Yeah. No, completely. I think we have a lot to learn. For me, as I mentioned, it was community. I feel like, exactly, we have all these NGOs and organizations trying to push different things and projects in Africa, but they miss what are we learning from Africa? What could actually benefit our societies? What could make us more wealthy in other ways that maybe we cannot imagine right now?
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Sometimes they miss the people part of the equation.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Yeah.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
I also didn't ask anything about witchcraft or supernatural powers. Would you like to say something about it?
James A. Robinson:
Oh, I could. I could talk about that. We're doing research on that in Congo. We're trying to write something up, finally, on that. That's an interesting... I talk about that in the context of this notion of... So one way of thinking about where does this wealth in people come from. If you were an economist, you'd say, "What's the micro foundations for that?" And the way I've come to think about it is just in terms of people's basic ontology, if I could use a more technical philosophical jargon, of ontology. That in Africa, there's this notion that people are connected to each other in a way that's... Really connected in a way that's not true in Western society. And we're connected to each other, and that's somehow the basis of this emphasis on community and people.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
In the sense that you need the other one to thrive as a whole?
James A. Robinson:
Yeah. That's we're connected by... The first person who articulated this view was this Belgian Catholic missionary called Placide Tempels, in the 1940s. So he said, "People are connected by forces." He called this force. And you're not just connected to people alive, you're connected to the ancestors, maybe the unborn. And so...
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
A spiderweb.
James A. Robinson:
A Spiderweb, exactly. He says people are connected in this spiderweb. What is witchcraft? I think the right way to think about witchcraft is you can manipulate these forces malevolently. Very typical in African society historically, but even today, as I discuss, for example, this work in Soweto in South Africa. To think that illness is caused by people manipulating... Illness is caused by people malevolently manipulating these forces. It's other people that make you ill. You may get cancer. Okay, fine. I know that the cancer could kill you, but why did the cancer start growing? That's someone's agency, is involved in that.
So I think for me, witchcraft is that sort of... It comes in as a theory of illness. Bad things happen. Why do bad things happen? In religious philosophy, there's this question of evil. Why is there evil? If God is so good, why is there evil in the world? The Catholic theologians spend a lot of time writing about that. And this is a theory of evil in some sense, of witchcraft. But it's very prevalent in people's lives. I think, again, there's a lot of variation. To me, in Sierra Leone, what's so fascinating about Sierra Leone is you don't see this in Sierra Leone so much as you do elsewhere because the way it's all organized, through these secret societies-
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Secret societies, yeah.
James A. Robinson:
Yeah, exactly. So a lot of it is just out of sight from you as a Westerner or as a Mexican, because it's done in the Poro bush or the Bundu bush or something, it's secret. People won't talk about it either. Even very sophisticated people who are used to interfacing with Westerners won't talk about it. None of my friends will talk about it. But in Congo, it's all in your face.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
It's more open. Yeah.
James A. Robinson:
And in Congo, it's very involved in politics, also. I avoided studying it for a long time in Congo, just because I felt I can't understand this. It's just like, "I won't be able to understand it." It's also something very sinister about it in Congo. So it's a little scary, to say the least. But in the end, the Congolese people we work with, they just kept on saying, "You're all in denial. You should be studying..."
And one thing which is very funny also, we were having problems with this data in Congo and stuff. I have a very good friend from Cameroon who I've been working with a lot, who's a professor at Georgia State University now. We're doing all this teaching together at the moment. So he's from Cameroon, but it's actually very... Culturally, it's sort of... It's west of where we're working in Northern Congo, but there's a lot of cultural connections.
So we had this meeting with him to talk about how should we think about... And he understood everything completely. He explained completely how to think about it and what was going on. That was mind-blowing. For him, "Oh yeah, it's the same in Cameroon. Let me explain what's happening." So I think that's very hard for a Westerner to understand. We don't have any... It's very difficult in, especially, post-Enlightenment. The Enlightenments killed off all of that stuff. It killed off superstition and whatever.
But I guess being British, I tend to be very empirical. I tend to think I look at how people behave and I look at what they say and how they think and how they explain things to me. And I say, "Okay, that's their world. That's their reality. I should try to understand that and not say, 'Oh, that must be nonsense, because that can't...'" When I teach this class to PhD students about religion, I say, "The biggest problem in the way that economists study religion is that for them, the most interesting question in religion is how on earth can people believe something which is obviously not true?"
For me, that's completely the wrong question to ask. Every observed human society has had supernatural beliefs or religious beliefs, or has practiced ritual, have had some concept of the sacred. And we should be trying to understand that. We should be trying to conceptualize it and not asking some silly question which is just driven by our paradigm.
Mario Venegas Wignall:
Of course. Of course. And I think that this was a huge insight for me while being in Sierra Leone, just the idea of it's really hard to understand this, but this doesn't mean it's wrong or it's bad. It's just something that I've never seen at this particular way. So trying to work and trying to develop yourself in an environment in which things are just not the way you think they are, or people see things completely different, well, it's very challenging, but I also think it's very enriching.
James A. Robinson:
If you look at the history of anthropology, it actually is quite funny. Economists are almost in a pre-scientific stage. So in anthropology, if you look at anthropology in the late 19th century, it was like white people read books and stuff, and they sat in their office and they imagined what must have happened in primitive society. No one did any fieldwork, nobody ever went to a primitive society, and then it was only when Malinowski basically started doing that in the first World War.
And he was almost forced to do it because he was Austro-Hungarian, and he got stuck in Papua New Guinea. And he couldn't leave because the Habsburgs were on the same side as the Germans and the Ottomans. So he got stuck in Papua New Guinea for four years, and he invented, sort of, fieldwork. And then he engaged in a completely different way with these other societies, which anthropologists hadn't done before. Before, you could call yourself an anthropologist and you could sit in your office and read books and just speculate. But a lot of work in economics is like that. You just sit in your office in Chicago and you speculate and you think that's fine, and you can write a model down, and...
Mario Venegas Wignall:
And that's what the word is.
James A. Robinson:
That's what the world is. Yeah, it's what you make it to be.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimen:
Thank you for listening to this episode of The Root of Conflict, featuring Professor James Robinson. This episode was produced and edited by Isabella Nascimento and Nishita Karun. Thank you to our interviewers, Mario Venegas and Isabella Nascimen. A special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit their website, thepearsoninstitute.org
If you found this episode interesting, we invite you to join us for the 2024 Pearson Global Forum: Negotiations and Agreement. Join us on Friday, October 18th, to hear from global experts as they discuss topics like the role of women in negotiations, speaking law to war, and other interesting panels around the theme of negotiations and agreement. This in-person and virtual event is free and open to all. You can find more information at thepearsonglobalforum.org.
Root of Conflict
09.05.24
Speaking Law to War | Kathleen Cavanaugh
Hannah Balikci:
Hi, this is Hannah and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You are listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
What are the key legal principles that govern the conduct of war and protect human rights? In this episode, we speak with Professor Kathleen Cavanaugh, the executive director of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and Senior Instructional Professor in The College at UChicago. Professor Cavanaugh's Scholarship, like her academic training is interdisciplinary and seeks to interrogate questions of law in its social context. She has published on international human rights and humanitarian law, theoretical as well as applied research on the use of political violence, ethno-nationalism, and more recently militant democracy and the politics of memory.
As a consultant, she has undertaken numerous missions on behalf of Amnesty International, including to Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine and Iraq. She'll be speaking at the 2024 Pearson Global Forum in October. In this interview, we discuss among other topics, the framework of international humanitarian law, storytelling and meta-conflicts, and the difficulties of accountability for human rights violations within the international system. Now let's go to my conversation with Professor Cavanaugh. Hi, my name is Hannah Balikci. I'm a second year MPP student here at the Harris School of Public Policy and the producer of Root of Conflict and a Pearson Fellow.
And I'd like to thank Professor Cavanaugh for coming into the studio today for an interview. Professor Cavanaugh, could you please introduce yourself and your work and welcome to Root of Conflict.
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
Firstly, thank you for having me. I'm Kathleen Cavanaugh, I'm director of the Pozen Center for Human Rights and faculty in the college. I'm a socio-legal scholar and have come to Chicago just about four years ago today.
Hannah Balikci:
Welcome.
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
Thank you.
Hannah Balikci:
How did you first get interested in your work in studying conflict as it is, over time?
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
Sure. Well, I've specifically said I'm a socio-legal scholar, and one of the ... I think the seminal turning points for me was my time in Northern Ireland. So I went to study as an undergraduate student on a junior year abroad in Belfast, Northern Ireland where I was looking at the underpinnings of protracted social conflict. And there are a couple of things that sprung from that, that really helped to shape and form my concentration on what I call the politics of law. And three things in general, I think not just sprung from the conflict itself, but also shaped how I approach the study of human rights and also humanitarian law.
The three are meta-conflicts, storytelling and lawfare. And so, I'll circle back to those in telling a little bit about Northern Ireland because your audience may or may not be familiar with the conflict, but it was a protracted social conflict. And the interesting part when I landed in Belfast was that there were so many different versions of the underpinnings of the history that led both unionists, British and nationalists who sided on the Irish side to have this protracted social conflict. And amongst them was whether or not there was a settler colonial society, which was part of the Irish nationalist argument or whether or not this was an ancien regime, right?
Was this a natural flow of peoples from Great Britain, mainly in Scotland over to the north, and therefore these were peoples who had legitimate right to be there, right? And depending on where you started in that history, telling that story also informed how you saw any resistance to colonial role. So if you were an Irish nationalist that you saw the British government, you saw the laws and the infrastructure of the British government there, as a colonizing force that needed to be removed. And if you were Republican, you felt you could do this through the use of violence. If you were a unionist, you felt this was a lawful government and that if you wanted to change the structure, the nature of the government, you needed to do it through constitutional means.
And absolutely, everything that flowed from the use of human rights and the language of human rights to how you actually saw your ability to get a job or to live in a particular area, flowed from those lenses. And that's when I talk about a meta-conflict because a meta-conflict is not just a conflict, an actual conflict that's happening on the ground, but it's a conflict about the nature of a conflict. And that rolls into the storytelling, which is that in order for me to be able to speak and talk about what was happening in what they colloquially view as the troubles or called the troubles, I needed to be able to understand those perspectives.
And it wasn't about truth-telling. It was about storytelling because those that were involved in the conflict had a particular perspective that was born of how they've seen the past. And that kind of contemporary past, influenced how they spoke with me, influenced whether they saw the state as representing them or not, adversarial or not. And then, the last thing that got fed into this is the use of human rights because if you were a unionist who believed that the British were lawfully there and it should be considered a lawful government, then the use of human rights was something your adversary did because Republicans and nationalists could draw on human rights because most of the violations against the nationalist population were coming from the state, right?
Unionists saw this and thought, "Well, human rights really is just a tool for nationalists. It doesn't really represent us." Why? Because the violence that they were experiencing were coming from paramilitant groups. And here's the rub, international law is about states. States sign up to it, states are meant to implement it, and states are held accountable. Non-state actors. It's very difficult for human rights groups like Amnesty or Human Rights Watch to talk about this because it's not these, sorry, non-governmental groups that actually engage in this treaty making, right? So human rights became part of this human rights as well as law became the surface over which these political struggles were waged.
And all three of those things, meta-conflict, storytelling and lawfare, and the reason I call it lawfare is that the original concept of lawfare is that you take things off the battlefield, off the streets and you bring them into the courts. But what we started to see happening very quickly is that sites of power, states, or even non-state actors use the constructive ambiguity of law to actually try to shape and form how we understand what that means, right? So human rights became part of that conflict, part of that contestation, and we don't just see it in Northern Ireland, of course, we see it all over where states try to tell us and control, have the hegemonic control over how we understand what these things mean.
And I saw the very roots of it in my time in Northern Ireland as an undergraduate, and it just continued to inform how I look at conflicts, how I approach conflicts, but also how I see law as part, sometimes of the conflict, not as the neutral arbiter.
Hannah Balikci:
In terms of the non-state actors and state components of that, could you briefly explain the framework of either not just international humanitarian law, but how international law sets human rights in a way, that might not be the right way of framing it.
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
Sure.
Hannah Balikci:
The overview, just in case people aren't aware.
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
Sure. So I'll do this very quickly. The main umbrella, if I can put this for international law is public international law. And there are a lot of parts that you pull down that address very specific topics For our purpose today, I'm going to concentrate on three, international human rights law, international humanitarian law and international criminal law. And they govern specific things. We say in law, Lexis specialis, what is the specialized form of law? And the specialized form of law always is about the law that is the most relevant at the time. So human rights law, the international treaty system that makes up human rights law is applicable during times of peace.
So international human rights law is applicable now. States sign up to it and are must, when they sign and ratify it, abide by its principles, en principe, in principle. Internationally humanitarian law, also known as the laws of war, govern what happens when a state goes to war, when a state goes and reaches the level of armed conflict. It becomes the specialized law, the Lexis specialis. It doesn't mean human rights law is silent, but it means this is the law that we hold states accountable for when you're in conflict, right? And it's important because if you think about it, you as a combatant in a conflict, armed conflict situation can kill somebody, right? If they're your adversary, in a situation that is much less the threshold than if it was in a time of peace.
So if you're a police officer, you can take someone's life in a time of peace, but she must do everything before to protect that, right? You try to take them in custody, you try to do everything to mitigate that last resort. If you're in a time of conflict, a right of life lowers, because you're adversarial, that's why the Lexis specialis is important. So humanitarian law or the laws of war govern what happens during war. Criminal law governs what happens when there are violations in this middle section, violations of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide. So once you have these violations and inevitably war is going to have them, what do you do with them?
What do you do for the victims, civilians that may have been mistreated, even prisoners of war that may been tortured? You need a place to bring that. And so, you have this last body called International Criminal Law, which is ostensibly the accountability part of it. Non-governmental actors, which is what you've asked about, in human rights law, it's very difficult to find a place because again, states sign up to it. So we've very often reached a kind of common article in the Geneva Conventions, not to get too specific, but there is a commonality that says you can't torture someone. So these are the kind basic principles that everyone regardless should be held accountable for.
It becomes much harder when you have paramilitant groups operating outside of a conflict situation to hold them accountable, full circle to why it was difficult to talk to some communities in Northern Ireland because if you're Amnesty, they're asking you why aren't you holding the IRA accountable? The mechanisms simply did not exist for that. Humanitarian law, however, has started to develop more and more because if you think about it, most conflicts are non-international armed conflicts. That is, it's a conflict between a state and groups within a state, right? So these groups are not part of a state military. These are non-state actors who for whatever reason, and across the globe, there's a variety of different reasons why people levé en masse, right? Why they take arms.
They don't have the same structure. So what do you do? Does humanitarian law just become silent? And so you have a lot of people, particularly within the International Red Cross, which is kind of the curator for humanitarian law, trying to develop ways to engage non-governmental actors to abide by the laws of war. And so, you are seeing a development of protocols, you're seeing a development of standards, and you're even seeing training of these extra groups under the laws of war so that you still are able to hold them accountable. It's not always successful. You have to have them willing to participate, but at least, to have them familiar with what the laws of war are.
Because if you think about it, if the state captures their combatants, their armed actors, then you want them to be treated the same way as they would if they were actual state-to-state combatants. So that is the second group. The third group, which is international criminal law, again, you're kind of trapped within this idea that you must hold state actors accountable and those that are fighting, but that does not preclude also being able to hold non-governmental actors accountable in that third realm.
Hannah Balikci:
Going off of that, I think the three things you said were metaconflict storytelling, lawfare on how that relates to this framework of law. Could you go into a bit more of that?
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
So it can help maybe on the lawfare part of it?
Hannah Balikci:
Mm-hmm.
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
One of the things ... Without going too much into the weeds of international law, one of the things to note is that a lot of the treaties that will be signed up to by states, whether it's human rights, particularly human rights treaties, but also humanitarian law, have a certain degree of constructive ambiguity, a certain degree of what I call wiggle room, interpretation that can happen. And with that wiggle room, the states and even non-state actors will try to take advantage to their benefit. So if we think about ... if I move it to this question of torture, this is actually a really good topic for illuminating why constructive ambiguity can actually move, and also this principle of evolutiveness.
So you'll have states that will argue that these conventions and treaties were set up a long time ago, right? Many of them were codified in the 50, 60, ratified in the 70s. Times have changed, right? So those who choose to use violence, those who choose to act outside of constitutional norms are now much more prepared to use these very lethal weapons that weren't existing in the past. And so, we need to be able to be responsive. And so you've heard this idea, the ticking bomb, right? So if you have somebody in custody and they have information and by extracting it quickly, you'll be able to save countless lives.
That's the ticking bomb scenario. That invites us into this world where you allow the state to lower the threshold on what is considered an appropriate interrogation method, that may actually be close to torture. So that bit that the state is able to take from a prohibition against torture, which is one of the strongest human rights prohibitions, that can be manipulated to tell you that we have to do this because we're protecting you, right? So the lawfare part of it is that they take a legal prohibition that they know is a prohibition at all times in all cases, and they try to change the narrative around it.
The narrative for why it was maybe at some point a good prohibition, but now we need to change it a little bit because no longer is it about a prohibition against you, it's a prohibition that is being applied to somebody who threatens you. So you take the human out of the person, you call them a terrorist, and then anything goes, right? And so, this is where the contestation is happening, both because the language of law allows it, it's ambiguous. If you're going to get a lot of states to sign up, something has to have a little bit of wiggle room, right? You want to get them to sign the dotted line on these human rights treaties, but it means you need to leave a little finesse.
That finesse is meant to be filled in by judges, by jurists, Opinio Juris, but sometimes it's done by states, and when states take control of it may actually erode its very value. And that is what we're seeing. We've seen it in human rights law. Torture is a case in point, but we've also seen it in humanitarian law, which goes back to this issue that we confront today, is how do we understand the principles that are involved in the laws of war and how do we apply them so that we understand when states are arguing that this is justified, what they're doing, is it justified? And there are lots of parts of the Geneva Conventions, which are the laws of war.
Geneva one through four, and its additional protocols that have been reframed by states who are asking us to understand what their restrictions are differently.
Hannah Balikci:
How flexible do you think the system is in terms of, as you're saying, judges are supposed to be filling in, but states are doing this more so now. Do you find that there's more of a degradation of rights instead of filling in the gap of the wiggle room that you mentioned? How is it supposed to be working? And if it doesn't seem to be working that way, what are the mechanisms that are lacking?
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
So there are some legitimate concerns around human rights, but they're not necessarily the concerns states raise. So there are ... so I'm going to stick with human rights and then I'll go to humanitarian law. There are legitimate concerns and critiques of human rights, very often known as the tainted origins by anti-colonial scholars. I'm one of them, but it isn't to ... it is not to take away the power of human rights, it's actually to make sure that that power is equally vested no matter where you are from. So this kind of north-south divide where the north controls how we understand rights and the south simply needs to be subservient to it, needs to change.
And so, there are a lot of scholars, myself and others that are part of movements that are asking to narrate and fill in those blanks, but to give it strength, not to weaken it. Judges and jurists can either do that and sometimes they're part of their political landscape, right? So you'll find judgments by judges that you might find problematic in the human rights context, and we've seen that also globally. States have a different stake in this game. There's a wonderful quote that says, international law is not a suicide club for states. So states don't like to be restricted by supranational powers. They at all costs want to protect their borders.
And so, their critiques on human rights very often is that it's northern controlled, it's western, it's liberal, all of those things. But it's not because they actually want to make it more universal. They're not anti-colonial scholars trying to fill in the blanks, but they're trying to remove themselves from scrutiny. So there's a push and a pull, and it's a continual contestation between those who actually want to strengthen the human rights regime and those that want to weaken it, and those that want to change it for strengthening reasons and those that want to change it for weakening reasons. So there are advancements that have been made.
But I think when you have states like the United States or France or United Kingdom that are participating in this weakening, it becomes problematic because states only are going to hold their part of the human rights framework in accordance with other states. That's how you get human rights to work. You leverage state to state, but if you have most states now, trying to undermine it, there isn't very much leverage, right? You can have India look at the United States and go, well, you guys do it in Guantanamo Bay. What's the problem with us doing it, right? And that's where the battle lies now, and those that are trying to inform this space, keep trying to push back on that trend.
Hannah Balikci:
That kind of goes into one of the questions that I was going to ask about how states use human rights as a political ... in their arsenal in a way.
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
Mm-hmm.
Hannah Balikci:
That it becomes a discourse between countries where you can use human rights violations in one country as a way to demand change, but then the finger could be pointed back at that country and they have their own host of human rights violations. Could they be considered absolute or are they relative? I mean, I guess in reality, they're relative to cultural construction. How does that influence legitimacy of enforcing them internationally across cultures, religions and identities? And if we are looking at this from this international space?
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
Yeah, it's a great question. So there are parts of human rights law that are non-derogable, and there are parts of human rights law that are absolute, and there are parts that are limited and restricted. The absolute rights are things like the right to life, save for certain circumstances, torture, slavery, and you cannot be convicted of a crime if it wasn't a crime at the time you committed it. Those things are non-movable and at all times in all places, regardless of where you're from or what your religious belief is, those have to be upheld. Increasingly human rights instruments are seeing your right to hold a religion and to practice a religion to be part of that.
But then, there's a whole slew of rights, what I would call the majority of rights, that are limited and restricted, that already have that cultural relativism built into it. And this goes back to why I said sometimes you need that to get states to sign up to it, because you have different systems of law, civil and common law systems. You have different religious beliefs, you have different ways that you look at expression. You have different ways that you look at equality. And so, in this kind of human rights framework, there are lots of ways for states to be able to maintain their individuality, their cultural autonomy.
And then, there are other things that it simply doesn't matter where you're from. This has to hold. That's why the cultural relativist versus universalist debates doesn't really make that much sense to me because a lot of it is already embedded, right? I think there are other parts where that struggle becomes much more evident, but that's where you actually have the narration of what it means. So the convention against the elimination of all forms of discrimination, against women has the most reservations based on the fact that a lot of states that have signed up to it, try to make their own interpretation of what equality means.
Because for some places, equality does not mean equality between a man and a woman, they read it as equality between men and men and women and women. And that's where you see that kind of push and pull happen on cultural relativity.
Hannah Balikci:
How have recent conflicts like those in Palestine and Ukraine challenged existing legal frameworks for human rights protection?
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
So they've challenged in a couple of different ways, and I'm going to pull it back not just to talk about the legal frameworks, but also the way we see and understand armed conflict and the ways in which humanitarian laws applied or not. So I think kind of in the public realm, Ukraine, when it first happened, when Russia quote-unquote first invaded Ukraine, there was a lot of public support and sympathy for Ukrainians, right? And there was a call by the international community for Russia to restrain, for it to protect civilians, for it to have humanitarian corridors. We heard the language of the Geneva Convention amplified by the international community.
With Gaza, it's been much more contested. And for there, I would say it's because in our public realm, there's a contestation that has not stopped much like Northern Ireland, but in a very different way about claims to territory and about the rightfulness of action. And I think the politics of law in that case weigh so, so heavily. So anytime you want to talk about Israel and Palestine, even how you refer to it is a signal. So calling it Palestine and calling it Israel, instead of Judea and Sumeria. Calling the occupied territories. All of this is that kind of messiness.
And this is where law fair is like up front and center, because the arguments that have been waged, and I do mean waged, within the kind of public square, but also the arguments that have been waged among international legal scholars is all around whether or not the actions that are being taken right now in Gaza are somehow justified, right? The issue for me is a lot of the justification comes from whether or not Israel had the right of self-defense. That is one part of humanitarian law, which is Jus Ad Bellum, right? Do you have the right of going to war? Once you however have engaged in conflict, the laws of war, Geneva one through three, are what applies.
It doesn't matter whether October 7 gave you justification or not, that goes silent. And then, there are a list of prescriptions that you should follow. And first and foremost is that you try to distinguish between military and civilian. So when you listen to the arguments of why hospitals are being bombed and why schools are being bombed, you will always hear because there was a Hamas person there. And that of course, can be said for any infrastructure inside Gaza, but what is failed to be pulled through is this principle of proportionality, which is that even if you only have a few fighters, you can't bomb a hospital where you know there are hundreds of people being treated and it may be the only hospital.
My point in engaging this, isn't the rightness or wrongness of what is happening in Gaza, but the ways in which humanitarian law itself has become part of this conflict and it's actually become a victim, I would argue, to this conflict. And it precedes Gaza, Israel and the occupied territories have been one of the conflicts that really has shaped humanitarian law, particularly the laws of occupation, which is Geneva IV. Why? Because you've had over 50 years of occupation and Geneva IV isn't prepared to handle 50 years of occupation. It's meant to assume that if you're on the territory of another party, you leave within the year and it's geared for that.
But if you're around for 50 some odd years, what you start to hear is that this isn't fit for purpose. Think about what I said about human rights law before. Torture was back then. Now, it's a different story. This was codified in the 1940s. Wasn't expecting, it's a Sui Generis situation. You'll hear that term. And so therefore we have to think about this differently. All the while they're thinking about it differently, but not to in some way strengthen, but to weaken. And that is what you have now going on in Gaza. So, it's a political debate. It's not a legal one.
Hannah Balikci:
Right, I think this sort of goes into this question I have of ... how does social media and the prevalence of mass communications change the perspective of what is just versus what is lawful, right? Seeing what we can see now every day, I think there's this sense of what's something may be versus what it isn't in a just sense versus what it may be ... it may be different when you look at it from those legal frameworks you've been talking about.
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
Firstly, I think social media has contributed enormously for understanding what is happening on the ground because there is a lot of contestation of whether or not media has been controlled, right? And whether what we're seeing is filtered. And it is true that when you're looking at TikTok or you're looking at an Insta posting or you're seeing video that's been uploaded, you have to wonder about authenticity, but it does at least fill in the blanks because otherwise, the media that's there can be controlled of what can come out of a conflict, and I'm not just talking about Gaza. So social media in some ways opened up that space.
And it's given us a lot more avenues to access truth telling. I think the question of what is just, versus what is law, is a really interesting one because I think for me, law and the rules and the principles that all players are meant to follow when and if they're followed lead to justice, but very often this doesn't happen and you don't have any justice. And very often, you can go through and you may have a very unjust outcome and justice isn't achieved. So justice for me is something you work towards, and it's not just through the laws, but it's also through civil society participation, for us to be curious about what's happening, to raise our voices.
To look for that justice that may not be available through the mechanisms that are available to the people that are seeking it.
Hannah Balikci:
One thing that I wanted to circle back on, which we were talking about in the sense of how I think the changing of war in a way, even just this idea of the context of stuff that comes through and how we're seeing media, this prevalence of AI that we've seen, things being doctored or whatnot. What are the ethical implications of thinking of drone warfare or AI related warfare that this targeting warfare. I mean, it's in Israel Palestine, but also I think more broadly. As war changes, how do modern technologies contribute to that wiggle room that we have in terms of human rights but also, the legal frameworks? I don't know if that's the-
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
It is, and it's a great question. So there are people that concentrate their entire ... I shouldn't say entire good part of their writing that are legal academics that deal with AI and more. So if you have a drone, and you're right, it's not just been ... the Americans did it in Pakistan, right? So how do you hold what is essential and artificial intelligence accountable? Well, you can because they're not acting outside of the control of an armed force or a state actor, right? And so humanitarian law in those situations can apply, so does human rights law. So it's not outside, but this is again, the arguments that I had originally talked to you about at the beginning about the evolutiveness of human rights.
I had said that there are two things that really help to frame our understanding of human rights and the reason why there's this push and pull. The first is constructive ambiguity, which is enough wiggle rooms, so states will agree to sign. And then, it's up to opinio juris, judges, jurist, court decisions to fill in the blanks. But the second is evolutiveness. So international law understands that when it's codified, it's going to change over time. And so jurisprudentially, so to can enforcing mechanisms, it can look at things differently. It can say what we thought was okay then isn't okay now, or we need to add something more to it.
So treaties very often have additional protocols to deal with these additional problems that arise from technology. And international law is always trying to keep up with these advancements. So I don't think that there are any big gaps. I think there are ways in which you have those that are looking to fill the gaps, continue to work, and those that are looking to lessen the control, continue to try to do so.
Hannah Balikci:
In looking at this concept and just in general, what gives you hope for the ongoing struggle to protect human rights and humanity in the face of armed conflict? Is there a specific thing that you can ... that's like a through line or I don't know if there's ... I know it sometimes it feels like if things are changing all the time, is there something that you see as a ... not that everything is negative, but as something as a positive force moving forward?
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
I think so. I mean, this goes back to this idea of how you speak law to war. There is a wonderful article that was written just at the beginning of 2003 by Joan Fitzpatrick, and I will get to your question in a minute. And she wrote this article called Speaking Law to Power, and there she was focusing on human rights. I think for all of us who are invested in this notion that law can be both a positive and negative, a political player, and not, I believe that there's something to the wish by the international community in general, civilians as well as states, to be part of a system that moves towards states of peace.
It may not be the case for all actors, but I think for the most part, a choice between being in war and being in peace, most people would choose peace, but there has to be structures in place that help us get there and show that there's an accountability that has a rule of law quality to it, to which everybody is held accountable. And I think that the international human rights system, as well as humanitarian law was set up to move towards this kind of utopia. We may never get there, but we keep moving towards it. And I've seen enough change and enough victims and interviewed enough victims in my life to know that they believe this to be their refuge.
And certainly human rights law, both those that are enforced by courts and in other enforcing mechanisms have made changes. We have seen that, right? If we look at the death penalty, we have seen more and more states be prohibitionist states for the death penalty. That was a big push that happened under the umbrella of human rights law. So there are victories to be able to share with you, but there's also challenges. But I do believe in the promise of it, and I think that that's what we keep reaching towards. And I also think the international community more and more is willing at least to, and by international community, I'm not talking about states, to stand up to recognize that there are certain things that are happening globally and this current political landscape that has to be addressed.
I think the encampments on campuses is a way of showing that, right? It's an awakening and whether or not it's fully understood what's happening amongst the students, it is a moment which I feel a great deal of hope that the students of this generation believe in something that is better than where we're at at the moment, and also, want to challenge authority that seem to not want to challenge those structures that bring about inequality and injustice, and that gives me a great deal of hope.
Hannah Balikci:
That's great. Thank you. I guess I keep saying I want to circle back on different things, but one of the things that I wanted to just elaborate a bit on was this idea of storytelling. I think you talked about interviewing people who experienced conflict. The value of a story I think gets across much more than what we see just through numbers. And I was wondering if you have an example either of a story or what I'm really thinking of is we think of many times where stories are used for negative outcomes, right? You think of this ... I guess I'm thinking of a specific time where you can use negative stories to say we need to have something to combat bad things, but do you also have examples of good stories that can help?
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
So I think I probably have to redefine storytelling because it's something different I think, than what you're thinking of, at least in an academic term. I understand what you mean by talking about individual victimization or individual stories of hope, right? Storytelling for an academic is really the ways in which you will understand as an ethnographer that people will present a situation to you that is through their lens and their lens may for you not be truth-telling, but it's how they're informed. Another way of looking at it is we sometimes call the Rashomon effect the Kurosawa movie where you have one incident in five different witnesses and you see it through each of their lens.
Their lens is informed by their history, so they see something very different than the person next to them, that is storytelling, and that's where you pick it up. The point I think I can draw back from you is in interviewing people, as I've done ... I have two hats, right? I'm an academic, but I've worked a lot with Amnesty International on missions, and there you interview victim after victim after victim. And for the most part, the stories they tell you and the stories that you then as a human rights advocate wish to share for the world will be those stories that are going to be very depressing. Why? Because it's going to get civil society in a move much more than the stats will, right?
Much more than an academic article, but what I have seen come from this is the hope, and this goes back a little bit to what I just said before, they have a hope that the human rights framework will assist them in this, because they feel where they're being violated very often by the state, there is no justice. There is no recourse. And so they have a great deal of hope that once that's lifted up outside, there will be something there that will hear their victimization and something that will be there to redress it. And that's the hope. It's a hope through very difficult times for them, but they do have that hope and they continue to, even though they're knocked back time and time and time again.
And so for me, the reason even with all of my critiques of the human rights frameworks that I stay in it is because they do, and they really do believe in something better.
Hannah Balikci:
This year's Pearson Global Forum is on negotiations and agreement, which you are presenting at in October. How do you see this concept that we've been speaking to fitting into the theme of negotiations and agreement?
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
It's the precursor, I suppose, to that. I think the first thing that I would say is that all of what I've spoken about ... today about humanitarian law, about human rights law, has led and is informed by contestation, and there is a politicization of law that happens. And I think that when you get to the negotiation table, there are going to be leveraging of accountability questions, right? So you'll have states that will argue that there has been violations on the part of the other. You'll have states that'll argue that they have actually upheld their commitment to either human rights or humanitarian law.
And I think the acceptance is that they're going to come with very different perspectives because the stories that they're telling about why they went to war or why they abused particular rights are going to be very different across the table. And I think for negotiations, there's an acceptance that there may not be a point of departure that they accept together as long as at the end, there's going to be systems of accountability that take both perspectives into account. And I think that those are where you actually have the most successful outcomes. The other thing that I would say is that we often think of negotiations and outcomes of negotiations as being forms of reconciliation.
That in some way there's an acceptance and some way there's a way of accepting the same truth and moving forward. And none of the conflicts that I have ever studied, does that happen. Very often it is an agreement to have an absence of conflict and the presence of peace, that's the motivating force and to put a set of legal structures around which both parties to the conflict feel that they're protected. So in Northern Ireland, it was putting a consociational agreement around the final negotiations, which allowed for representation by both sets of actors, both nationalists and unionists. In Israel and the occupied territories when this conflict is over, there is going to have to be a move forward from Oslo.
A move forward in negotiations. There's no way out of this, but there has to be a set of legal frameworks that allows both parties to feel that they're going to be protected as they move forward. So I think law has a role to play, but it's not necessarily in the understanding of the common acceptance of the underpinnings of the conflict or who was the victims and who were the victimizers. It's making sure that when they leave that to get to their final negotiations, that they both sets however many parties to the conflict feel that they're protected.
Hannah Balikci:
I think that goes back to this idea of justice, that if people feel the sense of justice then ... or that there's a path to justice that I can continue forward.
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
And this is where peace agreements. Last thing I will say, this is where peace agreements are super important. So I know I've gone back to Northern Ireland a lot, but I am going to do it because it has held, it's one of those conflicts in which we haven't gone back to the conflict. And if you read the Belfast agreement and the preamble, it is riddled with constructively ambiguous language. Basically it says everyone has a right to these claims, if you boil it down, both unionists and nationalists are both peoples, they both have claims to territory. It is so ambiguous that everyone walked away feeling not only were they heard in their own historical trajectory, but they're going to be protected moving forward.
Now, there's been bumps, but it was brilliantly done because no one accepted or was made to be the victim victimizer in this peace agreement. So peace a agreements are really important and moving processes forward as long as they reach a final agreement that both parties can sign and feel comfortable with, and then work towards a completely overt, a complete end of conflict.
Hannah Balikci:
This idea of ambiguity kind of works in both ways, right? Where you have the wiggle room, but then it also allows for people to feel heard in both ways, I guess.
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
Yes, exactly and in peace agreements, that's super important.
Hannah Balikci:
I think one question that we like to ask all of our guests is if there was one paper or book, a knowledge material that you think is important for any person studying public policy to read or to be familiarized with, what would you select?
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
There are a couple of ... Maybe I can frame it this way because international law is so big and so many people have written about it. I will give a couple of authors that I think are really important to read, both anti-colonial scholars that talk about human rights in a way that allows us to reframe and capture political philosophers, legal philosophers. So Paul Kahn wrote a piece I assigned to my students in Militant Democracy that's on torture, and it is one of the most brilliant pieces to have us understand how we can go from torture being seen as barbarian and prohibitive to how we are now accepting it. And by we, I mean we, in this room, right?
Not us personally, but civil society. So that would be one author that I would say, and in this particular piece, to read. The other are scholars like Ratna Kapur who is at Queen Mary University, also University Delhi, who's written about human rights and those frameworks that I had spoken about, the anti-colonial frameworks. But again, writing about it not to tear it down without building it up and some very specific way. And those two, I guess I would leave because the works on Northern Ireland and the works on Israel and the occupied territory are vast, and there's plenty out there. I would say just read both of the storytellings on those conflicts, but those were the two authors that I would highly recommend people read.
Hannah Balikci:
Great, thank you. There's always a thing where I wish I had asked. I'll talk about something afterwards or I think the thing that I'm trying to reckon with is I guess this idea of storytelling and truth in terms of different sides. And you talked about the peace agreements and how people can come away not feeling like a victim, but is there ever a case or just in general, where doing research, you also are doing research on memory wars, which I think is something else, that's a whole other category, but how people think about conflict and the ways that they perceive conflict, and even just what we talked about with Israel-Palestine of saying if there is a Hamas person there or there's a Hamas member there that's justifiable in terms of conflict.
How do you either break apart the storytelling or get people to ... in terms of looking at humanitarian, not just humanitarian rights, but human rights and seeing the humanity of people on both sides and that storytelling coming across the lanes to each side of the conflict. I don't know if I'm explaining myself-
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
You are, and I would say that I would pull it apart in this way. I do understand your question. So there's an idea of how you want to reach peace and how much you want to sacrifice justice to get there. I think you can reach a settlement that may be an unsettled peace or an uneasy peace and not have justice. Law requires that there is a sense of empirical fact that you can get to, and the storytelling then has to be moved away to say, if this person was killed by what means were they killed? And if you're talking about a human rights situation, were all measures taken to make sure that that was the last resort, right? There are a set of facts that you can look at that will inform whether that was done or not.
The storytelling is different. This is how we understand why state security may have killed paramilitants in Northern Ireland, and it may be a backdrop that they knew at some point they were going to do something, so they killed them in advance. That's the storytelling. But law says regardless of who you think this person is, you needed to have arrested him or her. In conflict, we can look at whether or not it's difficult. I've been in worse situations where distinction and proportionality are very hard to be able to measure, but you are able to look at things like, was there a corridor civilian corridor to allow people to escape in which you had a ceasefire in place at this time.
There are some empiricisms that can be looked at, that are required for you to be able to determine whether or not these legal principles were upheld or they weren't, right? Whether or not there are perpetrators that are guilty or not, that you hold accountable in this last branch I talked to you about. There may be sacrificing you do on that because you think if you were to ever try to do that, then you would start in another cycle of conflict. And there are plenty of places in the world where peace agreements were reached and amnesties were given. And I know Louise Melander was here recently, and she is kind of the guru on Amnesties.
And she will talk about this, right? How much do you allow states and non-state actors to be forgiven and not held accountable in the interest of peace? So sometimes reaching that last point of peace agreements and the absence of conflict means that for the parties to the conflict, they give up their ability to actually hold perpetrators accountable. And we've seen this through truth commissions. There are ways in which there are systems to set up where the victim might get some sort of satisfaction by recognition of truth, the perpetrator speaks with him, but that perpetrator is never tried and convicted in a court of law. And so sometimes, as I said, moving towards peace means that there isn't justice and they're not always aligned.
Hannah Balikci:
The last question that I think I'll ask you today, what's something that you wish we would've asked you?
Kathleen Cavanaugh:
I think ... and I kind of touched upon it, is student activism. Because last year was an extraordinary year, an extraordinary year that I've never seen before in all my years of teaching. And there are a variety of different kind of rights-based discourse that have come from what's happened, right? Freedom of expression, academic freedom. The Gaza War has, in my mind, framed it, but there's been a lot of content to it that I think is the hopeful part because I think students are engaged in processes and arguments and law and human rights and humanitarian law in a way I've never seen before. I think it gives me hope rather than fear about what's going to happen in the fall.
And yeah, it's something that when you asked what gives me hope, it's that. And I think that the debates around freedom of expression and academic freedom will continue. But I think the most important thing to note is that in an academic space, in a university space, being able to raise questions and engage in discourse that's difficult is part of what we're here for. And my hope is that in a very safe environment, we'll be able to continue to do that throughout next year and for years to come. It may not be on one topic, but that this kind of igniting of this space to me was very exciting last year. Notwithstanding, I know the difficulties that it caused some, it was quite ... Yeah, it gave me hope.
Hannah Balikci:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Professor Kathleen Cavanaugh. This episode was produced and edited by Hannah Balikci and Nishita Karun. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit their website at thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram @pearsoninst. Inst is spelled I-N-S-T. Thank you. If you found this episode interesting, we invite you to join us for the 2024 Pearson Global Forum, Negotiations and Agreement.
Join us on Friday, October 18th to hear from global experts as they discuss topics like the role of women in negotiations, speaking law to war, and other interesting panels around the theme of negotiations and agreement. This in-person and virtual event is free and open to all. You can find more information at thepearsonglobalforum.org.
Root of Conflict
08.08.24
Amnesties, Law, and Peace | Louise Mallinder
Hannah Balikci:
Hi, this is Hannah and you are listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You are listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
How is law understood and used by different actors during political transitions to achieve peace? In this episode, we speak with Professor Louise Mallinder, a professor in the school of law at Queen's University Belfast, and faculty affiliate of the Pearson Institute. She has a longstanding and internationally recognized expertise in amnesty laws through extensive writing and the creation of the Amnesties, Conflict and Peace database. She works as part of the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, led by the University of Edinburgh and funded by the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office. Professor Mallinder's teaching focuses on international human rights law, human rights practice, constitutional law, and transitional justice. We discuss how amnesties can be granted without compromising justice, the intersection of law with other disciplines in academia, and Professor Mallinder's perspectives at large on the field of transitional justice.
Natalia Zorrilla Ramos:
Hi, I am Natalia Zorrilla. I'm first year masters in public policy student and also a Pearson fellow, and happy to be here.
Louise Mallinder:
Hi, I'm Louise Mallinder. I'm professor of law from Queen's University in Belfast, and this year I'm a deposing professor at the University of Chicago and a faculty affiliate at the Pearson Institute.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
Hi, I'm Isabella Nascimento. I'm first year master of public policy student here at the University of Chicago, and also a Pearson fellow.
Hannah Balikci:
And I'm Hannah Balikci. I'm a second year MPP student here at Harris, a Pearson fellow and the producer of Root of Conflict for this year. So thank you for being in studio with us, Professor Mallinder.
Louise Mallinder:
Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm delighted to be on Root of Conflict.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
Okay, so I will start with an introduction here. I would like first, for you to introduce yourself and your work.
Louise Mallinder:
Okay. So I live and work in Northern Ireland in Belfast, which is the capital of Northern Ireland. And as I'm sure many of your listeners know, Northern Ireland is a devolved region of the United Kingdom, but it's a place where its constitutional status is contested. There is a proportion of the population who identify as British and would like Northern Ireland to be part of the United Kingdom, and there's a proportion of the population who identify as Irish and would like Northern Ireland to be reunited with the rest of the island of Ireland. This grievance was one of the central factors in a 30-year armed conflict in Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1998, which in itself was one phase of violence in a much longer history. Since 1998, Northern Ireland has had a successful peace process. There hasn't been a return to armed conflict. There's still a lot of work to be done, but nonetheless, the progress has been really significant.
And I live and work in that space, and so I think that to a large degree, influences what I do. So I work as a law professor, but I work in the field of transitional justice, which is an area of research and practice that borrows from different bits of international law. International human humanitarian law, international human rights law, international criminal law, but also looks at how those legal regimes play out in very challenging political environments and at times where the law itself is undergoing reform and changing. So I think working in Northern Ireland, working in a space where there's a density of people in academia and in civil society who have huge expertise in this and have it as a lived experience, I think really animates how I think about many of the challenges of transitional justice.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
Thank you very much. Now a follow-up question, how has your research, this means interests, areas, or disciplines evolved over time?
Louise Mallinder:
That's a great question. I think I started out at university by studying a degree in economic and social history and politics. At that point, I hadn't been grown up in Northern Ireland, I'd moved there and I was interested in learning more about the place I was in. And so I found myself drawn to modules in Irish history, but also modules in deeply divided societies and particularly the Middle Eastern politics. And so as part of my undergraduate studies, I did my dissertation on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and I did voluntary work in the US Bank for a period of time, so I was writing about the settlements. And so I think that brought me into trying to understand much more about what happens in conflict spaces. And so then I moved into law, thinking law had practical tools for how we grapple with some of these dilemmas, that's why I did a master's in human rights law and then a PhD in law. And I think that background shapes the type of legal questions I'm interested in and the way I approach law.
So I tend to think of law from an interdisciplinary perspective. Now I'm a law professor, but I work in an interdisciplinary institute. And I want to understand ideas about how law intersects with peace, thinking about it perhaps how in transitions from conflict to peace, law shapes the types of negotiations that are had, the types of bargains that are reached, and how lawyers or legal institutions acting in those processes can shape particular outcomes. I'm also interested in how understandings of law shapes people's visions of what the piece should look like, both while the conflict is ongoing and afterwards. I'm also interested in how law shapes how people imagine what justice looks like, and what sort of harms they see and don't see during conflict periods. And in particular how law can work to both reveal or conceal different types of human rights violations that happened in the past.
And so these are the types of questions that gradually from my different degrees and then into my academic life, I've been exploring in different projects. So some of them have involved looking at particular transitional justice mechanisms like amnesty laws in different countries around the world. Some of them have involved looking at different cohorts of transitional justice actors. In recent years, I worked in a project about the role of lawyers as political actors in different transitional societies. I'm also interested in international law as well, broadly. So how these norms are formed at the international level and trickled down into different transitional states.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
So could you please define amnesties for those who are not familiar with?
Louise Mallinder:
Sure. And it's a great question because amnesties are a deeply politically loaded term, and often in contexts, you see the word amnesty being used to describe different types of measures that people are uncomfortable with or resistant to. And I think what's complicated even further is there's no international definition of what an amnesty is, and the domestic legal systems of different countries have different approaches to how they apply amnesties or how they use that term. But in my research, I tend to think of it as measures that apply before somebody is convicted and they operate generally to prevent criminal investigations, prosecutions and convictions. So that's not to say that crimes can't be investigated by truth commissions or by other mechanisms, but an amnesty blocks individual criminal responsibility.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
And now, could you give us one example of a conflict that illustrates some of the concepts can be the concept of amnesty, of your work in academia?
Louise Mallinder:
Sure. Illustrates the concept how? Just different examples of how amnesties have been used or why, or?
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
Yeah, yeah. Or a conflict that this has been a debate on.
Louise Mallinder:
Well, to be honest, there are debates in most conflicts around the world. I mean, in my database... I created a database of all the amnesties I could find around the world since 1945, and I've published a subset of that, that relates to conflict settings. And I found that out of the hundreds of amnesties I've identified, about 75% of them since 1990, have been in response to conflict. When I tried to track that against states in the world that have had armed conflicts, I found that over 70% of countries that have had armed conflict have used amnesties in some form during their transition from conflict to peace. And about half of those countries have used amnesties for serious international crimes or human rights violations. And so they're a very prevalent tool in response to conflict situations.
But I think what always endlessly fascinating for me is thinking about how differently they're used in different places, perhaps because of different norms and understandings around justice, different political balances of power at the time of transition, and also the backdrop of the nature of the violations and other justice responses that have been achieved. And so I think what influences me is that a lot of the literature on amnesties, I think has been heavily influenced by the practice of amnesty laws in South America. Some of those are conflict settings. Some of them are more commonly understood as transitions from dictatorship.
But by and large, in the 70s, 80s, early 1990s, in that part of the world where amnesties were used, they were granted very broadly to cover all serious human rights violations, and they tended to be unconditional. By which I mean if you were a perpetrator of serious human rights violations, an amnesty would be declared, you would just benefit from it and you'd have to make no effort to contribute to peace, democracy, or addressing victims' rights. So they're deeply problematic amnesty laws, and I think they still shape some of the universal understandings of amnesties and their relationship with law.
But I think what's been interesting is that over a number of years we've seen particularly influenced by the South African experience of amnesty and truth, that amnesties can quite often be conditioned on trying to contribute to peace and reconciliation and victim's rights. So the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the best known example of this. And in this context, after the end of the apartheid regime, the new government coming in set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And in this legislation, it provided that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had the power to grant amnesty for political offenses, with political offenses being understood as including serious human rights violations.
But this was not an unconditional amnesty. So if people wanted to avail themselves of this, they had to apply, there was a formal written application process. And then many of them had to come in and give testimony for the most serious human rights violations, this was televised testimony and public hearings. And victims could take part in those hearings, they could have legal representation, they could ask questions, and they could make statements about how these violations had impacted upon them. And this was meant to contribute to not just helping your victims be able to get some of the answers they need in their individual cases, but building a clearer picture of the causes and consequences of the violence that happened during the apartheid regime. And so that's very different from a completely unconditional amnesty that completely closes the door in the past.
So there are a lot of different measures that we see. And I think today, roughly equal numbers of amnesty laws introduced during or after a conflict tend to cover serious human rights violations, and many of those are conditional in different ways, either on people contributing to security through disarmament, demobilization, non-recidivism, or through contributing in different ways to addressing victims' needs to truth and reparations.
Natalia Zorrilla Ramos:
Yeah, thank you. I think that was a great overview of your work in general terms. But how do you define the conditions under which amnesties can be granted in post-conflict settings without compromising justice?
Louise Mallinder:
That's a difficult question, and I think what I'm trying to do in my current research is investigate that more. So I think there are different positions we see today in statements about international law and in academic literature about when amnesties can be used and how far law restricts their use. So the United Nations, for example, for a long time has said there can be no amnesties for international crimes and serious human rights violations. It's written into resolutions from the UN General Assembly and Security Council, as well as a number of UN policy reports. And that position has been influential and has been echoed in the case law of some international courts. But I think what's been interesting for me is, I see that not all courts agree with that.
So in particular, in 2020, the appeals chamber of the International Criminal Court in the Gaddafi case, said international law on the status of amnesties is still in the developmental stage. So they're saying it's still unsettled. The Inter-American Commission on Human and People's Rights has said, well, there is a norm prohibiting amnesties for serious crimes, but it only applies to unconditional amnesties. So for them, they're like, "Conditional amnesties are permissible even for serious violations, it's just unconditional ones that are not." Other cases have pointed to the possibility that amnesties introduced at the time of peace negotiations need to have more flexibility around them, recognizing the difficult circumstances that those decisions are taken in. And so what I'm finding is actually, there isn't a clear answer at the moment about where amnesties can be used or what sort of restrictions there are on states. And that's what I'm trying to research.
And I think the reason we see these differences in divergences and different judicial opinions is because they're using different methodologies to identify if these legal rules exist. The key difference that you see there is how much weight they attach to what states are actually doing. So some courts tend to look at written texts, they will look at soft flow standards, principles and guidelines developed by the United Nations or UN General Assembly resolutions. They will look at treaties that require prosecutions of serious violations and infer from those that if an amnesty stops prosecutions and it must be impermissible. But what they don't do is look at what states are actually doing. And that matters because traditional perspectives to how we understand customary international law, which is one of the sources of law or how we interpret international treaties, means that state practice should be one way of thinking about that.
And so while all the other sources that courts are looking at are important and valuable, I think they should be looked at alongside today practice, but that's been missing from a lot of the jurisprudence at the moment. So that's what I'm trying to investigate at the moment, using my database and other empirical data that's out there. I think what I'm finding is that the state practice is quite mixed. The work is still emerging, I'm still halfway through writing the book. But I think it's hard to say there's a widespread state practice in terms of rejecting amnesties for international crimes.
Natalia Zorrilla Ramos:
Well, you mentioned how different international courts interpret the law, and I want to talk specifically about the ICC, the International Criminal Court. It has faced criticism from primarily prosecuting cases in Africa since its establishment with the adoption of the Rome Statute in 1998. In your opinion, what steps should the ICC take to broaden its prosecutorial reach in other regions of the world?
Louise Mallinder:
Okay, thank you very much. So I think the first thing to bear in mind when we think about the court, where the court exercises its jurisdiction is that there are constraints in the Rome Statute. Firstly, the court can only exercise jurisdiction over states that have ratified the Rome Statute or have issued a declaration to do so, or over places where the UN Security Council authorizes them to do jurisdiction. So we have those sort of territorial constraints. So there are parts to the world, including quite powerful states where the ICC does not have any jurisdictional reach at the moment. Then after we think about those contexts, there's also different triggers for cases coming before the court. So there needs to be a state referral or UN Security Council resolution, or the prosecutor needs to exercise their own initiative to investigate somewhere.
So those place some substantial constraints about where the court can look. I mean, it has a lot of jurisdiction across African countries because African countries have ratified their own statute, perhaps more than countries in other parts of the world, particularly in Asia. So I think that's one reality that we're seeing differences. And many of the African cases came before the court because those countries self-referred them. And I think there are... Or because the security council referred them as well, is another reason why some of those cases came before the court. But I think the ICC in recent years has tried to diversify its jurisdiction. So if you look at the cases where it has preliminary examinations now or open investigations, there are a number of contexts in Asia, in South America where it is actively investigating crimes. There are problems with how that's progressing. It's track record of investigating crimes against more powerful countries like the UK or the US, perhaps raises some questions.
I think at the moment, there are a lot of comparisons being drawn to how the court has responded to the situation in Ukraine and the situation in Palestine and Gaza, but that's an evolving context, and I think there are differences between the court being able to get into Ukrainian territory and work with the cooperation of the state to investigate and document the human rights violations and what's happening in Gaza, where the ICC investigators can't get in and investigate at the moment. So I think there are differences in challenges, but I think the court is trying to broaden its jurisdictional reach.
I think with the question of amnesties though, it's different issues. I think there have been a number where African countries have pushed back against the ICC at different points over the last decade or decade and a half. There's been particular issues that have animated that. Head of state immunity is one key issue that I think has been a fault line between them, but also African Union member states have talked about the risk of the ICC intervening in active peace process situations, and thinking they should hold off a little bit or think about how their interventions might influence the outcomes of peace or make peace more difficult to achieve.
That was something that was particularly discussed in relation to the ICC's investigation in Uganda during the Juba Peace Talks in 2006 to 2008. There an amnesty law had been introduced in 2000. It was an open-ended amnesty, it was being renewed each year, so it was still active, and that was designed to encourage rebel groups from the Lord's Resistance Army, and a number of other rebel groups that are active in Uganda, to surrender and disarm.
While the peace talks were happening, victims groups in Uganda who had lobbied the Ugandan government to introduce the amnesty law started lobbying the court to say, we don't want you to... We want to keep the amnesty process, we don't want the court to interrupt this. I mean, part of that I think, was animated by their desire for peace. They wanted to bring the conflict to an end. I think it was also a product of the fact that many of the people who'd fought in the LRA had been forcibly recruited, and many of them had been forcibly recruited as children and made to commit awful atrocities, and I think those communities in recognition of it, were wanting to have those people who'd been forcibly recruited returned home, and to enable them to reintegrate.
But I think also running through a lot of those discussions was a sense that the communities in Northern Uganda had their own understandings of justice that weren't criminal justice. They had traditional rituals to do with repairing harms, they were committed to do with reintegrating people when they come back. And they felt that those mechanisms could be applied to the crimes that have been committed during the conflict in ways that would help reintegrate the offenders, and help bring a sense of justice to the affected communities. And so, they were asking, could we use these forms of justice instead of criminal justice that might preclude it or might prevent people coming forwards and surrendering? At that point, the court didn't give too much weight for those situations. I mean, that's something they could consider more.
I mean, I've been interested in recent years that in a very, very different context in Colombia there, the International Criminal Court was perhaps a bit more cautious when it came to disrupting the peace negotiations that we were going on between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla group, leading up to the peace agreement in 2015, 2016. And there, while there's not a traditional indigenous form of justice, what has been proposed is kind of a tiered approach that allows for some forms of criminal prosecutions, but allows for prosecutorial strategies that recognize that some offenders will be prosecuted and some will not, given the scale of the atrocities, and also recognizes that where people are prosecuted and convicted, there's scope for leniency in how they're punished. So there's alternative sanctions, there's reduced sentences, and the International Criminal Court has approved those measures, has said it's closed its involvement in that site, saying that they could be in compliance with their own statute.
Natalia Zorrilla Ramos:
Thank you. I think you brought a really important point about the international system and how it actually needs states to cooperate in order to function well. So based on your research, what are key lessons or recommendations you would offer to countries undergoing political transitions and considering amnesties?
Louise Mallinder:
Yeah. Sorry, I'm just thinking at the moment I live in Northern Ireland, and we spent ages trying to give lessons to the British government over how to deal with some of these issues, and they have gone in the opposite direction and have introduced what is largely quite a broad amnesty for serious offenses committed during the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland. It's notionally conditional, but not in much of a substantive sense, and certainly there's no guarantee that any information that's provided under that scheme will filter its way back to victims or to Northern Irish society. So it's a problematic form of conditionality. So I guess the first thing I would say is don't look at what Northern Ireland's doing right now. This instance, the UK is not a good model to draw upon.
I think that when states are approaching this, I think they should look... As a lawyer, I guess law is kind of where I started thinking about it. And thinking about the range of human rights obligations that they have under different treaties and international humanitarian law as well. And looking at those things holistically and recognizing that all of those conventions create obligations for states to prevent further violations, which is connected to the right to peace, so that is part of the conversation, and that the states have duties to investigate to repair harm. And these things can all be understood in different ways and adapted to different contexts.
And so while I think international law provides a framework that should think about what are our obligations and how do we balance them against each other, harmonize these different duties in ways that tries to be constructive in terms of delivering peace, I think also recognizing that there is scope within that for thinking creatively about what's feasible within those countries and what ideas of justice really deliver for people on the ground, in a way that's feasible at the time of the transition. So I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all approach.
And I think generally in my work, when I go to different societies and they ask me about what form of amnesty they should have or not have, I tend to answer by asking them different types of questions. Well, what is it you want to achieve? Is this about trying to get rebels to disarm? Is this about trying to get answers about the past? Is this about trying to bring different communities together? Whether an amnesty is needed at all, is a particular question [inaudible 00:25:48]. So I think there's lots of things to think through, and it's rarely a choice between an amnesty or not an amnesty, but it can be about, well, what is the capacity of the state to deliver criminal justice? How much does that resonate with the community and how do we fit that alongside the other needs that we have to achieve at this point?
Hannah Balikci:
I think that gives a good transition into talking about the conflict and peace database that you've alluded to that you're building. I have two questions. One is, could you explain the main objectives of the database and how it's structured to facilitate research and policymaking? And then maybe just building off of the last point before you go into that, is there an amnesty or transitional justice program or process that you found has been particularly effective, and could you go through what the main points of that were? And again, I understand the localization of every amnesty and traditional justice process, but was there one that you considered a success or? They're all obviously in each context, but one that you think is a good example to point out to people?
Louise Mallinder:
Okay. So I guess on that, it's a difficult question because amnesties, I think are introduced for a number of different goals. Actually coincidentally, this weekend for a conference paper I'm doing next month, I started looking through amnesty laws, picking out how those laws communicate their own objectives, what they say they're trying to achieve. And many of them talk about peace, obviously. Many of them mention reconciliation and it's understood in different ways,, like national unity or forgetting. Many of them talk about development, talk about economic reconstruction, talk about addressing inequalities, and those are quite different objectives for an amnesty process than we often see in the literature. Some of them also talk about the goal of the amnesty being to encourage competence, to disarm and reintegrate.
And so that speaks to me about these are all quite different measures. If you want to understand how successful an amnesty is in encouraging rebels to surrender and reintegrate into society, well, there might be ways of tracking that. Usually there's some sort of administrative functions that are involved in overseeing those processes, and you can have numbers and you can have a think about how this actually worked. I think in practice there's a lot of amnesties that do that. Sometimes the effectiveness is challenged by slow implementation by the state.
So they'll say, yes, we are going to... We'll get an amnesty. But also, we're going to provide you with certain measures of security or certain support to reintegrate yourself into society. And those other support structures come later or don't come at all, and those promises aren't met. And sometimes that dissuades the rest of the competence from coming forwards. And so the success of the amnesty may not be about the idea of the amnesty, but it can be about how it was implemented afterwards. Where amnesties have goals to achieve peace, the success of that might depend on how you understand peace. I think a lot of scholars, a lot of the literature that's out there is trying to measure the impact of amnesties and conflict occurrence. And so there are numbers of international relations scholars who published work on that in the last few years.
Those studies are really interesting. They'll kind of think about amnesties in slightly different ways and think about peace slightly different ways, and they've come up with slightly different results. Many of them say that an amnesty introduced as part of a peace agreement does have a positive outcome in peace. So that's one measure. Does the main armed conflict occur? And you could measure that and say, well, actually, there's quite a lot of cases around the world where an amnesty was part of a successful transition to a peaceful landscape. Last week I was teaching my students about Sierra Leone, and that's a context where there was a peace agreement in 1999 where there was a broad amnesty enacted within that agreement and a truth commission. A couple of years later, the Sierra Leonean government asked the United Nations to help them set up a hybrid court, the Special Court of Sierra Leone, to try the leaders of the main armed groups that have fought in that conflict. So that court indicted 13 individuals and convicted nine of them.
But the thousands of other offenders in Sierra Leone who had committed very serious violations, benefited from the amnesty scheme. It was part of the terms and conditions of the disarmament and demobilization program, that they would get amnesty as part of that. And I think what's really striking for me is that at the time of that peace agreement, Sierra Leone had profound challenges. It had a very weak stage, there was little confidence in public institutions. It had very little financial resources to draw upon. They were heavily indebted as a nation. The rebel groups are quite powerful within the society, and the scale of the violence that had happened is jaw-dropping. It was really, really, really brutal crimes committed against civilians.
But Sierra Leone is now the 47th most peaceful country in the world, third most peaceful country in Africa. And so whether that is to do with the amnesty or to do with the successful demobilization and reintegration or to do with the truth commission or the Special Court of Sierra Leone, often it's a combination of all of these things that can make a big difference. And political will, I think is a big part of it in many of these societies. So I think what the outcomes of an amnesty are, what a successful amnesty is, depends on what you're thinking of, what the amnesty is intended to achieve.
Hannah Balikci:
Got it. Yeah, that's very helpful. I think, going off of some things that you've already built upon in this interview, could you explain the main objectives of then creating the conflict and peace database, what you're tracking, how it's structured to facilitate your research and research of others and policymaking that comes from looking at these commissions?
Louise Mallinder:
Sure. Initially it began during my master's dissertation, because that's when I started looking at amnesty laws. The year between my undergraduate and postgraduate studies, I worked as an editorial and research assistant in Brussels, in Belgium, and my job partially involved working on an access database, so I became familiar with these tools as ways of organizing data. Then I came back to Northern Ireland and I started working on amnesties for my master's dissertation. And I was reading all these different examples of amnesties in the literature and needed some way to organize my own thoughts. So it started out as quite an elaborate table in a Word document. And then as it got bigger, I didn't expect to find as many amnesties as I did. At the end of my master's thesis, I can't remember exactly, but I probably had less than 100 and I was like, "That's loads." That must be nearly all of them. But then I ended up doing my PhD on that, and the project started getting bigger and more complicated. And so then I had to teach myself how to create an access database.
And by the end of my thesis, I think I had over 500 amnesties introduced in that period, so it really spiraled beyond what I expected. But what I was doing deliberately trying to systematically capture those things was a couple of things. And it was always intended to be public at the end of that research. It took me a while to get it online, but I always kind of wanted to put it out there. And I think the reasons were, because as I mentioned a little while ago, I think much of our understandings of amnesty laws are shaped by the experiences in South America, and then after that, the experiences in South Africa. But they are kind of two very, very different types of amnesties, but they're not representative of all the different diverse forms of amnesty that are used around the world. And so part of what I was trying to do, is trying to expose all those differences and think about the different design choices that are available to states, and to get people to start thinking about those different measures.
And I think too, also as a lawyer, what I wanted to try and understand was patterns and how states are doing this. And the reason is that international law comes from either state signing up to international treaties or it comes from states engaging in particular practices because they think they have a legal obligation to do so, that's customary international law. And the case law of the International Court of Justice says for something to be a rule of a customary international law, there needs to be a widespread state practice engaging in certain behaviors. And so using my database gave me a way to count to that, to track it, to be able to think about how this is evolving over time, whether international law allows for regional customers to exist alongside global ones? And so I could look at, oh, well, what's different about amnesties in South America compared to other parts of the world? Or are there differences around how different regimes are using amnesties? And so I could use the data to try and track all those differences and then use that to talk about what the status of international law is.
Hannah Balikci:
Great, thank you. I think you've said this before, but the idea of an international norm for amnesties, and if so, are they binding, right? If there's a norm, do the states actually stick to them? How has the database been used? Do you have any information on how it's been used either through research or by policymakers or international bodies, in shaping these responses to ongoing conflicts? Do you think there's a binding norm or is it still forming? I know different places have said different things in terms of the norms for amnesties.
Louise Mallinder:
Well, I'm only partway through the book that I'm investigating. So I don't know yet where I'm finally going to end up on that. The work that informs the database that I have written up in various ways, has been used quite widely. So I haven't looked for a while, to kind of track how people are using it, but I know when I looked before, comments I've made about the use of amnesties have their frequency, where they're used most often, have found their ways into judgments of some of the international courts or submissions to them from different actors. It's been used by the Grand Chamber, the European Court of Human Rights, and they were talking... It informed an intervention that I and others wrote in terms of the Marcus case. And it's been cited in different policy reports at the UN and other bodies.
And so that type of practical resource, I think is something that there is an appetite for among those who are working on these issues and trying to make sense of them. But I'm not sure recently what recent examples of it. When I'm framing the research questions for my book, I ask, is there a norm, and if so, is it an emerging norm of international law? Or is it a fully established legal rule that has binding legal effects on states? Or is there no rule at all? Because I think before the recent developments of the UN position and that's been taken up by a number of other actors, amnesties are prohibited, what existed before that was the rule in additional protocol two to the Geneva Conventions Article 65, that code on states or encourage them to grant the broadest possible amnesties at the end of internal armed conflicts. So that was the old rule. Now is the question about whether there's this new rule to say states are encouraged to grant amnesties at the end of armed conflict except for international crimes and serious human rights violations.
I still have to do more work clarifying in my own head, but what the significance is of saying if something's an emerging norm, is that a soft flow, something that states can do, they're not violating international law if they refrain from granting amnesties, but I think is definitely the case, of course. But whether the states feel they have a binding legal obligation not to grant amnesties for international crimes, I think it's going to be harder to find overwhelming evidence that that's the case. I can certainly find evidence that some states are moving in that direction, that have been willing to exclude international crimes from peace agreements, from domestic legislation, often because of international pressure from the United Nations or other actors or conflict mediators. But I think many states are still willing to grant those amnesties.
And what's interesting for me too, is that if something is a binding international legal norm, international law and international relations scholarship would suggest that if that breaches of that norm should be an exception, and where states violate that norm, they should expect pushback from other states. They should expect criticism, condemnation, some sort of outcome. And I think what I'm finding when I'm trying to look at that, I've been looking at where states sign up to peace agreements or the types of recommendations they give each other in the Universal Periodic Review, what I'm finding by and large, is states are quite silent about other states granting amnesties. It's not something that's triggering a huge amount of backlash. So if you look at the Universal Periodic Review, for example, in cycles one to three of that mechanism, which is a peer review mechanism run by the UN Human Rights Council, it's gone through three cycles over a number of years. And across those cycles, states have given each other 90,000 recommendations. So I thought I'd find loads about amnesties when I searched through databases, there were 13.
Hannah Balikci:
Wow.
Louise Mallinder:
Yeah. So I'm not seeing big evidence that this is something that states are really pushing back as much as perhaps... I think where there is opposition to amnesties, it tends to come much more from the human rights community and for understandable reasons, and come from the United Nations. But it's not something we're seeing states doing in terms of their relationships with each other very much.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
Not even naming and shaming?
Louise Mallinder:
Not, but states are doing [inaudible 00:39:50]. Not as much, no. I mean, there are examples where it is happening. So for my own context in Northern Ireland, the Irish government has recently taken the British government to court, or to the European Court of Human Rights, complaining about the Legacy Act. So that is one example where one state is very, very clearly pushing back against what they see as a very broad amnesty. But I think those types of responses are rare.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
We wanted to understand how do you see the intersection of law with other disciplines such as international relations or economics or sociology, enhancing the understanding of transitional justice and peace building?
Louise Mallinder:
Okay. That is a very broad question. Transitional justice as a field, has always been a very interdisciplinary one. It began really, from the work of political scientists studying the transitions in South America in the 1980s and looking at the circumstances that give rise to a political transition and thinking about the different dynamics of those transitions, whether they were negotiated or regime collapsed, and speculating about what that meant as an outcome. And that work by political scientists was accompanied by the work of academic lawyers and human rights actors, trying to ascertain what the legal framework is for these moments of transition. And I think it's interesting if you read some of the historical accounts of that period, Paige Arthur has an excellent article on it, but also some of the human rights actors involved have written quite reflective pieces on it.
And one I particularly appreciated is a biography by Juan Mendez, who's a human rights actor. And he talked about how during the dictatorships, all the human rights mobilization was geared around naming and shaming. It was geared around calling on states to stop their abuses. But when the military dictatorships collapsed and the abuses did stop, then the human rights actors felt that naming and shaming didn't go far enough, given the types of abuses that happened. So they began to pivot and try and call for accountability. But there wasn't much... International criminal law wasn't as developed as it is now. International human rights law hadn't taken a turn towards criminal prosecutions that it did do in the subsequent years. So what you saw is an effort by lawyers working in this space, to try and start interpreting treaties in different ways, to try and say there are prosecutorial obligations on states where there have been serious human rights violations. And those ideas were then taken up by the different regional human rights courts in the United Nations.
And so lawyers played a very strong role in pushing for the development to the field within a particular orientation. And they did so with human rights actors on the ground in some of the South American countries who had quite a rule of law, legalistic tradition within their societies. Over the years, I think the work in transitional justice has broadened out considerably, and I think for the better. So you have many different scholars from different perspectives looking at how to understand questions related to justice, and relation to transitions. So you have criminal just springing their insights about well, what does it mean to prosecute perpetrators of serious human rights violations? How do we understand these crimes? How do we understand these actors? And does deterrence work in the same way in these settings? For example, what does retribution mean when you're talking about really serious violations?
You have sociologists trying to understand some of the dynamics around how societies move forward, ideas that collect historical memory and narrative, and thinking how does that filter into ideas of reconciliation, for example? Anthropologists will want to understand people's engagement with justice and how they envision it and what their cultural norms mean. And of course, there's a huge feminist literature running through all of it, and indigenous literature is increasing, and they're all bringing very different perspectives about what types of harms we need to see, what we need to address and what justice looks like.
So I think a lot of that literature has been quite critical of the legalistic focus in the field of transitional justice. I think it's quite narrowly focused on serious physical violence, and what's been missing from that is a lot of the structural violence that is often a root cause of conflict, and it's often aggravated during the conflict, often has much longer backdrops in different periods of victimization, including criminalization that are independent. And so they're trying to expose some of those longer term histories, and the complex structures that feed into the violence I think is really important for thinking about how do we prevent this happening again? So I think looking beyond law when thinking about transitional justice has been hugely important for giving a more complex and nuanced understanding.
Hannah Balikci:
I think that transition's pretty... I mean, no pun intended with transition, but I think that goes actually pretty well into the next question we're going to ask was, does transitional justice ever end the expansion of the field? Is there a cutoff or a norm that is in existence when looking at this? If you're looking at the situation of actors who have either died or victims' descendants looking at colonization as well, is there a sense that it ever ends or? I don't know your thoughts on that. Yeah.
Louise Mallinder:
I think when the field first began, there was definitely a lot of literature talking about transitions as really discreet moments. Short moments of opportunity where everything had to be done quite quickly because either attention would wane or become difficult to seize the moment. And usually, I think at that point, transition was sort of thought of as a period between the end of the old regime, and perhaps the first democratic elections of the new regime. But I think very quickly, really as a field of old, I think that understanding of transition as something very short-term and discreet is being questioned. I think today, we see transitional justice being used for decades after crimes had taken place.
So some of the earliest transitions were the ones in Argentina and Chile. And there I think what we've seen, is waves of transitional justice, where in the initial period after the military dictatorship holding widespread prosecutions became quite difficult and was blocked by amnesties in both settings. But as situations changed within those countries, the political outlook changed, there were legal institutions changed in terms of their composition or the constitutions were rewritten, there were various things that happened, that made it possible to reopen some of those criminal prosecutions. And so they're still going on in those contexts even now, many, many years into the transition. So I think that's a common theme, that it does go on for a long time and actually it changes as circumstances allow.
In other contexts, I think what we see is perhaps people's expectations of what transitional justice should deliver, shift as the transition goes on. So in South Africa, in the early years, there was obviously the Truth Commission with its amnesty process, there was a possibility of prosecutions for those who did not apply for amnesty or denied it, and there was meant to be reparations coming out of that, although those recommendations of the Truth Commission were never fully implemented. What there wasn't, was perhaps a broader look at the socioeconomic structures and structural inequalities in South African society as a result of apartheid. And so I think in recent years there's been much more of a pushback about that, and it's often framed as the unfinished business of the transition, things that were put to one side and people are asking for those things to be addressed.
And so you do see that in different transitions, that demands evolve as more things become possible, or perhaps the limitations earlier on become much more apparent. So I don't think it ends, and I think in many contexts actually demands for transitional justice. We know now cross generations where they're not resolved, where they're not really addressed. Spain is a very commonly incited example of this, where there was the Spanish Civil War, then the Franco regime, then a transition that was characterized by a very broad amnesty known as a Pact of Forgetting, so there wasn't really much space for looking into any of the crimes that had happened.
But since the early 2000s, there's been a push to kind of challenge some of those historical narratives, to exhume mass graves, to challenge the way that the Franco regime is remembered in the public sphere. And lots of efforts to kind of undo the past in that sense, even if it's not criminal prosecutions, but it's all still transitional justice, and a lot of that is being driven by descendants of those who were killed during the Spanish Civil War. And so if things aren't addressed, you can pretty much guarantee that those demands will not go away, that they will continue. But I think for me, it's hard to fully... I think a lot of the goals we think of as transitional justice or almost ideal types.
In the context where I live in Northern Ireland, whether we're still a transitional society, whether we're still in a peace process, is something that people debate. But I think people don't question that we still have problems, that our reconciliation hasn't gone as far as everybody would like, that our political institutions are still unstable, and that the past is one of the dividing lines there. And so I don't know what perfect reconciliation in North Ireland would look like, but I think it's something we can work towards and we can still make benefits for. And I think it's something that requires vigilance too, because you can be working towards something, but external political circumstances like Brexit for example, or other things that may arise in other societies can cause regression, can cause tensions, can make things more challenging. And so it's something that states are on a journey towards these aspirational goals, but how people imagine those goals, how they're seen, can evolve over time and the journey may not be linear.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
We are now getting to the conclusion of our podcast. So if there was one paper or book that you would recommend to students of public policy, which one would it be?
Louise Mallinder:
God, I need to think about that.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
It can be a podcast as well.
Hannah Balikci:
And you can name more than one too, if you can't pick.
Louise Mallinder:
At the moment, I don't think there's one text in the transitional justice field that really gives a how-to guide to address transitional justice. But there are some that give very practical guides for how to think about particular institutions. So I am thinking of Mark Freeman's book on Truth Commissions and Procedural Fairness, as an example of a really excellent book that kind of goes step by step between these are the things you need to think about if you're setting up a truth commission. So that's a very, very practical tool.
But if someone wanted a broader overview of the field, of where it is today, I think there is a research handbook on transitional justice that's recently been edited by my colleagues in Queens, in Belfast, Cheryl Lawther and Luke Moffett. And that's an excellent resource because it covers a whole range of topics. So if anybody wants to know quickly, how do I think about this question? Or the type of transition I'm working on is a transition from conflict or a transition from dictatorship, or I want to know how to address the involvement of women in a peace process, it would be a one-stop shop to cover all the issues that you'd want to be having a look at. So I'd recommend that one.
Natalia Zorrilla Ramos:
Great. And I think this would be the last question, it's asked to every guest that we have in the podcast. So what is something you wish we would have asked you?
Louise Mallinder:
I don't know, you've been really comprehensive, I think. I guess when I gave the talk the other week, somebody asked me what I think is going to happen next or what happens with how geopolitics is affecting transitional justice? So maybe that one. I think we're at a very interesting moment for the field of transitional justice. Since it emerged, it was always tied very much to the global legal order and an idea that there was an expansion of legal norms and institutions, that we are moving towards an age of accountability. You see this type of language being very, very clear in statements by the UN secretary-general, for example, but other actors as well. And a lot of that was premised in the sense that states were increasingly buying into these norms and increasingly supporting them. I think now we're at a moment where there's growing questioning of a lot of those assumptions.
Obviously globally, we're seeing a pushback against the international legal order in different ways. We have seen really egregious violations of human rights happening in different parts of the world, and the existence of international criminal courts sadly doesn't seem to be able to abate that suffering or to even encourage competent factions to refrain from particular types of violations. So I think that perhaps challenges some of the ideas for what is feasible and what transitional justice can really achieve in those contexts.
I think too, a lot of progress was made because of a trajectory towards more peace agreements. The conflicts were ending and there were going to be comprehensive peace agreements to be reached. That is less common today. I'm quite struck by how conflict mediators are saying we're going to see less of those big comprehensive peace agreements and more partial agreements, ceasefire agreements, humanitarian agreements, and that makes it harder to try and set up a comprehensive vision for what transitional justice should look like. So in some ways, I think that causes challenge, it causes concern that perhaps mechanisms or actors that are bolstered to push towards greater accountability aren't going to be as influential or aren't going to be as willing to act as they were in the past. And it's notable when you see democratic states turning more towards authoritarianism or turning away from international human rights norms, that's something that causes alarm within the field.
But I do wonder whether some of it could be an opportunity to address some of the challenges that people have been raising with the problems with legalism within the transitional justice field? I think in many societies where international legal institutions have not been able to intervene, what you see is a lot of energy and agency coming from civil society on the ground. You see people turning to different types of mechanisms, civil society documentation work, artistic projects, community-based justice mechanisms are creating ways of addressing these problems that are very much embedded in the local communities. And so some of that might actually, in the long term, be good for thinking about what does locally grounded transitional justice mean?
Hannah Balikci:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict, featuring Professor Louise Mallinder. This episode is produced and edited by Hannah Balikci and [inaudible 00:55:05]. Thank you to our interviewers, Natalia Zorrilla, Isabella Pestana, and Hanna Balikci. Special thanks to UC3P, and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit their website, pearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter @pearsoninst. Inst is spelled I-N-S-T. Thank you.
If you found this episode interesting, we invite you to join us for the 2024 Pearson Global Forum: Negotiations and Agreement. Join us on Friday, October 18th to hear from global experts as they discuss topics like the role of women in negotiations, speaking law to war, and other interesting panels around the theme of negotiations and agreement. This in-person and virtual event is free and open to all. You can find more information at thepearsonglobalforum.org.
Root of Conflict
07.11.24
Human Rights in North Korea | Julie Turner
Hannah Balikci:
Hi, this is Hannah and you are listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast. You are listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
How does the United States coordinate with regional partners to promote human rights in North Korea? In this episode, we speak with Ambassador, Julie Turner, the U.S. Special Envoy for North Korean Human rights at the Department of State. Ambassador Turner is globally recognized as an expert in human rights and democracy, and has worked over the past 20 years to strengthen democratic institutions and promote human rights throughout the East Asia and Pacific region. As a career civil service employee and former Presidential Management fellow, Ambassador Turner has dedicated her career to advancing human rights around the world.
We discuss how the United States and its allies in the region play a role in protecting and promoting human rights in North Korea, how the United States balances human rights with some of its hard-line measures like economic sanctions and military deterrence, and how Ambassador Turner engages with the broader Korean-American community. A note that the acronym DPRK refers to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the country's official title, which is also commonly referred to as North Korea.
Hi, my name is Hannah Balikci. I'm a second year MPP student here at the Harris School of Public Policy, and I'm a Pearson fellow.
Myong Kun (Chris) Shin:
My name is Chris Shin. I'm also a second year MPP student, a Pearson fellow at the University of Chicago, and I'm originally from Seoul, South Korea. Welcome to Chicago, Ambassador Turner.
Levi Latoz:
Hi, my name is Levi Latoz. I am a second year MPP student here at the Harris School as well.
Hannah Balikci:
So, thank you for joining us here, Ambassador Turner. Could you briefly introduce yourself for our audience and why you're here at UChicago today?
Julie Turner:
Yes. Well, thank you for having me today. I'm excited to be on this podcast with you all. My name is Julie Turner. I'm the U.S. Special Envoy on North Korean human rights issues. And I'm here in Chicago because I am engaging with students with the Korean American community with North Korean refugees that live here in the greater Chicago area to talk about U.S. government efforts to support the reunification of divided families or separated families, as well as to talk about our policy on North Korean human rights and how people in Chicago, Korean Americans, but also non-Korean Americans, can help contribute to improving the lives of North Koreans.
Levi Latoz:
Ambassador, your position as a special envoy had, until your appointment in 2023, remained vacant since 2017. Could you briefly share a bit about what a special envoy is and the significance of your recent appointment?
Julie Turner:
I want to make a joke about bureaucratic process and the title of special envoy, but I'll try to keep myself in line here with you guys today. But a special envoy is an individual that's appointed on behalf of the U.S. government to represent a particular issue that the administration or that the government feels needs more focused attention. My particular position was created by Congress under the North Korean Human Rights Act, and I was nominated in January 2023, but confirmed and sworn into my position in October of 2023. So, I have just dove into the issue and am hoping that some of these engagements that I'm doing help to do exactly what the position was mandated to do, which is to coordinate and promote efforts in the U.S. government to improve the lives of the North Korean people.
Hannah Balikci:
And for those that don't know, when was it mandated?
Julie Turner:
The North Korean Human Rights Act originally was passed in 2004.
Hannah Balikci:
Focusing on the work you're doing, building off of what you just said, can you take a moment to walk us through the U.S. Foreign policy priorities for your position?
Julie Turner:
Yes, For my position, I have five areas that I've laid out as priority lines of effort. The first one is to work with partners and allies to raise international awareness of North Korea's human rights record. And built into that effort, I would also include increasing the free flow of information into North Korea, independent information in particular. And so, that particular effort has involved a lot of travel and coordination with partners in Europe, with the South Korean government, with the Japanese government, among others. The second line of effort is promoting accountability for those most responsible for human rights abuses in North Korea. And this has been a long time area of focus for the U.S. government. But one of the efforts that I have built into my own work has been to really amplify and lift up the voices of survivors in the conversation about accountability to make sure that the process to achieving accountability is led by North Koreans.
And so, I've been doing a lot of engagements with North Korean refugees to better understand what they hope to see when we talk about accountability. The third line of effort is pressing for concrete change in North Korea, and this is the hardest one because it involves the North Koreans wanting to talk to me about what concrete change is. Right now, they've spent a little bit more time calling me names rather than demonstrating a willingness to engage. But I will, again, put out the same message that I've said over and over again, and that's that the U.S. government, including myself, stand ready to have a conversation with the North Koreans without preconditions. But in pressing for concrete change, we are looking for things like the repeal of the anti-reactionary thought law, for the repeal of the Pyongyang dialect law or reforms to those pieces of legislation that would create space and freedom of expression that is actually severely restricted under those laws.
The fourth area is helping to advocate on behalf of North Korean asylum seekers and refugees or those individuals that are seeking protection abroad. And a lot of that has involved calling on the People's Republic of China and Russia to abide by the principle of non-refoulement and to stop forcibly returning North Korean refugees. And then, the last area of work is one that is relatively new to the special envoy's mandate, and that is to engage with, to coordinate with the divided families community to better understand what their needs are, how many there are, and then, to work together with the community to try to facilitate family reunions.
Levi Latoz:
The State Department released the 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices last week. I wondered if you could talk about what are the current trends of human rights in East Asia and how do those relate to what you're observing in the DPRK?
Julie Turner:
I think a couple of trends that I would say. One, I think we've all been talking about the rise of authoritarianism for the last few years. I don't think that Asia is an exception to that. I think we've seen it with coups in Burma and just other efforts undertaken by governments that further restrict freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, the fundamental freedoms. And how this all relates or how it aligns with what we're seeing in North Korea, I think we've seen a lot of the similar restrictions or tightening of controls during COVID. They put into place the three, so-called "evil laws", the anti-reactionary thought law, the Pyongyang dialect law and the youth education law. Somebody's going to correct me on that last one because I know I didn't get the official name right. But those three laws, which increase penalties for viewing foreign information, for using South Korean dialect words in North Korea, now you can be punished or you can be punished for watching a K-drama. In fact, they, earlier this year, sentenced a handful of teenagers to 12 years of hard labor for watching essentially a K-drama.
But I would also say there are other things that we're seeing in North Korea that overlap with things that we're seeing elsewhere, and that's cooperation with other authoritarian governments through the transfer of technology, including specifically surveillance technology. There was recently a report that was released that highlights just increased observations of new surveillance cameras in North Korea that didn't exist pre-COVID and other things that we're seeing in places like the PRC that are now appearing in North Korea. And also increased transnational repression. Sometimes, in some cases in Asia, it's looked like prisoner swaps where one government says, "Hey, I've got somebody you want. You've got somebody that I want. We're holding them because they said something about the government. You're holding them because they illegally crossed a border. Let's just trade." The North Koreans are doing less trading, but more going to the Russians, going to the Chinese and saying, "Hey, we want these people back." And they're being sent back. And so, those kind of things that extend the types of repression that extends beyond one's territorial borders is an increasingly alarming trend that we're seeing more of.
Myong Kun (Chris) Shin:
Ambassador, you talked about the roles that United States and its allies in the region play in protecting and promoting human rights in North Korea, but sometimes, given the foreign policy approaches conflict with human rights advocacy, how should the U.S. And its allies balance some of the potential hardline policies like economic sanctions or military deterrents with continuous effort to advocate for human rights in North Korea?
Julie Turner:
So, one of the things that I am talking more and more about and that the U.S. government is talking more and more about, something that we've said at the UN on a number of occasions is the interconnectedness, the inextricable link between international peace and security and human rights. And so, these things are tightly wound together, and we see this in the form of, for instance, North Korean overseas workers who are in conditions that amount to forced labor. They're dispatched overseas, they make money, they don't see a dime of that money. That money gets sent back to the North Korean government, and that money is then being used to support the weapons program. We've seen recently reports through an organization called the Outlaw Oceans Project that highlighted North Koreans in Chinese seafood processing factories. We've seen a Reuters article earlier this year that highlighted North Korean workers making false eyelashes, beauty products that end up in U.S., South Korean, Japanese beauty markets. And all of that is being made with forced labor and all of that forced labor is generating revenue that goes to the regime.
And so, I think the international community is coming or starting to at least circle around a consensus that that interconnectedness exists. And I think that it's our responsibility now to continue to build out those examples and to underscore why it's imperative that governments around the world take action to address simultaneously the human rights situation and the security situation. To your point about sanctions versus how that impacts the people, I do also want to underscore that the U.S. government sanctions, as well as the UN sanctions have carve-outs for humanitarian purposes. None of our sanctions are targeting the people of North Korea. In fact, we very much do care about their welfare and want to protect their rights and to make sure that their needs are being met, which is why we have those carve-outs. But we also, at the same time, want to make sure that we're taking the steps necessary to help address the long-term security issues.
Levi Latoz:
In what ways is the United States coordinating with its regional partners to promote human rights in the region? And do you see any potential opportunities to partner with the PRC on this matter, specifically in the context of the DPRK?
Julie Turner:
This is a good question. We're partnering with a number of partners and allies in the region on human rights. We have a number of human rights dialogues. We have consultations on democratic governance with the South Korean government. We have similar consultations with the government of Japan. You all have seen, in the last few years, that we have had a number of summits. We had the Yoon administration here. We just recently had the Japanese government here for an official visit helping to also amplify the effort that was undertaken in the trilateral meeting through the Spirit of Camp David: Joint Statement. And so, there's a lot of work to make sure that we're coordinated, that we're speaking with one voice on North Korea policy issues, but specifically also North Korean human rights issues.
There's also an overlap in our interests here in that all three of our governments across that trilateral relationship have family groups that have been impacted by the North Korean government's repressive policies. That's for Japan, the Abductees. For South Korea, it's divided families, abductees, detainees, POWs. And for the U.S., we also have the divided families issue. And so, continuing to work together across governments to highlight how those policies, how North Korea's restrictions on freedom of movement, how their censorship and surveillance have prevented families from communicating with each other is a cross-cutting issue for all of us that we need to work together to advance.
Now, in terms of China and China's role, I think we are looking for areas and ways in which we can cooperate with the PRC on North Korea specifically. It would be great if we could partner with them on human rights issues. That could include on the refugee situation, but could also be on talking about areas in which there might be potential for concrete change in North Korea. And that may be starting in an area that the U.S., the PRC, and the DPRK can all agree, maybe disability rights, an area where we're all doing work already. And so, I will remain optimistic in that space. And the Secretary of State was just in China last week talking about North Korea, and I hope that we can carry forward some of the outcomes of that visit and make sure that we're working hand-in-hand on the North Korean human rights issue.
Hannah Balikci:
I know we have limited time with you, so we have a couple questions we ask every guest on our podcast, one of which being, if there was one paper or book that you would recommend to young public policy students to read about North Korean human rights or in advocacy or anything that you think would be helpful, what would you recommend?
Julie Turner:
This is a really tough one, and I don't want to-
Hannah Balikci:
You can say-
Julie Turner:
Endorse a particular one because, because I've read so many of them and many of the North Korean refugees are dear friends of mine. But I would just encourage students to pick up one of those books and to read about the life of a North Korean refugee, what that journey looked like from their earliest memories in North Korea to where they are today and how they got there. To be completely honest, having known some of the people whose memoirs I've read and having known them first and then going back and reading their books, it's pretty powerful stuff, especially comparing the person that I know today to this very unbelievable lived story, the obstacles that they had to overcome.
One of these individuals has talked about finding his human nature again, that North Korea, because of the competitiveness and survival mode that you have to be in at all times, had described how you almost become animal-like, and how he had to become human again once he got to the United States. Knowing him now, he's one of the most wonderful human beings I know, and it's hard to believe that he had to live through what he lived through. And so, I guess my real challenge is, read one of those books, but also spend an hour just talking to a North Korean refugee because it puts just a completely different lens on the issue.
Hannah Balikci:
We'll try and put some links in the podcast information. Our final question for you is, what's something you wish we would've asked you?
Julie Turner:
That's another good one. It's a tough one. I think it's really about what you can do now as students. And really, part of my purpose in being here and doing outreach to university students, to the Korean American community is really to push that call of action beyond governments. I definitely feel the pressure from civil society groups to do more and they give me great recommendations for things that we can pursue in the multilateral space, bilateral conversations that we're having. But I'm really here to encourage you all and the other students and Korean Americans or diaspora Korean that I'm interacting with while I'm here in Chicago to take part in the effort to promote North Korean human rights.
And you can do that by... There is a large refugee community here in Chicago. If it's tutoring a student, a North Korean refugee who's trying to learn English or helping Korean refugee get plugged into resources that they might need. A lot of them need legal assistance because they have pending asylum applications or just need to get a work authorization, which is an arduous process here in the U.S. But also, for those who are more on the policy side to get involved in a human rights NGO or to do more advocacy efforts. I won't mention any particular organizations, but I'm sure you all are familiar with some of them, and maybe you can also share some ideas in the links as well.
Hannah Balikci:
Thank you so much for your time today, really, and we'll be going to your talk at IHouse after this.
Now, let's go to a conversation between Ambassador Turner and Karl Friedhoff, who is the Marshall M. Bouton Fellow for Asia Studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. This program was held at the University of Chicago's International House and hosted in partnership with the Center for East Asian Studies, the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and the Asian Policy Forum.
Karl Friedhoff:
So, continuing on in the region, we talked a little bit about the state of democracy. This is obviously a big election year. It's not only the U.S. There are, I think, 50 elections around the world this year. There are more than half of the population is going to vote. We've already seen elections in South Korea, by-elections in Japan. Indonesia had an election and India is coming up. What is the role of the United States in promoting democracy in the region? How is it pooling its partners to do that? Is there a role for alliances? Obviously, the Biden administration has focused a lot on alliances, mostly on the security side of this, but in terms of pooling alliances in to focus on democracy and how we promote that and build a stronger network, so then you can then use that influence to then turn it on in North Korea? Turn it on in North Korea is a little bit of the wrong phrase, but...
Julie Turner:
Absolutely. In terms of building upon pre-existing partnerships and alliances, we recently hosted the Japanese government for an official visit. We have, during the Biden administration, also hosted the Yoon administration for a state visit and had numerous other, both state visits, but also efforts that we've undertaken to upgrade relationships. We have an expanded partnership with ASEAN now. We also have an upgraded relationship with Vietnam now. And so, we're not just relying on the old partnerships, but also trying to build trust and confidence through expansion of new partnerships. And I think that the partnership with Vietnam and ASEAN are two perfect examples of that.
In terms of election years and how we support democratic processes, I think, one, it is support of a society because they are at the core, the ones who are going to lead the way in building democratic institutions domestically in their home countries. Also, empowering and supporting independent press. These countries can have an informed citizenry because informed citizenries are able to better engage with their governments and to really demand responsive governments, which at the end of the day is what we are hoping to see more of, and that increases peace, stability, security.
Karl Friedhoff:
So I'll pick up on two things there. You mentioned civil society and independent press. Two things which obviously are very limited in North Korea. Is there a way to promote those inside of North Korea? Are there attempts to do that or, at this point, is there more harm to be done in doing that because you put people at risk as you're trying to reach them and have them become more active in North Korea?
Julie Turner:
So, I think right now, it's very clear that there's a demand for independent information in North Korea. And I think that we can see that demand in the North Korean government's recent actions because they've been tightening control of the information space. Human Rights Watch put out a report a couple of months ago about backsliding in North Korea's human rights situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. We're talking about one of the worst human rights crises in the world, and it got worse. The unimaginable happened, and the way I've interpreted their report is that COVID was the worst thing that could have happened to the North Korean people, but the best thing that could have happened to the North Korean government because it allowed for this tightening of repression. They put in place three new laws that increased penalties for viewing foreign media. We've seen them enforcing those laws. They put in place a shoot-to-kill order.
So, without a doubt, there is real fear on the North Korean government's side of this external flow of independent information. I think from our side, one of the areas that the U.S. government has prioritized for many years through news outlets like Radio Free Asia, Voice of America, but also supporting independent refugee and defector-led groups that are based in Seoul is to increase the amount of information that's out there. And then, it's really up to the end user to decide whether or not they want to take the risk to take it. We don't want to inadvertently put somebody at risk by pushing information into hands of an unwitting end user.
Karl Friedhoff:
So, all this rising middle class, that's an intriguing idea to think about, that there is this rising middle class there. Can you talk about where it is in North Korea? Is this a regional focus? Is it all Pyongyang or is this also out into the outer regions if there's a rising middle class there?
Julie Turner:
So, I should clarify. I think that rising middle class existed, but is quickly being squashed, and particularly in recent months. The last time I was in Seoul, I had the opportunity to go to Hanawon and met with a couple of the groups that had come by sea directly from North Korea to the south last year. When I asked some of the younger generation, teenagers I guess amongst the group, they all told me food security was never an issue for them. Now granted, these were people from southern part of the country who lived close to the ports, and so, there probably was a lot more trade and other traffic going through, but they said food security wasn't an issue. They had cell phones and were living relatively decent lives. Were watching South Korean television.
But for all of them, they said across the board, in 2023, that shifted. That the risk of watching South Korean TV became too great, which is also part of what led them to make the decision to leave. "I want opportunity, I want a future. I can't have that here, so I'm going to go elsewhere." I asked one of them, I was like, "Oh, well now you're here in South Korea. What's that opportunity that you want? What do you want to do now that you're here?" She's like, "I don't know. I haven't really thought about it. I just knew that I couldn't have whatever it was if I stayed in North Korea and I'll figure it out now that I'm here."
Karl Friedhoff:
So, you mentioned Hanawon. For the audience, this is a place in South Korea where people who have left North Korea, they come in and I think they're in Hanawon about six months, and they go through things to kind of learn how to use an electronic banking system ans how daily life is going to work in South Korea. I was there about 10 years ago, and one of the things that is very obvious when you're at Hanawon is the gender disparity in the defectors that are there. You look at South Korea overall, the percentage of defectors that are in South Korea is about 70% are women. Can you talk a little bit about what drives that gender disparity and what drives women in particular to seek to cross however they're going to get out, [inaudible 00:28:48] China? Why do they seek to come South Korea and take that risk? Why does [inaudible 00:28:54]?
Julie Turner:
So, I think there are probably a few factors with why the numbers are a little bit skewed right now, but I also want to tackle the issue of what the numbers look like right now in this very moment. But I think, historically, you saw a wave of the numbers, you go way back, were much higher amongst men, and then, there was the wave of women that followed and then bringing children out after that. And so sometimes, it was just the families coming in different tranches. There's also the issue of trafficking, and many of the women are trafficked into China and then sold into marriages. And the women that are sold into marriages oftentimes have children who go unregistered in China and are then de facto stateless, which creates problems for resettlement because they don't have a nationality and can't get exit permission and sometimes can't get entry permission to a third country.
And so, there are waves of problem with the trafficking, but that also leads to a disproportionate number of women in the border area. Many of them, after being trafficked, forced into marriages, having children, it takes between five and 10 years to save enough money to be able to make the difficult journey from Northeastern China to a Southeast Asian country where they can get to South Korea or elsewhere. And so, I think we're still seeing some of that wave right now. Many of the refugees that are arriving in Seoul have been in China for [inaudible 00:30:37] right now. COVID did essentially shut down the refugee flows. When I was at Hanawon, most of the facility was empty, but it's quite possible that the border slowly reopening that that will change. The South Korean government has done an excellent job of keeping that facility up and fully functional and ready to support any number of North Koreans that may end up making their way to South Korea.
Karl Friedhoff:
So, when we think about human rights, I want to touch also on the U.S. policy side of this, not just the situation internally. In the past, if you go back, and I'm sure you've experienced a lot of ways that were negotiators at the six-party talks, that's going back a while, but when you talk to them, they're all very clear that human rights was never raised as a part of the negotiations. And they're pretty unequivocal in the fact that they think, through their interactions within North Koreans is that if human rights is raised, it's a non-starter, and North Korea will essentially get up from the table and leave. If we do enter negotiations at some point in the future, right now, there are no negotiations, no known communications ongoing, if negotiations were to restart, how does the U.S. ensure, how do you work to ensure that human rights are now on the table and are going to be a part of the negotiating package moving forward?
Julie Turner:
So, I think that the conversation around security and human rights has developed since the six-party period, in particular. And I think some of this came into light around 2014 when the UN Commission of Inquiry report was released, but also as the U.S. sought to work with partners to get North Korea's human rights situation added to the Security Council agenda. In order to have the Security Council talk or take a serious look at North Korea's human rights record, we had to build out a storyline of how North Korea's human rights record is connected to international peace and security to be able to sway the votes that we need to be able to have that discussion every year. I think, more recently, and this is something that the panel of experts have looked at or has looked at, is how North Korea dispatches overseas workers to China, to Russia, those workers all work in conditions that amount to forced labor, which is a human rights abuse.
So, the North Korean government's human rights abuse in that situation then is generating revenue that the regime is using to support its weapons program. And so, that shows some of that interconnectedness. I think we're seeing more of that now as well with Russia and North Korean military cooperation, where similarly, North Korean weapons are now in the hands of the Russians, which are then being launched into Ukraine and taking civilian lives to Ukraine. Also human rights abuse. Similarly, North Korean arms sales to Myanmar or Burma where [inaudible 00:34:13] also using North Korean-made products to kill innocent civilians in the course of their own domestic conflict.
So, the international community is beginning to see those threats connecting these two issues more and more. I think how we continue to carry that forward is continuing to build out those connections, and that requires more of the security world to be talking more to the human rights world about where these two things are overlapping. And we hope to, again, this year have another conversation about North Korea and human rights at the Security Council.
Hannah Balikci:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Ambassador Julie Turner. This episode was produced and edited by Hannah Balikci and Nishita Karun. Thank you to our interviewers, Levi Latoz, Chris Shin and Hannah Balikci. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit their website Thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter at Pearson Inst. Inst is spelled I-N-S-T. Thank you.
Root of Conflict
06.06.24
A War Later | Juanita Vélez
Root of Conflict
05.09.24
Power and Development | Raul Sanchez de la Sierra
Hannah Balikci:
Hi, this is Hannah and you are listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You are listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects.
In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC-3-P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
What is the role of narratives within the political economy of development? In this episode, we speak with Professor Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy and a faculty affiliate of the Pearson Institute. His research tackles problems in the economics of development, political economy, and conflict. He conducts most of his research in areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC, where he looks at the organization of society, the economics and psychology of armed groups, the emergence of state functions and the economics of organized corruption, working closely with these actors while also gathering detailed data for statistical analysis.
We discussed Professor Sánchez de la Sierra's path to working in the DRC and later involvement in Congo calling, a documentary film that follows him and two other Europeans who work in various roles within the international development aid sector in the DRC. Later, we discuss his goals and objectives for his class power and development, which he teaches in the spring quarter here at Harris. Finally, we explore Professor Sánchez de la Sierra's perspectives on the state of the world at large, including his insights into the Free Congo Movement. And with that, please enjoy our conversation with Professor Raul Sánchez de la Sierra.
Hi, my name is Hannah Balikci. I'm a second year MPP student and a Pearson fellow.
Raphael Rony Anthony:
Hi, I'm Rony Anthony and I'm a first year MPP student and a big fan of Professor Raul.
Manda Bwerevu:
Hello, everyone. My name is Manda Bwerevu. I am a first year Congolese MPP student and a Pearson fellow.
Hannah Balikci:
And welcome professor. We're so happy to have you in studio. Thanks for coming. We were just wondering if you could introduce yourself and tell us your origin story really going right into it.
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
Perfect. I'm very happy to be here. And I'm also very excited to be in your community, whether it is in the class and outside the class. I'm a Spanish citizen who was born in Spain in '84. I think it was the year before that Spain was declared no longer to be a developing country by the United Nations. Around the time, it integrated the European Union. And as soon as I was 1, my family moved to France. So I grew up with two societies. It took me a while to kind of articulate what it meant for me. Partly it was just feeling awkward in the summer, having two parts of yourself that don't really communicate with each other.
But also little by little, I would go to Spain on holidays and it wouldn't be a very poor country, but it would be a significantly poorer country that changed a lot in the '90s, and the kind of type of social life that people had had also very different values. The groups of friends that I began to have were like 30 kids. Everyone was completely different. Everyone was helping each other a lot. There were values of solidarity and of community that I didn't find as much in the other side of the border where kids were more alone. There's a lot of problems in France, but in general there's an environment of material well-being and of security where there's a welfare state.
There's a lot of problems that have to do with race that what I say is not true for certain people, but even then materially there is a safety net. Looking back at the history of my parents is what kind of motivated me to be here today probably. So my parents were born in the '50s, during the dictatorship of Franco. Different people reacted differently in the face of the pressure that this signified on people. And for the case of my father, his parents had fought or collaborated on the side of the public against fascism. And at the time in the '50s, it was a time of huge repression so there was a lot of silence at home about politics.
And so after a few years where my father was not allowed to go to school because they were low class, so they couldn't acquire education and they had to work, when he was 18, he kind of realized that his father was not kind of the bad person in this story, but rather also a victim of a system that was bigger than him. So he started to also be actively involved in trying to introduce democracy in Spain. And so Spain is a country beyond the story of my family that is hugely traumatized by the Civil War of the '30s. Hundreds of thousands of people died on both sides.
After the fascists took power, the repression continued for 10 or 15 years. It's almost like the Civil War killing continued on one side. So I've been always very moved by the lives of people who suffer in power and conflict, I guess if that's also one of the questions. So growing up in France, not only I started to be involved politically, but also I started to be interesting on this new thing called development, which had to do with all the countries that didn't have the chance that I had growing up in France. And so the rest is here.
Hannah Balikci:
Yeah, I mean you jumped the gun a bit on our questions. We were going to ask why conflict and what went wrong or right in your life for you to focus on conflict? So that kind of gets at it. Is there any more you want to talk about then?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
There's a bit more. Surely the stories of the Civil War in Spain is still something that makes a lot of us vibrate for the injustice that took place, and that has not really been talked about openly in Spain when one side has tried to open mass graves, the other side has often tried to push back saying, "This is opening wounds. We shouldn't talk about this," while often it's not even politically. It's people who want to know where their grandfather is buried in a mass grave.
And so when I started my PhD at Columbia, I focused on development and political economy, which was about why certain countries are poor and the role of power in development and also in injustice. I stumbled on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Congo is many things. One of the things it also is, it's not the only one, is a lot of suffering in relation to conflict since the '90s especially. If you think in the big picture of conflict in the last 150 years, it has been subject to massive conflict from the outside and from political leaders in conjunction with the outside. But that kind of revived in me the interest in conflict, even though I wasn't necessarily going to be focused on conflict.
Hannah Balikci:
How did you find your way to Harris through that then?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
So when I started thinking about the questions of power and development, some of the most impactful scholars that we read when I was doing my master, one of them was Avner Greif, who is at Stanford now, and another was James Robinson. And so I happened to kind of cross paths with James Robinson when I did my postdoctoral studies at Harvard just after the PhD. And at Columbia, I also crossed paths with Chris Blattman and I found out that this new group had been formed with Oeindrila Dube, Chris Blattman, and James Robinson. It was already my community. So at the end of that, they just sent me a link and say, "We're looking for someone if you want to apply." And it was just a very natural thing to do. It's an extremely unusually creative environment where people are very open to kind of listen to the logic of societies in their own words before trying to impose a structure, whether it is game theory or whatever that can come after. But I think the inductive humble approach to research is something that characterizes this hallway on the second floor.
But having spent a decade, five years ago, for example, with a huge amount of human experiences in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it just felt as been an extremely hard challenge to condense all the lessons in this academic writings. So now hopefully this is going to change soon. So teaching allows to convey all of the learning through that experience that doesn't fit in academic papers.
An academic paper in my field could take eight years until publication. Someone might need just three papers in top journals in order to get promoted. So one focuses on almost nothing in terms of knowledge for a very long amount of time. And teaching also has another side that is not just the experience of thinking through it, but actually what is research? Research is teaching because it's people who are driven by curiosity. They want to learn so that the world can also see. And so teaching is the same. So it's an act of generosity that fulfills someone. And in teaching, it feels so much more meaningful because there's so much more that it can be heartfelt. Whereas with research, do I really care now that this paper of 2020, there is a small group of people who read it and think differently, a little bit about something. Maybe not as much as the vast amount of human and informal knowledge that I gather through the process of doing research, yeah.
Raphael Rony Anthony:
Now talking about research, can you give a small glimpse of what research that you're doing right now to our audience?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
Yeah. So I started going to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2009 as a research assistant. I took a class called Political Economy of Development. I worked really hard so the professor said one day, "Do you want to go to Congo?" I said, "Of course." In the process of that, I also came to feel somewhat uncomfortable in the approach to development and approach to research that I was part of. And again, it took me a while to articulate it and to identify what the issues were, but there was something clearly paternalistic in the very question. People were going there saying, "We're going to bring democracy to the Africans." Because they don't know it. It's not as if they have been living there for 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 years.
So my dissertation was about when do our actors have an incentive to behave this way or that way? Now this was the dissertation. I don't know if I have enough time, but even though I was very excited about it, all of this remained part of my imagination. So this bandit that steals you, et cetera, it's kind of a mental experiment. I did do a large amount of data collection during the dissertation to show that in certain places when there is high value due to minerals, it could be due to anything else, then the armed actors have an incentive to settle and to provide protection to create custom systems, to give visas to people who enter the mining and to tax output.
In other places where output is very easy to hide, such as valuable gold, they can't really tax the production sites, but they start settling in villages where people live and they have wealth that they start spending in food and clothes. So they start taxing everything leading to more sophisticated fiscal administrations. But over the years, I also realized that this was very much based on imagination. Even though the numbers coincide, the interpretation makes sense, economists think that the interpretation makes sense, it's still part of the imagination of a European.
So over the last eight years, I started building much more personal connections with not only with the villagers, but also with armed actors themselves, getting very close to certain organizations, learning about their logic, about how they think, about how they feel about who are the people who lead the organization, who are the people who join it, what are the different functions, how does recruitment operate. So now I'm working with one of those organizations that places phone calls to my team every day. There's 160 human resource commanders that are part of a cell phone system that inform us in real time where someone joins the organization that allows us to send a team in conjunction with a civilian organization for development in the area that we work to interview those who join to understand their psychology and also to interview people in their village to understand in what ways their psychology is different from those in the village.
And now we're just following up two years after they joined to try to learn about how does joining an armed organization change the psychology. There isn't much of a difference with the US Army with regards that it's humans that go to a place where they're going to kill other humans, and there is a prosocial motivation to do so to contribute to the community. And the question then is how legitimate is the narrative that brings people to feel that it's out of a prosocial motivation? I think for example, after 9/11, the kind of motivations that people had to join the US Army included a demonization of people in Muslim countries with the idea that they were the enemy and they had to be killed for some greater cause. So the comparison is one of structure, not of content of the narrative, but yeah.
And that's some aspects of the research. We also, in 2015, worked a lot not just with armed doctors, but also with the state itself to try to understand how the state functions when it's so-called weak state. And so, we spent a lot of time preparing a study where we hired 150 people to work inside the Traffic Police Agency of Kinshasa to map every single transaction in the system that "might be called corruption" or informal revenue generation, to learn about how much is generated, how it's generated, the role of supervisors in it, which we normally presume but we don't see.
And so the takeaway is about 80 or 90% of the revenue generated by a traffic police agency is informal. That pays the wages of people. That pays gas expenses. And it's profoundly hinges on the role of supervisors and their power of their agents. It's also very distortionary. It creates a lot of problems like traffic jams. It doesn't lead people to want to respect the law because those who get arrested are not those who violate the law, but anyone who doesn't have friends in higher places. So it kind of hopefully helps understand a bit better nuancing what weak state means and how it functions. Yeah, this is some aspects on the research. Yeah, happy to-
Raphael Rony Anthony:
I found it very fascinating when professor's talking about his research keeps on referring to the group as "we." And I'm assuming what you mean by "we" is Marakuja.
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
Yeah.
Raphael Rony Anthony:
And I think we need to start talking about that. So I'm going to start with the full name of Marakuja. That is Multidisciplinary Association for Research and Advocacy in the Kivus by United Junior Academics. Now that's a huge name. We found out from the website that it's defined as our name comes from salad de fruits or fruit salad, a team-building activity that led to our group. So first of all, how the name and why the name.
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
Yeah. In July 2010, when I went there for this impact evaluation, we were tasked to train 100 surveyors for collecting data that would last two years of this evaluation. We were students, we didn't know anything, so we had to learn from the experts. One of the experts was a Congolese man who had been in the organization for 10 years and he was very good with people. And so the first kind of trainings that we did, we knew the survey and he knew management much more than we did. We did breaks and he said, "Now we're going to play fruit salad. Everyone has to pick a fruit name in a circle." And so I had just discovered that morning the passion fruit, which is called Marakuja in Congo in Swahili. And so I chose my name to be Marakuja. And so you have to stand up and call two fruits and you take their chair. And so everyone laughs because someone stays without chair and some people fall, the chairs break. It's a very fun game. So that was very early in 2010.
So what happened is people started referring to me as Marakuja in DRC. So I came back in 2012 to start my own dissertation. I arrived with almost no money as a graduate student. I said, "How many villages can we do with this?" We had discussions about with the six or seven people that I was closest with. Some people were saying, "Well, the wage must be increased. Look." And one of them stood up and said, "Look, we all know here the impact that it had on us to have two and a half years of stable employment for the first time in our lives. You got married, you had kids. You also got married, you bought a house. And after what this person has done for us, it is our turn now to thank him. We don't need to talk about the wages. Now you might not have funds. We have your back and we want to make you a professor."
Of course, it's not that I took advantage of that gratitude, but it illustrates the beginning of a very strong bond that starts to kind of breach this invisible race barrier between us and "them," despite the asymmetry of financial means that is impossible to get a around. And so it's this kind of reciprocity that created, first, one bond. So that I did the dissertation, I kept funding funds. And then the dissertation worked. And then I came back. And at that moment, one of them who you have met stood up and said, "Look, we need stability, therefore we need to create an organization. Enough with this consultancy. So can you use some of that funding to create an organization?" And it turns out that by then, it was 2015, these people for six years, whenever they refer to them, they're like, "Oh, they're with Marakuja." Others were like, "They're with John." Or, "They are with Peter." But so they were called the Marakujas or the Johns or the Peters, whoever was the employer's name, or they are the IRCs for example.
So when we decided to create the organization, of course we would be Marakuja. There were some other organizations with acronyms that were hard to follow, but Marakuja no one would forget. We then completely made up the words that constitute the acronym just to give some semblance of seriousness. Only later I realized that this was not the Pan-African name, which I thought, which we thought. It's actually Guarani and it arrived to Africa later, so did the name. But it's now a Swahili name. And so that's the origin. That's the answer to the question.
Hannah Balikci:
So what sets Marakuja apart from other research-focused organizations in the region or in the country?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
Yeah. So there are two types of organizations. There's the kind of implementers, NGOs, and there's a huge amount of them. And then there's their data collection ones. There are not that many. The two that I know emerged from the same hundred people that we trained in 2010. They learned, we learned. And so some data collection managerial skills led to that.
There's a third one that came from extremely qualified people from Benin, from the Africa School of Economics mostly, who had worked at IPA and the World Bank. They're based in Kinshasa. Typically, they don't have the local knowledge that Marakuja has. So most of their projects they need to work with Marakuja, but also so does Marakuja benefit from working with them and their skills. So often Marakuja collaborates with them.
Now, the big difference of Marakuja in terms of its principles comes in comparison with organizations such as implementers, and it emerged as the outcome of spending various years. We, the Marakujas, so the Marakuja was founded by eight people, seven Congolese and me. The seven were the surveyors, and now they're managers. They're experience working in NGOs was not good. They made money, but they experienced very racialized hierarchies where they were continuously silenced, not just the kind of inequality within the same organization was very uncomfortable. It was almost more uncomfortable for the "expatriates" than it was for them. But really the kind of silencing that operated within those organizations, people who are "locals," which in fact means, de facto means people who are Black. They could not acquire positions that are supposedly for "expats."
So often you would have a girl who would be 22, she would come from New York as soon as she finished her master and become the boss of this person who had been there for 12 years, had the number of kids, had extreme expertise. It often is not just the hierarchy and the distribution of material resources, which is important. It's also the attitude that people had towards the Congolese was very difficult to witness. So often you would have people who would come from the US and kind of treat Congolese as if they were almost like children and that they had to follow them because they were the expert.
So I was present in a lot of situations where that happened even before forming Marakuja as we were bringing people from the outside to help with the technical side. The mentality that people have when they come from the world of the NGOs is, "I'm going to be country manager. I'm going to rule here. The Congolese don't know anything." My wages, of course it's going to be eight times higher because I'm the country manager. And the Congolese are almost assumed to have no morality. They're greedy, they're trying to cheat their way through, and there is a constant environment of mistrust. That is degrading.
So Marakuja was born to try not to reproduce that. And so even after it was born, we had issues among people who came to work with Marakuja. And so we had to write these rules that made it very clear. So now any time that a European or an American goes to work with Marakuja, they're an assistant. They're not a country manager. The country manager is [inaudible 00:23:59] now, ad they come to assist them with whatever skills they have the privilege to acquire, but the expert is actually someone else.
Hannah Balikci:
So just going through the timeline, because you say Marakuja was founded after you finished your dissertation and you were back. And you became a professor and then started Marakuja?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
Exactly.
Hannah Balikci:
Okay. I think this is a good transition to go into Congo Calling, which is a documentary film that you're featured heavily in, which features three Europeans who work in various roles within the international development aid sector in Congo. How did you first get involved in the production of this? What was the focus of... How did these people, how did you and the other two Europeans get selected? It's just the background of how you were involved in this program. Does this also shows the... Not the beginning, but that Marakuja is featured in the film as well, so if you could talk through that.
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
Yeah. So it all starts, I think, with the sensitivity and perceptiveness of this person who is the director. I met him in 2004 when I had just come back from spending a year in Germany. And he was a German who had just started his year in Spain. We were both studying economics. We got along well. So we wrote together an undergraduate thesis on Karl Marx labor theory of value using mathematics, which was a recent development by some economic theorists just to try to understand what would it mean today and what is missing. He left economics, he started film school in Munich. By the time I had gone the first seven months to the DRC, or even the second year again about half a year, we met in New York. He came to visit. And I was telling him about the research and the life there, and he kept asking me questions from the perspective of a human. A lot of things that I have unpacked now when I speak, I hadn't unpacked them before. I wasn't even aware of them. I was just talking about the project.
But he was very moved by the human side of this inequality, the contradictions that people have to live through when they come from a place of privilege and often motivated precisely because of equality or injustice or privilege, and they find themselves in an even stronger position of privilege. So of course the human reality that I was describing to him had a Congolese side, and he was moved by that first and foremost. But very early on he understood that he couldn't really speak to that or convey voice in a way that wouldn't be biased. However, he could try to see the world through the eyes of these Europeans to portray kind of the human side of this impetus of going outside of the bubble of privilege and how one navigates emotionally contradiction without very clear early on, so without taking a stance necessarily more to kind of unpack it and help empathize.
So then we started filming in 2015. There was a pilot in 2013, I think. He got some funding. And 2015, he came in. That's when Marakuja was about to be formed, I believe. And that's when I met back the team saying, "Thank you for the work" and I bring back the dissertation in a book. And then two years later he came back in 2017, filmed again.
So I was supposed to be a co-director. We were motivated by the same thing, which is try to illustrate that challenge in the world of aide, NGOs. But he started following me when I was doing my research and said, "Can I film here? Can I film that?" And one day he said, "Actually, you experienced the same in a perhaps different way because you want to stay there forever. The kind of relationships that you build are of course different than those of "expats" who spend one year or two, put it on their CV and leave, but it has the same kind of exploitative risk. It has the same like a mining corporation. You go there to get your publications even though you tell yourself that it's good, maybe it's good, maybe it's not. So I think it would be nice to illustrate it as a parallel."
Then he met this German humanitarian worker who had spent his whole life in Africa and who was in the verge of being kicked out of his home at one reception of the German foreign affairs ministers who is not the president. And then I had worked with a third person, the third character, Anlo. And so we had kind of met through a friend. Anlo also had gone through her process of kind of thinking through what it means to be in that industry. She had been in NGOs. She had to quit and she had a more sincere relationship with the country than how most people coming from Europe start. And so it was also an interesting story to portray. At that point, I was fired because of conflict of interest and I became a subject. And after that, I was just grateful that he chose to portray some of it.
Manda Bwerevu:
So speaking of the portrayal of and the selection of the characters, a theme that I've picked up in a lot of their responses so far as centering Africans in the development of Africa. So in resolving conflict and helping uplift and empower the DRC specifically in this context, with the selection of these three characters, obviously there are three wide characters speaking about Congo, what do you think the takeaway can be for the lens that we're using to assess the conflict in the Eastern DRC? That kind of ties in with the next question of, obviously you don't have a lot of creative control over the direction of the production, but I'm curious about what were the elements and the conversations that were had around how does this affect then the way people will digest what we're trying to convey in the Eastern DRC based on the selection, choices that were made, and the creative direction of the documentary itself?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
Yeah, we didn't always agree in the process, and I defer to him because he had much more expertise also about the artistic sides. So I learned also to defer to him. I didn't necessarily push back on his choice of characters even though I wasn't involved. I probably would've chosen Congolese to be characters. Or even in my case, there's a relationship with the Congolese called Christian. It's all my perspective. So that for example, we did have conversations like, "Why is Christian a bit silent in this relationship?" And he was always very clear. I found he had thought about it more than me even saying like, "I can try to portray their view, but I will not succeed in portraying their view. I'll portray what I think their view is. So we have to focus. Let's focus on like, we're in Europe, Europeans have the question, how can we help the world? So let's show the European audiences what happens to Europeans when they go there and what challenges themselves they have to navigate."
However, I think part of the objective was to show how people struggle. And he became a subject because he was also struggling with those questions himself about what his positionality, what his role, what is the impact of his actions by transmitting just one side, especially because the characters, especially me and certainly Peter, I have nothing to say about him, but I carried a huge amount of blind spots even then. And the director who empathized with me was very able to convey my vision, my view. Therefore, the documentary also brings the blind spots with them. That today we see the documentary to kind of illustrate those blind spots. At the time, it wasn't necessarily filmed with that objective in mind.
And so I think if we were to go back, probably we would've challenged more. I would've, and he too probably the idea of saying, "Oh, we should just take the perspective that we understand. He always says, "There's a lot of very good Congolese filmmakers. They're just much better than me in doing that." But the reality is there's just one documentary that is there about humanitarian sector and it's the European perspective.
So with those blind spots, therefore, one of the challenges is people who look at the documentary and try to make conclusions about the conflict that are going to have very limited view because it doesn't directly address it. But also there's another problem, which is because the presence of the whites in some scenes, there is a specific performativity that distorts the voice of the Congolese, even when they're accused of corruption. There's the presence which is almost a huge asymmetry of power, but also almost with a huge baggage of history of the white that's present there. So people act differently. Even when Christian, for example, is asked in private in an interview, it's not private. There's the camera. And he knows that it's as part of the relationship with Raul that he's being asked about the accusations against him.
Another example is we meet these commanders that have been hanging out for eight years, and there is this one scene that I think he's irresponsible to show even if the scene happened, because the audiences are not prepared not to interpret this as a way that kind of feeds into preconceived ideas of almost backwardness and primitiveness when they describe how they eat the liver of people or whatever. Now you need also the contextual awareness that we didn't have at the time, I think, and certainly the audience doesn't have to know how much of this was performativity as well. It was a group of young kids trying to impress the white, trying to almost bully the white into gaining his respect and vice versa. We were negotiating our position in different hierarchies. For example, when I interrupted someone, I had to apologize with the military gesture, and I was a bit scared also. And sometimes when they interrupted me, I said, "I'm a professor now, you let me talk" and they would apologize to me.
So we were constantly trying to find who we are in their relationship. They were also trying to find what they can get from it, et cetera. This is not to say that specific facts are not true, but it's like journalism. The choice of what to show has a social responsibility aspect independently of whether it's true or not and also how it's shown. And that's, I think, a problem to talk about.
Raphael Rony Anthony:
Okay, I think it's a great place to start talking about power and development because we were just talking about your dynamics with the people in Congo and you working with them and you being the white man presence in that situation. So your class, Power and Development, if we are to advertise it to the people who come into Harris, we have to ask the question like, "Why this class?" How would you answer that?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
I think there are two reasons. The first is coming from the perspective of a class on political economy of development. There is something really frustrating that even though it's called political economy, which is about power, it entirely omits the role of power at the bigger scale in explaining the evolution of societies. It's often like whether this person sends a text message to a politician to let them know that they prefer to have a well rather than a toilet in the village. And so we operate in a society where there are a lot of silences with regards to how power has been deployed, especially in the last 500 years.
So let me say this perhaps more explicitly. We just come out of two phases that were different in nature. I don't know in which phase we are now of European expansionism that a lot of reasonable historians have called European imperialism. The first wave being focused around the slave trade, the second wave in the 19th century with a different philosophical justification being based in large part in colonization of Asia and Africa.
Our generation has kind of been numbed when there was a formal devolution of power to the societies that were on the receiving end of colonization in the '60s with the Cold War that became the kind of only obsession of everyone. And we're kind of emerging trying to realize the legacies of these 500 years. A lot of the legacies are mental shortcuts that people take uncritically as granted, that have to do with essentially dehumanizing people of a darker skin that is present in our society pretty much everywhere. If you just go one block down, people look very different where we are. One doesn't need to go to another country. But it informs working relations. It informs decisions of police officers, of judges, of entire societies in support of current policies.
And so it's a look critically at the silences that have been introduced in the historical narrative with regards to the use exercise of power by Europe and later by the United States in asserting a certain type of military domination across the globe. This is not a conspiracy theory, these are the facts. But interestingly, we still don't learn about those facts in high school.
So what the class is predicated upon is we start with the development aid position. Someone goes, there's a few symptoms that are weird, those which we talked about in Congo Calling or in the paternalistic relationships of giving democracy to "Africans". And then we take a step back, go back 500 years to try to trace back the origin of the inequality of wealth in which we are born today and try to ask questions whether the exercise of military domination by the Europeans plays a role at understanding who we are today in terms of our wealth and at explaining the emergence of ways of thinking that inform how people relate to each other to today.
Something that's quite noticeable. We had a guest from the Congo a few days ago in class, and he explained that this baggage of thinking is very present among Europeans. It's less present among the Congolese, this kind of social hierarchies that presuppose that white people are superior essentially and that Africans are backward. But what makes it even more perhaps revolting and important to talk about is that he also said the Congolese also carry it with themselves. And they have internalized the relationship of paternalistic relationship where they are on the inferior end and they look up to the European as if the European is the one who invents everything rather than what might be more accurate as the one who systematically stole from their society and with a scale that might explain why they're richer today.
So we talk about these historical facts. We talk also about philosophical tools that we can use to understand some of the things I'm touching upon. For example, epistemic injustice is the idea that certain voices are silenced in the production of historical narratives and also in the articulation of their experience. In this case, the Africans' own experience, but also the concept of hermeneutical injustice, which is that society's dominant language or prevailing language makes it harder for people who are subject to a particular form of injustice to articulate and find the tools to become even aware of that experience. It's for sure those who experience it are more aware than those who do not, but they're constantly challenged by the absence of tools that they need to develop talking to each other, to identify patterns, to realize often, "It's not this thing that happened to me here. It's not my fault" or, "This thing that happened 20 years ago. Now I can understand it."
So there's a lot of con-events between questions about gender and the experience of being of a particular gender in a society and the development of a language to gain awareness as well as race. There has always been this kind of conversation between the two. Sometimes it's not necessarily a good conversation, like white people, no matter their gender, are not always aligned with people of color. But there's a lot of solidarity as well in shared experiences with regards to these process.
So the objective of the class is perhaps to jointly gain awareness of that seriously, not just postulating it, really interrogating it and asking even econometrically, how much of this can explain that? What's the research going to go to continue to answer this question?
And then the last part of the course, after having questioned these exceptionalist narratives of why Europeans are rich with the presumptions that the rest of the world are more backward with something that comes from the 19th century, we then take a step back and say, "Okay, if we are to undo, unlearn that mode of thinking, let's reconstruct political economy of development from the voices by the people who experience it themselves." So for example, we start with philosophical foundations of Igbo philosophy in one particular country, and we try to see how would political economy of development look like through their voice?
And then that's kind of the most challenging part of the course. It's also the most interesting and I think enriching because recognizing injustice also has the risk of depriving agency to the people experiencing injustice. Recognizing a symmetry of power doesn't imply transforming people into just they are defined by victims. There's much more. Just like in life in Congo is about so much more than conflict and history of oppression, it's about music, it's about solidarity, it's about extreme levels of creativity and of social ingeniousness that are obscured by just talking about injustice. But we do need to talk about it when we take seriously the question of political economy and development.
Raphael Rony Anthony:
Right. And so now when we were talking about power and development, we had the most fun framing the questions because we went through your whole syllabus, and the syllabus is a really funny concept that we need to talk about. So I'm going to take some quotations from your syllabus and I'm going to ask you why is it the way it is. So it goes like, "Instructor Raoul Sanchez. You can be mean to him. He's working hard to make your learning uncomfortable." What do you mean by that?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
Yes, that's in a context of I think trying to encourage people to be kind to each other, but completely frank, because we're going to talk about topics that evoke emotional reactions, often of discomfort, whether it's guilt. And I can say this as a white European man, I understand that. And so while people have to be kind to each other, it's also saying, "Don't worry about me. I've done enough emotional work that I'm not going to be offended." But I'm trying to make you uncomfortable, and that's the objective of the class. Because often, growing with regards to this question goes through a process of feeling a little bit uncomfortable. That's where some parts of our knowledge and of our growth are kind of blocked a little bit by fear. And so it's kind of acknowledging that with a little playful tone.
Raphael Rony Anthony:
Okay, the next one, it goes, "Maximum freedom of expression, including offending and uncomfortable ideas without attacks against the dignity of every anyone."
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
Yeah.
Raphael Rony Anthony:
Okay.
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
So here we're at the University of Chicago. We're also at the crucial point in time where there are topics that have been somewhat silenced. And so I want to uphold the values, the freedom of expression of the University of Chicago saying that being uncomfortable is not being unsafe, and often the feeling of uncomfort has been weaponized by misinterpreting it as being unsafe and therefore the need to silence certain speech that might be violent.
So for example, when I criticize, let's say, or when we analyze the psychology of one of the readings we have to do, is we look at the work of a psychiatrist who is Black in a white society or white-dominated society, Frantz Fanon. It's very difficult to read. It's very difficult to read as a Black person because it points fingers on a lot of difficult experiences that sometimes doesn't teach anything, sometimes helps recognize. It's very uncomfortable for a white person to see as well, to identify all the ways in which one has contributed to assert oppressive relationships, to silence the expression of the self of people who keeps telling us but we are not hearing. So that discomfort is something that kindness and compassion has to accommodate to grow, but it's not something that ever can be used to silence these conversations.
It is kind of astonishing that Frantz Fanon is often dismissed as being political, even though he's a psychiatrist who is trying to take seriously the experience of being Black in a society that constantly tells Black people that they're inferior and that they have to speak like the French in order to be more civilized. The same goes for a scholar who has spent his entire life trying to show that people in societies east and south of Europe are also human beings. They also have their logic, trying to deconstruct these myths about the Oriental that was perhaps constructed during relationships of domination in colonial times, and that kind of distorts very strongly the immediate impetus that Europeans and Americans have when it comes to relating to people outside. And that is especially important in the particular context where legitimate critique of military policies such as in the state of Israel. And we can say something that the International Court of Justice has said, "At least it's plausibly a genocide."
Raphael Rony Anthony:
So the last part of this conversation, I feel, is the most important one, is a warning that you give in the syllabus as well as in your first class where you tell the students, "If you cannot handle being uncomfortable, you may leave the class." And that makes your class one of the most unique experiences in Harris. So why do you give that warning? That's the first question. And the second question is, do you have anything to tell the students who left after the first class?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
Yeah, I think those students who left, there might be 27, let them be welcomed. They have many reasons to have left. I just encourage them to talk to the students of the class to see how they go. And even this kind of threat of feeling uncomfortable, whether it really materialize in the end, it's a very safe space where compassion is the rule. And we also spoke, for example, about how white people feel uncomfortable when so much negativity is being brought to light about the history of countries and the construction of privilege that some people call whiteness, and it's okay to feel bad. It's out of a place of love, we have a community in the class.
The other thing that you mentioned is about the... Oh, "If you are not ready to feel uncomfortable, it's better that you quit." Look, until a year ago, even discomfort was invited in the class. And the experience in the class was somewhat different in that some group of people kind of knew, but felt that they had better tools to articulate what they already kind of had a gut feeling for. And some were like, "This is new. I feel bad, I feel guilty." And so the process was really cathartic. It was one of together trying to see each other so that when you go out there, you have much better visibility in each of your relationships and interactions.
The context in which we are now also makes me unsafe, and I don't want to be in a situation where whatever topics we talk to and I really am not interested about whether it is the military policies of the state of Israel or whether it is the US or whether it is Europe, I'm not going to be silent with regards to describing those. I'm not going to give privilege to one country over another. And so in the context in which we are, it's a climate where some faculty do not feel safe necessarily. And so I want to make sure that if people are going to confuse discomfort with safety, it's better that they were not going to have a good experience at the moment. But the key point is despite kindness and compassion, freedom of expression to continue growing inquiry which is what we're here to do.
Manda Bwerevu:
So speaking about conflict, let's go back to the Eastern DRC. It's a place where the conflict has been raging on for 30 years with approximately 120 different rebel groups involved, and numerous Western and eastern agents also involved in the conflict. Because of this, it's really complicated for a lot of people who are outside of that Eastern DRC context to understand what is actually happening in the Eastern DRC. So the first question is how would you explain the issue in eastern Congo to a fifth grader interested in understanding the context? And then added onto that question is, a lot of governments have recently come out to condemn Rwanda specifically for its support of M23, which is a large rebel group contributing significantly to the instability in the East. Yet these same governments like France and the US in particular are still sending aid to the Rwanda defense force. So the second question is, how can we reconcile the cognitive dissonance there in terms of the foreign policy of these countries? And what are tangible actions you believe that the governments can make towards helping liberate the Congolese people?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
Perfect. So I would start by saying that people who have studied the Congolese conflict reach always the same conclusion that it's extremely complex, that there are many causes, that it's about land, that it's about politics, that it's about ethnicity, that it's about conflict minerals, that it's about the weakness of the state. That is also not very helpful when it comes to paint a picture of what's going on.
And at the risk of being oversimplifying, if I were to talk to a five-year-old, let's say, look, if you look over the last 30 years when the first and second Congo war happened and the conflict that we have now, something happened in a neighboring country which was really bad, it's called genocide, and that resulted in 2 million people coming into the Congo as refugees including those who perpetrated the genocide. As a result, because of political reasons first, neighboring countries had an interest in coming into the Congo to hunt down these people, which they did perpetrate in a countergenocide. Another silence in the historical narrative is that this is not really spoken about. And so these political motivations of neighboring countries to either take over the Congo or take over parts of the Congo was the impetus of the first Congo war.
The second Congo war, that was also true, but they started to realize that there were also economic benefits to be had. Society had been partly militarized. There were a lot of guns, there was a lot of opportunities to use guns in a context of a weak state to achieve whatever. So one of the whatever is people realized in Rwanda military networks that minerals in Congo would be very valuable. So the second Congo war, which started politically also was in large part about facilitating the illicit exploitation of Congolese minerals. There's a 2001 United Nations report that was the first to kind of show it.
And later on, once society is militarized, once the state is weak, pretty much anything can be a cause for violence because you can use violence to steal, you can use violence to express a grievance or to negotiate with the central government. But if one were to paint a picture now, pretty much everywhere in Eastern Congo, communities have mobilized as a defense to the challenge of their territorial integrity by foreign actors, be the Rwandan government or be the enemy of the Rwandan government, who are the Hutu militias who later became FDLR, who have been terrorizing the population for a variety of reasons. They're extremely violent as well. There's political reasons because they feel unstable, and so they steal from the population, so they act like roving bandits.
But the bottom line is 120 armed groups, most of them are popular militias that mobilize to protect the community. Once again, once they mobilize for political reasons, then they realize they can tax people, they can grow, economic logics grow. So you have a mix of political mobilizations with extortion that kind of explains part of the behaviors that you see today. The common denominator is the weakness of the state.
Manda Bwerevu:
Got it. Could you speak a little bit to the cognitive dissonance there in the foreign policy between France and the US in the way that they're supporting the Rwanda defense force, yet also condemning them by [inaudible 00:54:31].
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
The first kind of hypocrisy is something that is difficult to call out because it is known but the evidence is often hidden, is the role of the French in supporting the Hutu government during the genocide in the beginning where they were arming, sending even equipment and training them in the ground. It is unclear whether they knew exactly what was going on. They say, "No, it is unlikely that they did not know," but they had a calculus, which was to maintain their influence for the Hutus of Francophone over the Anglophone Tutsis. They had a geopolitical interest to kind of turn a blind eye of how excessive the violence might be as long as they could keep control.
They lost control. It was the Anglophone Tutsis who had... Many of them were refugees in Uganda, not all of them. There's a new division now emerging within the Tutsis because of that, which the US have felt very closely aligned ever since. The reasons for the US alignment are, number one, the US felt guilty that they didn't do anything during the genocide, the Clinton administration at the time. So that has marked a lot of people who remain with a lot of power in the State Department. Two, personal relations and business relations were also built with high levels of the Rwandan government back then. The same government is in place since '94. It is Kagame.
And three, the US has found a strategic interest in supporting maintaining the Kagame government in place, in part because it might act as a buffer for, especially after 9/11 for what they perceive to be threats of Islamist groups going to areas that might be of strategic interest like the Congo. I don't know whether that this is justified or not, but I know that the US has a long history of constructing fears to justify strategic interests that are often based on falsehoods.
So now when the United Nations repeatedly, the group of experts, does reports that show the role of the Rwandan government in the armed groups in the east, which they often use satellite groups, the US is systematically involved trying to silence those reports. Often there are addendums that get cancelled and then they get leaked to the press. It is often at that moment that the US then starts to ask Rwanda, "Please behave a bit better because my name is on the line essentially." This hypocrisy is not something new. Foreign policy is not dictated by any moral principle, I believe, other than strategic calculations and at times economic interests of people who have more power. It's something that I think is very striking today when one looks at the Congolese conflict and when one looks at the genocide on Gaza in ways that are very difficult to comprehend, the level of mismatch between what society is actually able to see and the discourse of the US government trying to hide and sanitize something that is too late to hide anymore.
And the same happens for the support of Rwanda. The violations of human rights in the Congo exploitation of illicit minerals have a long history of Rwanda involvement since the '90s. Also, human rights inside Rwanda to maintain the regime. So there's a common pattern in that when a group or a regime is of strategic value for a powerful country, then they are willing to cut more slack on a variety of issues to this group so that they can remain aligned, which is a form of extracting rent from the big powers saying, "You need me, therefore I'm going to do things that other people might not like, and you can keep protecting me."
Manda Bwerevu:
And then on the note of the Free Congo Movement, that's really popular right now in huge part because of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. I'm curious why you think that the connection between the DRC and Palestine is being made and what the Congolese people can do to capitalize on this media tension to help address and spotlight some of the conflict there, because it's been a conflict that's been happening for a very long time, really large scale. Violence and lives lost, yet not really a lot of media attention. So I'm curious what you think we can do to help capitalize on the Free Congo Movement.
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
I think it's an empowering moment, and it's also a very difficult moment because the madness that is currently taking place in Gaza shadows also other conflicts that are often brought back by defenders of the madness of Gaza, by saying, "Well, if you care about them, you should also care about this 50 other conflict."
In the case of the DRC, the few studies that exist showed that within five or six years, 7 million people died as a result of the wars just between 97 and 2004, and how murderous the situation is continuous. Perhaps less intensively, but millions and millions of people have died in Congo directly or indirectly as a result of the war. So I think when people started to develop the language of, for example, genocide... Or to use genocide, it's something that resonated a lot among Congolese people who have, in a sense, it relates I think a little bit to this hermeneutical injustice who have been in the shadow of the look of the international community while suffering at a huge scale without necessarily being given the tools to put a finger of what exactly is that is happening to us.
The scale is huge. The difficulty in addition to be shadowed by the other conflict now is that in the other conflict, there's one very clear perpetrator that every day decides to destroy everything through dumb bombs. In the case of the Congo, there's 120 groups and people don't understand from the outside what would be the one logic, what would be the role of the Rwandan actually if one were able to intervene intervening at the level of the Rwandan government would be important. Also the political elite in Kinshasa, what is their role? Each of hundreds of groups typically has a political pattern. Sometimes they're in Kinshasa, sometimes they're in Rwanda. The key denominator is that the state is too weak.
And so that makes it even harder to articulate a language saying, "We have to stop, and this is the strategy." Because it seems like it's almost like conflict that has infected everything and people don't really know where to begin. So I think it has provided the language a little bit to remobilize the fight in the Congo to end the suffering. It's shadowed and it's very difficult for a lot of people to identify one solution.
Hannah Balikci:
I think starting to wrap things up a bit, we just want to know... We just have some final questions that we ask every guest on root of conflict. And one thing is that if there was a paper or book that you would recommend to a young public policy student to read, which would it be? Was there something that you read either in your studies that you found seminal or that you teach in your class that you think is something that people should be really reading and internalizing?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
Yeah. Can I give a few?
Hannah Balikci:
Yeah, for sure.
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
So I would start probably with Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, which I think is very enlightening and empowering to understand some of the issues we have been discussing. Democratizing also for people to read it. I would probably also suggest that's also a difficult book to read, but Dunbar Ortiz, An Indigenous History of the United States that kind of traces back the history of the last 300 years from the perspective of indigenous people who received the colons and who were exterminated before the word genocide even existed, to kind of position ourselves in the historical context to better understand who we are and what we do and why and to better decide freely ourselves what we want to do. This is not to dictate just normatively who we ought to do.
I think there is a recent book since we're talking about the current conflict, a a recent book called The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein that illustrates how the Israeli military very rarely understood that they had an edge in military technology. And part of the edge became huge with the birth of artificial intelligence because military technology hinges on experimenting. And it is a society that essentially has millions of Palestinians on which new technologies are regularly experimented. That may not explain the current conflict, but I think it provides some context.
I would also provide perhaps two other last recommendations. Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine gives good context for most people, I think, to understand, I don't want to say the Palestinian perspective. I want to actually say a more holistic perspective. As well as of course, Ilan Pappé, the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which is an Israeli scholar that took seriously the most taboo question in the birth of the state of Israel, which has to do with the removal by force of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Palestinians from their historical homeland.
Manda Bwerevu:
The next question is, what advice would you give to students or people in general who are interested in working in this area and are just beginning their careers?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
I think courage. Courage to you. I encourage you to continue recognizing that if you can, you are born in a historical context of privilege that doesn't make you evil, that gives you a responsibility to look back at why you, or we, have this privilege where we can actually spend our time trying to help other people. Doing that, undergoing that reflection, taking the responsibility of perhaps historical injustices that might account for the distribution of wealth today to say how better can you use it?
And hopefully, the kind of historical introspection might also help better make sense of the relationships that you're going to build. Beware of anti-intellectual quick thinking that is very present when it comes in building relationships across different groups. It's very present today in the media when people regularly call other people human animals, for example, in a way that's almost sparks like wildfire. People are very ready to take these representations of other people as a way to justify violence. This is not about the current conflict. It is about the history of humanity. And especially over the last 500 years, it's about... I think looking at it can make us better to have the impact we want to have.
Raphael Rony Anthony:
What upcoming event in Harris that you're looking forward to and you would recommend everyone to go and attend?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
So I think there is an event in May, I believe it's May 16th, where a film is going to be showed with a producer. The film is called Israelism. And again, along the lines of what we have discussed about the class, I think it's not something that is going to be very comfortable to watch for some people. And I really don't wish people to feel uncomfortable. I watched it myself and it helped From the perspective of Jewish-Americans, explain to me as an outsider, how important is their relationship with the state of Israel after a millennia of persecution of Jewish people. How also not only important it is, but how much dissent that is also among the Jewish community with regards to if we are going to have a state for ourselves where we can be safe, should it be at the expense of other people with violence?
And it led me to realize that very early in the 19th century when people became aware that the political project of Zionist was about to remove people with violence, a lot of Jewish people became anti-Zionist of different political ideologies. Some of them have the view that today they live very safely in the United States, and maybe there is a way to have their own homeland, but perhaps not this one or not the way it has been obtained. I'm an outsider. I just found it very illustrative for me. And so part of the reason of consequence of watching this film is that yesterday I was at a Jewish celebration, a Seder by Jewish academics who are against Zionism as a political project. It doesn't mean they want to destroy the state, doesn't mean they want anyone to die, but they just interpret their cultural and religious and historical roots in a way that is more consistent with their struggle as well as the struggle of others.
So I have full respect for, and an appreciation for the complex relationships that people who have suffered so much persecution have with the state of Israel. But it also, I think, illustrates how people came out of a particular relationship by realizing that they perhaps did not agree with the political project. And I learned a lot. And maybe other people disagree, and hopefully more people come to share their views.
Hannah Balikci:
And finally, what's something you wish we would've asked? We've asked a lot of questions here. It's been a long, long episode. What's something that you would've liked us to talk about?
Raul Sánchez de la Sierra:
I run out of ideas because you had so many great questions and you asked me more than I thought you would ask, which I really appreciated too. Maybe I position myself with this discourse that we have to be critical about the role of race, et cetera, but I'm also human and I'm a perpetrator as well. Deconstructing that aura that might emerge when someone is critical would be nice. I've been very difficult to work with, with the Congolese, with people from Europe and the United States.
I do have to say that having experienced the huge injustice of the living conditions of the Congolese, there was a moment they really lost any respect for European or American students that went to work with me and had this attitude with the Congolese. Things that were important needs for them, that I consider just an expression of entitlement. And I think I've grown over the years. I've also been difficult with the Congolese before. But to kind of base everything on compassion, that's the starting point. And the work that I have done on myself is not over. It's just the beginning. But that also implies that one has to use compassion with others. And everyone starts from a place that is not malicious. A lot of people in position of privilege also start from a place of some ignorance. It's not their fault. It's also good to kind of extend the bridge to help people, including me.
Hannah Balikci:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict, featuring Professor Raul Sánchez de la Sierra. This episode was produced in edited by Hannah Balikci and Nishita Karun. Thank you to our interviewers, Rony Anthony, Manda Bwerevu, and Hannah Balikci. Special thanks to UC-III-P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of the series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit their website at pearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter, @pearsoninst. Inst is spelled I-N-S-T. Thank you.
Root of Conflict
04.11.24
Polarization in a Region of Turmoil | Daniel Brumberg
Root of Conflict
03.07.24
Colonizing Kashmir | Hafsa Kanjwal
Root of Conflict
02.08.24
Philosophies of Research | Austin Wright
Hannah Balikci:
Hi, this is Hannah and you are listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You are listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC-III-P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
What kind of ethical concerns should researchers think about when deciding to take on a project? In this episode, we speak with Professor Austin Wright, an assistant professor of public policy at Harris, and a faculty affiliate of the Pearson Institute. We speak about his past and current research projects in Afghanistan, dual-use infrastructure and broad US policy interventions. We also talk about his work teaching as a professor, his advice for students, and how his life journey has influenced his understanding of conflict and ripple effects.
Hi, my name is Hannah Balikchi and I'm a second-year MPP student and Pearson fellow.
Austin Wright:
Hi, I'm Austin Wright. I'm an assistant professor here at the Harris School of Public Policy and an affiliate of the Pearson Institute.
Jose Macias:
Hey everyone, my name is Jose Macias. I'm a first-generation Chicano, and I'm also a second-year MPP student and Pearson Fellow.
Hannah Balikci:
So, Austin could you introduce yourself, how you came to Harris and your work, why conflict and how you got into all this?
Austin Wright:
Sure. Yeah, so I think that how I got into conflict I think is a story about a really pivotal time in my life. So when 9/11 happened, I happened to be at a high school in San Antonio, and when the towers were struck, my school went into lockdown. Those who are listening to the podcast might know, but might also not know, that San Antonio is military city USA. You have a large number of bases, a large constellation of military infrastructure there. And so my school went into lockdown because of that and concerns of the potential that San Antonio or nearby sites might be struck during a large-scale coordinated attack, which was unclear if that was happening on that day.
And the person that I was locked down with happened to be, again, military city USA, their partner was at the Pentagon. And when they found out the Pentagon had been hit, they of course went through this period of trying to gather information. Communications were locked down, they weren't able to get in contact with them. So, I spent that day, a day of tremendous suffering in the United States and abroad, I spent that day with someone who was in a very real sense going through the phases of reckoning with the potential that they had just lost their partner. And I think up until that point, I was a young teenager. I didn't really have a sense what terrorism meant. And I think many people around that age kind of experienced it for the first time then. We weren't really thinking about the attack on the World Trade Center that had occurred before, or even necessarily the attack on the USS Cole, that really didn't strike home for a lot of young people.
But this day, that event in particular, being with someone who was processing life, just how close terror can come to individuals who are thousands of miles away, that made the stakes really clear for me. And from that point forward, I became really interested in foreign policy. I became really interested in the notion of how people use violence as an alternative means of politics. And that day really solidified for me an interest in finding ways that we might both understand what the root causes of conflict are...
Hannah Balikci:
Good plug for the show.
Austin Wright:
As well as think... Yeah, good plug for the show. But also ultimately how, if we understand, if we can understand what are the causes of conflict, what are the root causes, what are the drivers of participation, why do individuals feel the need to resort to violence in this way, ultimately generates a set of challenges. And I think a core part of what I hope the Harris School is doing is not just thinking about that set of problems, thinking about what the drivers are.
The opportunity came. So you asked out how I ended up here. When the opportunity came to join Harris, I jumped at it. In part because it was around this time that the Pearson Institute was forming, and there was a lot of excitement about the potential that that could promote both on the research front and on the policymaking or policy advocacy front. And I'm here because I'm excited about that work. And I think all of us, maybe the folks listening to the podcast, I think a lot of the folks in this room right now are thinking about, how do we not just identify what drivers are, but how we can go out and build a better, more prosperous, more just world.
A world that our kids are going to live in and my kids live in. And this is what motivates me in the work that I do and the advocacy that I do because of that. And I think that what this has enabled, I don't mean to be too long-winded, but is that when we struggle with, we're all purpose-seeking animals, and we can find purpose in any number of ways. And the purpose that I have found in my life, at least at this moment of my life, is really how to build that more just and secure and prosperous world for my children and their friends and the children that they will have. And a big part of that is not just how to we identify origins, but find solutions and how do we reinforce our relationships with strategic allies abroad, especially in the goal.
Jose Macias:
That's awesome. So thinking about your impact, and since joining Harris, you've taught about eight generations of scholars now. Could you describe what shaping a generation of policymakers is like at the Harris School for you? And if so, in addition to that, what are three things you want your graduates to remember when they leave?
Austin Wright:
Okay. Yeah, no, no, that's real, real. I feel like doing the numbers, I have the good fortune of people sometimes enjoying my lectures, and so sometimes they're a little overpopulated. That's probably at least 2000 students that I've taught that have come through that I've touched in some way, and many of which have gone off and worked in the public sector, have gone off and done important work there, have gone off and done work in the private sector, have gone off and worked in city and local government.
And look, not all of us need to study these questions. Not all of us are driven or motivated by the questions of understanding conflict. But I think all of us are driven by a core set of interests in how do we use policy as this lever? And ultimately people, I hope, lead, the courses I teach here are mostly in the core and mostly focus on how do we leverage data to generate the insights that will ultimately shape policy. And I think, yeah, so that's the aspiration. I think that we've done those programs internally with folks here at Harris. Big picture we've also expanded the offerings that Harris can provide so that we can reach beyond. Jose, you've been an instrumental part. This is kind of how we first met, and you've been an instrumental partner in enabling us to be able to take those opportunities elsewhere.
Ultimately, more recently thought about going out and not just working people who are thinking about going to graduate school, but also thinking about people who are already working for governments and enabling them to be successful. We're doing that with a strategic partner in the security arrangement of the United States, and I think that that's a meaningful thing. That goes just beyond the scope of Pearson.
Now, three things I hope students who leave Harris, who I've interacted with are ultimately thinking about. I think the first is that in order to do good work, we need to understand the settings. We need to understand the context. That I think a lot of folks often confuse running regressions with a true understanding of what's going on. But once you really understand what you can learn from the regression, you do know that in order to get the most out of this tool, in order to get the most out of data, you have to understand what generates the data. You have to understand the local context, you have to understand drivers and measurement. And that just requires a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge. And I hope that people coming through here don't get confused about the fact that just because I'm looking at a table or I'm looking at a really beautiful figure that it's necessarily telling me anything meaningful if I don't know about the-
So, that's the first thing. I think the second thing really is that I hope our students leave with the skills to both be good, hopefully be good producers, but if they can't be good producers of research that they know how to more skeptically consume research. And I mean, that's part of the first thing, but I think it's also much bigger that you know how to ask questions about what is generating the sample, what are the potential biases that are here? Part of that is understanding context, but also part of that is also understanding the method you're using or what the method other people are using.
And I think the third thing that I hope that students leave my class with an understanding of is that there are many people here at Harris that care. There are many people here at Harris that want to enable our students to be successful. As an institution, I hope that we're committed to this, but at the very least, I hope my students understand that if they ever need to come back and they want to talk about a problem that whether it's professional or personal, whatever, mostly professional, right? I'm here for talk therapy, but mostly I'm to give you advice about it like make better policy.
But I would hope that they understand they can come back. There is a home for them here. And I mean that both here in a literal sense, but there is a home for them and in intellectual sense where they can come and find me wherever I am in the world. And if they have a problem and I have the time and bandwidth to help to solve that problem, I will give them everything I have.
And we talked about this, Jose. I think that's just part of, and when we think about, for me, the true origin of the roots of my interest here intersect very closely with a lot of those drivers we were talking about earlier, which is I grew up in abject poverty in some sense. We had holes in our roof, we had holes in our ceiling and black mold, we didn't have heat, we didn't have AC. And what enabled me to be successful, it was that people were committed. And so I hope that people leave my class with the sense that I'm equally committed to their success because people in the past have seen something in me and took gambles and made flyers and they took a pass. And I hope that the gamble paid off and I'm here to pay that far forward. So, yeah. Third thing, hopefully.
Hannah Balikci:
One of the things you talked about, you teach the core classes, but there's a class you also take that's big data and development. And I was just wondering to get your thoughts on what's your definition of big data and how do you use it within your research and how do you use data, the context that you talked about and together to create research?
Austin Wright:
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think that big data has no single definition in the sense that how big does it have to be? In this class, what we are focused on is a broad set of settings. We're innovating on data collection. People are innovating on measurement, people are innovating on clever research designs, all of which leverage large-scale data. And I think that one of the benefits of a class like this is I get to teach papers that I like and I get to share some of the cool things. But we don't shy away from the fact, look, we're scientists and everything, nothing I do is perfect and nothing that anyone else does is perfect. And there are always things that we can improve on. That is, that should be our mission as scientists, is to find the ways that we can improve that which we see and ensure that it's as robust as possible and as meaningful as possible.
And that class gives us an opportunity to read through papers at the bleeding edge of data science and big data as it intersects with social science and questions of interest for us in development, which is a broad spectrum. It's like political developments, it's economic development, it's development in fragile settings often which are marred by conflict. And to both think about how to do good work in those places that leverages things like remote sensing, so satellite imagery, high-frequency satellite imagery at super granular levels.
In yesterday's class, we were talking about a really nice paper on fires that crop bring in Pakistan and India and a super nice, super interesting paper. But I hope that the students understand that I really like this paper. I think this paper is excellent in many, many dimensions, but there are many things that we could do to potentially tweak it around the edges and improve it. And when they come in and they see that cool data, they see all this high-frequency information, they see the beautiful data bits. I hope that that doesn't keep them from asking skeptical questions. Just because this is great doesn't mean it can't be better.
Hannah Balikci:
Right.
Austin Wright:
Yeah.
Hannah Balikci:
I think that kind of goes into some of the projects that you worked on and you talked about context. You've been to Afghanistan before 2021. One of your projects I think was released last year was territorial control. And even just talking about non-state actors and how that creates conflict and how, I think just how the control and effective sovereignty of political entities can be measured through big data. But also just how did you, I don't know. I guess my real question with this is how did you come to that research topic and how did you use the context you had from being in Afghanistan to sort of say, okay, this is something we can measure. How do you take those results and can you apply them to other places? And what's the policy outcome you want to have from that?
Austin Wright:
Yeah, yeah, that's a excellent question. Yeah. So we had a project that leveraged some rather incredible survey data that had been sponsored by NATO. And we negotiated through Pearson early on access to this data. We had just moved to Keller and I was here, I couldn't sleep. And at that time I lived here really close to probably way too close to code. So when I couldn't sleep, I would just come to the office super late at night and I would just read. And I happened to be reading one of the reports that came alongside that survey data. Basically explains how did they collect it in the field and I was thumbing through these extremely long documents, and I get to the very end of one of them, and it's explaining something called a sampling recent. And what I was seeing in this report was this notion that the Taliban was actively blocking them from going in and collecting data in certain places. And then I was leaning back in my chair, I fell down, I hit my head pretty hard. I went uncon- No, I'm kidding. I'm joking about this part. This is my apple hitting me on the head type moment.
No, it was just like in that moment I...
Hannah Balikci:
Are you okay? It's two in the morning.
Austin Wright:
That's right, that's right. It's two in the morning. I wake up little birdies, like little birdies flying around my head. No, it's like in that moment I just kind of had this aha where it's like, okay, okay. Everything that we see is conditional to being able to go collect data and the data they're collecting is sensitive. The data they're collecting is insights into how civilians behave, what they believe, what they prefer, and insights about the operations of the Taliban. And so if you are this non-state actor and it's smart because you asked the question about generalizability and whether or not I can take this and take it to other places. And I think that in that sense, it's portable in that non-state actors, whether it's the Taliban, whether it's the FARC or former FARC or paramilitaries or armed groups or criminal groups or just criminal organizations in general, or even just regular political actors, will often have incentives to keep people from knowing information about their activities.
They want to keep that private and their ability to keep it private in a setting like this reveals something about their power. And it reveals something about the territorial integrity of what they control in a geographic sense. This is all in-person data collection. They're constantly pinging these districts trying to go in and access them. And what's happening is if there's territorial integrity, those data collectors are going to get blocked, and if they have an incentive to block them, they're going to keep them out. And so yeah, that's where that project came from. I didn't actually fall. It did not need to seek medical attention, but it was this aha moment where it's like, okay, the sampling, resampling process in these surveys is instrumental for thinking about whether or not we even see the data. And that tells us something, that gives us some insights into the battle space.
Jose Macias:
So thinking about, we were talking about this international paradigm. Austin, it sounds like you came of age after 9/11, which impacted an entire generation of scholars. What do you think now as you sit here, you do this research, you leverage different kinds of methods. What does evidence policymaking look like under strategic competition with the New York [inaudible 00:17:55] what does that look like? What is the research, but how do we articulate findings? How do we drive impact? This idea of strategic competition as we've transitioned from the war on terror to what we see today?
Austin Wright:
That's a hard one. I think that, in an ideal sense, what we would be able to do is have a line of communication to share insights from our work with stakeholders who are making decisions. And that's a difficult thing to achieve, whether it's during periods of counterinsurgency or period now something like great power competition or near-peer, or as we recently found out with the war in Ukraine, maybe not near- peer, but big picture still concerns, right? We want to take those potential threats very seriously.
So there is something that emerged that Pearson has supported that Harris School has been an active participant in, which is something called the Empirical Studies of Conflict. It's a project that was initially funded by support from DOD to create exactly this. A network researchers all committed to the same core sort of credible causal approach, or at least the approach to social science research on these questions and to give advice. And we have a seat at the table in some sense. We can share those insights. We have partners. And again, that's because you have to build out reputation. You have to build out that relationship. They need to be able to say, okay, I can reasonably rely on what you're saying because the work you do is high quality. And I can differentiate between you and someone who's just a talking head on TV.
Now, that organization was originally founded with the focus on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are counterinsurgency conflicts. But the toolkit that we use, the toolkit that we teach our students here is portable. I can take it from studying these sets of questions and I can use it to study questions, not necessarily questions of true grand strategy, but I can use it to think about very precise questions in the context of great power competition and near-peer competition and the threats that we face in an international setting and not just in a counterinsurgency setting. And we're beginning to do that. And in fact, one of the big projects that we're launching is focusing on that transition, is focusing on, and we're rolling up those old projects. We still need to learn the lessons of those conflicts because we invested a lot of blood and treasure in those wars. We need to learn from them to prepare for the next set of counterinsurgencies, because these wars will not go away.
These wars don't go away. And when the United States is in a position to intervene in support of a strategic ally or to intervene in a humanitarian sense, I hope that we don't shine away from our obligation to humanity as this great nation, but we also need to prepare for an eminent set of concerns at a global scale, which are not that. And we're beginning to work on those sets of projects to understand how we can prepare for that eventuality because it's better to be prepared than to be caught off guard. We're getting ready for that.
Jose Macias:
Can you give a teaser to the audience? What kind of projects are coming down the pipeline?
Austin Wright:
Yeah. So we have a series of projects on Ukraine specifically. We launched a couple of projects there. We've already wrapped up one of those big projects about how we can better inform the public during periods, during episodes of instability that we can message to them understanding how responsive they are and figuring out better systems to help our allies in a setting where Ukraine is now engaged in a near-peer competition with Russia, right?
Jose Macias:
Yeah.
Austin Wright:
That's what we're seeing. And that stalemate creates a lot of potential concerns about the civilians getting adjusted to that. So that was what that project was about.
But in terms of that sort of, I don't really see this as a tri-polar world. This is like my hot take. Russian forces are not prepared for what the United States would be able to unleash in a ground war. That's obvious. And that is not near-peer competition in a broad sense. But there is a coming conflict with another nearby nation. A rising nation that is a recognizing its place in the world that would like to reshape the world in its vision. And that nation is also facing a series of internal crises and will soon find it probably politically advantageous to engage in a large-scale military conflict or military buildup to offset a crumbling economy. And the United States needs to be prepared for that eventuality and is increasingly becoming prepared for the possibility that that state won't just harness military capacity but will harness its strategic investments in the acquisition of seaports and trade terminals globally.
And so that is the work that we're doing is to understand just what the consequences are of the massive, massive spending that they have been doing, buying up the majority of the world's most important ports, and what potential consequences that might have for global trade. And of course, if that nation only directly controls somewhere on the order between 68% of global trade, so even if they withdrew from the global economy, I mean of course it would be a massive hit in terms of manufacturing and production, but there could be strategic reallocation. But through their port acquisitions, they now control probably something on the order between 65 and 75 percent of global trade through their ports.
Jose Macias:
Wow.
Austin Wright:
And that is of grave concern at a global scale. And our project is to better understand just what the consequences are of that amount of acquisition and doing some scheming about settings where they might be able to leverage that tremendous power they now have in a commercial sense, as an extension of the states to those commercial enterprises. And the way to think about this is in the wake of World War II, the United States chose guns. We have naval assets deployed globally. We have military assets-
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]
Austin Wright:
... states chose guns. We have naval assets deployed globally. We have military assets deployed globally. They have chosen butter and they have chosen to be able to control the global flow of butter. They have chosen ways of being able to influence who gets that, how much they pay for it, and they can use those means potentially to completely destabilize global trade. That represents an existential threat to the global system.
Hannah Balikci:
Right. I mean, it does represent an existential threat to the global system and especially to the United States. But looking towards the Western hemisphere, take for example the situation in Ecuador where the president has declared a state of internal armed conflict. In Ecuador and in Latin America in general, how do you get the economic situation in a place where people stay instead of coming to the US for economic opportunities? Or even also fleeing violence, there's the two sides of that. You have to do both the immediate violence and we've seen that in Bukele in El Salvador. How do you do the violence stuff? But also it's the bandaid for right now, but then also getting to the root cause of the violence.
Austin Wright:
These are many dimensional problems and if we think about gaming out a strategy that helps us resolve one thing, it might inadvertently have these second, third order effects that we have not carefully thought through.
I mean in the end, I think, listeners, if they know me, they probably know I'm a Harry Potter fan. This is like Snape turning-
Jose Macias:
What's your house?
Austin Wright:
Bro, obviously Slitherin.
Hannah Balikci:
Same.
Jose Macias:
Wow.
Austin Wright:
[inaudible 00:25:44] Bro.
Jose Macias:
That's real fake and all.
Austin Wright:
But I will say, I admit that I'm a Slitherin, but I struggle against some of these things. I made a commitment this year to be more empathetic. Snape is turning to Dumbledore, you asked too much. Have you ever stopped to think that you asked too much?
And I do think that this is something we need to think seriously about. There are a multitude of drivers, all interacting with each other that if we want a sustainable, intentional solution or a sustainable intentional intervention that we hope looks something like a solution, then it involves us thinking about all of these complexities involved in what the drivers are and the interaction between those local economic conditions and violence. And the fact that some individuals are fleeing the lack of economic opportunity, some individuals are fleeing the presence of violence, and some of them are fleeing places where these two things are very closely interconnected with one another.
Of course, we're also running up against very, very serious strategic concerns that we might have about the replacement rate in the United States, our birth rate, the extent to which we can pay for our social service commitments that have been made to an increasingly elderly population. And of course, how has the United States been able to do this over time? Because we've been significantly increasing the presence of immigrants who are paying into the system but are not yet benefited.
All of these things have to be taken together and thought about in concert with one another. But I think the tricky part is like, all right, are we asking too much of a process that can barely get the answer on a very simple set of problems? And this is a really complex one and we need to take seriously what can actually be done to address that.
Hannah Balikci:
I think of that like sometimes it feels like the US is almost doing too much. I don't know, this is just one of a personal thought that there's a lot of policy that's being done by the US to different countries around the world and does it feel like sometimes the US' policies are... I think of US sanctions of Venezuela, the secondary effects that happened from that are now not necessarily that it's only that, but that the economic situation as a result of the US sanctions of Venezuela has led to this migration throughout South America. And now with the Barbados Agreement trying to walk that back, how do you get to these?
Jose Macias:
And I think that just goes to show their shifting priorities and how do you adapt to a shifting priority? It sounds like this was probably an effort by the administration to try to offset energy crisis by introducing more oil to the market at large. But I think it goes to, is the US doing too much or how do you balance your priorities given what's going on in the shifting world or international conflict?
Austin Wright:
It is a tricky problem, because when you think about the sanctions question, when the initial decision is made, we tend to think about this as a partial equilibrium problem where it's like, can it have the direct effect that's intended on that target audience without thinking about the downstream? General equilibrium effects it might have, the externalities it might create or the second and third order effects. That's because often... This gets back to the conversation we were just having before that the policymaking process can rarely get simple problems right. And then when you think about, now I'm going to ask you to not just think about the direct effects today and try and optimize for those, but I'm going to ask you to think about what happens three congressional cycles from now when you might not be in office, when you might not reap the political benefits or face the political consequences. You don't reap the benefits of success and you don't face the consequences of failure necessarily.
Then, that creates a lot of focus on the present value of whatever you're doing. If we can't even get those right, then it becomes really difficult for us to think about these longer term strategic planning. And you have these whiplash effects where some new conflict emerges, you face an eminent concern today, you roll back an intervention that you introduced before, and it's basically just you're shifting your priorities and constantly reevaluating. And then that doesn't lend itself for the long-term planning you need to fix the problems that you were talking about earlier. To think about how do we go in and build that more just and secure and prosperous world that we were talking about before? How do you go do that? That's a really hard, that's a long-term commitment to a place. I think there are reasonable questions about like, how much should American taxpayers be responsible for the citizens of another country and helping them build their country?
Hannah Balikci:
And that goes back to Afghanistan, which what we were talking about.
Austin Wright:
That's right.
Hannah Balikci:
I was doing a bit of research on some of your current projects, and one of the things is the Refugee Repatriation Project and how really talking again about more people are on the move at any time now more than any time in human history. I think if you can go a bit into the project, it was an interesting, natural experiment of seeing people who had cash assistance versus not and the decoupling, repatriation with conflict. Is that right?
Austin Wright:
That's right. I mean, this is one of these... All credit for the initial idea goes to my coauthor Christopher Blair, who's at Princeton now, was a PhD student at Penn at the time. For thinking about this big question of how do we evaluate the impact of large scale resettlement? The movement of individuals who were previously displaced from their country back home, repatriation. That's a really hard problem because when we think about, and this is like what? The paper emphasized what you're picking up on, which is that there are these episodes throughout history, recent history, where we observe this mass relocation back to a place of origin or mass outflow away from a conflict. But crucially, it's all happening because it's endogenous to conflict.
Then when we're thinking about how do we go and we do an evaluation of the mass relocation of individuals? Is really hard because it's often embedded within a context where the driver is the very thing that we would like to be able to study the impact on. And this is so closely coordinated with one another.
This project is a nice opportunity to begin thinking about how do you go in and do that? To our knowledge, it's the very first of its kind to do effectively a natural experiment impact evaluation of resettlement at scale. And this is all coming from a shock induced by a change in cash assistance that was provided by the United Nations to individuals who relocated from Pakistan back to Afghanistan.
There's a lot of, as you might imagine in a space like this, when you're thinking about a lot of individuals, a lot of at-risk individuals, and this conflict. Sensitivities to the side, a lot of military-age males who are at risk relocating to context of ongoing conflict and that the timing of the policy was timed to, as it turns out, coincide with the beginning of the fighting season. This could have been an absolute disaster in terms of planning and in terms of the unintended harm that it could have created.
It was very serious and it was unclear whether or not it had those effects. There were a lot of conjectures and there still are a lot of conjectures about the effects of repatriation and relocation on conflict. What happens when you take a mass of individuals who have been abroad? Who have been exposed to all sorts of economic and political hardship? All sorts of insecurity. And now they're coming back home, a place they've been dislocated from for maybe months or maybe years or maybe decades? They're coming back to an origin community away from which they have drifted and to whom they might be viewed as an enemy or at least a rival, a competitor, putting pressure on that host community that they're going back to. Those are all serious concerns.
There are so many theories that one could come up with which exists that it's a tinderbox, you're about to light a match and we're going to see this whole thing light up in a way that's obviously was not the intention of a program that would lead to a wave of return.
What we do is we could take advantage of the unexpected timing of when the cash transfers were announced. And what you see is within days there's a flood, there's just a wave of individuals who are returning back to the country taking advantage of this doubling of cash assistance, which in that context is a significant sum of money, especially when you think about this like a median household scale. It's a very large amount of money in the context. You see this mass wave of return that could have had all these disastrous effects on the reemergence and intensification of the conflict or escalation of the conflict. Indeed, what we end up seeing is that either the conflict is unaffected overall, or there are some types of violence that go down.
In particular, the thing to remember is that this is one of the benefits of them not returning on their own, they're returning with this effectively a significant economic stimulus, is that that can have spillover effects across households within the affected the target communities where they go back to. Indeed, what we see is this a significant decrease in labor-intensive violence, which is consistent with the story that they're effectively increasing the reservation wage of fighting because they're coming back with cash. Of course, we can't go ask the Taliban how much were they paying their fighters. We can't find direct evidence of that wage mechanism. But all of the evidence points in this direction, especially when we think about what would civilians demand for valuable information. So we see some results there as well.
But of course, when you're in this world, you're budget-constrained, you have an interest in maintaining the production of violence, and now it becomes more difficult and costly for you to produce one kind of violence, maybe you turn to another. What we end up seeing is that there is this reduction in labor-intensive violence, and to be clear, that is the mass of violence. But what they end up substituting into are the types of violence that are insensitive to this shock or largely insensitive to this shock, which is capital-intensive roadside bombings. So what they start doing is they start investing more and that type of weaponry, that is what we see. As an additional test of that mechanism, what you see is not only are the increasing the number, but the sophistication of those attacks increases, as well. The impact that it has on the conflict is increasing.
It's a bit of a double-edged sword. In one sense, what we found is that overall violence is not really moving around that much, but that's actually masking these splits where it is moving in a way consistent with the story about reservation wages and it is moving in a way consistent with an insurgent group, having an incentive to produce violence, but now being constrained in one way. So they're going to substitute, and it turns out when they substitute, they're substituting into the most deadly form of violence. And when they substitute into that form of violence, they're making increased investments in that, it's becoming more technologically-sophisticated and they're harming even more people than they did before.
Like we were talking about earlier, it's all coming full circle. When we think about a policy intervention, you got to think about the first order effects, but then you got to think about second, third, and fourth, third, all those downstream consequences. Because what ends up happening is that Afghanistan overall doesn't become necessarily more violent place, but it comes a significantly more dangerous place, especially in the places that those individuals are going to, and not necessarily because of any fault of their own. It's becoming more dangerous because of a strategic substitution by an armed actor who still has an interest in producing violence to disrupt the state. That's what makes this so hard to think about policy interventions, because when we think about, "Well, we can put our finger on one problem, we can block off one channel." And then that starts spouting off this game. It's a game of whack-a-mole where I'm going back and forth, and now I'm stretched across all of these things. It's like that scene from Star Wars. It may have been a collab between the Asia Foundation and UNHCR.
There are some things that you have to be careful with is the sensitivities of data and how things change. When we began working on that project, there was still the democratically-elected government in Afghanistan. It is like a non-trivial thing because when we have a series of papers, now you're seeing the underbelly of academic publishing is that it takes way too long to actually get papers out. But we have papers that were submitted before the takeover, then the takeover happened and it's like when we initially submitted, we were free to release a good chunk of this data, and now we have very serious concerns about how this data might be appropriated by bad actors in bad ways.
In particular, we have a project on information operations during the war and the impact on civilian collaboration and making that data publicly available in any way, it would basically be a map to collaborators, which collaborators in the sense of they were actively supporting the provision of security in their area. They were just doing it to the wrong actor, or now. When the paper was submitted, they were coordinating with the active government of Afghanistan, but then when the paper was accepted and it was about to be published, now, they actually were collaborating with the former regime. That's the things that you have to be careful with.
I'm glad you brought up the credential program because this is, again, it's opportunities for us to be in thinking about how can we use that as a test bed or how can we think about using that to refine our ideas? Actually, Hannah, you asked this question earlier about a territorial control project, it feels like hours ago now.
You know what?
Jose Macias:
It's the magic of mixing.
Austin Wright:
The magic of editing.
You asked about a project, and actually people in this program, they were some of the first to see that data in the wild, and some of them were giving lots of feedback about how to think about the measurement strategy, how to think about that and shout out to them because this is basically... I got to use that as an opportunity to trial run an idea, to get their thoughts on wrinkles and where it might not work and under what conditions it does work. And that's all tremendously useful.
Again, to go back to those earlier themes where it's so important that we realize that there's an interplay between research and teaching, research and teaching, research and teaching. Because if you use your work to guide your teaching, you can use your teaching to inform the work that you do.
Hannah Balikci:
And then in fact, policy from there.
Austin Wright:
And then ultimately, yeah. Look, I've spent the past week thinking seriously about this. The work that we do is a three-legged stool, one of these legs is research. The core thing that drives universities, especially research universities, the production of knowledge. And that's important.
The second leg is the leg of teaching. Enabling your students to be successful in the world by recasting the way that they think about problems and giving them the toolkits to be successful and to go out and to have the impact that you hope they will, whether they go off in industry, or they go work in the public sector, local, state, federal, international. You hope that you can do that.
And the third leg is doing. The third leg is actually going out and trying to reshape the world, not just through your research and not just through your teaching, but through active policy engagement and policy consultation. I will say that to me, this is the hallmark, the place that is doing its job well. Is that we both think on our own, we train people to think, but we also do, and we train people to do.
As of late, I've been thinking a lot about this notion that there is no higher calling than public service, both in the interest of your state and the interest of your nation and the interest of humanity. And I hope that we play a small part of recasting the shape of the world in all of its multifaceted dimensions by training the people who will go do those things and make it that more just and prosperous and secure place.
Jose Macias:
Just and prosperous.
Hannah Balikci:
Absolutely. You mentioned it as a stool. Is that the stool of the university or who sits on that stool?
Austin Wright:
For me it's a three-legged stool. I don't know who actually sits on a stool, maybe Jose over here. But in some ways, it can't function if one of these is broken or banged or-
Jose Macias:
Special issue over here, let's go. Represent. Austin, where are you at?
Austin Wright:
One of these is not functioning, it's underdeveloped or it's immature. It's not stable. I don't know, maybe this is not the point of university in general because I think that maybe there are some parts of the university like philosophy departments or humanities departments or the liberal arts that should exist in a way that lives the life of the mind. But when I think about what is the aspiration of a place that would like to have an impact, that would like to have influence, this is how it happens. We can't really do that. Think about what is the difference between a public policy school and an NGO? What's the difference between a public policy school and a think tank? NGO is really focused on advocacy, it's focused on doing, and maybe there are some people inside of it that are engaged in research. In fact, many of those NGOs are engaged in research, but they're not engaged in teaching.
When we're thinking about a think tank, the think tank might be actively involved in research and it might actually be actively involved in lobbying, but it's not going to be actively involved in training people. Then, where is the one place where all of these things can collide with one another? Where you hopefully learn all of these things together. It's a university and maybe not university in general, maybe a professional school where we don't just train people to think, we train people to practice.
Jose Macias:
Which is great because it's low-stakes environment to an extent. You can fail here and still grow.
Austin Wright:
Oh, sure.
Jose Macias:
It's going to help you be a better researcher and critical thinker.
Austin Wright:
I thought that was the most dry joke I've heard all day. Low-stakes setting, no big deal, we were just talking about massive relocation of people from Latin America to the United States. No, but I think you're absolutely right. You should think about it, this is the laboratory. It's an opportunity for you to take your time at a place like Harris. In the classroom, you're not having that a direct effect. You can choose trial runs on ideas. I mean, I just did a trial run idea earlier and it...
Jose Macias:
Did it land? No?
Austin Wright:
In one sense, it landed, but it burned. That's a good thing where it's helpful to be able to bounce ideas and get a sense of what other people's priorities are and where they see that going, because then they can give you feedback about your idea before you actually go out and make perhaps a mistake.
I think that's absolutely right. But again, the reason why it's so helpful to have that low stake setting where you get to train, you get to think about these problems is so that when you go out in the real world, you've had that time to reflect. You've figured out the best practices, you know that, before I go out and I do this thing, I should assemble the smartest people I know and ask them for their sage wisdom. Get that advice. The time that you spend here at Harris, I mean, I hope... All of this is aspirational, because I don't know, because I'm not you. I don't know what the experience is, and I'm sure everyone has different experiences, but I hope that you take this...
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]
Austin Wright:
... and I'm sure everyone has different experiences, but I hope that you take this time to build out your social network, that you take that time to find, oh, here are my trusted advisors that I can go to.
And maybe that's meant in a purely personal sense where I need advice on some life choice that I'm making, maybe some furniture that I'm buying. But meet it in a broader sense as well, which is that you're finding the people, you're building the network that you're going to come back to over and over and over again to seek advice. Because you've been through what I hope is a challenging experience. Hopefully it's not too stressful, but a challenging experience where you are forged in fire to think about things in a similar way.
Jose Macias:
Can confirm forged in fire.
Hannah Balikci:
Right, yeah.
Jose Macias:
Absolutely. It's interesting that you think about that you're sharing your thoughts about how we can think about each other. Like Hannah and I and the entire class here, as advisors. Because I remember I think on day one, or I forget when the kickoff was for admissions, when Regin Daniels stepped up and said, "You should think about each other as your future board members for some sort of firm or some sort of consultant agency."
I'm thinking now, "Yeah, I definitely know who to call if I need help figuring out how do I deflate this value to constant 2022, or my code's not working. Can someone lend me a hand because I don't understand why this is not working so well?" Or just picking an idea. This is definitely a place to generate social capital and then leverage for the future and hopefully to do good, try to apply and change the world using evidence-based approaches.
Hannah Balikci:
And hopefully think about those second, third-order effects too for things that you're doing.
Jose Macias:
Which I think is really a conversation about ethics. And so, I think this is a good setup to transition to asking...
Austin Wright:
I like that segue. I like that segue.
Hannah Balikci:
Smooth, yeah.
Austin Wright:
It's totally natural.
Jose Macias:
Yeah. Brought to you by Spotify.
Hannah Balikci:
Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Jose Macias:
Student discount, let's go. In the policy world, sometimes there's pressures by stakeholders, and you alluded a little bit to it in terms of the change of regime, at least in Afghanistan. Sometimes these pressures come in different forms for a type of research, maybe sometimes like a shiny object or chasing the news cycle. Austin, how do you stay true to objective evidence-based policy research? And has there ever been a project pitched to you that tested the moral boundaries as a researcher?
Austin Wright:
Earlier we were talking about how the skills that you acquire, hopefully the way that we teach you to think about the world helps you realize it's not just ways of thinking about things like counterinsurgencies. It might be ways of thinking about great power competition, near-peer competition. It might be ways of thinking about dynamics of say, population movement.
And I remember, I think most listeners who were here at the time in May-June of 2020, really thinking through a series of events that were unfolding. Both the murder of George Floyd, but the subsequent response. The mobilization of public for demands that there be changes. And of course, one can debate about the merits of those demands and in the end, whether or not they were actually effective at shaping criminal justice outcomes and the interaction between marginalized communities and the criminal justice system, their experiences of the criminal justice system.
But this was a moment of a reckoning and a very personal one for me, which is that my wife is African American, my children are tri-racial, so they're part African American, they're part Hispanic, and they're white. And there was this moment where of course, it doesn't take having to have a personal exposure, I would hope. It's part of being more empathetic. We don't need to just be thinking about things that directly affect us. But in the end, when I was thinking about this episode, what struck me is that it was getting real.
My daughter, all of my children are beautiful. All of them are brilliant. All right. I'm just glad they look like their mother. I suppose most parents would probably say that, but I genuinely mean it. These kids are great kids and I have zero responsibility for making them that way. But I look at my daughter, so she's now 10. And if one were to describe her and one were to pick a race to describe her visibly.
Jose Macias:
Yeah, expressed. Right?
Austin Wright:
They would probably pick white. She has gray-green eyes, she has brown hair, straight brown hair, and she is light skinned. Her physical appearance, one might think that she's actually only one race, not three. And then my son, my first son, his name is Simon. He's got people here know him around the Twitter know him because he's got burnt orange here, it's copper. It glows in the sun. It's incredible and it's curly. And if one were to ask, is this child at least partially African American, the answer would certainly be yes.
And as all of these things were unfolding, I had this moment. I was sitting in our backyard and I was contemplating life and I was watching my children play. And what hit me in that moment was this profound sense of concern that I had no agency to affect the world that my children are going to live in a very particular way, which is that someday Rosie and Simon will be walking down the street and Simon will be racially profiled, but Rosie will not.
And they don't necessarily look like brother and sister. They have some similarities, but he will be racially profiled and she won't be. And there's nothing that can break the heart of a parent more than the idea of their children suffering. And suffering for no fault of their own, in a way that you have such limited locus of control to effect. And again, I want to emphasize that it's like it shouldn't take it being personal for it to matter. These kinds of things just should matter. But in this moment, for me, it was very personal.
And of course, I felt like, man, what value can I have? What value do I add? I work with data, what can I do? I'm not going to affect change immediately with going to a protest. I really...
Jose Macias:
You don't want-
Austin Wright:
Generally, those are not particularly effective modes of actually achieving change.
Jose Macias:
Yeah, driving change.
Austin Wright:
But one thing that did strike me is that I was seeing news coverage of events that were authentic, events that were coordinated by and supported by Black Lives Matter and allied groups. Were coordinated just by like-minded individuals, not even necessarily tied to Black Lives Matter as an institution.
And I was reading news reports of those authentic protests being penetrated by inauthentic actors, members of the Aryan nation, members of white supremacy groups who were attempting to undermine what they were doing. And they were going to do that by engaging in acts of arson, by engaging in acts of looting or making it appear as if they're looting. And then engaging in acts of violence against the police with the intention of triggering a response from the police, which then leads to an escalation.
And then of course, the narrative of what would've otherwise been a relatively peaceful event, making very serious demands, but a relatively peaceful event that gets distorted. Basically, they can hijack the narrative of coverage and make it about something that fits into a trope.
And when I read about this, I was like, oh, finally, I'm of value because I am a data person and this sounds like an empirical question and I have an idea. And the idea is if we can find a way of estimating all of the locations of these events, of the protests that are occurring. Okay, this is going to sound a little scary. If I can then track all of the individuals who participate in this protest, and then I can look at where those individuals come from, then I can discern the likelihood that those individuals are authentic participants.
But more likely than not, the focus would be on identifying a set of individuals who are inauthentically engaging. And whether or not those protests that involved members of the public that may have been inauthentically engaging or may have only been there as agitators or saboteurs there to distract, whether or not those were indeed the ones that were more likely to escalate to arson.
And so I worked with an amazing co-author of mine. We very quickly put together a project. It took us a couple of days. Again, this is when earlier you talked about data access and things like that. This is the perk of having a lot of data, is that you can readily work on projects of interest to yourself.
And we were able to do that. We came up with a method, using cell phone trace data. GPS trace data. For all you listeners who are listening on your phone, or you should know if you don't already, because I say this quite a bit now, that your phone is just, it's a surveillance device that happens to make phone calls.
And I mean that in a very skeptical critical sense, but also in a bit of a comical sense. Because the thing that we're using is actually just marketing data. It's data that when you're on Angry Birds or what's the new thing? The TikTok, the TickyTock, the gram, you do it for the gram. Yeah.
Hannah Balikci:
All LinkedIn all the time. Yeah.
Austin Wright:
Yeah. All [inaudible 00:59:03]
Jose Macias:
Well, here at Harris. Yeah, definitely. This is a professional school, so we use the professional network now. Yeah.
Austin Wright:
That's right. Yeah. That LinkedIn premium. Shout out. Shout out.
Jose Macias:
50%.
Austin Wright:
50%. That's right. Wherever you find your podcast. That was really good, Hannah. You're very professional at that. It's almost like you've done that before. I think it's everywhere. Almost everything you do with your cell phone, you're leaving breadcrumbs, at least up until a couple of years ago. You're leaving breadcrumbs that allow me to track basically your patterns of life.
In some sense it's not as scary as it sounds, but in another sense it is absolutely as scary as it sounds. And of course, I'm a scientist, I'm not a marketer, so I'm not necessarily interested in that dimension of things. I'm interested in what I can do with that data. We figured out a way to estimate locations and protests using this data.
But in order to do the harder part, well, the real thing to be able to back out who the inauthentic participants were with high fidelity, what we would have needed is more precise information. We reached out to an organization that had this information. Had a conversation with them, they were thrilled at the idea of the project. They were willing to grant us access to this information at an extremely steep discount.
And we were trying to figure out whether or not we were going to buy it. And then the clarification came. The clarification came that one of the reasons behind this, the willingness to grant this, is because it would be of value to the organization. And not just that organization, but other entities of the federal government.
Jose Macias:
Oh. This is a public-facing institution?
Austin Wright:
Yeah. Other elements of the government that would be interested in what we find and how we found it, and the IP. I had conversations, look, as a scientist, I was torn. I mean, you all know this, I love data. And what they were about to do is keys to the kingdom in some sense. Thinking about, well, you all have seen The Dark Knight.
Jose Macias:
Yeah, I love that movie.
Hannah Balikci:
Yeah.
Austin Wright:
Okay, well thank goodness you all... Have you seen that? Okay. All right, awesome. All right. Think about this as that scene where they're using echo location to do a 3D scan of Gotham to identify the Joker. You all remember the scene? It's kind of wild. Yeah. That's the world where that started off as fiction and then it became fact. And the fact is this data that they were willing to give us access to, is you can map with extremely high fidelity the movements of the vast majority of devices in the United States.
Jose Macias:
That's crazy.
Austin Wright:
Okay. Now what that would allow you to do is to understand where there were locations where inauthentic individuals were going in to engage in bad faith behavior to undermine a movement. A movement for all the reasons that we just talked about earlier I was interested in understanding and supporting. And that has very serious ethical implications. And not in the sense of the immediate thing, although one could think about just should one be able to have access to this in general.
But in the downstream things, and this is where you can't just think about the first-order implementation of what you're doing, because that might be done in good faith. That might be done with what you think of as the best interest of the public in mind yourself. But you have to think that once you have opened this box, once you have revealed the thing and how useful the thing can be, if there is no one there to constrain bad actors who might use it, then you're responsible for what they might do with what you have produced.
And this is the point where you have to begin thinking about is this paper dangerous? Maybe not dangerous today, but maybe dangerous in the future. Or how could it be hijacked for a purpose that was completely unintended? Now, that's probably true of most research that we do. If you tell me how to rebuild an economy, you're also giving me a backwards map to how to destroy it. And if you're telling me these are ways that I can go fix the link between conflict and growth or conflict in some public policy intervention, you're also telling me, okay, how can I go enhance conflict as well?
That's probably true of most of the things that we do. But this was in a very real sense, a natural thing that one could do after releasing this thing, which would be, well, you told me the subset that were inauthentic. Let me just flip this around and I'm going to go find the authentic ones. And not just that, but I'm going to go find the repeats. I'm going to go find the leaders of the organizations behind that, the people who are showing up repeatedly at protests, who appear to be engaging in coordination given their location within the flow of individuals within a site. Yeah. That's one of these situations where we had to think seriously about where there's sufficient safeguards in place.
Jose Macias:
Wow.
Austin Wright:
And the answer was no. And so what did we end up doing? We ended up shelving the paper. We ended up shelving that paper and we backed away from that project. Now things to know, at the time, this was 2020. I was still fairly early on the tenure track. Every paper matters. Professionally, this was a costly decision to make.
And personally, I felt really invested in what we had done because this project had given me a way that I could do something. I felt powerless in that moment that I could go down the street and raise my voice. But do I actually think that that's going to have a real impact? That's not my comparative advantage. I'm not the person who goes out. I'm not the person who will go lead that movement. That's not me. I'm not the community organizer. I'm a professor. I work with data.
And so finally I had an opportunity where I felt like I could be a value. And then to realize, oh, there was this ethical challenge, a very serious ethical challenge of concern over how it could be misappropriated that dang, the thing that I thought would be my value add might actually have these unintended consequences. And so yeah, we backed away from that. And that was a hard thing to do professionally and personally, but I think it's important to be willing to do that.
Jose Macias:
When someone says, "If you're not going to do it, we're going to find someone else to do it," does even phase you. Do you just take psalm, knowing peace that, well, that wasn't you. I guess I'm thinking about Oppenheimer, right?
Hannah Balikci:
The war to end all wars, like the weapon to end all wars.
Jose Macias:
Exactly. The weapon. Exactly.
Hannah Balikci:
Which didn't work. Yeah.
Jose Macias:
Which no, exactly. That's why I'm wondering, had that guy left and not created the atomic bomb, it was a race until someone else created it. I wonder how do you feel about if you don't do it, someone else does? And someone else is going to maybe get the tenure or somebody else is going to get the praise. How do you deal with, can you deal with it? Doesn't even matter.
Austin Wright:
It does matter. It does matter. I think that if you think the thing that you're going to do is not sufficiently specialized, somebody else can't just go do the thing that you did, then well, that's something for you to weigh in your decision.
A slightly different version of this is let's just say, I think that actually what that person will do is the wrong thing. If they're going to make some fundamental error. They don't have this tweak that I thought of. Then you're like, okay, oh shoot now, now I've got to weigh, not just the idea that someone else is going to go do the thing, but they're going to do it worse than I could have done it.
Jose Macias:
Dang.
Austin Wright:
Your like oh.
Jose Macias:
That's [inaudible 01:07:28].
Austin Wright:
That weighs too. That weighs too. But I think that that's also the appeal of a scoundrel in some sense, where it's like if you can convince yourself that someone else is going to do it, that's just an appeal so that you feel better about the fact that you really wanted to do the thing and now you're using it as motivation for actually just doing the thing, for rationalizing doing the thing.
These are things to balance. It's like, okay, am I really genuine about the idea that someone else is going to go do this? If they're going to go do it, they're going to do it worse. And it's going to be wrong and it's going to be wrong in really important ways. And if that is true, then you have to take a step back and think, "Okay, am I only doing that to rationalize the thing that I want to do to begin with? Am I only doing that to rationalize the sort of benefits that I might receive from it? Or am I genuine in my belief that it could be done?"
Now, I mean what we did is not terribly difficult. The intuition is pretty straightforward. But do I actually think that other people could do it if we did? I don't know. Doubt it. I mean, we were the first ones that did it. And maybe the answer is, yeah, somebody else would've had the idea and they would've put it together. But the human capital inputs to produce that kind of thing are non-trivial, human capital, real capital in terms of data are r non-trivial to put all these things together.
And I will say, I'm ready to.... We're going to melt... I'm going to burst some bubbles here and tell you that we often have this idealized vision of all the sort of meritocratically selected technocrats who run government or meritocratically selected technocrats who work in industry who are for profit reasons all very positively selected and doing the right thing at the right time because there's either public interest or private interests that are driving.
No, no. I mean, I'm here to tell you when you go off and you're working in the real world, everything has a distribution. And there's a very real chance that you're probably overestimating the capabilities of those entities, those organizations, those groups. Even if they're like-minded, they would like to do the thing that you're doing, they're probably not capable of doing that thing.
I mean, depending on how specialized it is. But get prepared to be frequently disappointed if you go in thinking that, oh, the people I'm going to be interacting with are all...
Jose Macias:
Top notch.
Austin Wright:
The best of the best.
Jose Macias:
No, I think, so for the listeners, before coming to Harris, I had some time to work on the Hill. And I remember coming straight out of undergrad after a year thinking about who runs government. And very much to that extent of it's got to be the top people`. Because it's challenging. It's a really hard place to break into, do some really good work.
But being on the hill, this is not a reflection of the office where I was at, but you realize that fundamentally people are still people. People still need soft deadlines. People don't necessarily have the right tool set to do it. And some people just know the system well enough to put your little idea from point A to point B. And they have their win, and that's all they really care about.
Sometimes it's not even about what the bill does, what the goal is. Sometimes it's just getting a win. I think that's one of my issues with working in the Hill, it's like it became more about theater, political theater than it did and about policy. Still a good experience, got to learn a lot, met some awesome people at work, grew.
But yeah, I think it's very true that we have this imagination because we're taught, I was political science, international relations undergrad, of what the Congress is. It's the pinnacle of democracy. It is the top, but at the end of the day, it's still run by humans. Humans are imperfect. And so I think there's a lot of truth in, yeah, there's going to be some disappointment there. But hopefully you come to a place like Harris to try to change that, to take up that space, to bring your skill set that is incredibly valuable and missing because you matter.
Austin Wright:
Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, I think that earlier we were talking about legacy, we were talking about why we do the things that we do. We were talking about the fact that we're all purpose-seeking animals. And I think that you're absolutely right that a core part of what we hope we can do is that we can affect how many meritocratically selected technocrats there are. And-
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:12:04]
Austin Wright:
Like, how many meritocratically selected technocrats there are, right? And that the people going into these positions of power will be taken more seriously if they have the skillsets that we like to train people to think about.
So yeah, in some sense, I want people to be constantly skeptical. In general, I want people to be constantly skeptical of what they see, the world around them, what it actually means, the relationships that are underneath it. Is it causal or does it happen to just be a correlation? And I want people to be skeptical, but also, at the end of the day, the reason why we like embed within you this inherent, hopefully, state of skepticism, is so that you do your best work. Right, that you go out and you could be a part of that change, right? But I want that, I you to know that going in, you will be surprised just how much growth there is left to achieve, right?
Hannah Balikci:
Right. Mindful of time, I just want to maybe wrap up and ask a couple just concluding questions.
Austin Wright:
Sure.
Hannah Balikci:
Related to that, you've talked about a couple papers that you recommend to your students in your classes and things that you admire. If there was a paper, or book that you'd say every public policy student, or anybody who's interested in this space, or people who are interested in conflict, or whatever your qualifier is, what paper would you recommend to people, as something to... Paper or book, yeah, what would you recommend to folks to really get a sense of what you're talking about here?
Austin Wright:
[inaudible 01:13:32]. Okay. That's a hard one. All right. So there's a paper called Aid Under Fire, published almost a decade ago now, if not a decade ago now, on a community-driven development program in the Philippines that was at least partially sponsored by the World Bank. And it's an interesting read. I think in many ways, it's an exemplar of how to write a paper. The introduction of that paper is phenomenal. I go back and I reread the introduction of that paper often.
Jose Macias:
Wow.
Austin Wright:
Because to me, it's short, it's punchy, it's to the point. It says exactly what it needs to say and it clarifies the stakes. And often, as academics, we're not so interested in like, "Oh, you're going to come up with an exact T-test or something like this." Like, "Okay. All right, bro, that's helpful." In subsets, it is meaningful. It is meaningful, it's science. It is science, it is knowledge. And I respect that work, right? But when I'm thinking about, "Okay, what is the work that I find meaningful?" It's not just about, again, thinking about the world or coming up with a better mousetrap. It is something that tells me something unique about an actual setting.
And this is a paper the introduction to which is fantastic in that sense. It's an exemplar. And so it's a teaching tool, I love this paper. It is also a paper that clarifies the stakes of the work that we do. And so the World Bank has been pretty forthright, the benefits of that program were minimal. So this community-driven development program was basically them going out, and rather than imposing a set of projects onto a community, they incentivize the community to come up with the projects that they thought would be the most helpful. So in theory, this should be the driver of change, right? I don't come in with my generally uninformed, generic theory of change or development. I'm going to go in and I'm going to ask the community, the stakeholders, "Where do you see this as adding the most value? Tell me," have a council that decides, and then ultimately the community will get to drive the development, right?
Great idea. Turns out, didn't really work. It didn't really work in generating the amount of growth. There was basically no minimal return on investment. Okay, and World Bank is pretty transparent about that, at least in that particular place, with that particular set of projects, with that scale of funding, it was less effective than they would've hoped. Okay, now what the paper does is say like, "All right, we're not going to focus on that part. Instead, we're going to focus on the fact that running a program like this, you're running in a context of an ongoing insurgency." And what is the nature of community-driven development, but winning hearts and minds by achieving community engagement? And when you're running this program, what should you have at the top of your mind? Risk potential. And because what you're having those communities do who are eligible for the program is meet and coordinate.
And at the core of what they're doing is figuring out, "Do we want to engage with the government?" And in the context of an ongoing conflict, that means that now you're putting civilians in harm's way, by making this choice public, in a way that it would not have been before, by making it high stakes and observable. And so what this paper does is take seriously this potential concern. And the nice part about the project is they've got incredible, incredible data on conflict dynamics. And what they ultimately find is that there is a surge in violence, not overall, a surge in violence in the planning period, when the villages are having to decide whether or not they take the government's money.
And the reason why this is such a well-regarded paper is that the way the aid was allocated was according to a ranking rule. So there's a running variable and there's a cutoff at which point there are some communities just inside of the cutoff who are eligible and some just outside of the cutoff who are not eligible. And your listeners, who have just been through this, you should know this is regression discontinuity. This was like a built-in natural experiment, almost like an experiment. And they find that there's a certain violence in the barely eligible communities. And so that subsides, and who pays the... They're going out, they're targeting government actors. Who's engaged in the violence? Political actors. So the ones that are actually initiating the violence against state are political organizations, not criminal organizations.
And again, it's a reminder of the stakes of the work that we do, that we cannot just be focused on the first-order effects. We must think about the fact that we are embedding an intervention within a complex setting. We're not studying something in a vacuum. When we're making real policy, there are real effects, and we need to learn from that. I'll say one other thing real quick about that paper. So I really liked that paper. That's super nice. Very well written.
Hannah Balikci:
That's Aid Under Fire?
Austin Wright:
Yeah, Aid Under Fire, Joe Felter, Ben Crost. Excellent paper. The setting, though, is super interesting, and lends itself to other research, and got some friends at the World Bank who work on these problems, who think about the Philippines, who think about community-driven development. And one day, they came across a paper that claimed that this program led to extreme deforestation.
Okay, and I will say this was a bit of a wake-up call to me about, as a reminder, right, so to go back to this question earlier about ethical dimensions, sorry, you got to think about who you're partnering with. You got to evaluate, like, "Do I actually believe in the mission of what they do?" Because when you work with someone, potentially, you're giving them a nontrivial part of your life. You only got one life and you're taking that time, that scarce time, your most scarce resource, which is your time, you're giving it to this organization. And you've got to think about, "Am I ready to back their play? Are they serious about the work that they do, or am I just doing this in a transactional way?"
Jose Macias:
Wow.
Austin Wright:
And I can tell you that when the World Bank found out about this, they came to me and they said, "Austin, you've thought about related projects quite a bit." And I was like, "Oh, I happen to know quite a bit about this context. I've read that paper way too many times." And they were like, "We want to know, is what they found right? We don't have people necessarily," to go back to the point earlier. They want to build out those technical skills, but they don't have people on their team, and that particular team who can go in and read that paper, and assess, "Is it actually credible that there's that level of deforestation?"
And so they came to me and they said, "We need your help. Could you please help us with this? Because if this is right, we will need to go in immediately. We're going to make a public statement. We're going to go issue restitution. We're going to go find a way to make those communities whole, and we will take this into consideration in future projects." Right? And that was that moment where I was like, "Oh." Like, I've been working with them. I like the work that they do. I think they're serious about the work that they do. They think about evidence. But I'd never been in a conversation like that, where a stakeholder was like, "If we messed up, it's not just, 'Oops,' it's like, we are going to go and make this right." And they were serious about this.
Jose Macias:
It's a lot of power to you. That's a lot of power, as a researcher to kind of drive that change.
Austin Wright:
Yeah, and pretty high stakes when somebody's like, "Hey, if-"
Jose Macias:
It's the World Bank.
Austin Wright:
"If you think this is right, if you think this project is right, we're going to go fix this problem. We'll fix it. We're going to allocate resources, we will take the reputational hit. But that's because we are seriously committed to change. We are seriously committed to the work of the World Bank." And it turns out, I mean, almost everything about that paper was wrong. So I had to go back and I rebuilt all the data behind this paper, and I re-estimated everything. And there were just flaws throughout. And the author had misinterpreted key elements of the regression. They interpreted the wrong coefficient. There were pre-existing level differences across these places, all sorts of things. The paper was just straight up wrong.
Jose Macias:
Oh, my gosh.
Austin Wright:
The whole thing was wrong, the whole thing was wrong.
Jose Macias:
What does it feel like when you find that out? When you just realized you just kind of... I mean, this is not a bad thing, but you kind of just destroyed a paper.
Austin Wright:
Yeah. Well, so what came of that was, and I'm glad that they came, I'm glad that they reached out, I'm glad that they realized they didn't have... Respect to them also for realizing they didn't have the technical skill to fully understand what was going on, so that what was happening. So shout out to them, and in addition to that, knowing that if it actually was valid, that they were going to do something about it. It's like, "This is important. This is a general life lesson that everybody who's listening to this podcast right now, know your limitations and surround yourself with people who can help you." And that's exactly what they did, because they knew their limitations. They went out and they found someone who could help them. And in the end, they were committed to change, if it needed to be changed. In the end, it didn't need to be changed because everything about that paper was wrong.
Now, I can tell you that they were very firm about their willingness to make restitution if something were wrong, that something that they had done did actually have this effect. But I can tell you that they applied equally zealous response when I told them that, "No, the paper was wrong," and they wanted to make it right. And this is the part where, Jose, your question is a serious one, which is like, look, there's fellow academic who made not just one error, but a series of errors, and I mean that, like every single thing in that paper was wrong.
Jose Macias:
Wow.
Austin Wright:
Every core result in the paper was misspecified, or incorrectly interpreted, or misrepresented. And in the end, I walked them back from the worst-case scenario that they wanted to engage in, to correct the record. And instead, I reached out to the researcher myself. I asked them to give me time to help guide them through the process so that they could arrive at their own decision to remove the paper from the internet. Now, yeah, so it's like, yeah, but that's tough, right? This is a hard thing. We have teachable moments, and that was a teachable moment. Those were mistakes that frankly should not have happened, right? But we all make mistakes. I have certainly made mistakes in what I've done. The work I do is incomplete. I mean, all of our work has mistakes and is incomplete, but that was one that was so profoundly wrong and profoundly wrong in a sense that it was meaningful from the policy side.
Jose Macias:
Wow.
Austin Wright:
And so it's crucial.
Jose Macias:
Yeah.
Austin Wright:
And again, so you ask, what's a paper to read?
Hannah Balikci:
Right, there we go. Yeah.
Austin Wright:
Pretty frigging awesome paper to read. And in addition, sets you up to think about a bunch of big-picture things.
Hannah Balikci:
Right, yeah. The last question we always ask in our interviews is what's something you wish we would've asked you that you want to talk about? And here's your space to... Whatever you want. What should we have asked you that we didn't?
Austin Wright:
About my sneaker collection.
Hannah Balikci:
Yeah, honestly.
Austin Wright:
Yeah. Honestly, it's the root of conflict.
Hannah Balikci:
Yeah. Go into it. Yeah.
Austin Wright:
I'm teasing, I'm teasing. No, I mean, I think that, look, the sneakers in my office are about to get [inaudible 01:26:02], I'm about to get real. Okay.
Jose Macias:
It's about $10,000 worth of sneakers and gold, just for everyone watching. They're all in case, he has level 39 security locks. It cannot be stolen.
Austin Wright:
Yeah. My door is definitely not unlocked all the time.
Jose Macias:
There's definitely not exams on the table.
Austin Wright:
Definitely. Yeah, exactly. There's definitely not the answers to the final exam. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. They're not there. So if you're listening to this-
Jose Macias:
This is not an advertisement.
Austin Wright:
This is not an advertisement for cheeto.com. All right, so I think that I was joking about the shoes, but I do actually think there's something meaningful that connects back, which is that, so the shoes are there in part because I needed to get them out of my house, because my kids would mess them up. But big picture, look, we all carry with us the residues of our past. We all carry with us the things that have happened to us before, and the experiences that we've had, and the things that we grew up with, and the things that I grew up with is a lack. And it wasn't because my parents didn't work hard. They worked really hard, but there were things that they could not do for me, and some of the reasons why they couldn't do that were outside of their control. But for me, those shoes are a representation of the fact that, in some ways, I've made it. Yeah, I can flex a little bit.
Jose Macias:
You can get the nice things, you know?
Austin Wright:
Yeah, you can get the nice things.
Jose Macias:
No more Payless shoes, man.
Austin Wright:
Wow. Yeah. No more Payless shoes. Well, yeah.
Jose Macias:
There's nothing wrong with Payless shoes.
Austin Wright:
There's nothing wrong with Payless shoes, shout out.
Jose Macias:
They minted this whole generation of scholars here, okay?
Hannah Balikci:
Right, yeah.
Austin Wright:
Shout out to Goodwill, keeping your boy in the flex. But I mean, real, real, for me, those shoes are a manifestation of the fact that I made it out of a bad situation. I mean, not a bad situation. Well, yeah, a bad situation, I guess that's pretty straight up, you know the situation.
Jose Macias:
Yeah, you got to own it. You got to own it.
Austin Wright:
It was a situation that I am extraordinarily fortunate to have been able to move beyond. And for me, the shoes are a very real manifestation of that fact. They're a visual reminder every time I walk into my office that you got to keep it fresh. But also, it's a reminder that with hard work and with dedication combined with luck and opportunity, all is possible, right? And yeah, I mean, to me, when I think about development, when I think about the hard questions that are behind the podcast, when I think about the roots of conflict, these are roots of economic progress, and development, and justice, and security, and prosperity, all of these things intersect with one another. And that's just a very real physical manifestation in my office. It's a visual cue to remind myself that I have, in some ways, made it. Now, there are still other very real things that are constant reminders in my life that the work is not done yet, right?
But every now and then, it's okay to also take time and say, "Look, I've worked hard and I'm going to get myself this nice thing as a reward for the fact that I work hard. And as a reminder of the fact that with hard work comes, hopefully, the fruit that your labor bears." And for me, it just happens to be Jordan 1s. And I think other things that I like about my office, I've got a lot of things. I have a bent piston in there, the arm is bent, and it's a reminder, "Don't get bent out of shape, otherwise you're going to do what? Because that engine blew up." Which for me is not just that, right?
It's a reminder that where I came from, I came from a house where I was destined to be a mechanic. And there was absolutely, shout out to my mechanics listening to the podcast, there's nothing wrong with being a mechanic. There's nothing wrong with hard, manual labor. The world revolves around people who are willing to do tasks like that, right? But it's a reminder that when I was growing up, education was not a priority, that, if anything, I was told not to take education seriously. And that was the path that I was on. It's kind of a reminder of that, in addition to being a reminder not to get bent out of shape, otherwise you're going to blow up. And I've got other things in my office that they're little tokens of the life that I've led, right? I have all these cards. I have a thesis, a bound thesis of a student that I advised ages ago who's now at Harvard in the PhD program, shout out to Maria, and she went through DPSS.
Jose Macias:
Yes, I remember, I remember.
Austin Wright:
Yeah, she was a TA, and it is a reminder of what you can enable in others. And I've had the great fortune of people who enjoy my teaching style, and I love them for it, and I appreciate the things that they shower on me. And I try and keep as many of those little things in my office as a reminder, because every now and then, you have a really bad day, right? And we all have really bad days. You have a really bad day, and you need the reminder that it's okay. There's always going to be me and [inaudible 01:31:33], and today was a bad day. But with tomorrow, with hard work, I can go and recast things and rebuild things. But yeah, no, maybe that was the thing I wanted you to ask, because I wanted to explain, because often people walk by my office and be like... Their reaction is a bit mixed.
If you're faculty, they walk by and they're like, "This is the most extraordinary unprofessional office I've ever been in. And there should be books here instead of sneakers, I don't understand." And other people will walk by and they'll be like, "Well, these are really nice sneakers. It's cool. Why do you keep them here?£ And it's like, "Okay, here's a straightforward answer." And then there are the people who are like, they realize, we lock eyes and they know, because they know my past, and they know that it's a physical manifestation of something that I get to keep there as a reminder, both that I've done hard work, and with that comes rewards, but also a reminder that I remember what it was like and I remember what it was like to be in those communities. And those are the exact place... Those are the exact people that we hope that through the work of Pearson, through the work that you all talk about on this podcast, that we can change, that we can support them, so that they realize that their outside option is not necessarily to participate in the unproductive economy.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Professor Austin Wright. This episode was produced and edited by Hannah Balikci and Nishita Karun. Thank you to our interviewers, Jose Macias and Hannah Balikci. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit their website, thepearsoninstitute.org, and follow them on Twitter @PearsonInst. Inst is spelled I-N-S-T. Thank you.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:33:28]
Root of Conflict
01.10.24
Gendered Dimensions of Conflict | Maliha Chishti
Hannah Balikci:
Hi, this is Hannah and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast. You're listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs and use data analytics to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
How do war and conflict give rise to gender-based violence? In this episode, we speak with Dr. Maliha Chishti, an assistant instructional professor at the Divinity School and an associate of The Pearson Institute. Her core research interests are international peace building, security and development, as well as gender and human rights in post-conflict contexts. We talk about gender-based violence in the context of war, Dr. Chishti's work in passing Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, and the complexities of humanitarian aid implementation today.
Hi, my name is Hannah Balikci. I'm a second-year MPP student at The Pearson School.
Julia Higgins:
Hi there, my name is Julia Higgins. I'm a second-year student at the Harris School and a Pearson fellow.
Rabail Sofi:
Hi, my name's Rabail Sofi. I'm a second-year student at [inaudible 00:01:26].
Hannah Balikci:
I wanted to thank Dr. Maliha Chishti for joining us today in studio. Thank you so much for coming.
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
Thank you for having me.
Hannah Balikci:
We wanted to start off the conversation by asking you to introduce yourself and your work.
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
Sure. Yes. I am Assistant Instructional Professor here at the Harris School of Public Policy, but I've also joined faculty at the Divinity School, and my field of research is the intersections of religion, culture, gender and politics, specifically addressing issues of women in war affected regions with a specialization in Afghanistan.
Julia Higgins:
Great. I think we'll have an amazing opportunity to get into some of those topics today. I think a good place to start off would be your previous work and how maybe they relate to the current moment and various situations unfolding across the globe. So we know that your doctoral thesis focused on conflict analysis and post-colonial critique in Afghanistan. And according to our research, you argue that the US's intervention constructed, "An outwardly oriented state responsive to the desires and needs of the international community rather than being inwardly oriented and responsive to the needs, expectations and lived realities of the majority of Afghans." So we're curious, as a researcher, do you observe any parallels between this analysis and how scholars will characterize you as support and funding of conflicts that are still ongoing?
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
Well, you really did your homework. I haven't looked that dissertation in a while. Well, my work really merges two ideas together, ideas that come out, academic research and also ideas that circulate in the practitioner community. So I am an academic practitioner or a scholar activist, and half of my life has been to try and understand how foreign aid operates in war affected countries or it operates in Third World countries. And then to try and extrapolate that in the field theory, critical theory, post-colonial analysis and development of thought and development thinking to merge those ideas together. And the dissertation was a launching pad for me to do that. And then as I was thinking through the impact of war on women, for example, in Afghanistan, you see the same kind of trends happening across the war on terror in other sort of war hotspots. And so my work has been to sort of see these intersections of empire and how empire is connected to foreign aid and how that intervenes and gets resisted, gets reconfigured and remapped by communities.
So the best case is Afghan women. And so my research from that dissertation has moved on to a very specific focus on the impact of war on Afghan women and the global war on terror specifically, which has been an outstanding failure. And what I was writing about 10 years ago, it's almost haunting because when I was defending that dissertation, there was a lot of hope in the air that the goals and the intentions of the war on terror were operating, were happening, were unfolding. But as we found out for 20 years, much of what was happening, we didn't know about. The Washington Post published a series of interviews, 600 interviews called the Afghanistan Papers, that have been declassified. There were interviews with high ranking US government officials at the State Department, the DOD, international agencies, including Afghans.
And essentially, the headline, if you were to summarize the headline of the Afghanistan, was to clearly call out colossal strategic failure of the war on terror in Afghanistan and that how most Americans and Canadians, because I'm a Canadian, didn't know we were sort of shielded from the magnitude of that failure. So we kept supporting it, supporting it, and that support sort of ebbed and flowed. But nevertheless, we're here with the Brown University's cost of war project report that was just published that puts a dollar amount on that failure. And that's $8 trillion with close to 1 million deaths. Deaths of who? Deaths of civilians and combatants as well as journalists and humanitarian workers. And so we're sort of sitting here and having to come to grips with that or perhaps we've moved on.
Julia Higgins:
And I think that quantification aspect is something that we are always sort of keeping in context here at the Harris School. Really interesting to hear about that new research. I think also to continue on this vein, we're curious, have you observed a shift in people's understanding of the US's definition of the war on terror since we pulled out of Afghanistan? And how do you characterize that now?
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
Right. I think that the war on terror has always been this phantom, it's ambiguous. It's never quite solidified. The terrorist is this elusive figure that comes in and out. And it's very much trope that is given to sort of a singular entity, and that would be Muslim. It doesn't matter if somebody else commits those same acts of terror in other countries, there are racialized differently, et cetera. But the label of terrorists has been targeted almost very specifically to Muslims. And so I think that that trope remains, and it's useful to have, I think, because it's easy to embark on it and then validate and mobilize a war machine to go after it.
And so now, for those academic scholars, activists, organizations that are starting to come to grips with what the war on terror is, especially as we receive these kinds of reports that are coming out of Browns University that call it a colossal failure, then hoping that mainstream Americans and westerners can start to critically interrogate it and to critically interrogate the underlying assumptions, biases and ideas that are associated with them. It's not to say that the entirety of the war on terror is false, it's not. But it's to say that we have a lot of critical work to do as academics, as activists, as citizens to find out what really is at the core of it. That's a conversation that I don't think happens.
Julia Higgins:
Incredibly helpful analysis for us. And now I think we'd like to switch gears just a little bit to transition into a discussion about gender-based violence in the context of war overall. I'll start us off with maybe a question about the gendered media framing that happens a lot of the times in the context of civilian deaths. So many news outlets seem to apply what we see as an inherently gendered lens in their reporting. So for instance, commonly cited reframe in recent headlines is that, to date, two thirds of those killed in Gaza are women or children. And on one hand, this is a factual demographic statement that deserves acknowledgement, but on the other hand, it may portray female agency in a way that is less than optimal. So can you walk us through what you think about the utility of this media framing?
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
Sure. So maybe we can step back a little bit and talk about Women, Peace and Security. So Women, Peace and Security is framework that engages women's organizations on the ground, international organizations, the UN states, researchers, et cetera. The core underlying idea WPS is that women are disproportionately impacted by war and protracted conflicts. Since I think the 20th century, women and children and the elderly are disproportionately killed in wars. And so the context that's happening in Gaza and reporting that over two thirds are women, that's not new for those of us who research the impact of war on women. Now, I think given that idea of the Security Council Resolution 1325, which very specifically underpins the Women, Peace and Security framework, that Security Council resolution is historic because it's the first time that the UN took women seriously, frankly, and understood that there is a disproportionate impact of war on women.
And because it kind of creates the overarching framework, that piece of resolution, I think, is very important. I helped to draft that resolution, I helped to conceptualize that resolution, and I helped to push it through at the UN. Part of the significance of that resolution is to recognize that women are killed and that they are victims. So one, that they are victims, but second, they have agency, meaning that they are at the forefront in every war context since the 1990s that we have recorded that are promoting peace, that are crossing ideological, religious, tribal, whatever boundaries of difference, protracted difference, women have been sort of peacemakers, peace negotiators, bringing communities together. But their sort of roles are seldom formalized, meaning they're never really sitting at peace negotiation tables. Their voices are muted in international processes of peace negotiation and Security Council 1325 acknowledges that and their important role in rebuilding countries, so peace building and post-conflict recovery.
Back to that question, I have found it troubling. Now, despite we're in an age of sexual media, the narratives of what's happening in Gaza with women aren't coming from women in Gaza. And if they're coming, they are incredibly held in suspect, they're suspicious. They're like, "Well, I'm not quite sure if that's what all women are actually experiencing," death, displacement, hunger. And so you have an interesting sort of situation that unfold that establishment and those in the hierarchy of power at the top, mediate the voices of and start to sift through them. They're not talking to AP, they're not talking to Al Jazeera, they're not talking to CNN, they're talking to local women's organizations. They're talking to local networks and they are mobilizing and engaging in advocacy work for themselves. But we are not really hearing it, or if we're hearing it, we're not prioritizing it. And that's the tragedy, is to look at the mechanisms of power that are in place that mute, silence and marginalize these very critical voices.
Hannah Balikci:
Just one thing to go back on, would you mind just explaining or talking about Security Resolution 1325 and some of the main points and what it's done since it's been enacted? Just sort of for our audience that may not know.
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
Sure. So Security Council Resolution 1325, it's considered a landmark resolution, as I've mentioned. First time the United Nations Security Council addresses women as part of their mandate, which is to promote international peace and security. The Resolution 1325 has three core frameworks. One is the protection of women in armed conflict. The second is the analysis and the understanding that women should be at the peace table, so they should be negotiating peace settlements. And the third, that women are active participants in the recovery of their society, so they're a critical role in peace building and post-conflict reconstruction. So that particular resolution has subsequently created a bunch of new resolutions on the block, so to speak, and they're addressing sort of very different issues.
Now, this resolution is important because it's coming out of women's voices and women's organizations for the decade. So the United Nations Conference on Women held these caucuses of women in armed conflict. And herein, you had women from around the world for the first time, gathering every 10 years and documenting what they were experiencing in wars. And the international women's movement, academics, et cetera, started to take notice of that because the armed conflict caucuses at the women's conference were flooded with, there were just very engaged dynamic, really. And so everybody was trying to figure out what was going on, what was going on. And we noticed that what women were enduring, we had very little idea about.
So this was coming from the global south, saying that these wars, over 114 in the 1990s, Rwanda, Bosnia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Liberia, et cetera, these women were gathered together and they were looking at how their impact of their particular war was the same in so many ways. And the international women's movement documented those experiences. And the specific attention was sexual violence, that women were used as weapons of war, their bodies were foils of war. Their bodies, their honor was a weapon of war used to manipulate war. And so from that conversation, including 1325, was the first time that the international community recognized rape as a weapon of war and rape as a war crime.
Rabail Sofi:
I know you just mentioned sexual violence and war, and that's actually one of the sections that we're interested in learning more about, because right now we are seeing a lot of sexual violence in conflict zones across the world. We know that the use of sexual torture against Palestinians specifically, since that's really trending right now, is extensively documented since 1948, whether it's in Israeli prisons or during the midnight raids that are going on or just at checkpoints in general, we see that these are sexual violence structures of militarization. And taking this next question away from Gaza and what's happening in Palestine, could you dive a little more deeper into how war gives rise to sexual and gender-based violence?
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
So violence against women and sexual violence against women particularly is one act of ethnic cleansing because it targets women's bodies as holding national honor for their ethnicity, their state, their people. And so by dishonoring women, you dishonor the nation and you virtually collapse society. So there's a lot that's been written about it in the context of Rwanda and Bosnia. In fact, what has been so courageous in world history is the testimonies that came out of Bosnia and the massive sexual assaults and rapes. And the testimonies given by those women for the international community to view and to prosecute and recognize rape as a war crime. So that's really imperative that we understand that it's not that it's just not women alone, but that the idea is intentional. It is intentional in the context of those that seek to pursue policies of ethnic cleansing. And they will target women, in fact, to kill women, to target women, to rape women, to impregnate women, to forcefully transmit aids to women. These are all sort of documented across the wars and that they happen regularly.
And now there's a lot of international attention to it. What I think I really want to say is that we're in a very difficult situation right now where we're clawing back from positioning the centrality of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, Geneva conventions, Rome statutes. So we collectively experienced in the 1990s wars I was mentioning, is a new, actually post-World War II, international apparatus of human rights humanitarian law. And we had a lot of formidable new institutions in place like the international criminal court, for example. When we willfully do not recognize violations of international humanitarian law, when we see genocide and don't call it genocide, when we see rape as a crime, as a weapon of war and we don't call it out, when we see indiscriminate killing of civilians and we don't call it out in the language of international law, but we politicize it or provincial it or even sort of ghettoize it as a foreign policy issue of another state, then we essentially crumble the very foundations that we've worked so hard to build up. And then calling out human rights violations in the world becomes hypocritical.
And here's what I'm going to say is the most, what we do when we don't call it out is we practice Western. If we don't apply the very laws that we have created in terms of a civilized society that is bounded by law, that's the whole Western post-Enlightenment project. Isn't it? So when we see it, don't call it, then what are we saying? Either we're saying that the entire international apparatus of humanitarian law, human rights isn't really real, we don't really want to put too much into it. Or we're saying that Palestinians are subhuman, they're not full human beings, their full personhood doesn't count and so it's okay to not apply international law to them. And then when you say that, I don't know, you don't say that out loud, but when you don't have uniformity, especially at the level of the United States foreign policy and statements coming out of the White House calling it a genocide. If it looks like a genocide, talks like a genocide, it's a genocide.
And it's not a genocide because out of moral outrage, it's a genocide because a genocide has a legal definition. That legal definition has been met. And South Africa has compiled 84 pages outlining what that genocide is, evidence-based, and has taken it to the international [inaudible 00:21:58]. And we know that, you look through that document, it's written by lawyers, many international humanitarian lawyers, many lawyers have already called it out. So for us to be in a context here, the year 2024, where the White House is very reticent at calling it the G-word, then we're in hot trouble. We're in hot trouble in the context of how we have become complete warmongering instead of promoting peace. And the fact that we're hesitant to call for a ceasefire, that calling for a ceasefire is becoming politicized, we're in hot waters. And I'm really nervous about what kind of messaging we're sending to the rest of the world coming out of the United States. That messaging is terrifying because we have just folded our tents, gone home and likely the charges against us as being bias, of being lawless are rightly to be considered.
Rabail Sofi:
Thank you so much for mentioning international law, giving that context. I think it's super helpful for our audience. Kind of going back to what you said about testimonials, bringing up Bosnia, Rwanda, we are seeing a lot of very violent forms of violence, sexual violence specifically. Whether it's leaked or just shared, we are of course seeing this in Palestine, we saw this happen in New Iraq, we also saw a lot of stuff leak from Afghanistan. What are your thoughts on the lack of coverage of sexual violence perpetrated by [inaudible 00:23:44]?
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
Sure. It's the lack of coverage in mainstream media.
Rabail Sofi:
Yes.
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
But it's solid coverage in social media and alternative media and in the media outlets of the non-Western world. And so that, to me, is a very striking look at what is going on and how our media communications, at least formally, institutionally, is implicated in war machinery. And I think that the average person knows that. I'm probably a rare breed, I'm not on TikTok, I'm not on Instagram, I'm not on whatever else there is, but I am close to other people who sort of have these perspectives and whose perspectives have changed, who have a sense of what's happening in the world because mainstream media is biased. Right? And for those who study media politics, media communications, Noam Chomsky 101. Right? So we know manufactured consent, manufactured media and how media is very closely related to government. So that's why I think that the fact that people and people grouped in social movements are aware and circulate these testimonies, who believe these testimonies, that's what's really important is that when they see women in Gaza, they don't stop and say, "Oh, who is she? And maybe she's faking her tears."
Whereas in the vetting, looking at these images and immediately holding them suspect, that doesn't happen in social media. It's actually quite democratized. So we have much more real dialogue debate that happens on these alternative media platforms than we do by institutional media. And so I don't actually even think of mainstream media as a source of credible information anymore. I don't even want to be validated in those outlets. And I don't think that I'm alone. I think that we're now increasingly looking at alternative media podcasts. I watch a lot of YouTube podcasts. And what's happening is that it's interesting because the people that are in these alternative media podcasts, they're the ones that are doing such interesting work. They would never be given hope, a guest spot on CNN or Fox News, et cetera. So in that sense, I think that as much as it's shut down in mainstream media, it's not in global media.
And I think it's very important for us here in the United States to start to peer into what news outlets are saying in other parts of the world, go on to the news sites. I actually read newspapers in Afghanistan, phenomenal news. They write about what's happening in their country that you can't get a hold of here. It's never interesting. It never makes the cut. You can find out what's happening in Palestine by engaging in news outlets in Jordan, in Egypt. And many of them are circulating in English. And so we do have spots of credible news stories and these atrocities being understood, validated and circulated.
Julia Higgins:
Thank you. I think one of the things that we wanted to ask you was just related to that, what sort of people and or news outlets would you recommend, people want to get more news directly from, as you say, Egypt or Jordan? Is there anything that comes to mind? I think the direct news, I also find that, and especially reading the news in the language is really a helpful way, which not everybody can do, but now there's so many translation services that people could use. Is there a way that we could add, that we could uplift voices directly from these places of war or that any sort of... Are there specific organizations and/or media sources that you think are doing good work in terms of uplifting these voices in a way that isn't making it to mainstream media? And how does the democratization of media in terms of social media either enhanced or detract from uplifting these voices?
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
Sure. So in the context of women's voices, I would suggest that people look into local women's organizations. And every major women's organization across the world has some kind of a website or some kind of a platform where they circulate ideas. Like for example, in Afghanistan, RAWA, which is Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan, it's the largest national secular organization in the country. It repeatedly posts these really impressive press releases that nobody but me reads, but right.
Hannah Balikci:
Right, yeah.
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
Nobody reads in the west. And I always look and I look at the analysis and I find it so engaging and so refreshing. And I think when we de-center the analysis from Western outlets and we earnestly look to see what the majority of the world is thinking about it, then we'll be intrigued and we can have engaging analysis and you can really help to have a more comprehensive understanding.
So looking at women's organizations and you can just do basic Google searches for local women's organizations and go navigate on their websites. You can do that with local headlines in different countries, they all pop up. It's really easy to get that information if you are interested in it and you're interested in reading about. And also I would say to read authors that are based in those countries. If you're interested in feminist writings, for example, I read their works, their understanding, their analysis. And what that tells us is it almost opens the world's, what the real perspective is on issues, that it's just not us in our little silo conversations, we're just talking amongst ourselves. But when you kind of have a conversation, and by conversation I mean when you hook into these perspectives from around the world, you get a really good sense. They're just enriching and they're important to read. And I'll give you an example. You've had Professor Amal Hamada on, right?
Hannah Balikci:
Yeah.
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
She is so brilliant. I had a meeting with her. We both teach the same course. I teach women peace and security here at the University of Chicago. She teaches a similar course on gender insecurity at the University of Cairo. And we were talking about 1325. And I just started talking about, "Oh, my students engage with 1325 in this way and that way." And do you know what she said about Egyptian women in her classes? They said, "We don't care about it." And I was kind of held back by it. I'm like, "What? It's such an important landmark resolution."
And she said, "No, they don't care because they say that the western world infringes on human rights, international law, on all of these resolutions, they themselves push them through and are the first to walk away. So why should we even think about it? Why do we have to frame our conversation as era of women on the context of a western instrument that is flagrantly violated at every point by those same powers that push it through and promote it?"
And I thought, "Huh, well that's really interesting. And wouldn't it be interesting if our students got together and had a conversation about it?" So imagine how enriching that is for us to get a sense of how other people perceive what we value. Where I'm thinking the only pathway out of this situation is international humanitarian law, there's a pushback from a group of Egyptian women at a university that's like, "No, that's not our only pathway." And so I'm intrigued. Well, what's your pathway? How do we get out of this mess? And they might have something very intriguing to say.
Hannah Balikci:
Yeah, absolutely. She was our last guest on the podcast. So when looking at these questions, noticing a similar pattern in terms of the work that we would be talking about. And one similar, something on the same lines as Dr. Hamada's work is how do gender dynamics, cultural norms and societal expectations shape the experiences and roles of women in longstanding conflict, whether that's Palestine, Afghanistan, sort of global?
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
Sure. I think in the context of conflict, there are multiple competing roles that women take on. We know that. We know that know that most women become female headed households overnight. 10,000 children in Gaza have no fathers right now, since October 7th, that number has increased, but the last time UN Women reported it. And so that thrusts women into roles of mothers and mothers as providers and managing resources and maneuvering already shortages of humanitarian aid, taking on the toll of displacement. What does displacement do of 82% of people in Gaza right now? I mean, just one conflict that's right in front of us. These families are displaced and women are at the forefront of having to take on multiple roles just for survival. So the survival, the resilience and taking on multiple roles and also claiming victimhood too. That's a profound role to be in where you are yourself a victim, but you have no choice but to be resilient and strong and be an income provider or a primary caregiver for the most vulnerable and the weakest in your household.
Hannah Balikci:
Yeah, just related to migration, according to UN Women, the conflict has resulted in close to 493,000 women and girls being displaced from their homes. And related to that, how can we begin to think about the generational ripple effects of forced migration on women and girls in the generations to come.
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
The trauma that is happening and the implications of that trauma. There's been such important documentaries actually that came out of Palestine over the last wars in Gaza in 2014, I'm thinking about, and I saw a really interesting film, short film documentary. A young woman who every day woke up in terror because of the bombs that she experienced and the deaths that were happening around her in 2014. And this was years later. So imagine that one documentary was just tracking the life of one woman and you compound that with a population of two million. And what are the implications of that trauma? How does that trauma implicated impact women in their everyday roles? Dreams that were squashed, lives that were killed, identities that were dismantled. And sort of like a quandary, how does a population in such a confined area then rebuild, restore, recover? There are people that specialize in that. I certainly don't know. But I can imagine that we were so caught in the conflict right now, but implications and the reverberations of this conflict are many years going to be unfolding very specific lives, lives of children, women and men.
Julia Higgins:
Right. And just continuing that thread and maybe continuing on specifically using Gaza case studies, since we've gotten into it a bit, we've seen that each day there are 180 women approximately giving birth without water, painkillers, anesthesia for C-sections, electricity, medical supplies. We also know that mothers have been reported to mix baby formula with contaminated water and to go without food for days on end so that their children can eat. And so situations like this really necessitates a need for humanitarian aid. So we're curious, and I know this touches on a bit of your work more broadly, what role do you think the international community plays in ensuring that humanitarian aid reaches women and children in conflict settings and how we increase it?
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
Right. The compounding tragedies here is the inability of the ceasefire. And that ceasefire is so critical because it's the pathway for humanitarian aid to come through and for international humanitarian actors, well established in the international community, meaning that when there is a war and an emergency, they are deployed and they get there. And I understand that humanitarian aid and humanitarian emergencies are just fraught with other kinds of complexities. Now putting that aside, I do believe a hundred percent that local actors are able to get needs that are being deprived, like basic water, access to water, access to medicine, access to food that has to come in. And the fact that we haven't had, the United States has blocked that is just devastating. It's devastating. And the fact that journalists and humanitarian, UN workers have been killed.
I don't know, but I did read that the death of humanitarian workers has been quite alarming in the Gaza conflict. And so the international community should be alarmed at that. That means that if humanitarian aid workers are not safe in a place, nobody's safe. And that if humanitarian aid workers cannot move their work forward to helping the most desperate and the most vulnerable, then that is a real emergency. And I just feel like, how much more do we have to say about it? At every corner that you go, why are we even having that kind of a conversation? Right? Why is a ceasefire so politicized? Why is access to humanitarian aid so complicated? We have the international instruments, we have the resources, we have the money, we have the people. That can happen in a second. It really can. And so to make a claim for it, to now have to rationalize it, pull out numbers and red flag it, to me, it's really heartbreaking actually.
Rabail Sofi:
I don't have the data on hand at the moment, which I should have prepared, but I know that humanitarian aid workers are being killed or are dying at an increasing grade in conflict zones just around the world. And whether or not humanitarian aid is a human right, I believe that humanitarian aid shouldn't be politicized in that sense. It should just be a neutral thing that should be provided. Do you think that there's, whether or not it's the western institutions that are surrounding humanitarian aid and/or the multilateral institutions like the UN, is there some sort of, I don't know if you've seen this in your research, is there a shift in perspective of these organizations that either their legitimacy or the perspectives of the people on the ground have changed that results in politicizing them more? Or I don't know, is there a way that you think perspectives have changed of western institutions that are resulting in this change in humanitarian aid, the politicization of humanitarian aid?
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
Right. So yeah. That's a very distinct conversation and there's a lot to say about that. Humanitarian aid has always been politicized. You had, for example, what's called the CNN, [inaudible 00:40:46] nurture. So you have where there is greater media attention, all of a sudden that particular conflict or that humanitarian disaster receives an inflow of resources. But there could be the exact same conflict somewhere else that doesn't receive, either it's completely ignored or it receives a trickle amount. And so many who kind of talk about the politics of humanitarian aid, look at how humanitarian aid isn't always equal or fair across conflicts or across disasters. And we know that because so much money went into Kosovo, but nothing went to Rwanda during the genocide, oh, until much later. So that often becomes the case study of comparing the politics of humanitarian aid.
But to speak sort of loudly, not loudly, to speak generally, and loudly, about international organizations generally. So there is the politics of international development organizations or humanitarian organizations or human rights organizations. They have in different countries a reputation. And much of how they operate often is related to the kind of politics that they're part of in the context of that war or that conflict. In Afghanistan, for example, we know for certain that a majority of Afghans wanted to keep a distance from international organizations. International organizations and the international community, in Kabul, when I was there, they were often referred to cows that drink their own milk, meaning there was a sense that these organizations were just here for their advancements of their careers, were just kind of throwing money here and there, willy-nilly. There wasn't sort of well-thought-out, there was a sense they duplicated and replicated work, didn't engage Afghans or had considered Afghans as just passive recipients instead of active agents in the recovery of their own society.
So that kind of sort of stuck. And we had a Kabul bubble where you had really a paradise for international aid workers coming in, staying at the best hotels, having the best salaries, really coming in for a year and then moving on to the next war zone because it was all about climbing the career ladder. And people notice that. People recognize that this kind of community that's coming in to support us, strengthen us, rebuild us is actually in it for themselves, perhaps more so than us. And we know that clearly from the Afghanistan Papers that were published by the Washington Post, where the United States government officials were actually saying explicitly that, well, we really didn't know what we were doing. We had no stated goals and we were a self licking ice cream cone, meaning money just came in, we have to spend it. We really didn't care about evaluating what we were doing. We were sort of building this, rebuilding that, and there was no accountability. And we know that as a fact, by SIGAR, the inspector general for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, that millions of dollars were wasted. And the end of that is a country, does it look any different than it did in 2000? 20 years, billions of dollars of aid, so many deaths. And if you go right back to Kabul and you were there at 2000, maybe better buildings maybe. Maybe one or two, if they haven't been blown apart. That's telling, that's really telling
Julia Higgins:
I think on this thread of sort of what you're characterizing as the misdeeds and mistrust of these institutions and some of your previous work as well in the context of post-coloniality could be an interesting place to go forward from here. From our view, calls for decolonization include neocolonialism. And for me, the actions of these multilateral institutions, whether that be the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, fall under that scope. So I'm curious from your perspective, what does a better vision for the redistribution of wealth from the global north to the global south look like? And can we talk about that bit?
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
Sure. Well, if we go back to Afghanistan, let's establish one very important fact. And this was marked Montgomery and Rondinelli in a report, that published report that came out really early 2003, 2004. They said that the international community [inaudible 00:45:55] in Afghanistan with 50 years of institutional knowledge of how to do peace building and development [inaudible 00:46:06]. And they applied none of it. So we need to have a conscientious pause, why foreign aid organizations and actors arrive in a country they know nothing about and start to rebuild it without drawing from 50 years of institutional knowledge in the knowledge banks of these institutions, World Bank, USAID. We have the toolkits, we have the tools, we've been doing this for 50 plus years. And so I'm not saying you're not supposed to make mistakes, of course you're supposed to mistakes, but we were making mistakes of lessons that we already learned in other places that we kept making those mistakes over and over and over again without any accountability or transparency.
And so that lackadaisical approach to doing development, just kind of like, "Oh, let's see," that is clearly conveyed in the work, testimonies, US officials. So when that sort of happens, then you have a clear idea that there is continuity of what we would call colonial modalities, which are hierarchical relations of those who know and those who do not know, those who are experts and those who are just beneficiaries and they're passive. And so if foreign aid is built on a hierarchy of us and them, and us are always the ones that know everything, we have all the money, we have the discourse, we have the language, we have the funding, the programs, plans, and they are merely recognized as empty passive vessels. And so when you have any aid relationship that is situated in that kind of binary, that is neo-colonial, that is clearly a colonial modality.
And so if you operate on the basis of relationship where Afghans do not contribute to the thought process, imagining, interpreting, understanding their social, political, economic recoveries for themselves on their land, in their country, and foreigners who have no training, who are hopping from conflict to conflict arrive and have the power to create the pathway, this country's politics, economic, social structure and then we want to peer into changing culture, that, you don't sort of look at it in that framework. And if you don't have an understanding of coloniality as a concept, then you would be wondering, "Well, this is just the way aid is done." It's not the way aid is done, it's how aid is appropriated within this colonial matrix of power. And it doesn't have to be because every community that I've worked in the world is open to a collaboration with the international community.
It's not that they want to collapse that collaboration, but they are all incredibly wary and suspicious of the kinds of relations that are fostered, and those relations are not equal and those relations are not liberal. And those relations don't allow for the autonomous, sort of intellectual and social political development of societies on their own terms, using their own language, using their own discourses. Right? We enter Afghanistan, enter any part of the world, and we roll out the carpet of our discourse.
For example, I do gender work. In all of the countries that I work with, there is no equivalent word of gender. Gender isn't in the language of Afghanistan, we have to make it up. In Arab countries, in Ordu, Pakistan, everybody's like, "Okay, let's just use your word. Let's just use your terminology." And so if we can conceptualize an idea of a collaboration where it's truly based on solidarity, it's based on equity and it's based on democratizing conversations, then the international interventions that are happening in Afghanistan will look very different from Gaza, which will look very different from Somalia, Bosnia, Latin America. But the fact that aid organizations treat all of these countries the exact same way, I can take a program, conceptualize a program and roll it out in all of these countries without changing anything, that should be politicized. And that is what we call neocolonialism.
Hannah Balikci:
Thank you so much for that. So we will just conclude now, if there was a book, a paper or a website that you recommend public policy students can take away, what would you recommend?
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
All right. So when I was a graduate student at the University of Toronto, I was fortunate because I learned from a number of amazing scholars that were born and raised and had their education outside of the western world. And Professor George Day had a very strong influence in cultivating my understanding of the need to constantly triangulate, situate, engage and negotiate my thoughts with scholars from the global south and to read them because they're rarely published in western peer review journals. And so he made that comment that if you're just reading what western educated scholars prioritize, then you're really missing out, and especially if your intent is to understand what's happening in the world. And so he encouraged us to read the work of scholars based in Africa that were having a conversation amongst themselves. And many of them are published in western peer review journals, but many of them are not.
And they meet regularly and they publish online. And you kind of get a sense of what conversations or issues are happening on that continent in ways that we sometimes don't have access to. So the website is CODESRIA, it's the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. And I'm looking at the website right now, it is so much better, more accessible, user-friendly than, they sort of publish a newsletter called Africa Development. And there's a lot of interesting ideas and physicians around women, peace and security as well [inaudible 00:53:03] find and engage with these scholars that are writing it.
Julia Higgins:
That's great. We'll be sure to plug that for our listeners. Thank you. And then lastly, to close out in the spirit of learning from our previous work, what is something that you wish we would've asked you in today's conversation that we didn't?
Dr. Maliha Chishti:
I think the centrality of ethics, which is something that I am increasingly finding we're not talking about. We're moving towards politicizing and a lot of ideology in our understanding of what's happening and what's unfolding the world. And I really feel that ethics has been lost and I've lost it myself because I have realized I'm not trained in. And what I'm positioned into right now is to understand development or politics or war in the context of ethics and morality. And these are conversations that probably now that I'm attached to the Divinity School, they are circulating more in the Divinity School than they are in public policy. And I think a bridge between those two schools, and where I probably think I too can benefit being in both schools, is to start to really deeply engage this beyond theory and into sort of an ethical, moral framework of understanding of war and peace. And in doing so, I think that maybe I'm going to try and find some answers as to why peace has become so problematic.
Hannah Balikci:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Dr. Maliha Chishti. This episode was produced and edited by Hannah Balikci and Nishita Karun. Thank you to our interviewers, Rabail Sofi and Julia Higgins. Special thanks to UC3P and The Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on The Pearson Institute's research and events, visit their website, thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter, @PearsonInst, Inst spelled I-N-S-T.
Root of Conflict
12.07.23
Mothers and Peacebuilding | Amal Hamada
Hannah Balikci:
Hello, this is Hannah and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You're listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. What is the role of mothers and counter-terrorism efforts? Within conflict, women have traditionally been viewed as victims that need protecting. However, their involvement is much more nuanced than that. In this episode, we speak with Professor Amal Hamada, professor of political science and gender studies at Cairo University. We talk about the role of gender when discussing conflict, the women's movement in Iran, and Palestinian mothers today.
Jordan Enos:
My name is Jordan Enos. I'm a second year master in public policy student and a Pearson fellow.
Raphael Rony Antony:
Hi, I'm Raphael Rony Antony and I'm a first year MPP student and a first time podcast recorder.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
Hi, I'm Isabella Pestana. I'm a first year MPP student and a Pearson fellow.
Jordan Enos:
It's an honor to have Dr. Hamada at the University of Chicago today. Dr. Hamada, welcome. Thank you for being here. Can you tell us about yourself and your work?
Amal Hamada:
Okay, thank you very much for the invitation. My name is Amal Hamada. I'm an associate professor of political science in Cairo University and the director of women's studies unit at the university. I'm trained as a political scientist, but for the last maybe two decades been working more interdisciplinary approaches to see different angles to what I believe everything is political. I felt the need that I need to understand more about different approaches in sociology, anthropology, et cetera. I work on gender issues. I'm [inaudible 00:02:24] of formal politics, meaning the formal, more traditional forms of political participation of youth, women, even citizens. For the last 10 years or more, I've been working on the less formal dimensions of political participation, how ordinary people see, practice politics on their daily life. This is me.
Jordan Enos:
Thank you. Yesterday, you gave a talk on the role of mothers in counter-terrorism. How does the way women are depicted in the media and public discourse influence the public's view and government decisions regarding counter-terrorism?
Amal Hamada:
Okay, this is a very complicated question, because on the one hand, women are portrayed in the media as the sweet, feminine, need protection kind of individual. But at the same time, they're expected, especially mothers, to do miracles. When it comes to portraying women in conflict, the mainstream used to portray women in conflict when they saw them. Because a couple of decades ago, they didn't see women in conflict. When they saw them, they only saw them as victims, victims of rape, victims that need protection, et cetera. Later on, we discovered this is not the case. Women have agency and sometimes bad agency. Sometimes they become terrorists themselves and they are warriors. They are peace builders. But the perception changed a little bit again to build on the expectation of the ability to make miracles, that okay, so you're not a victim, so you are a hero. You're expected to act as a hero.
I think this is unfair, because not all of us are heroes. We're all human. Some of us are heroes. Some of us are victims, and even the same person can be a hero, a victim, and an average person, depends on the context. For the way the media and the policies are categorizing women, it's just too flat. It doesn't see the complexity of the situation. I can be violent at the moment because I feel that violence is the only way to protect my right. But this does not mean that I'm a violent person. Or the whole discourse about survival, a victim of rape, are we victims of rape or survivors of rape? You are taking agency from the woman, deciding that for a moment, I'm a victim. But this does not describe me as a person for the rest of my life. This is why I don't really engage with how the media is portraying women, because it's too flat. Living realities of women everywhere is too complex. It's not that one dimension.
Jordan Enos:
Theme of women's role in the resistance, I hear you, is nuanced and complex and probably depends a lot on context.
Amal Hamada:
Yes.
Jordan Enos:
Yesterday, you talked about equipping women with the tools, and mothers especially, with the tools to support their family and maybe guide them against terrorism. Can you talk about the tools women need to be able to support their families?
Amal Hamada:
Knowledge. Knowledge, because one of the things, maybe specific talking about radical groups, radical/terrorist, while I know the term is very controversial, so let's go with all the meanings. They propagate an absolute version of truth. They have the version of truth, and it's a very difficult time where the youth, very skeptical about everything. They have doubts about everything. When someone gets to them with an absolute definition of truth, and no one can counter this, it becomes very hard to resist. Imagine a mother living in a small village anywhere with her kid, usually means, it's unfortunate, coming up to the mother to tell her that what you're doing is forbidden, haram, and you're going to be punished by Allah. You're going to burn in hell, okay? And I have the way to save you and to save the rest of the world.
If she doesn't have the knowledge, it's not only that she cannot save him. It's she's going to join. If you provide women with knowledge, specifically what I'm working on, religious knowledge, different understanding of religion, different interpretation of knowledge, counter discourse to the religious discourse, terrorist, this would make a huge difference. She will be able to protect the child herself and the rest of the family, because it's kind of we're losing one by one to the terrorist groups. My main focus is, how can we educate? Yesterday, there was this lady who was a little bit skeptical about me blaming women for their kids becoming terrorists. God forbid, you don't intend to blame women for anything, but just can we equip them with tools to fight back, to know their limits, to know their potential? I think this is the case. So yes, economic empowerment is important. Definitely, it's important. Political empowerment is. Without this knowledge, it's not going to take us anywhere.
Jordan Enos:
Your research includes studies of women's group around the world, women in Russia, Women in Black, Code Pink. Do you think those groups are the best avenue for knowledge that you're talking about for women? Or how do you disrupt a culture in which that underlies in the absolute truth that may lead to terrorism or radicalization?
Amal Hamada:
Well, they might not be the best, but they're there and they are appealing. It depends on what you need. So if you are looking for activism, anti-war, Women in Black would be the perfect venue for you. But if you're looking for a knowledge, abstract religious knowledge, maybe Women in Black wouldn't do anything, wouldn't provide any answers, or other groups which I didn't have the chance to talk about. Islamic feminist groups in the Middle East in general and even in the US, they have very, very interesting, liberating, challenging, controversial kind of discourse regarding religion and religious knowledge.
These might be helpful, but having said this, maybe even them are not appropriate for a woman living in a very distant village. Maybe we need to bridge, because this is a very sophisticated knowledge, not applicable to anyone, not convenient to anyone. So maybe we need new form of groups that can kind of explain and make it more [inaudible 00:09:50] to the average women. But what I'm trying to do is just to highlight the ability and the potential that these groups have. Maybe it's just an example and we can build our more convenient examples depending on the context.
Jordan Enos:
During your talk, you also talked about how mothers around the world share this deep love for their family and commitment for their family and their children, regardless of where they're from. I think another theme mothers experience across the world, especially in times of conflict and strife, is they're often the ones responsible for keeping their families together. You even mentioned that women would do anything to get food on the table for their family if that's the most pressing need. How do you respond to women who may think my goal right now is to keep a roof over my family's heads at night, to keep food on the table? How do I prioritize learning or seeking out knowledge may prevent my children going down a path of radicalization?
Amal Hamada:
But I think this would require women to reflect a little bit about what does it mean to be a good mother, okay? Because shared that I'm a mother myself and I have three children in my eye, but my eldest is 29 and my youngest is 26, so they're not kids. But they're kids, and I think throughout the journey, and I don't want to generalize my experience, but living especially in the last decade or so, it takes a lot of reflection. What does it mean to keep a roof on top of my kid and over their head and food on the table? And how am I helping them face [inaudible 00:11:48]
Because if I'm not equipping them with knowledge and the skills and capacity and trust, it's not about the food and the roof. It's different. In this difficult time, it's even become more meaningful about dignity and food [inaudible 00:12:10] We're not animals. We're human, and human have dignity. Is it only about having food and roof, no matter how do you get the food and the roof? Or as a mother, I need to tell my kids that it's you. You have to live in dignity, even if you are eating a potato fried on wood.
Jordan Enos:
Thank you. Your research interests include gender issues in the Middle East with a special focus on women's daily strategies for their lives and conflict related issues. What are some of these daily strategies? How do women in the Middle East face conflict differently than their male counterparts?
Amal Hamada:
Okay, this is a very good question. I used to believe that maneuvering is not resistance. Resistance is clear resistance. You have to stand up and fight physically or with words. But I discovered from listening to stories of women about their daily little struggles, how they survive and make a living and make a meaning out of their life, that sometimes maneuvering is resistance. Building alliance with other women in the family or even other men is resistance. But I cannot list the strategies. It's different. Maybe sometimes, I know some of my colleagues would hate maneuvering, because they think it's a sign of weakness. But for me, understand the structure. Sometimes the cost, open resistance, is very high and women cannot really ... Because of this structure, they cannot really pay the price.
How do they maneuver, for instance domestic violence? Okay, well the easy way out of domestic violence for a middle class liberal western woman would be walk out of the relationship. Leave. Get the divorce. But this is not the reality of an uneducated woman or even educated, but she doesn't have a job. Or she has a job, but it doesn't pay enough. Or she has kids she needs to protect, and she cannot simply walk out of a relationship. Does this mean that she's happily living, enjoying being beaten and insulted? Definitely, no. Does she resist? Yes, she does. She maneuvers sometimes, different techniques. I think if we pay respect to these forms, maybe we can help her, rather than blaming her for staying. Why are you staying in such a bad relationship? You should respect yourself and leave. But when we listen to her stories, maybe we would as scholars, as professors, we would learn that her experience is teaching us. It's not us telling her what to do.
Jordan Enos:
October in the United States was Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and I think there is a misconception that, why don't women just leave? And you have the agency, if you are educated. A lot of times, women don't because of various reasons, and I think being there for their children is probably a primary cause for staying. Can you say more maneuvering looks like? Is that figuring out survival in a conflict-ridden relationship or community?
Amal Hamada:
Sometimes, maneuvering would be building, focusing on your kids, rather than yourself. I know this might sound naive, but this is what mothers sometimes do. So they know that maybe I don't have a life out of this, but I can help my kids to have a life, focusing on the kids, rather than on herself. Sometimes, maneuvering would mean even avoiding the significant other in heated conversation, maybe saving money behind his back, maybe giving him the silent treatment, maybe making him suffer in sex, use different things women do. I understand from a feminist perspective, this might be too little, and I agree this is too little. But every individual, every woman, she knows what she's capable of. It's not about, take a jump of faith. No, it's not that easy. Maybe for an empowered woman, yes, it's easy. I will definitely walk out of the relationship, but this is not the case and doesn't mean that the other women are not worth of respect of their experience.
Jordan Enos:
Much of your work involves the theme and the role of women in peace building. Can you talk about how we involve men, particularly in heavily patriarchal societies?
Amal Hamada:
This is the point. I believe women have agency, no matter what, okay? It's just, how do we define and contextualize agency? Okay, this is one. Second, definitely, definitely as much as you can do anything without the help of women, you can do nothing without the help of men, because we're living together. I believe, yes, we do need to bring them on board. The question is maybe focusing too much on the formal level. Women become a threat to men. Reading in strategic and peace studies, there is this belief that when women are occupying formal positions, whether in negotiation, in government, et cetera, men feel threatened that she's taking their position. Maybe working on building the trust that we're not, it's just that we're taking the responsibility for the destiny of everyone, we're doing our part, and working on the informal level. This might help building the trust more. I don't know, maybe.
Raphael Rony Antony:
[inaudible 00:18:36] Hamada. Yeah, so we are going to start talking about, I feel, one of your important interest areas, and that is Iran. We are going to dive into the topic that is what has been happening there for the last one year, especially since the death of Jina Mahsa Amini. The protests that followed after that, in your opinion as a scholar on Iranian history and Iranian politics, how has it changed the protests that has been happening over the last year or so?
Amal Hamada:
I've been working on Iran ever since 1990. That's a very, very, very complicated and interesting example. Unfortunately, there is kind of iron curtain what's happening in Iran. So we don't really know what's happening. We know about the protest. We know about the death, the tragic death of Mahsa Amini. But unfortunately, we don't know much. Though this is very alarming, but I feel that this is very assuring, that something big is happening on the ground. Because nothing is happening, then the authorities would not mind sharing, because it would show that they are in control. So as long as they are trying to keep everybody in the dark, it means that the other party is gaining ground, okay? So I'm not sure whether women are more free now to go on the street without being forced to with their veil or not, but building on my experience in Iran, unfortunately I haven't been there since 2007.
But even before 2007, women, of course they had to wear a headscarf, but it was a fashion statement. They put it on their head flying, so half of their hair is showing. You can tell that if this person is conservative wearing hijab because she chose to wear hijab or she is just complying with the law because she doesn't want to be arrested. [inaudible 00:20:26] Iranian women are very, very exceptional. They're on the street all the time. The first time I went there, it was 2001 and the last time 2007, and was surprised with the number of women on the street moving around, working, having fun, et cetera. I think it has something to do with Shias in specific, because I don't know if you know or not, but Shia Islam has doctrine. It's based on the daughter of prophet Muhammad, Fatimah and her husband. It's the daughter and her husband, and the husband of course is the cousin of the prophet, but it's the daughter. So women in Shia Islam play a significant role in the history of the doctrines.
So there is a sense of pride that we're daughters of Fatimah, and you cannot really separate. It has nothing to do with being religious or not. It's just the cultural aspect of being the daughters, okay? Unfortunately, I'm a little pessimistic when it comes to governments giving in, but I think changing. It's changing on the ground. My main fear, following the news in Iran, was the societal disputes over the need to control women's body. This is my main fear, that societies in general and especially conservative societies feel that they have to control women's body. Actually, it's all society. It's not even conservative societies, because liberal societies feel that they have to control women's body by covering or uncovering. So it's the same. The end or the bottom line, it's the same, being forced either to dress or not to dress. I remember watching very alarming videos of people fighting, average people fighting with young girls deciding to take off their [inaudible 00:22:35] This was really scary to me, more than the authorities trying to suppress women, because this is more scary, more violent.
Raphael Rony Antony:
Okay, coming back to a point that we picked up from your talk yesterday about mothers just protesting outside just to find out if their children are alive or not, to find out where they're buried, if not alive. Based on your experience in Iran and your scholarly expertise, can you explain how that situation, mentally for a mother just to go out and protest or go out and just ask the government, "Is my child alive? If not, can you tell me where his remains are?"
Amal Hamada:
I think this is a very difficult moment, and it's very motherly thing that sometimes mother, she just want to know where she can go to recite or read some verse from the Bible and feel near to her kids, even if the kid is not alive. But she needs to feel the connection. Sometimes, even the sad reality is that my kid is not alive anymore, but at least some comfort will be in knowing that he or she is first buried with dignity and can visualize this kid even under the ground. I remember there was an older incident in Iran of maybe 2013, 2014, Reyhaneh. Reyhaneh was a girl who was sent to death because she killed her rapist.
A guy raped her and she killed him in the post. The judge simply sent her to death, and she wrote a very, very, very moving letter to her mom, telling, I remember ... I don't remember the exact quote, but it was something along the line that you told me that to love the world, but unfortunately the world does not love us. It was really moving, and I think Reyhaneh is dead now, but the legacy is alive, and the grief of the mother is alive. So sometimes, it might mean in terms of gains, what are you going to benefit just from where your kid is? But for a mother, it means a lot. It means a lot. It means accountability. You did it to my son or my daughter, and the body of my son or my daughter is the proof that you did it.
Raphael Rony Antony:
All through the protests in Iran, we read about Voria Ghafouri's arrest who was a Kurdish football star who stood up for the issue. Then I was on ground in Qatar during the workup when Iran National Team, they first refused to sing the national anthem. That time, they were supported by the general public, but then they were threatened by the government and they were in fear of their families' safety. So then they had to comply with the government's request and then they had to sing the national anthem in the next game. They were all public as a mass. They were against the Iranian men's team when it comes to a question like while protesting for the basic rights, but I have to protect my family as well. So in that situation as a man who wants to stand up for people around, and irrespective, men, women, it does not matter, just for the basic rights, what sort of expectations are there, is what I want to know.
Amal Hamada:
Well, as much as we expected from women, we expect more from men. You're a man. You should stand up, okay? This actually does not recognize or respect the limitations. As you said, they had a family. Their families were living in Iran, and they need to protect their family. So I think the first time they refused to sing, they told the story. They sent the message. That was it. The second time, they complied even better, because everybody now knows that they did it because they were asked or forced or talked into doing this. That's what mattered. For me, it's about symbols. It's about the narratives. So this is what it takes. Now we know that even the national team is not happy, more than enough.
Raphael Rony Antony:
Okay, now my last question from my side, more than a scholar on Iranian politics, as a woman, as I would say a Muslim woman, what does the phrase, "Women, Life, Freedom," [Persian 00:27:10] mean to you?
Amal Hamada:
It means a lot, because I remember I'm veiled, but liberal veiled. I'm not conservatively veiled. I remember when I was in Iran, especially the last visits, I didn't take off my veil, but I kind of wore it the way they do, the more liberal. I remember having a colleague coming to me and saying, "Why are you doing this? You are veiled. Why are you not removing, but kind of loosening it a little bit?" I told her that out of solidarity, I don't want them to feel that they are alone, though I believe that veil is a religious duty.
But at the same time, I believe that it's the woman's choice to comply with the religious duty, and it's not my business if anyone else is deciding to wear or not to wear. For Women, Freedom, Life, it's everything and doesn't mean that I want to take this right from men or to take this right from someone else. It's just, why can't we just simply respect the right to live? Even if I believe that your choices are not the right choices, it's your life. Ruin it, as long as you are not ruining my life. It's your life. Ruin it.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
We are recording this episode just about one month since the conflict began in Israel and Palestine. Both the United States and the European Union have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization. Do you have any examples or experience to tell our audience of a Palestinian mother and their role in counter-terrorism or disputing?
Amal Hamada:
I'm not a politician, okay? So naming groups as terrorist groups is not my job or my interest, okay? And I think we need to contextualize when we are naming groups. So for me, it would be too difficult to put ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Taliban in the same sentence with Hamas. It's a different complex. This is very important point to start with, okay? Second, I believe it would be too difficult after losing 5,000 lives of women and children, 10,000 lives, Palestinians in a month. Maybe it would be too unrealistic to talk about women in peace, because I was thinking the other day about mothers and building peace. Are there any mothers left in Palestine to build peace, to teach their kids about peace? It's very difficult.
But if we try, and I think this is very tragic moment and it's a missing opportunity, we missed opportunities by this tragic development, by these tragic attacks and the massacre happening in Gaza, okay? So if you want me to share an experience about Palestinian women working for peace, I would share a movie that was done in 2003 by a Palestinian director. He is a son of a Jewish woman and a Palestinian guy. Both were communist, and the Jewish lady was part of building Israel. Then she joined the Communist Party and she married the Palestinian guy and she moved to Jenin, the camp, where she spent her life working with Palestinian women, educating kids about art and theater.
She died in Jenin out of cancer after years. This is an eye-opening example of women living together, educating the kids about the importance of survive through art, okay? The lady, her name is Arna. The movie is Arna's Children, and it shows ... It's a documentary movie. It shows footages of her standing at checkpoints, protecting Palestinian men, women, and children to pass through the checkpoints, et cetera. For me, it would have more sense to humanity if we build on that experience, rather than deciding on simply killing 10,000 plus, half of them are women and children, and then expect mothers to be agents of peace.
Yet on the Palestinian side, it might be too difficult to talk about this. But if you follow the demonstration on the Israeli side, the anti-war demonstration taking place right now, demonstrating in front of Netanyahu house or the Parliament, the Women in Black, the group I talked about yesterday, they're there, and they want to stop the war, and they know that it makes no sense, and it's against human rights. It's against any sense.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
Following to my next question, I would also ask you, what are the impacts of this long conflict on the emotional and psychological wellbeing of mothers? And how can this aspect be addressed?
Amal Hamada:
I have no clue. It's amazing, their ability to resist, meaning that following [inaudible 00:32:55] techniques, Palestinian women trying to adhere to normality is actually scary. There are photos of women trying to give their kids a bath in the middle of a wrecked building, photos of women baking a cake for a birthday, celebrating the birthday in the middle of the wreck, a very, very heartbreaking photo of a woman preparing her infant to be buried. She's just wrapping him in the [inaudible 00:33:32] and she seems composed. For me, I cannot describe it in words. Because as a mother myself, I cannot imagine the pain. But also as a mother, she needs to survive because of the other kids, not only her kids, but the kids who lost their mother in the war. There is this sense of responsibility that this is going to end, and we need someone to take care of the kids. Who is going to do this? It's the women. Definitely when this is over, I think part of the reconstruction, we need to pay attention to the traumas and the damage happened to Palestinian women.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
How do you think gender dynamics, cultural norms, and the social expectations shake the experiences and roles of mothers in this longstanding conflict?
Amal Hamada:
Okay, in the Palestinian case, I believe mothers are the buriers of the buriers. They carry the history. They're the one who tell the story. They're the one who tell the story, not only the political story. They're the one who tell the story about the grandparents, the house, the cooking, the embroidery, the small little details, the songs. How do we celebrate marriage? How do we celebrate having a new baby? This is important, because it's not only about the political negotiation over the land. It's how we narrate in order to maintain the memory, the collective memory, okay? So I think this is the main role women are playing. Definitely some of them are playing political roles, et cetera. But my focus and my interest is this role.
Raphael Rony Antony:
I just wanted to ask you another question.
Amal Hamada:
Yeah, sure.
Raphael Rony Antony:
We saw one of your TED Talks from, I think, 2014 about more street politics. In terms of the cultural structure in the way the Arabian Gulf from the Persian Gulf is structured, how do you expect ... It's very difficult for women to just go out and protest in general, especially if you take the Arabian Gulf. We have seen a lot of changes in terms of ... I'm talking about the changes in Saudi and how things have loosened, but yet ability to go out and protest for right, especially for women, is very difficult. What recommendation would you give for them to-
Amal Hamada:
It's not about going out to protest. It's about going out, being present in the public spaces, being visible in the public spaces, the ability of women to occupy, in the good sense, the public spaces. When I teach my students that men don't have to justify why they are in the public space, it's their right. Women have to justify it, to say a reason that you're going out. So for me, street politics is not only about protest. It's about the ability to be in the street and the daily little strategies used by women to be present and visible and to take it as a right. This is what I mean by street politics.
Raphael Rony Antony:
I don't know if you know, there was a couple of arrests in U Chicago yesterday for protesting against the current conflict in Israel and Palestine. So as students especially involved in politics and public policy, again I'm asking for your expertise, your recommendation on what are the best ways to get our voice out there for our rights, our basic ... I would say just getting ourselves out there.
Amal Hamada:
Well, you know your context, so I'm not in a position to give you advices in this regard, but my only thing is that it's amazing that as the war on the ground is taking place, there is another war of narratives. This is the new thing happening, that people get to see other narratives. People have access to other narratives, and no one can take this from you. Maybe the right to protest might be restricted or something, but no one can take your right to tell your story. I think this is the way to go. It's a very long road, but it's very sustainable. It's very sustainable.
Raphael Rony Antony:
One last question from my side, from listening to you over the last two days, we seriously look up to you as a person, as a-
Amal Hamada:
You shouldn't. You shouldn't.
Raphael Rony Antony:
No, as an academic, as a scholar, as a mother. So who do you look up to?
Amal Hamada:
This is difficult. I look up to all the brave mothers who are not as privileged as myself, are less lucky. But still, they wake up in the morning and they have something to tell to their kids. A Palestinian woman doesn't know if she's going to wake up in the morning or not because of the bombing, but she still has the ability to dress her kids and to bake a cake. There is no way of comparing my life to her life. I cannot complain. I have zero to complain about, and so I look up to them. I look up to mothers all over the world who lost their kids because of terrorism, because of war. They kind of moved forward beyond the loss of a child and try to save the rest of the children, not only in Palestine, but anywhere.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
There is a last thing about this conflict I would like to ask you. What are the organizations or activists that you are following that can help provide our audience with more information, what is happening on the ground?
Amal Hamada:
Well, I've been thinking about this question since yesterday, and I decided I will not recommend anyone, because I think it's enough, telling people what to listen to or what to follow. I think it's more important to tell the people that you need to search for yourself and find a narrative that makes you go to bed at night feeling that you tried. You tried to know the truth. You tried to know what's really happening on the ground. It's not someone recommending speaking against anyone, but I feel, truly feel, that I can give you a long list, organizations, websites, people to follow. But I will be doing the same that I criticize, that not you, but the other side is telling you that this is the absolute truth. As the radical groups, they tell you, "This is the absolute truth." No, search it for yourself. You're very lucky. You have the internet. You can decide for yourself.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
What is something you wish we would have asked you?
Amal Hamada:
I don't know, maybe about my kids.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
Are they well?
Amal Hamada:
Yes.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
That's so good.
Amal Hamada:
About my dogs.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
Yeah, how many?
Amal Hamada:
I have two dogs.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
Amazing.
Amal Hamada:
[inaudible 00:41:44]
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
Good to know. Thinking about our audience, there are mainly public policy students. If there was one paper or one book or even a movie, another movie that you could recommend to our [inaudible 00:42:04] to watch or to read, which one would it be?
Amal Hamada:
Okay, there is a beautiful movie done by a Lebanese director. Her name is Nadine Labaki. The movie is a little bit old, but it's very beautiful. I show it in my class every year. It's called, [Arabic 00:42:24] And Now Where To? [inaudible 00:42:28] very moving, but it's nice. There is this recent book I just discovered. The subtitle is Beyond The Crying Mothers. It's by Springer, 2023. I'm sorry, I can't remember the main title of the book and it's ... discuss. It's an edited book and it discuss. It's not public policy thing, but it discuss different roles of women in building peace as mothers. The subtitle is really, really interesting, Beyond the Crying Mothers. These are my two recommendations.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
Thank you very much. It was an honor to be here with you.
Amal Hamada:
Thank you. Thank you. It was my pleasure, and I hope people listening to the podcast would make them think, reflect about new things.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento:
I'm sure about this.
Hannah Balikci:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Dr. Amal Hamada. This episode was produced and edited by Hannah Balikci and Nishita Karun. Thank you to our interviewers, Jordan Enos, Raphael Rony Antony, and Isabella Pestana. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit their website, PearsonInstitute.org, and follow them on Twitter @PearsonInst, Inst spelled I-N-S-T. Thank you.
Root of Conflict
11.02.23
After Authoritarianism | Monika Nalepa
Hannah Balikci: Hello, this is Hannah and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast. You're listening to Root of Conflict, a Podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects.
Hannah Balikci: In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict. A research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy, at the University of Chicago. How are authoritarian elites and their collaborators handled in the aftermath of democratic transitions? The modern discipline documenting transitional justice, began with the Nuremberg Trials for Nazi perpetrators. The trials shifted the way the international community thinks about accountability for human rights violations committed by authoritarian regimes and are generally the most well-known example of transitional justice. Yet there exist different procedures of extrajudicial transitional justice, including lustration, truth commissions, and purges, that hold human rights violators accountable and remove them from positions of power without formally sentencing them.
Hannah Balikci: In this episode, we speak with Professor Monika Nalepa, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, about her new book, After Authoritarianism, and her monumental work building the Global Transitional Justice Dataset, at the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab. We talk about the different implications of transitional justice for both leaders and rank-and-file members of authoritarian regimes and the more recent global phenomenon of Democratic backsliding.
Olga Bednarek: My name is Olga Bednarek. I'm a third-year dual-degree student at the Crown School of Social Work and the Harris School of Public Policy, and I'm a Pearson Fellow. I have the privilege of working at Professor Monika Nalepa.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento: I'm Isabella Pestana. I'm a first-year MPP student at the Harris School of Public Policy, at the University of Chicago, and I'm also a Pearson Fellow.
Monika Nalepa: Hi, I'm Monika Nalepa. I'm a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, a former member of the Political Economy PhD program, as well as a Pearson's Institute for Global Conflict Affiliate.
Monika Nalepa: Thank you so much. I want to say that first I feel like I had the privilege of working with Olga. We met just before the summer, and I hired her instantly as a research assistant. And I work on, I think the broadest way of saying it is on regime change and factors leading to regime change and also concentrating on what happens after regime change. Probably the biggest area of my research is transitional justice, which is the way that new democracies deal with members, collaborators, and a vast array of legacies of the previous authoritarian regime or regime that was boggled by Civil war.
Monika Nalepa: I've been interested in this topic for over two decades now. I wrote my dissertation on it. I've written two books on it, given lots of lectures, written a number of articles. Most recently I wrote about, prospects even for transitional justice in Russia following the war Ukraine. I would say that's the greatest passion that I have substantively. But also as a social scientist, I pay a lot of attention to methods and I would describe myself as an institutionalist. Somebody who pays particular attention on the way that institutions structure human behavior and how humans interact in political situations and social situations.
Monika Nalepa: At the University of Chicago where I've worked for over nine years now, I teach classes on game theory, social choice theory, and analytical methods and comparative politics.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento: Super impressive.
Olga Bednarek: Could you please define transitional justice for those of us who are not familiar with the term?
Monika Nalepa: Sure. Paradoxically, it has often a little to do with normative concepts of justice. And it essentially refers to all kinds of mechanisms that are set up in the aftermath of transition to democracy, to handle former authoritarian elites that are collaborators, sometimes bystanders, sometimes victims. And very frequently, the concept actually extends to non-judicial institutions. Following transitions from authoritarian rule, new regimes are often resource deprived or depleted.
Monika Nalepa: Coming up with judicial procedures for handling sometimes huge atrocities that were committed on behalf of the former authoritarian regime, is just not feasible. Hence the reliance on extrajudicial procedures, such as illustrations, urges, truth commissions, hearing commissions, et cetera. And even though these mechanisms often... What else? Opening archives, but with documentation of human rights violations that were committed. And although these extrajudicial procedures don't fulfill standards of rule of law perhaps, and due process, just because of the vast array of actors and actions that one has to deal with in the aftermath of transition, they're better than having judicial processes set up, only reach a few.
Monika Nalepa: I would say that in my most recent strand of research is arguing that, transitional justice procedures that may be skimp on due process and rule of law extrajudicial, but reach a vast array of former citizens of authoritarian regimes are better than concentrating, for instance, just on criminally prosecuting the leadership, the authoritarian regime. There was a normative implication there, if you want to catch me on that, but yes.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento: It's amazing. Please.
Monika Nalepa: The normative implication basically is that, following, I would say, World War II and Nuremberg trials, there has been a shift in the way that the international community thinks about accountability for human rights violations committed by authoritarian regimes. There's been this shift towards believing that, if we hold accountable leaders of these authoritarian regimes and those who are issuing orders, then the incentives to fulfill these orders on behalf of the rank-and-file will disappear. Meanwhile, there are reasons to doubt this.
Monika Nalepa: In fact, we see that, I have a theoretical paper with Stephen Boyd, one of the students from my Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab, where we show that there are actually limits to the strategy and perhaps prosecuting rank-and-file numbers of authoritarian regimes. Those who are fulfilling orders in the long-term can actually be better at disabling these principal agent relationships. Between authoritarian leaders who are issuing orders of repression and rank-and-file members who are fulfilling those orders. I'll qualify that though.
Monika Nalepa: It's better from the following point of view. If we're asking, what kind of transitional justice mechanisms are best suited for reducing the volume of repression that is committed by authoritarian regimes? I'm not saying that it's just to let leaders off the hook or not to concentrate on them so much, I'm just saying that in the long term it reduces or maybe punishing them harsher and harsher at the expense of punishing rank-and-file members, does not reduce the amount of repression that they exert against their own citizens.
Olga Bednarek: Speaking of your lab, could you explain to us how you are gathering this data? How you're studying it? Because it feels a bit ambiguous to us, I think. You're studying such a big topic and so, really understanding how you are would be helpful.
Monika Nalepa: Sure. The idea of the lab came out of, just looking at the geography of transitional justice and how this discipline has unraveled. And it's mostly happening through country studies, right? There's a regime change in confidence on country and country expert from that country, writes about the transitional justice procedures that were administered there. And often this would be very disjoint from similar research on transitional justice from sometimes even neighboring countries. At most the works in comparative politics that dealt with transitional justice would cover two or three countries. There were very few cross-national efforts.
Monika Nalepa: And while I was at Columbia University, my advisor, Jon Elster, was writing a book about transitional justice and historical perspective. And he was actually interested in a more qualitative way, but really surveying over time and across space, how various countries have dealt with elites of their former authoritarian regimes. And he asked me to collect data on six East European countries and their transitional justice processes. And he gave me very little input on how he wants that data organized. So, leaving it largely up to me.
Monika Nalepa: And the first thing that I thought to myself, that instead of just taking a snapshot of what are the transitional justice mechanisms that have been implemented in a different country, why not create a chronology for the entire Democratic period. Starting when the country transitioned away from authoritarianism and focusing on four mechanisms. In my case, it was, illustrations, purges, truth commissions, and victim compensation. Why not concentrating on those four mechanisms? Just prepare chronologies of transitional justice events that took place in that country.
Monika Nalepa: And when coding these events or when collecting data on these events, concentrate both on developments that were advancing the transitional justice process forward, as well as events that were setbacks. Well, if the president vetoes a transitional justice bill or they'll say, opening archives of the secret political police, that's a setback for transitional justice. But if the legislature passes a law, creating a truth commission, that will uncover the passion of abuses committed by an authoritarian regime. That will advance the transitional justice process forward.
Monika Nalepa: And then out of this collection of events, some pushing the transitional justice process forward and others backwards, and we can actually code those literally as zeros and ones or negative ones and plus ones, and create measures of the severity of transitional justice. Using that approach, in many, many years later, after I graduated from Columbia, I applied for a grant to the National Science Foundation and laid out this idea that, we should be collecting systematic data on transitional justice. And I also proposed a theory that I would test with this data because otherwise the NSF does not give money for the data fishing expeditions. And after being funded, I hired roughly 10 research assistants, to help code these data from all democracies in the world that have transitioned from autocracy since 1918.
Monika Nalepa: In the first phase of data collection, we focused on extrajudicial transitional justice procedures. So frustrations, purges, truth commissions. Purges of entire agencies, purges of individual persons, illustrations on truth commissions. And that data set was released in 2021, and that basically concluded the funding from the National Science Foundation.
Monika Nalepa: But, following that, I was fortunate enough to get support from the University of Chicago, including the Pearson Institute. Thank you very much. And we expanded actually our data collection to criminal procedures. We decided to focus, in-line with this paper that I described a little earlier, we decided to focus on, collecting information about, transitional justice events of criminal trials against perpetrators of human rights violations. But focusing both on leaders, so those who are issuing orders, and the rank-and-file, so those who are fulfilling orders.
Monika Nalepa: And that data set is going to be released tomorrow, on the day of the global forum. The first sneak preview of the data set will actually happen during the global forum. And what it reveals, just as a descriptive statistic, is that, indeed, after 1946, there has been this shift towards prosecuting leaders. Those who have been issuing orders rather than those who will be fulfilling orders. But that's just the first snapshot out of the data set. There's lots more that can be done from it.
Olga Bednarek: Could you please tell us, since you're publishing this data set tomorrow, will it be available for the public to view? How will you be basically disseminating to support information?
Monika Nalepa: Both data sets will be available on the website of the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab. The address for that is tjdemstabilitylab.com, and there is a tab there that goes to the global transitional justice data set. And right now the data that is available is for these four transitional justice mechanisms that are non-judicial, illustrations, two types of purges and truth commissions. And that database is interactive so one can choose a subset of countries to compare the volume of transitional justice mechanisms in those countries. One can look at the severity, the urgency, and the volatility of transitional justice in those countries. And next week, we will make downloadable the data set on criminal trials. So the second part of the data set that breaks down criminal trials against leaders and rank-and-file members. And it will also be available in the interactive format. The tjdemstabilitylab.com website also has a page with the research products of our labs, so papers that have been published as well as papers that are in progress. And it also introduces the members of our lab, so you can see our faces.
Olga Bednarek: Thank you so much. I'll definitely have to look into that and play around with that data set. I do have two follow-up questions. The first one is, could you please define illustrations for us?
Monika Nalepa: Thank you. Thanks for that question. Illustrations, from Latin, it means shedding with light or purifying with light. And it's a transitional justice term that has been used very broadly, to refer to any way of dealing with members of the leadership of the former authoritarian regime, but, in not these non-judicial race. So not criminal trial. Firing them, preventing them from holding office. And in my new book, After Authoritarianism, I actually re-conceptualized the use of the words illustration and purges. Because illustration is also used popularly to refer to, exposing who among citizens of a former authoritarian regime, collaborated with the secret police and preventing those who collaborated with the secret police from fulfilling all kinds of functions.
Monika Nalepa: And one of the things that I point out is that, that's a very different mechanism than purges, right? When we think about purging, we think about, firing from office, from their positions, whether in the enforcement apparatus or in the bureaucracy, people whose status and collaboration with former authoritarian regime was known, right? Who was a minister in an authoritarian cabinet? Everybody knows. Who was the chief of military? Everybody knows. But what people don't know is who the secret collaborators that the secret police recruited to spy women's surveillance of the opposition was. But those are the people who are known.
Monika Nalepa: And illustrations to the extent that they focus on revealing these collaborators or preventing former collaborators from running for office, creates very different effect than purges. Purges essentially are punitive, right? They sanction people for what they did in the past. Sometimes they might correct systematic biases that keep in place pure council numbers of the authoritarian apparatus might create. But what illustrations do is actually remove opportunities for blackmailing former collaborators of the secret police with compromising information.
Monika Nalepa: I'll give you an example. If a former collaborator of the secret police becomes a politician and is in a position of executive power, some executive power, and only he knows that he was a collaborator, and arguably his leading officer or some people from the tight circle of the secret police, that person can now be blackmailed with the threat of revealing this information about collaboration. And can be steered towards implementing policies that they would otherwise not implement. This blackmail ability of former collaborators, makes illustrations or transparency regimes more broadly, actually a forward-looking mechanism rather than backward-looking mechanism like purges.
Monika Nalepa: Even though purges and illustrations have been used interchangeably, they're very different mechanisms. And in my most recent book, I argue that countries following transitions, such as Russia hopefully will be, should focus on transparency regimes like illustrations and eliminating the use of compromise from politics. Whereas with purges, they should use them sparingly and only apply them when actually the bureaucrats or the members of the enforcement apparatus who are being purged, don't have any expertise to offer that could be usable by the new Democratic regime.
Olga Bednarek: Thank you so much for that definition. One more follow-up question. You were talking about studying over space and time. My question is, does transitional justice ever end? How long is your timeframe for studying? 10 years, 20 years, or is it indefinite?
Monika Nalepa: It's indefinite, which basically means that, the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab is an ongoing process. Because even countries that transitioned decades ago, are still embarking on transitional justice. And I'll just point to a couple of instances here. Spain and Argentina are fantastic examples. In both of these countries, their initial efforts of holding former perpetrators accountable or even revealing the truth about what happened in Spain, both during the Franco regime and during the Civil War, were put on hold. There was this strong belief that transitional justice will distract Spain from setting on a path towards democratization. But putting on hold issues of accountability, often comes to haunt new democracies. And sure enough, decades later, a memory law was passed in Spain, and these discussions basically resurfaced.
Monika Nalepa: And now we're in an era where street names are being changed, information is being circulated. Of course, many people are being held accountable because too much time has passed, but transitional justice doesn't really end for good. Of course, perpetrators might die and become ill, and there's not really a chance to hold them accountable, but there's always truth to be revealed. One of the things that I think come out of my research is that, transitional justice is not really a choice whether to do it or not is just how to do it.
Olga Bednarek: Thank you, professor. We have seen examples of authoritarian regimes transitioning to democracies, but there are also examples of places where democratic institutions seem to have faced some type of fragility. We can talk now about Turkey and some will argue about Brazil. What is your opinion on this topic? And now it's my curiosity, do we also have data being produced about this? It would be the opposite of transitioning to democracy, but places that were democratic.
Monika Nalepa: I'm really glad that you asked that question because that's basically a second strand of my research agenda, which largely started because I'm Polish. And in 2015, Poland that had democratized in 1989 started this process of backsliding into autocracy. And the only reason I can now speak about this process with complete relaxation is because, just this last weekend, the first election in any country actually in the world that has been backsliding for two electoral firms, the election actually reversed the support for the incumbent. And most likely we will, within a few months, have a non-backsliding regime. But liberal opposition will come back to power.
Monika Nalepa: As always, Poland, it's a little bit complicated. It was research interests sparked my developments in Poland but of course, as you noticed, it's a phenomenon that has occurred around the world. And it's a very puzzling phenomenon because especially I think for citizens living in established democracies who've come to believe that who've come to take in their institutions, the democratic institutions and institutions of representation for granted, the fact that the role of restrainers of executives is being diminished. And by restrainers, I mean, courts, other chambers, opposition parties, is very troubling. Researching the causes and consequences of that is another one of my interests.
Monika Nalepa: And I would say that the biggest focus of this research has been on diminishing the role of vertical restrainers. Vertical restrainers are essentially voters. What do incumbents do to prevent voters from voting them out of office, when they start undermining democratic institution? It's puzzling because presumably voters want to live in a democracy, the elect into office an executive who is undermining democracy, such as, firing judges of the Supreme Court, trying to take over control of the media. Why do voters keep voting for that incumbent?
Monika Nalepa: In one of the papers that I've written with a couple of co-authors, Catherine Chiopris and George Vanberg, we posed that, voters are uncertain about the true intentions of these executive incumbents and may be led to think that these incumbents are actually pursuing policy goals. And that making some changes in these constitutional institutions, such as courts, such as electoral systems, are merely an instrument to achieve those policy goals. And because voters want to see those policy goals implemented, they give these incumbents the benefit of the doubt. And then the incumbents after being re-elected, turn around and use the fact these institutions of control have been weakened, to stay in power forever. This is of course, a shortcut from Adam Szybowski, but, basically main difference between autocrats and democrats is that, democrats are willing to step down when they lose popular support, autocrats want to stay in power even when they lose popular support.
Monika Nalepa: In this paper, which I just described, we actually were fortunate enough to carry out an experiment in Poland a couple of years ago. So writing a little of the electoral cycle, and we were able to find supporting evidence for this mechanism. That once voters become less uncertain about the true intentions of the incumbent, they can actually reverse their decision and vote against an incumbent that they formerly supported.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento: So it would be more about the short-term outcomes of some policies then.
Monika Nalepa: Let's talk about Poland for a second. We actually just talked about this yesterday. What happened in Poland that could have made those former supporters of the populist backsliding government, revert to voting for the opposition or just from staying at home? We know that PiS, the law justice party that was ruling for the last eight years, lost half a million voters, which is not a huge amount. Actually, the opposition gained way more voters than the incumbent lost. But one of the things that we were talking about was what made that half million change their mind?
Monika Nalepa: It could be simply displacement. It could be that the old voters for PiS and young people switch their vote over to the liberal opposition. It could be corruption scandals that exposed that really, the PiS government was just about filling its coffers. It could have been also something deeper. It could have been reactions to the refugee crisis in Ukraine, it could have been in a variety of things. We're now in the process of trying to get survey data from, what was it? Two weeks before the elections? Everything I shared with you, Olga? Yeah. And see what's going on there.
Olga Bednarek: And in your opinion, there is spillover effects that you were talking about researching just in one nation and having also these cross-national studies. Do you think there are spillover effect, and we are facing some of them or not?
Monika Nalepa: Yeah. That's right. Methodologically, my approach to studying global transitional justice, is very different from studying backsliding. And I think the reason is because, for these incumbents to stay in power, they have to be re-elected by voters who have to make these individual decisions based on their beliefs. There was a huge advantage of doing sub-national studies to test these phenomena, even though the mechanism that I explained, I think works in a broader set of countries on spillover effects.
Monika Nalepa: For the longest time, I think people believed that, Hungary and Poland are sort of working in tandem, right? At first, both democratized very rapidly. In Hungary the opposite Fidesz, backslider Fidesz, at first was in the opposition for a very long time, then it came to power, started gradually dismantling democratic institutions, starting with courts, got into trouble with the EU. And in Poland, basically the same thing seemed to be happening. Many people are saying that, "Oh, Kaczynski is just following Orban's playbook up till now," right? Because basically, while Orban managed to secure victory in the third consecutive elections, in Poland it seems that that fund was reversed.
Monika Nalepa: And I think that one of the reasons behind this difference is, the legacies of opposition resistance in Poland, which, I don't think are as prevalent in Hungary. Let me turn to Olga here, who basically, when she was hired as my research assistant, she was tasked with this gargantuan task of coding the city where oppositionists who were interned in Poland in 1989 were. Poland during its most threatening to the autocrats authoritarian crisis, had martial law enforced. And during this martial law regime, about 15,000 of members of solidarity, the Independent Trade Union, were arrested and basically placed in isolation, which is known as internment.
Monika Nalepa: Thanks to the Institute of National Remembrance, we have now a database of the orders requiring that specific persons be arrested and interned. What this allows us to do is actually to trace the density of opposition networks in communist Poland. What Olga is helping us do, me and Hanna Bosz, a co-author of mine from Stanford, is we're trying to see if these patterns, these opposition activity from the communist authoritarian regime, were by any chance recreated in resistance to the populist backsliding regime in Poland. We have a hunch that these legacies of opposition activity don't die out. And because in Poland they were just so prevalent, but we think that we'll still be able to find a link there. But it's basically just a hunch hypothesis that we hope to test.
Olga Bednarek: Thank you so much for explaining your research to us. Could you explain if there's any way to relate your findings over the past 20 years to what's happening in the U.S. at all?
Monika Nalepa: Thanks. U.S. is a very tricky example because it's an established democracy, at least at the national level. And because of that, I feel that the sensitivity to issues of transitional justice is somewhat depressed, because you need to have regime change to realize how important transitional justice is. And the U.S. democracy has just lasted for quite some time, and it was just interrupted with the Civil War interval. However, an often-neglected fact is that, actually it was transitional justice, both after the War of Independence and after the Civil War.
Monika Nalepa: After the War of Independence, there was a push for lawyers from the colonies to disbar loyalists, so people who had collaborated with the British. And the goal of that was actually very common to the goal of a lot of new democracies, which was to give a chance for the lawyers who were affiliated with the Independence Movement to have jobs. And following Civil War, there was a similar push to remove from positions of power and control, elites who had collaborated with the Confederacy. Now, those attempts were actually unsuccessful. Confederate elites, as we know from Jim Crow, were able to return and even entrench themselves. But because of lack of transitional justice at the elite level, there were a lot of acts of spontaneous justice, which I won't refer to as transitional justice because they were not really procedurally sanctioned towards the rank-and-file.
Monika Nalepa: What this meant is when confederate spies were found, they were instantly hanged, and they were court-martialed and summarily trialed. Actually, the U.S. does have a history of transitional justice, it's just not acknowledged or research history with one exception. There are several political scientists who are experts in truth commissions and have researched truth commissions around the world. And what they have been documenting is the creation of local truth commissions in the U.S. for dealing acts of racial violence. The problem, however, is that, all of these truth commissions are tasked with researching only very specific and very narrowly defined events. There has not been basically a nationwide truth commission or a nationwide transitional justice institution, such as the one that would make it, for instance, into the global transitional justice data set. So the U.S. is not even a dataset that we released.
Monika Nalepa: But of course, as the events of 2020 suggest following the murder of George Floyd, there is an enormous need for accountability of racial injustices in the U.S. Not just racial violence, not just racial physical violence, but also, unfair housing policies and a history of discrimination. There's definitely room for people interested in doing research on the U.S. to work on transitional justice. There are tons of questions that are still unanswered. And I think we have now developed by working around the world on transitional justice, the tools for doing that. I would encourage students who are listening to this podcast, to turn their interests there.
Olga Bednarek: Amazing. And do you also see the reflections of your work in today's global policy?
Monika Nalepa: Yeah. It is a very tricky question to ask for somebody who's not affiliated directly with a policy school. I work in the political science department, and I've always been focused on researching these basic institutions. How to reconstruct institutions of transitional justice. When do they work? When do they not work? And I think largely, shying away from consulting, but of course, there's no way of hiding policy implications of my research. Like I said, forced policy implications, I will offer them. And in this most recent article that I published in for Soviet Affairs on Transitional Justice Options for Russia, we actually do make some suggestions.
Monika Nalepa: And of course it varies from place to place, but the overall normative implications is, if the goal is to ensure democratic stability, then transparency institutions work better than punitive institutions, such as purges. And to the extent that, criminal responsibility should be administered, which of course this is contingent on having the judicial resources, et cetera, et cetera. And actually having peace in the first place, it's really not worth neglecting the prosecutions of rank-and-file. Because they're just as important, if not more important than prosecuting leaders.
Monika Nalepa: And on that note, there is the, if one looks at the way that international criminal tribunals have been set up, this overarching goal of reaching order givers or those who are leading regimes that give orders of repression, has led some of these tribunals, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, to actually pre-bargain with rank-and-file members, as well as middlemen, so mid-level officers, in order to get them to reveal information about leaders issuing orders. And I would say that that is a terrible strategy. Because it essentially lets off the hook people who have committed crimes with their own hands sometimes, or have committed the most brutal acts of violence, and sacrificing a justice done to them in order to punish the leaders. And we don't even know that punishing the leaders is in the long-term effective.
Monika Nalepa: Meantime, victims are observing this and just feeling that, the testimony that they gave to go after these rank-and-file, has been completely wasted. I would say, I've shied away from making policy implications, pretty long time just focusing on these basic institutions. But I feel pretty confident in giving those two pieces of advice. Transparency institutions on the one hand, and then not neglecting prosecutions of rank-and-file.
Olga Bednarek: Perfect. And now turning to our audience. If there was one paper or book that you would recommend, which would it be?
Monika Nalepa: Wait. It's not going to be a book, it's not going to be an article, but it's actually going to be something a bit better. It's going to be a blog. A few years ago there was this part of the Washington Post, which is called the Monkey Cage. Maybe some of the listeners will recognize it. And it was a space for political scientists and social scientists to describe their research, especially if it was relevant for the interpretation of current events, in a way that's accessible to a broader audience. And unfortunately, because of the way the news market works, the Monkey Cage was closed down. And for about a year, they basically were homeless, but now they have recreated themselves as Good Authority.
Monika Nalepa: It's essentially the same model, political social scientists commenting on current events based on their own research. And interestingly, they're not opinion pieces, so they're not op-eds. In fact, authors are given very explicit instructions to shy away from opinions, they're rather analysis pieces. And I think there are two advantages of reading that. But one is that it's gives you an opportunity to very quickly learn what the current research tells us about this event. But also it allows readers to familiarize themselves with who is an expert on this topic. And you can go to their academic webpage and read their most recent article. I would definitely put a plug in for Good Authority.
Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento: Amazing. Thank you very much, Monika.
Hannah Balikci: Thank you so much for all of your insight today. It really does seem like your research is incredibly important and can have some long-lasting implications, especially when thinking about today's current conflicts and all of the atrocities happening all over the world. We really appreciate you taking your time to be here with us and your decades worth of work on the issue.
Monika Nalepa: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to speak to you and to speak to the product audience that is listening.
Hannah Balikci: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict, featuring Professor Monika Nalepa. This episode was produced and edited by Hannah Balikci and Nishita Karun. Thank you to our interviewers, Olga Bednarek and Isabella Pestana. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute, for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit their website Thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter @pearsoninst. Inst is spelled I-N-S-T. Thank you.
Root of Conflict
10.06.23
Kurdish Women and Resistance | Rez Gardi
Root of Conflict
09.07.23
Lives Amid Violence | Mareike Schomerus
Reema Saleh:
Hi, this is Rima and you are listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast. You are listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the study in resolution of global conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
What mental models underpin international development and how do they hold back actors working in conflict affected countries? In this episode, we speak with Dr. Mareike Schomerus, author of 'Lives Amid Violence' and Vice President of the Busara Center, one of the first behavioral science research labs in the global south. Drawing from 10 years of research by the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium, she argues that the international development sector in its current form often fails to take into account the experiences and perspectives of people living in violent contexts. And she offers a new language for transforming development in the wake of conflict. We talk about the colonialist thinking that underpins international development, how the sector's unflinching faith in causality creates blind spots for practitioners, and what it means to envision this space anew.
Hannah Balikci:
The following is a PSA from the University of Chicago's Pearson Institute for the study and resolution of global conflicts presenting the Pearson Global Forum. A thin line divides human realities. The fundamental desire for simple human existence remains the same, yet reality is dramatically disparate for many. Join us on Friday, October 20th to hear from global experts as they discuss the topic of disparity and how it impacts people around the world in places like Iran, Afghanistan, and Mexico. This in person and virtual event is free and open to all. You can find more information at the pearsonglobalforum.org. Thank you.
Reema Saleh:
Hi, my name is Reema. I'm a Pearson fellow and a student at Harris.
Julia Higgins:
Hi there. My name is Julia Higgins, I'm an MPP student at Harris as well, and also a Pearson fellow.
Umama Zillur:
Hi everyone. My name is Umama Zillur. I'm also a student at Harris and a Pearson fellow.
Mareike Schomerus:
And hi, I'm Mareike Schomerus. I'm a visiting lecturer at Harris and also Vice president at Basara.
Reema Saleh:
Alrighty. So can you tell us a little more about why are you here this quarter at Harris? What courses are you teaching?
Mareike Schomerus:
So this is my third time that I'm teaching at Harris in the spring term, and I teach two courses this time. I teach qualitative research, which is of course within Harris, a little bit of a novelty since this is not a very qualitative environment. So I think it's one of the few courses that you can take at Harris where you learn qualitative research and get to do a little experimentation with your own qualitative interests and approaches and so on. And the second course I teach is a hybrid course that we teach across Busara, which is my home organization in Kenya and here. Where we have people design a behavioral experiment, and the actual part that we do in class is the so-called formative research. So where people set up the first round of research where they're trying to understand what really is the context like in which they're going to implement this hypothetical experiment. And so we do a little bit of data collection so people can actually experience what it's like to design an interview instrument, analyze qualitative formative data, and then how to use that for experimental design later on.
Reema Saleh:
Can I ask what first drew you to this intersection of behavioral science and conflict studies?
Mareike Schomerus:
Yeah, it piqued my interest probably by now six, seven years ago. In fact, after I did a lot of ethnographic field work, very qualitative field work in conflict resolution and peace protest and armed groups and so on. And it really became very clear to me from reading more and more about behavioral science and from cognitive biases and cognitive processes, and primarily actually the point where it becomes very clear that people start remembering things very differently as time passes and change their own recollection of what it is that brought them to a particular place. And which I had seen a lot happening if you do qualitative conflict research, you see that, of course you see people changing their stories and so on. And I thought, I wonder what that is. And I've read a lot more on behavioral science and then thought, I think qualitative conflict studies is really missing a big perspective or it doesn't engage more with behavioral science.
Because behavioral science, at the time even more so than now, sits very separately, sits as a mainly quantitative discipline still, even though it's also hugely qualitative and anthropology is often very behavioral and so on. And so I started looking into what kind of research could be really useful to try and interlink a very serious qualitative perspective, which is what I bring, and a very serious behavioral science perspective. And it turned out there wasn't a lot of that around. And so I set up a little research project to try a particular approach, which we then implemented, and that's kind of how I ended up at Busara.
Reema Saleh:
That's amazing. Can I ask how that's informed? We'll be talking a lot about your book, 'Lives Amid Violence'. How did that inform or what inspired the book project in the first place?
Mareike Schomerus:
So the book project was inspired by a very technical requirement. I was the research director of a big research consortium, the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium, which ran for 10 years. Was hosted at ODI in London, funded by, at the time, the Department for International Development, which is the UK's development secretary really at the time was called DFID. And it was looking into that seemingly very simple question of how people survive in situations of violent conflict. And survivor being quite a holistic category, not just security wise, but also in terms of really income, food, services, health services, education, things like that. How do they manage in these situations?
And I took over as the research director for my predecessor in 2017, something like that. And then the project came to a close in 2021, and the final deliverable for the final research director was to step back and answer the big question. Say, well, if we do 10 years of research with really dozens of partner organizations all over the world, we have over 150 outputs from that particular research consortium. All very specific on many, many different aspects of this question in many nuanced ways.
But really what is a big picture answer that you can give about what you learn? Which is actually a really tricky question to answer. You have a huge amount of material from very, very different methodological perspectives, very different voices and so on. And so that task fell to me as the research director. And I guess the only way that I could answer that question really was to do something very different. I wouldn't have been in a position to really summarize the research. It's too nuanced, and I make that point very often in the book that really each individual piece of research stands alone. And if you're interested in a particular part of this broad range of questions, you would really need to go and read the research on this.
So I wanted to look at patterns of insights that arise from this. And the patterns of insights that were really striking to me were that over these 10 years, these many outputs, the recommendations that almost every piece of research has to the policy makers, decision makers, program designers and so on, were very, very similar. They hardly ever seemed to change. And yet also alongside the hardly ever change in recommendations, hardly anything else ever seemed to change either. And so I thought, well, why it? Why can you keep saying the same things over and over again and nothing seems to shift in this? And so that's my inspiration for what the book actually ended up being, was recognizing these big patterns.
Reema Saleh:
That makes sense. Can I ask where kind of the title came from originally
Mareike Schomerus:
The title of the book? So 'Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict'. So 'Lives Amid Violence', I think came to me quite early because it was very clear that I wasn't going to write actually primarily about the people whom the research was about, the people who were living in situations of violence. But also a lot about the people who were on the other side, on the implementing side, on the side of trying to deliver development programs and so on to support those other lives of people who were living amidst violence. And so I thought that was a phrase that caught both the fact that everyone's lives gets wrapped up in these situations and in often very unhelpful ways.
But it also, I really wanted to have an emphasis on this understanding that amid violence lives also go on, they continue. They are often brutally interfered with, interrupted sometimes, but remains really crucial to pay attention to how people live. And I think that's particularly crucial for the people who then make decisions over how to support those people. Because I would argue that very often their decisions are a bit misguided, because they interpret things in a particular way that is not very helpful.
The second part of the title, which is a bit grandiose, transforming development in the wake of conflict, I actually mentioned that in the book that I had to say that out loud quite a few times to myself to see whether that sounded completely ridiculous. Because everything that has transforming in the title is a little bit cringe worthy to me, but it's also important to highlight what direction the book is going in. And so from a publisher's point of view, it's very important that people know that this is about international development and that this is in the wake of conflict.
So it doesn't do that division between we're now in conflict and we're now post conflict, which is usually the jargon that is used. And the transforming part, I think the publisher, who was very supportive of this title, felt that it is a book that called for a genuine transformation. And that it's quite serious about this despite the fact that I find it quite hard to let the word transforming come out of my mouth. But it is, it's asking for a real shift. And so that's how the title comes about. But negotiating a title is also not something that the author does alone, I'm just saying. So I think my very original title was a lot more creative, which would've never made it to the bookshelves.
Reema Saleh:
Oh, can we know what it is?
Mareike Schomerus:
Yeah, I don't remember embarrassingly, I shouldn't have said that. But it was definitely something more creative.
Reema Saleh:
Oh, we'll definitely follow up. We won't. No, but to me, I admit it always struck me as, because I feel like the book writes a lot about, it's hard to define when a conflict starts or when it ends for people. So it kind of captured that for me.
Mareike Schomerus:
Great. I'm delighted to hear. So it does work kind of.
Reema Saleh:
So I think we're definitely going to get through what needs to be transformed about development and how we think about aid, state building kind of things. But first, can you walk us through what is a mental model? And what about the mental model underpinning international development needs to change?
Mareike Schomerus:
So this is exactly where I landed when I looked at all these many outputs and recognized this pattern of recommendations were always the same. And they were basically in one way or another, every recommendations were saying, you have to work being politically aware, things have to be context specific and context appropriate, and any planning needs to be flexible and it needs to work with local realities. And I mean, these are very common policy recommendations that you see and yet they never really changed. And so I thought, well, why is that? And as I was trying to understand, literally letting it emerge. People can't see me, but I'm grasping things in the air with my hands, which is very much actually a reenactment of how this process felt like. Because I was sitting often and I was walking around talking to myself and trying to really grasp what it was that I was seeing.
And at some point it was very, very clear to me that what I was seeing was a mental model underpinning these international engagements in conflict situations that wasn't ever going to be appropriate for what the realities were. And so what that means is, so a mental model is something that we all have in multiple layers and multiple versions, which is basically our go-to, often subconscious or unconscious explanations of how things work. So you fall back onto, you make sense of the world through the interpretative patterns that you have ingrained in yourself based on your personality, based on your background, your upbringing, your culture, your surroundings, your learnings and whatever. And you just apply that very snappy and say, "Okay, this is why these things are in a particular way."
And so mental model aren't, it's not correct to say this is your way of thinking because it's much more visceral than that. If it was your way of thinking, it would be much easier to say, "Oh, let's articulate this thinking and now let's rethink," which is how this is often done. But a mental model is deeper than that. It's the blood that flows through that thinking where people say, "But I'm deeply convinced that there's one particular way in which something works and the mechanisms through which something works." And the way I unpack that in the book is through looking at what some of the major approaches are in these situations of violent conflict. And why in a way they never really change in their approaches despite the calls for being context specific, despite the calls for being politically appropriate and aware and so on.
And how that emerged to me in front of, as I was grasping with my hands in the air for explanations, was that I realized that the language in which international intervention of development speaks about this sounds like you're talking to a bunch of engineers. So it's almost like you're sitting in a room with people who've written a blueprint on how to now create a post-conflict society. And I say this a little bit flippantly, but actually it's not that flippant. It's quite stark.
If you look at the language that's used in this, it's state building and institution building and building blocks and blueprints and pathways. And I mean it's all very, very technical engineering language. And what that does is it really speaks to one mental model, which is the need for certainty. So there's a real deep need I think for people who work in that field to feel somewhat able to say, "No, we're on top of this situation. We're in control of this situation. We have a plan, we have sequencing."
So yes, clearly we need to, this is a situation that was, for example, a peace deal has been signed, so now we need to go into the institution building and we need to stabilize this. Again, stabilization, like build a foundation that can't slide. Very, very architectural. We need to stabilize this. We need to build these institutions. These institutions then need to become accountable. They need to then start acting on behalf of their citizens, at which point the citizens then stop contesting the legitimacy of these institutions. And that's how you bring about a peaceful society.
And that mental model of this engineering mindset, I think for starters is really misleading. The second part of the mental model is that ultimately all of this thinking that happens and the many nuances in, for example, a state building effort and so on, really speaks to an idea that deeply believes that economic growth in one way or another will solve all problems, is completely necessary to solve very complex social problems. And that also with the idea that economic growth and economic resources is the most important thing for people, everything becomes a transactional relationship rather than a social relationship where people maybe build an economic transaction on top of a social relationship.
The mental model of international development flips it and says, "Well, the most important thing for people is resources, material wealth." And that's interesting because we see time and time again that this very established idea of the hierarchy of needs, where always the economic need is the big foundation of the pyramid gets flipped in situations of violent conflict. Or contestation where actually people put other needs, where they forego economic opportunities for social connections, for example. And this mental model that ultimately, in really bare bones words, it's the mental model that informs still the idea of homo-economicals, the rational driven by the aim to get the best economic decisions done and gain the most benefit from these decisions. That is still a mental model that underpins a lot of the analysis of these contexts.
Umama Zillur:
So on that train of thought, and just maybe looking at a more long-term view of this, all of this I think is... I mean, my original question was, what's wrong with international development and its relationship to colonialism and ongoing conflict? But I want to rephrase that and ask you, do you think the relationship is a prominent part of the development economic discourse currently? And then unpack why that link or the fact that the link is missing is an issue.
Mareike Schomerus:
The relationship to colonialism. So I think that well, colonialism had has at its heart the same mental model. And so let me nuance that a little bit more what I mean by that. So colonialism, I think often when people speak about it, they think of it actually weirdly, again, the mental model of engineering and administrative things. So very often when people speak about decolonization, they think about the administrative parts of this. The first wave of debate on de-colonialization was countries becoming independent. So actually a very technical administrative act. And now I think the debate has moved on, luckily, a lot more and has realized that there's also deep thought patterns, deep prioritizations of what kind of knowledge is important, what kind of knowledge is even readable to people. And sometimes readable quite literally, whatever is written down still holds a lot more power than something that is spoken and so on.
And so I think the relationship that I see between colonialism and these mental models of international development is, I guess has a couple of elements to it. One is economic growth, trying to get the best economic gain out of a situation. I would argue it's really profoundly part of colonial thinking. I would also argue that the idea that you can put people's experiences into certain boxes of administrative units is also part of a colonial... Colonial administration, that's how they administered people, by segmenting them by populations, segmenting them, even within one person there would be segmentation of what this one person was about. So it wasn't a very holistic view of humans, not a very holistic view of human experience. And I think in so many ways, development replicates that.
So you have that replicated through the various sectors. It's very hard for me to really understand how you can separate the health sector from education or how can you separate health and water and sanitation. These two are very intertwined, yet they're completely different sectors in international development. The second way I think, in which or third way maybe in which this is replicated, is in this really, really difficult subject of targeting. Of how NGOs, non-governmental organizations actually deliver their programs to people.
They always do this by identifying categories of people that are most, in their view, most eligible or most needy, most in need of what they want to implement. Which sounds like exactly the right way of doing it, because it kind of seems very commonsensical. You identify who's in need and then you deliver your program. But in this categorization, actually a lot of thought patterns I think continue that take people out of the entirety of the holisticness of their being, their nuances into a very, very narrow identities that aren't necessarily reflective of how people feel.
And the work I used there is from a colleague who worked in Uganda a lot, and he gave us an example that in Uganda, a lot of programs would target female headed households. So women who were the head of the family for whatever reason, and they were often targeted with a very particular set of programs, non-food items, so wash basins and soap, and sometimes also food items and so on. But his argument was that a lot of them were actually embroiled in land conflicts, and they were trying to battle the right for their land, which they had lost. And really what they needed was legal advice, legal support. And so while they took the non-food items, it didn't really gel with how they themselves experienced themselves.
And so this fragmentation of identities into these very operationally, easily implementable categories, I think also is very much part of this relationship between international development and colonialism. Because that was an element of control during colonial times was to say, "Let's segment people. Let's put them into categories." I mean, categorization along administrative lines was a pretty popular tool in colonial administration. So that I think indeed would be one of those mental models that categorization is a necessity to implement anything. That is quite a challenging one.
Umama Zillur:
Thank you. That's a really helpful way to look at that link, I think. And do you think that that link is now a prominent part of the discourse when it comes to international development?
Mareike Schomerus:
I think it depends. It can be and then it also isn't. So it can be, let's start with a more constructive one. I think it can be because, well, weirdly, I think, sorry, let me rethink how I start this because this is complicated stuff. So it can be when people make it visible that some of these thought patterns still continue. That is definitely, I think, very helpful. I think it's very helpful that there's definitely an awareness now that the model of implementing programs that are designed in New York or Washington, Brussels or London or Oslo or wherever, and then they've flown into any other part of the world and implemented in similar ways. I think that is very much established now that that's really not the way to do it.
It gets more complicated in many other ways. The first way in which it gets more complicated is that of course a lot of the debate continues to be held along the lines of categories. So weirdly, and this is what's so fascinating and so frustrating and also necessary to have about this identity debate. I would say that the debate that says, we need to really make sure that the discourse on international development isn't held by western people, but weirdly that still works with categories. Really, that is still quite an unnuanced and quite clunky way of actually thinking about what does collaboration between people need to look like. Collaboration, that from where I stand, has to rest in the realization that some countries are where they are right now because they took from other countries. So I think that's, for me, that's a very, very good platform for which to have that debate.
The then very categorical debate is trickier, because on the one hand I understand it, I can even support it. On the other hand, I find that it does replicate some of these patterns that aren't particularly helpful. But that's a difficult debate to have. I think we need to engage on the substance of this, and we need to try and figure out ways in which some of these power relationships become very visible. How identity-based directions are guided in certain ways in certain traditions that replicate power patterns. All of that is hugely important. But I don't know whether we get that far if we are simply doing this based on identities. Because the dirty history doesn't get changed by that, but the future truly has to be collaborative. There's just no other way on this planet, that's the only way that we can work together. So I'm very torn about how to have this in the best possible way.
And then of course, I'm also very aware that based on my own identity, it's tricky for me to be the one to say how this debate should be held. So this is the cycle in which I then get caught up. And then at the same time, I also think it's too important for people not to show up for it. So that then also includes me. So this is really very nuanced and contradictory. But I want to say that also one of the things that I feel is a mental model that's not helpful is to try and get rid of contradiction, which a lot of international development tries to do. It tries to find the one way in which it seems seemingly this is the right way, and that is very problematic. It will always be contradictory. It'll often always be ambivalent, ambiguous. It will feel uncertain and it will be uncomfortable. So in my own learning with this debate, I also try to then remind myself that I truly believe that it needs to be uncomfortable and contradictory. And it often is.
Umama Zillur:
I think it makes sense to be torn about something like this, because it is tricky and it is difficult. I know you touched a little bit about this, but at the core of the two books and just your life's work is that we need to handle the experiences and perspectives of the people living in context of violence and conflict with care. Can you walk us through your vision for how to transform development in the wake of conflict? And what does responsible engagement in these spaces look like for you? What are some of the ways you hold yourself accountable when existing in this space?
Mareike Schomerus:
Yeah, I mean always in incomplete ways, that is I think also true. So what does transformation really look like? Again, I can only, truly I can only speak from my perspective and I can only say that I think it requires an acute awareness of these mental models. It requires an acute almost check-in mechanisms with oneself. And this is where it gets, again, very tricky because sometimes when I talk about this, you can feel a palpable sense in the room where people go, "Oh my God, she wants to sit around the campfire and sing songs." I'm like, "No, this is not a touchy-feely thing. It's really a necessity to understand why you are seeing certain things in the world in the way that you do." To really recognize that that is also shaped very much by, not just by personality, but by background and culture and education and all these kinds of things.
And then take that as a real invitation for self-awareness and say, "But where's my role in this? Why am I pushing for something like this? Is it because my mental model that I fall back on? Is it because it's my sense of this is my seat at the table, so let me take that seat at the table?" So these processes are really important. They have nothing to do with me going and hugging a tree, because they're actually very, very incomplete in a lot of these processes. So that is where I would argue that's where their transformation really needs to start.
And then bringing the perspectives in of the people, again, is one of those seemingly really obvious things to say. And then once you put it into practice, it gets very tricky. So a lot of the times people say, "Well, that requires spending more time with people where you're doing research so that you do better research." That is true, but that doesn't then give me the license to claim that I've now adopted the perspective of someone. It's also true that simply by virtue of someone being from the same country then doing research in the same country, that person isn't necessarily closer to the people with whom they're doing research. Because stratification doesn't just happen along national borders.
So this idea that prospective representation is a straightforward thing by allowing others to speak through you is a little bit simplistic, because the whole point of research is the research creates the knowledge, they become the interpreter. And it's tricky when they start speaking for the people with whom they conducted research, because there is always a translation process. So I would embrace the imperfection there and do by all means everything that is possible. And obviously our research methods are a lot more aware of this now, we have much more participatory methods and so on. But I think it also remains the case that the process of research of someone else coming in and working with people to ultimately extract information about their lives from them, there is always a certain power of relationship in this. And then being the one person who is then able to write that down in a linear story that then somewhere else can read.
So this is I think another moment of embracing contradiction and trying to do the best that you can. And the best that you can, the accountability that you were asking about I think just comes from continuing to check, continuing to reflect on why I have certain perspectives. I grappled with that a lot and really also stopping myself often and taking a step back. And I had a jargon dictionary while I was writing this, and I wrote the first draft and also realized that there were many things that I couldn't explain without the typical international development jargon. So I kept a note and then at the end when it was almost finished, I did a word search of the whole document to try and get rid of the jargon that I really find awful, like beneficiary and all these kinds of things.
But actually, I also realized that very often once I got rid of the jargon, I mean I didn't have the vocabulary anymore. So even being aware of this, that sometimes I use language that I dislike because it's the only way that I can speak about this, because I'm so embedded in this system as well. Is a contradiction that is one to then make visible, but not necessarily one that I can get rid of. So that to me is very important that it will always be imperfect. And I fall on the side of saying, "It's still worth trying with the imperfection." Others fall on the side of saying, "It's not, you shouldn't try that. But that's a good debate to have, I think.
Umama Zillur:
Yeah, I think the love hate relationship with academia is something a lot of people can relate to.
Julia Higgins:
I think this whole conversation really illustrates how insidious colonial legacies are in development work and how complex engaging with these ideas can be. To shift gears a little bit now, I think a theme that really shines through in your writing is the fact that relationships are really crucial to state building and institutional capacity development. Can you walk us through exactly how relationships function as currency in post-conflict settings? And if I recall correctly in the book, you focused on a couple of really interesting case studies in the DRC and Afghanistan.
Mareike Schomerus:
So there's many elements to this. So the engineering mindset of state building is very much based on this idea that you build an institution, and an institution in that image is almost imagined as being quite literally the building. And fill it with administrative processes, which is where this notion of capacity building comes in very strongly. So building a capacity for a country means to train civil servants to do the very technical aspects of their job. I mean, a lot of capacity building is done on spreadsheet training and things like that. Very technical stuff.
And it really overlooks that, of course, institutions always are hardware and the software and that what the building projects very often is very different from what happens inside. And that's true for anywhere in the world. There's the hardware and the software version of the institution. And the common capacity and state building approaches have overlooked that a little bit. And they've overlooked it, because I think as a little sideline, because I think they took Max Weber's ideas about the state a little bit too seriously and a little bit seriously too long over a century, saying, "This is the only way that a state should look." I think that's a tricky one.
But also because the idea of the state in that particular imagery is one of a leveler and a neutralizer. And it really is the idea that the institution should try and counter the social relationships that might've existed in situations where there isn't a democratically elected government, but that's not the format of governance. So this idea of the neutralizer and leveler still underpins this and often is projected as so often these things are in international development into an infinite future. At some point in the infinite future, this institution will function so that it pays equal attention to all citizenry in the country. But when exactly that future will happen, we don't really know.
And yet what we see, of course, that in a lot of situations of violent conflict, the very same structures and dynamics that created the conflict in the first place, and often conflicts are very long-running. They will of course continue once there is a state building effort and humans are very clever. So they will usurp the state institutions to make sure that they function in the interest of the people who held the power before a conflict officially ended. They will make very sure that that continues to be the case.
And so what that also means is that despite institutions being built, there will be continued relationships, and this relationship, state run on relationship is very important. And the example that you're alluding to in the DRC was done by two scholars who did this very interesting work where they unpacked the relationships that provincial governors had with the capital in Kinshasa. And then tested this relationship often based on length of knowing the president and so on against how efficient their provinces were run, their districts were run. And efficiency being measured in the ability to pass legislation and budgetary resources and so on. And that it turns out that the stronger your relationship is, the more efficient you can become.
So relationships are a real capacity builder, of course, in the kind of state building mindset that's the worst version. Because the way I described it, is one way to describe it, the other way to describe it is patronage. And that's the one thing that the idea of the state as a neutralizer and balancer wants to avoid. But it actually is the more efficient way to govern, if you are allowing the inside that relationships are capacity, that they aren't just something that needs to be neutralized and controlled away, but that they can be a real engine.
And that's very tricky because of course these relationships are often held amongst elites. And the international state building effort wants to make sure that the elites don't run the country to their own interests only. But that's again, one of those contradictions that requires a little bit of unpacking in each needs context. Now, is it ultimately maybe better for the populations that are removed from the elites, if the elites feel secure in the resources they have access to, and actually it is better for ordinary citizens? Or is it ultimately better for ordinary citizens if the state building efforts continue to try and break the grip of elites on the state resources, possibly then continuing battle for authority and resources and ultimately continuing conflictual dynamics?
Julia Higgins:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really interesting to think about relationships as a tool to pull us out of this infinite future that you've referenced and into more of a concrete present. Very interesting.
So again, to pivot to a little bit of a different topic here, in your previous work you've engaged pretty extensively with the violent conflict in Northern Uganda, between the government and the Lord's Resistance Army. And in the context of that work, you and your research team applied the concept of a mental landscape, which I think is pretty closely intertwined with the mental model framework that you were describing previously as well. But essentially how I understood it was that it is how people perceive, interpret, and experience their circumstances today and how that can be shaped by legacies of war or violence in their particular setting. So I'm wondering, can you speak a bit how you utilized these mental landscapes to contextualize your work in Uganda specifically, and also how you apply that framework to other conflict settings?
Mareike Schomerus:
Yeah, so the mental landscape conflict as a concept is a concept redeveloped through this work. And it really came out of this realization that was quite confusing, that some of our survey work showed that even in situations where the hard indicators had measurably improved for people. So it was measurably more secure, there weren't any more attacks. People were walking at night on the street, there were streets where there hadn't been streets before. People were growing crops that needed longer to mature, all the kind of indicators that you would look at to see whether a security situation is improving. And so even in situations where we saw that, when you ask people whether their lives were improving, they were saying, "Well, no, they're not."And this was actually one of the moments where I thought, this is where we need to bring in behavioral science into this conflict study, because we don't get far enough by asking people because it's confusing. The answer is confusing, contradictory yet again.
And so we basically went in with this question to say, is there something specific about people who have been through a very multi-layered experience of conflictual dynamics, of vulnerability, of uncertainty that makes it harder for them to experience their own recovery? If that's how you want to call it. Because arguably, if you can't experience your life getting better, then it's not getting better. It doesn't matter whether I tell you 10 times that "No, your situation has improved." And so that's when we used people's own stories of...
We didn't even use their own stories of conflict. We asked a group of people whether they could tell us something that was important to them or that happened that was important to them during the time of the conflict. And then we asked another group of people whether they could tell something that was important to them two weeks ago, very, very recently. Because you have to think very, very carefully of how you talk about these things in an ethical way. And then we asked people to make decisions through some very established behavioral games on altruism and their risk preferences and so on. And we saw that even on this tiny little difference of asking people to situate a particular memory, and not everything that people talked about who talked about the time of the conflict was specifically about the conflict. That there was a noticeable difference in how they made decisions.
And so that's where the concept of the mental landscape was born, because we then did a lot of qualitative interviews as well. And it's very clear how people carry many, many layers of memories and sense-making with them at all times. And some of them are contradictory again. And we know, I mean, there's a lot of very quantitative research done on the question of whether the experience of violence changes your behavior and your preferences. But to me, that question is almost too narrow. So I wanted it to be a little bit wider, and I thought, but it's more than the experience of a particular violent act. It is your individual memories, your communal memories. It is your own experience of being able to access a particular resource or not.
So a continued experience of marginalization, which you then might explain through one of your individual memories, so it becomes reinforcing. So it's really complicated. And it also changes, because if somebody, for example, has a religious faith, they then interlace their own sense-making a lot with their religious faith. So it's very complex, changeable, movable landscape that really has seasonality. Like every landscape has, where sometimes the mountain looks very gray on a day, and then the next day it looks very green.
And I find this a very helpful way of thinking about this, that moves us away from the much more bare bones perception survey. Which basically asks people, how do you perceive your situation to be and demands of them to give you a snapshot of what it is in that particular moment. And this mental landscape where you also then say, "But what are some of your communal memories? Why do you think this is the way things are for your community? Why do you think this is the way things are for you? What kind of also disappointments have you had, for example, with generations of international development programs?" Who very often come in and offer a lot of hope and a lot of promise of a better, again, future somewhere in the far, far future. Which then cannot deliver this?
So you have an added layer of people being permanently disappointed and needing to preserve for themselves their sense of hope. So they become very reluctant often to engage in the next round of program. And because hope is a precious currency, you can't spend it freely because you need it to keep going. That things will ultimately be okay, is really an important thing to carry with you. So the mental landscape one is trying to nuance a lot more what prior was only ever captured in really quite dry perception surveys. And tries to very explicitly what I've mentioned earlier, bring the many, many elements of humans back together in a way that is still graspable.
This is also my problem with, even though I kind of came up with this concept as a mental landscape, and I need to work on it and nuance it much more. I also find it really difficult, because of course, at the same time, it still tries to capture, give a catchy term to something that is very, very nuanced and multilayered and complex and changeable. So while I'm trying to say, "No, there's a lot of fluidity and it's nuanced," I'm also saying, "And here's the label, the one label that makes it really comfortable to talk about it." So again, it's tricky, but if it helps towards an understanding, even in this one element of communal versus individual memories, then I think that's already much, much more than we have right now.
Julia Higgins:
Yeah, much more comprehensive.
Umama Zillur:
In 'Lives Amid Violence', in one section you describe the success of peace building as being presented as an Excel table that shows the number of attendance at a meeting. I think that this really captures how much of the current practices surrounding evaluation of development projects really miss the mark. Because we want to quantify impact and change, we only look for things that are quantifiable and in the process, what ends up happening is we're missing rich insight into actual impact. Whether that's positive or negative. So I want to ask, how can those working at the intersection of evaluating peace building efforts strike a balance between measuring progress with precision and avoiding the flattening of personal stories and structural narratives? And that's already a long question, but I want to add onto that. Do you think the broader friction between qualitative and quantitative research feeds into this reality?
Mareike Schomerus:
So I want to preface what I say by saying on any of the points that I make, there are always good examples. And I say that because I know that a lot of organizations also do fantastic work. And wouldn't measure their peace building efforts in attendance at meetings, but many also do. And a few good stories don't make an approach a successful thing. So this is very, very important. And often obviously people come back to me and say, "But this particular program, it did great work." I'm like, "Yes, I don't dismiss that at all. But there are still underpinning mental models that primarily then make many more programs look in this other way."
So how can organizations counter this? I don't know whether the burden is necessarily just on the organizations, because this is another thing that I write about, and this is a very established area of discourse in international development. Is the cognitive dissonance with which many international development professionals operate, where they implement things, do things, count attendance at meetings so that they can put it on the M&E spreadsheet, while knowing that that's ultimately meaningless.
It's really, I think, not to be underestimated how many people work with that permanent cognitive dissonance, because they also believe that the small parts of some of the efforts ultimately are a good thing to do. Or a lot of people also buy themselves some freedom by delivering the spreadsheet based M&E and say, "Well, once that's okay, nobody will look too closely in what I'm doing, so here's what I'm actually doing." And that I think is quite constructive. So that cognitive dissonance is not to be underestimated.
But I also think that the main responsibility on changing this isn't really necessarily just with the implementing organizations, because all implementing organizations look to their funders. And the funders will often request these things, will often want reassurance. And there it is again, the mental model of certainty and reassurance, and also of that tricky bit of trust. How much do they trust the implementing organizations to really do something constructive? They get a bit of reassurance from seeing the spreadsheet in which the attendance was marked. And that's complicated to change, because the funders then sit in the treasury of donor countries and ultimately at some point in time get called in front of parliament and say, "This is why we're spending money on this."
And there's work on this political narrative that needs to really change in this, which is that the idea of the money that is built as foreign aid isn't money that is so directly improving people's lives. But it's really a political tool of the donor countries as well. And once that narrative would be shifted towards that, then it would be much easier to account for it in parliament, and a lot of these slightly performative practices might change. So a lot of this I think needs to change also in the donor implementing relationship.
And then I forgot now the second part of your already very long first question, but just remind me.
Umama Zillur:
How does the broader friction between qualitative-
Mareike Schomerus:
How I forget? How could I forget that question? So the interesting thing is, the friction for me is not as frictious as it might sound to you. Because for me, no method is perfect and they all need to speak to each other. And despite the fact that I'm a qualitative researcher, I'm really no purist on this. And I really think of the way I teach qualitative research is to say there are certain questions and certain types of answers that you can only elicit through certain kinds of methods. And some of them are very suitable for just quantitative approaches, and it's very helpful to have a quantitative answer to establish obviously the scale of a phenomenon and things like that. But that's not particularly valuable if you don't then also pay attention to saying, "Well, why do these things happen?" And even in the quantitative work continue to highlight that this doesn't yet help us with understanding the nuance.
So the two methods really speak to each other. And so for me, that divide actually, despite the fact that I am quite at home in the qualitative methods, that's actually quite a helpful contradiction rather than a friction. Because it also allows these broader questions that need to be asked about, when is knowing the scale actually important? Is knowing the scale part of a political theater that allows for the very quick soundbitey, election driven arguments and policies? If that's the answer to this, then that's a very, very useful insight to have and say, "But then we need to change that that's what people want to hear." And at the same time, we can say, "But when is something that we know for a fact is only been experienced in a particular way by one person," because we only ask this one person. When is something like that so powerful and resonant that it can actually change people's minds more broadly, and it's completely irrelevant whether this is a phenomenon experience by one person or by 2 million people? That to me then recreates exactly the humanity that we talked about.
But the two need to speak to each other, need to work in tandem with each other. And they also, as philosophical approaches really benefit from having a conversation with each other. We wouldn't have had the kind of insights that we had without both a quantitative survey and then a lot of qualitative and ultimately also some experimental work, and without a lot of conversations between people. This is the other thing that's always underestimated. Research is not a lonely undertaking. It becomes a lot better if you speak to each other.
Reema Saleh:
So what are the biggest takeaways that you think policymakers should take away from this book? And what should we have asked you in our hour together?
Mareike Schomerus:
What are the biggest takeaways? So I would say this idea of a takeaway is a very, very unhelpful mental model, because it always... No but it's, I know everyone's laughing and I'm laughing at myself, but it's true. Because ultimately it again tries to head us towards some sort of certainty, some sort of nugget of insights, some sort of solid ground on which to work. I had a one-hour conversation and I walk out with five takeaways, which is exactly the kind of thing that is really unhelpful because you can't condense this complexity endlessly. You can't endlessly synthesize.
So actually, I would say that a good takeaway is one where everything feels a bit unsettled. So not one in the lines of recommendation and, "The government should do this, and the implementers should do this." But in the line of, "Wait a second, what am I listening to? Why am I doing the work that I'm doing? What can I contribute? What can I not contribute? What fulfills me in this that then might become helpful to others? What fulfills me and might not be helpful to others?" I think are really useful questions to ask. And continuing to ask oneself, "Why do I believe that things work in the way they do? Why do I fall back on certain explanatory patterns? Why are they so ingrained in me?"
So the main takeaway is uncertainty and contradiction, but that's a really, really tricky thing to get your head around. And it feels weirdly unsatisfying when people walk out of an event and go, "Well, that was a bit fluffy. Well, she didn't really tell us what to do." People very often ask me, "So what's the solution?" I'm like, "Yeah, that's the mental model, the solution." How could there be one solution? These are complex, long, deeply rooted thing. There isn't one solution beyond continued engagement and learning and discussion and realization and so on.
Reema Saleh:
I feel like it almost reminds me of, there's a Susan Sontag quote that often comes back. "The only good answers are the ones that destroy the questions," it kind of reminded me of that. But I don't know, it's a scary thing. How do you even know what is underpinning your own mental model? How do you go beyond just rethinking it?
Mareike Schomerus:
It's very scary. It's very scary to me, and it was very, very hard for me to write this and to also say, "No, this is really what I think. This is actually how I think about these things." Because it's very clear to me that some people will really like it and others will think this is really naive. I had a comment from someone who said, "But your whole idea that this is not about economic growth unless redistributed properly, otherwise nobody can benefit. But don't you understand that that means some people will have less?" I'm like, "No, I do understand. That's the whole point of redistribution." So it's not as if I make some naive suggestions here, but I do understand completely that for some people, this idea that deeply the mental model isn't always applicable to every concept, it's very, very challenging.
And I catch myself out all the time. I almost would've given you five takeaways here because I'm so conditioned for this as well. And obviously my own mental models can be ripped apart by someone else on a daily basis. So it does feel very scary, and it feels also, I don't know, the way I then always think about this is to say, some people listen to me and go, "Oh, that's a bit naive and cute." And I'm like, "Yeah, but people still talk about trickle-down economics as workable." That's pretty naive and cute. But nobody talks about it in this way. For some reason that's an accepted way of thinking about this. So I'm trying very hard, and I don't mean to suggest that I succeed all the time, but I'm trying very hard to embrace that, that it feels scary and uncertain and that I can be attacked and that I represent contradiction in this. And that that has to be part of this as well.
Reema Saleh:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Mareike Schomerus. This episode was produced and edited by Rima Sala and Nishita Karun. Thank you to our interviewers, Julia Higgins, Rima Sala, Umama Zillur. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.
Root of Conflict
08.01.23
Sudan’s Political Transition | Ibrahim Elbadawi
Hannah:
Hello, this is Hannah and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You are listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
What does an interrupted democratic transition look like? In this episode, we speak to Dr. Abraham Elbadawi, Managing Director of the Economic Research Forum, and former Minister of Finance and Economic Planning in the Republic of Sudan. In May, Dr. Elbadawi joined us in Chicago at the 6th Annual Reverend Doctor Richard L. Pearson Lecture to discuss Sudan's political transition and economic policymaking. The lecture took place just weeks after violent conflict erupted in Sudan. Fighting between two military factions has forced millions of Sudanese to flee the violence and cast a shadow of uncertainty over Sudan's ambitions to transition to a civilian-led democracy.
Hisham Yousif:
My name is Hisham Yousif. I'm a second year MPP here at Harris. I'm also a Pearson fellow.
Kirgit Amlai:
I'm Kirgit Amlai. I'm a first year MPP and also a Pearson fellow.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
My name is Ibrahim Elbadawi. I am currently the Managing Director of the Economic Research Forum for the Middle East and North Africa. I joined this forum back in 2017. It's a forum of distinguished economists from the region and outside the region. It's really a very interesting forum that produces research and reports on the development and public policy issues. Before that, I was Director of Research at the Dubai Economic Council in Dubai, which is a semi-government institution on policy-oriented economic research. However,
the majority of my professional experience was developed while at the World Bank Development Economic Research Group, which I joined in '89 and then I resigned in 2009 and came back to the region.
I was a graduate of the University of Khartoum and then I had a PhD from Northwestern University and North Carolina State University. So we lived in Evanston for two years and my wife and I and our elder daughter who is with us here, Dr. Lina Elbadawi, she's a medical doctor, was born in Evanston. So it's really a great pleasure to be back here in Chicago. When I was a graduate student, we used to come to the Department of Economics of University of Chicago to attend some seminars and so on. So I've always been impressed by University of Chicago.
Hisham Yousif:
All right, so before we start with the questions, just kind of a framing, we have as our kind of working title, a retrospective on democratic transition interrupted. Many people studying conflict and folks that listen to this podcast, the civilian transition after the toppling of a dictator obviously is the most sensitive and fragile part of the transition. That process of democracy, you got headwinds of entrenched former regime elements, you got the army, you have various civil interests, you have protestors out in the street. So ultimately, we'd like to hear what it was like to be in Khartoum during that transition in a place of sensitive posts during that period, and how we got to where we are today. Obviously, you can't flip on the news without hearing what's going on in Sudan.
But before we get to that, tell us about your upbringing. Where are you from in Sudan and how was it like growing up in good old Sudan?
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
Despite the political instability and what we come to know in our kind of political culture as the Sudanese political syndrome, which are all of these coups and uprising and the alternation between short-lived democracies and long-reigning dysfunctional authoritarian military regimes.
Nonetheless, for my generation, we lived in a country that enjoyed a legacy of strong institutions, educational system, efficient bureaucracy, and to a large extent, a judiciary system and services. I enjoy it actually as the rest of my generation the benefits of meritocracy and being able to study at the University of Khartoum.
Of course, before that I was raised in a medium-sized city in central part of Sudan, in the region of Kordofan, which is a region that reflect the mixture of various cultures at the crossroads of various tribes and communities. And so, I studied my pre-university in my city, in my home city, and then I moved to the capital to study at the University of Khartoum, which was then in the late-70s or mid-70s was considered one of the best learning higher learning institutions in Africa and the Middle East.
For example, one of my professors, he was a physicist who actually became so renowned in his research on astrophysics so much so that he was contributing research to NASA at that time. I remember in the early 70s when I was a student majoring in mathematics at the university, he gave a talk about general relativity. And of course, we didn't understand much, but it tells you about the standard. We have an Arab linguist who was considered one of the major contributor to the history of the Arabic literature and so on and forth. And as well, as of course, economists, because I transferred to economics after my first year in mathematics. So what I was saying is that actually it was really great growing at that time, despite the fact that they were coups and militaries and so on.
The major setback to the Sudanese society and politics as a nation was the coup of 1989. That coup actually reflected or came as a result of a movement that we call in Sudan now an Islamawest. Not an Islamic because actually that movement effectively used the great religion which constitute the face of the majority of the population in order to advance very narrow-minded sectarian kleptocratic gains or agenda. Since then, actually Sudan was never before.
I personally was fortunate because in '89, I got an offer from the World Bank to join the Research Department of the World Bank. So six days after the coup in June 30th, 1989, I left the country. But my colleagues who were there, they really suffered. Because I used to teach at the University of Gezira, which is the second largest university in Sudan. They actually basically mismanaged everything. For example, they thought that they will feed themselves so the country will feed itself, so they destroyed the cotton industry and tried to grow wheat in a climate that's not conducive to high-productivity wheat. That's just one example. This is in one of the major agricultural projects in the country, the so-called Gezira scheme. Two million acres of irrigated agriculture, which was a backbone, so they destroyed that. That's just one example.
The Sudan Shipping Corporation that used to have a thriving maritime transport capacity, they basically sold that. Privatized and sold at fair sale prices to their membership. They did the sort of privatization that very much akin to what happened in the former Soviet Union when the former Soviet Union collapsed and chronic capitalism emerged. They disseminated the army and the civil service so much so that during the waning days of the regime, many of the leaders of that movement, they regretted what they have done. So it was a situation where you have kleptocratic ideologues taking over a country and destroying the elements of vitality in that country and that society.
That is why when the youth who were basically raised under the reign of that regime, 30 years and below, because that regime survived for some 30 years between early 90s up to 2018 when the revolution started in December, 2018. So these very youth who were raised under that regime, they actually they were the one who rebelled against the regime. The stories abound about their bravery and patriotism and their lyrics and literature and all of the wonderful things that the social media have reflected.
So myself, and my generations, who felt really challenged by what this new generation have done and that we failed to do, we've looked to serve in all capacities, including in myself. In my case, I resigned from my, I would say, comfortable position as Managing Director of a major research center based in Cairo to join the transitional government.
Hisham Yousif:
So before we get to that point, it was good timing on the World Bank that you were able to leave right as that regime took hold. A family member has described that period of time of they had an energy, but it was all directed in the wrong place. The privatization or the intensification of the war in the South or like you said, the destruction of the military and then having these parallel militia groups essentially where a lot of young people were conscripted. The 90s was a rough time for the Sudanese population. During that time, where were you headquartered? With the World Bank? Were you in ... ?
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
Headquartered at the World Bank. But like all Sudanese in the diaspora, we were not oblivious about what was happening, the atrocities in Darfur, the religious war in the south and the persecution and brutalization of the political movements and so on. So what we did was, or in fact personally I did, was to join the opposition in my own teams. Obviously as an academic and a researcher writing papers and participating in discussions about how to develop, for example, an alternative economic agenda, national agenda.
Then in 2005, an opportunity came for me to be directly involved from my perspective of the World Bank, which was the peace agreement between the Sudanese People Liberation Movement of the late Dr. John
Garang. With the support of the international community and the US and other members of the UN Security Council, a peace agreement was arranged between the then government of General Omar Bashir and the Sudanese People Liberation Movement. I was invited and asked to actually join the international group to support this process.
So I used to travel to Nairobi where we met with the two delegations, the government and the rebel SPLA movement, and we discussed issues about the future in terms of economic agenda, and the needs and the support that the World Bank and the UN system could provide in terms of technical support, in terms of training officials from both institutions, from the government institutions and their counterpart in the South. And so, that was a great opportunity for me to be involved and the first time actually in my lifetime to visit South Sudan. Because Sudan is a huge country, so I never had a chance to go to the south. The amazing thing is that we were staying for two weeks at the headquarters of Dr. John Garang, SPLM, the Sudanese People Liberation Movement, and then they were cattle rusting in the neighborhood. So we came with a plane from Kenya, but the weather actually, there was a storm, and so the plane could not come back. By the way, this is the same area where Dr. John Garang actually died as a result of an airplane crash.
Hisham Yousif:
That's right.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
It's called New Site. So we spent two weeks providing training and discussions with the technocratic leadership of the Sudanese People Liberation Movement. And so on the way back, the commander of that camp or the base decided to actually escort us with the Sudanese People Liberation Army.
Hisham Yousif:
Oh wow.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
And so, when I went back to Kenya in a town near by the border Sudanese/Kenyan border, that was a kind of an interesting point of discussion with my friends about that it was the first time for somebody like me to be escorted by the Sudanese People Liberation Army, which in the north, or at least the discussion was that this is an army of the rebels and what have you.
Hisham Yousif:
The enemy for a long period of time.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
But it's amazing that it's so unfortunate that the SAOs has to succeed as a result of the policies of the former regime. Because the young man that I was actually sitting by him and he was driving the car was playing Sudanese music, a famous singer, the late Mohammed Wardi, who was very popular in Sudan.
Hisham Yousif:
Oh, wow.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
This is supposed to be the rebel movement that was supposed to articulate grievance and a different culture and so on. So there were so much in common. If, for example, the thinking was right about their Sudan is ultimately a multicultural, multi-ethnic society, and we need this political system that actually accommodate all of these diversity.
Hisham Yousif:
It truly was a lost opportunity, unfortunately. The fact that as Bashir came to power, you were able to jump to the World Bank. That in retrospect is actually a positive thing in the sense that you were able to escape the closed environment that gets created in a dictatorship like that. So when an opportunity presents itself for services to the country, after the regime gets toppled, you were able to create these alternative ways of looking at the economy or rendering services, a thought process that happens outside of the country. And so, you have a very interesting journey here. So describe to us how you came to be in a position to be in the Finance Ministry, the Finance Minister, during such a pivotal moment playing such an important part after Bashir was gone.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
I think obviously part of it is that, as I said, like many Sudanese professionals in the diaspora, I was quite concerned Sudanese first and foremost, but also a quite concerned professional economists who would like to help. Therefore, I was involved in a variety of activities during the 30 years, attending opposition events and presenting papers. And so, there was almost like a consensus about that I was a person that might actually be a good choice to lead the economic agenda, especially since the regime actually destroyed the economy, and it was by its own politics because of the sanctions and the listing of Sudan in the state-sponsored terrorist list. But also because of the mismanagement of the economy and especially the fact that they were unprepared for what we call in Sudan ... sorry, in economics, the sudden stop. The sudden stop is that when you have an economy that depended on a resource, whether capital flows by investors or an actual resource, and suddenly that stream of income stopped.
So what happened was that actually most of the oil more than 70%, or in fact 75% of the oil proceeds come from oil wells produced in the South. So when the South succeeded, they thought the ideologues of the so-called Islamic front who controls the government then, they saw that this is a time for them to exercise full control on Northern Sudan as an Arab Muslim country. But then they didn't really, their economic calculus did not really take into account the huge implications that an economy will suddenly lose this significant resource. That is why that the beginning of the end for them economically. Obviously the revolution was a revolution for dignity and freedom and so on, but it was aided by economics, economic crisis.
And so, when the transitional government or when the agreement, when the revolution succeeded, and the coalition that came out to be known the FFC, the Forces of Freedom and Change, which is a large coalition of freedom forces and political parties and civil society and so on, they decided to form a government for two years in order to prepare the country for elections and democratic transition, but then also in the interim, to manage an economy and to prepare the legal infrastructure for election, for the systems of government and what have you. I was one of those who were considered most qualified to lead that agenda. I'm quite grateful for the opportunity given to me.
I think despite the political instability and the setbacks and so on, the economic agenda that actually I was responsible for as the Senior Minister in charge of the economic sector remains the best hope for Sudan to chart a path of renewal and nation building.
Hisham Yousif:
Sure.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
Right now, I think there is a general consensus that hopefully when we return back to the constitutional process, we will go back to the same agenda, the unfinished agenda.
Hisham Yousif:
So before we actually get to that agenda and that period of time, which is pretty interesting, you also had the military kind of in the background. So one of the interesting things that I think people want to know is how much freedom was there to be able to implement such an agenda during the transition? But how did you come to the attention of the Forces of Freedom and Change, the FFC? How did that transition come about? How were you able to join the government in that direction?
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
Because of my activism during the period, the 30 years period. For example, as early as 1994, I presented a paper about the alternative economic agenda at the Sudanese Democratic Forum then in the 90s. Then in 2011, in Sudan, after the peace agreement and some opening up of the political system, I went to Sudan and there was a major, major conference or workshop organized by the Umma Party, which is one of the largest party in the country. Even though I'm not really an explicit political activist, but I am associated with the Umma Party.
Hisham Yousif:
I see.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
And so, I presented the alternative economic agenda in 2011, which basically constituted the basis for the program that I tried to implement during my reign as a Minister of Finance.
Kirgit Amlai:
Wow, I mean, that's interesting, with years of experience and all you've been able to contribute. I just wanted to, if you could share more back in 2021, the Juba Power Sharing Peace Agreement, which you talked a little bit about it. We know that it was designed to promote peace and democratic transition in Sudan, and evidence showed that provision of effective inclusion of previously marginalized ethnic groups could increase chances of peace. What went wrong? Any hope for this agreement to move forward?
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
Actually, perhaps maybe the intentions were good. The expressed intentions. But really the Juba Peace Agreement entailed much more than meet the eye. The Juba Peace Agreement, it started when I was a minister. It was basically overtaken by the military partners in the government. And it turns out that actually the reason why they pushed for the Juba Peace Agreement was that they wanted actually to reorder or to move the balance of power towards their hidden agenda, which is basically to disrupt the civilian democratic transition by building alliance with the so-called what we call in Sudan freedom fighters. But they're really leaders of militias who proclaim to represent the aspirations of the marginalized people. Of course, they fought and paid heavy prices, their armies, but at the end of the day, they were also military institutions.
They were not sure about their political power base, civilian power base, even in places like Darfur or the Sudan Blue Nile or the Sudan Kordofan. That actually created a dilemma for the Sudanese political discourse because they basically were quite ready to concoct a deal with the military leadership in Khartoum. Except for one leader, all of them, they actually joined the coup that took place in October, 2021. That was a litmus test as to their commitment to the democratic process and to the true aspirations of the people of the marginal
right regions. Unfortunately though, they remain powers to contend with because they have fighting forces and so on.
But I think the future, thinking ahead, the Juba Peace Agreement has to be integrated into a national peace conference in which all the stakeholders, civilian stakeholders, should have a seat in the table. That is the only way to ensure that peace is a democratic peace. Because actually what was happened in Juba was essentially, as in hindsight now we know, was basically a collusion of military institutions, military forces in Khartoum in terms of the army and the rapid support force, which is of course now they are fighting it out in Sudan and in the capital on one hand, and the rebel movements. And so, that actually kind of repeat the experience of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Sudanese People Liberation Movement and the regime of Omar Bashir.
Because when you confined, in fact, I wrote a paper and presented it at the Copenhagen Consensus Forum, which is a forum in Copenhagen concerned with peace and development. I criticized the agreement then of the 2005 as an agreement between two military protagonists who eventually will control the process and exclude the civilian stakeholders who have every right and legitimate right to be part of the process. So I think my answer to the question is that while it was a process that at least silenced fighting, but it wasn't enough, and it should have been integrated into a broader context. Unfortunately, part of the hidden objectives was actually to consolidate the militarization of Sudanese politics
Kirgit Amlai:
Considering your experience over the time both in Sudan and outside of Sudan, in every conflict there are always stakeholders be it within and external. If you could just share more, what has been the role of external actors such as neighboring countries, regional organizations, and international communities in responding to the crisis in Sudan and how their actions have influenced the trajectory of the crisis.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
This is a very important question, I think. The external actors have substantially influenced development in Sudan and will continue to do so. I think if I take the African Union, I think in Sudan and in all of Africa, I think the African Union has come a long way. The African Union actually has now matured and emerged as a respectable, genuine regional organization that actually promotes peace and security and development.
Obviously, not all African countries are democratic, but it is very clear that Africans as a collective body of people and political discourse and culture, I think they are much closer to democracy and democratization through the various interventions like for example, not recognizing a government produced by a coup. That has been very helpful for the case of Sudan after the 25th October, 2021 coup that reversed the political process.
I think the UN system obviously is impaired by the lack of consensus in the Security Council and the role that the autocrats in the Security Council play. Because China and Russia, they basically prioritize sovereignty, national sovereignty, and economic agenda over human rights and political rights and so on. But then also, I think probably the West also has own some other interests that may not necessarily align with these ideals. But by and large, I think the European Union and the US have played a very positive role in supporting the democratic process in Sudan, has provided immensely needed resources to support the program that I have
been responsible for, which I understand I can speak about later. So I would say that the external influence, largely positive.
The Arab countries obviously are not as advanced in terms of embracing democracy and democracy ideal as the African part of our belonging as Sudanese. But nonetheless, I think the more recent role of Saudi Arabia is really very commendable and supportive and neutral. Working with the United States now is, I would say, the only hope for the Sudanese people to help stop this violence. Because right now this violence is not like a
standard civil war. It's actually a high intensity military conflict between two branches of the armed forces. And so, this is the sovereign institution fighting it out. So it does require positive neutral external intervention to stop the war first. Then, we're very heartened actually the vibes that come out of the two sponsors, the recent reiteration of commitment by the Secretary of State, that the ultimate goal is not just to stop the fight, but also to ensure that there is a democratic transition. And I think he went further, which is really very encouraging, that actually the security reform should be under the auspices of the civilian administration. That's really very important.
Hisham Yousif:
Looking at the situation now and see that these two branches, as you call it, of the military fighting it out, they've had control of this situation or at least the government for a while. So while the Secretary of State Antony Blinken talks about having security reforms under a civilian transition, we're kind of a long way from that. Before we get to that point, we need to understand that what happened the last time the civilians were in control and how that kind of unraveled.
And so, there's going to be two questions here. One is going to get us to the role of the civilian institutions, whether it be the Sudanese professional association or the forces of freedom of change and how they did not want to support President Hamdok on the second try when he came back after reversing the coup. But before we even get to that, the period of transition where the Hamdok regime was in power, they were met with a lot of resistance, secret resistance from the army. And one major part of that is that the army has a large stake in the economy. Being a Finance Minister responsible for jump starting this economy, you must have had bumped up against that obstacle.
So can you tell us about that transition period? Because it started off very optimistic, there was a lot of energy and President Hamdok was saying all of the right things and the civilians were moving in the right direction. If you can take us from those first optimistic days to right before the eve of that coup in October and how it all unraveled.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
Actually, as you said, the revolution itself, or what we call in Sudan, the Glorious December Revolution itself, injected huge feeling of optimism about the future of the country. I was going to say tomorrow in my speech about the meeting that I had with some group of staffers from the Congress who actually requested a meeting with me when I came in September, 2019 to attend the annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. I was really pleasantly surprised about their knowledge about Sudan and also about their admiration of the Sudanese youth and their expression of support. That makes me feel quite confident that actually the US and other countries that really wanted Sudan to move forward as an example of a democratic system. And it did happen obviously in terms of the various programs that they supported. So all that, in addition, in fact first and foremost, the support of the Sudanese youth and commitment and so on, not only actually filled us with optimism, but it was in the first place the reason why we flocked to support the new system.
Unfortunately, I think the impact of isolation has actually created a huge impediment to us in the government. As a Minister of Finance, I had to deal with two major sources of headwinds. The first one obviously and the most challenging one is the military itself, as you said. But we thought that we will be able to overcome that through the agreement with the IMF. The staff-monitored program is a famous agreement that usually the IMF try to arrange with countries coming out of conflicts that are highly indebted countries or countries that are highly indebted in economic crisis and dysfunctional kleptocratic system, like what we experience.
One of the clauses in that agreement, which I think was the genesis or the beginning of the motivation for the coup of 2021, was that in June, 2020, I signed a framework agreement with the IMF in which in addition to
the standard economic reform, there was a clause that stipulates that the HIPC program, the High Indebted Poor Countries program that was going to actually provide unprecedented debt relief for Sudan. Actually the HIPC was going to reduce the debt of Sudan from 64 billion or above 60 billion to less than 15 billion. About 50 billion will be relieved. That would constitute one-third of all the resources is spent in the HIPC program since it was established in 1996. So this is a really, really huge deal. This will open up opportunities in terms of investment, in terms of attracting businesses, in terms of a huge transformation in the very well-endowed Sudanese economy.
I thought as a Minister of Finance that will be enough to convince the military. I tried to actually, because as a Minister of Finance, I was a member at a very important forum, which is called the Security and Defense
Council. I was also a member of the Supreme Peace Council. These are all led or chaired by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan as the Chairman of the Council of Sovereignty. We used that as a way of introducing, of course in addition to our normal business at the Council of Ministers, the Civilian Council of Ministers. I was presenting this program as a program that is going to enhance and enlarge the economy, and therefore the share of resource allocation to all functions of government including the military. I was one of those who thought that this will be enough to convince them that you go for the bigger pie in the future in lieu of a smaller pie that eventually will not be sustainable.
I think that particular clause, if you think about it and how two main actors react to it, I think will give you an idea about the challenge and why eventually things collapse. That the military for some reason, they don't seem to be willing to abdicate their hegemony on the economy and the illicit activities in the gold sector, as well as of course the budget, and so on. That is one major impediment. This is because of kleptocracy. I think the Sudanese situation teaches us that when you have a kleptocratic regime that remains in power for so long, it creates a culture of kleptocracy and of kind of political marketplace in which the actors basically corner the resources and their political calculus that let us stay with the current and the future is uncertain. So, they don't really gamble on a prosperous future. They want to retain what they have in a very kind of myopic scheme of thinking.
The other actually impediment was the isolated political class, especially the left-wing Sudanese political class, especially like the Communist Party and the Arab Ba'ath Party and so on, who were actually very influential in the FFC, in the Forces of Freedom and Change. They didn't see the agreement with the IMF, which came by the way as a result of a national vision that actually we developed very carefully as Sudanese economists and Sudanese thinkers, that actually we need to undertake reforms because actually these reforms were not sustainable. The country was spending deficit financing through deficit financing, one third of the budget on fuel subsidies.
I was very embarrassed really when the visiting Minister of Energy from UAE, from United Arab Emirates, who is a very good engineer and told me about the prices of energy in the world, and that Sudan, Iran, and Venezuela where the three countries that provide the cheapest energy prices, sell energy at the cheapest prices in the world. Iran and Venezuela are major energy producing countries, but Sudan, he just mentioned that to
me. I knew about it but the lessons became very clear. How would you actually expect us to support you if we are actually pricing energy at a more costlier and more realistic price than yourself?
So basically we came up with a communication strategy that I tried to preach very widely in Sudan through the radio and television and so on, was that we are not lifting subsidies. We are actually graduating from supporting commodity subsidies to directly empowering Sudanese people. Our two main instruments for that empowerment was a very comprehensive salary review program that basically addressed the distortions in the
salary structure, and also increasing salary in order to actually meet the high expenses, the living expenses. The share of salaries and benefit in the government in Africa was on average about between 8% to 10%. We inherited a share of about 3% to 5%, which shows the impoverishment of the civil service as well as the military rank and file in Sudan. So, we have to address that.
Then also, the Family Support Program, but which I can speak to, but I think your question is geared to different angles. So I would say that you'll find the military on one hand, and supposedly the supporters of the revolution and the political parties, some of them, very opposed to any kind of reform. But nonetheless, of course, even though I left the government, but the program that I was responsible for was implemented later.
Now when I go back to Sudan, or have been going back to Sudan actually recently, everybody I meet in Sudan as well as outside Sudan in the diaspora, almost everybody, especially the young educated people, they would tell me that that was a learning process. But unfortunately that learning process was slow. But everybody now seems to be in agreement about the agenda that we had to do. But unfortunately, the lack of support by the military as well as by some partners in the civilian camp basically created a situation of apathy and undermined the hopes and aspiration, and I think contributed to the coup.
Hisham Yousif:
By the way, I think that's an element of transitions that are not talked about enough in the sense that there is two parallel from what you just told me. There's a mirror ring that happens. So the army and the kleptocratic regime is afraid of economic reform because they don't want to give up what they have now for positive things later in the future.
But there is a parallel to that in the civilian population as maybe isolated elements, left-wing elements of the civilian coalition, that there is a subsidy dependence. There is no way that they can give up the security in such a precarious economic situation to be able to get economic growth, which they see on charts. They really don't understand what that means. And so, being able to get to that democratic transition is not just ballot boxes or economic opening. It's convincing two different elements, kleptocratic and civilians that are concerned about subsidies being lifted. And that's a really difficult challenge that I don't think many people understand that democratic transitions have to go through, and it opens up a lot of difficult questions and difficult decisions, and how can you implement unpopular policies that are good for the long-term that are not good in the short-term that creates an effect.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
If I may very quickly, I would say that-
Hisham Yousif:
Please.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
... we basically were very aware about this dilemma. That's why we introduced the Family Support Program, which by the way was very successful. The international community provided about 800 billion ... 800 million, sorry, $800 million for this program. $400 from the World Bank and the other $400 from the bilateral donors.
The start of this program was based on creating direct links with the families, and if the time allows, I'll tell you a nice story about that when I presented this program at the Security and Defense Council. One of the top leaders, I won't mention his name, but he's now one of the top leaders who are now involved in this unfortunate conflict, asked me about how much we are going to give to the families. I told him that we will be giving about $5, which then would be about 500 Sudanese pounds.
I went on to explain, a family of six will be receiving about 3,000 Sudanese pounds per month. Imagine a family in isolated village in Darfur, that family, the only thing that they remember or they experience vis-a-vis the central government is conflicts and warfare and atrocities and what have you. That event, the head of the family, the woman, the mother or the father receiving the 3,000 will be the most important event for them. And that will be tantamount of a new social contract. That is how I try to present it. You know what that leader told me? He said, "If you really manage to do that effectively," and that was before the Juba agreement, "those rebel movements will not find fighters to fight for them."
So it was really a big deal. But unfortunately, people who were isolated for a very long time, it's hard for them to appreciate the potential. In fact, I will tell you that I had a discussion with the Director of the World Bank, the Regional Director of the World Bank for Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, who actually, he's from Senegal, who was actually transferred from Vietnam. He was the Director of the World Bank office in Vietnam. When I actually explained to him that I'm facing some difficulties, and I believe these difficulties is because of the isolation and some of political activists could mostly really appreciate the potential, he said, "How about actually inviting some Vietnamese officials from this Vietnamese Communist Party to come to the Sudan and explain their experience?" And so, you have a very powerful ruling communist party in Vietnam, and of course before that, in China, who really understood because of the elongated experience they went through, that actually they need to reform the economy and they need actually to have an efficient economy in order to finance the social agenda that they care for.
Hisham Yousif:
And so, that requires certain innovations in communication with the population, certain ways to persuade that this is how we're going to deliver. What happened?
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
What happened, of course, I left the government. Before, I had my own differences with the Prime Minister, but because maybe I was hoping actually to move forward as quickly and on the agenda before, and because maybe the divisions within the FFC itself kind of complicated the process. But right now, I think the main point really is that now the real concern is the military. But actually, If you manage to get an agreement whereby the military, and that's a different story, but the military is cleansed from this Islama west group that actually ignited this conflict in the various place. Also, the other branch of the military, the Rapid Support Force to be integrated into a unified professional military. I think the politics now is fully aligned. I think everybody now, almost everybody now understands that the program that I tried to implement is really the way to go. The Sudanese people themselves now I think will be very much from this experience. Perhaps maybe you have to go through this experience to be able to appreciate the end result.
Hisham Yousif:
Especially the kind of a missed opportunity. So the next time it comes around, I think everybody will seize it. So you said you had differences with the Prime Minister and you left the government. I think, what, about three months before the coup? Is that right?
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
No, I left actually in July, 2020.
Hisham Yousif:
Ah, I see.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
So much later. By the way, I will tell you also that actually after the Prime Minister resigned, I was approached by the military leaders to come as a Prime Minister, and of course I declined.
Hisham Yousif:
Fascinating
Kirgit Amlai:
Wow.
Hisham Yousif:
Go ahead.
Kirgit Amlai:
I mean, we've had a lengthy discussion about economy. I know the issue of subsidy in most African oil-producing countries is like a major, major issue, but it's something that I know we're not really going to delve into, but I just want us to just look at other things. Earlier we were having a conversation how Sudan was once the largest country in Africa, which you also kind of give us some details how the separation affected the economy and so on and so forth. But I wanted to ask, Sudan fought one of Africa's longest civil war. The first one was in 1955 to 1972. The second was the largest that lasted 22 years. With all the things that happened, I just wanted to ask just what are the lessons learned? What were the mistakes that led to what is happening now? How can Africa learn to avoid issues like this moving forward? Because it is a global issue now and almost everyone is watching and it's a learning curve for almost every African country. I was just wondering if you could just shed more light on this.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
Thank you. This is a very important issue. I remember in 2000, the World Bank, I was a task manager for a project that produced a widely circulated and discussed report called Can Africa Claim the 21st Century? That was the name, that was the title of the report. One fundamental conclusion or message from this report was that unlike the historical Asian experience where an authoritarian regime, developmental authoritarian regime, could be counted on to actually create huge economic transformation, eventually subsequently leading to democratization, as in for example, Taiwan and Korea, this experience is not transferable to the case of Sudan ... sorry to the case of Africa, as well as the Arab world, by the way, because of Africa is dominated by social diversity and in many countries actually social polarization. And so, even if you have a developmental authoritarian regimes, and there are quite a few of them, take the example of Ethiopia, that regime under Meles Zenawi was able to transform Ethiopia in about 15 years where the economy grew more than four times from 2000 to 2018.
Nonetheless, at the end, because of lack of democracy, a civil war erupted as we know, and Ethiopia had to deal with warfare and conflicts and so on along ethnic lines and so on. So I think what we need in Africa is really is to give much more premium to the importance of democracy. But not democracy as electoral competition. It has to be democracy as an instrument, as a platform for discussing how to develop resources and how to distribute these resources. And so, I think we need an economic legitimacy for democracy.
That has been actually for the cause of Sudan one of the problems that Sudan inherited from the British system, a west ministerial democracy. And we had elections in 1954. It's one of the early elections, fair and elections and open in Africa. But because it was a system imposed on a backward society and kind of primitive economy, it did not survive. And there was a disconnect between the educated minority kind of
class in the center of power in the Nile River region of Sudan and the rest of the country, especially the marginalized regions, the far reaches of the country in Darfur and the south and so on. And so, uneven development was the main cause behind the conflict. Then when the conflict was resolved temporarily as part of disagreements that we talked about, it was not a democratic peace building. It was a militarized peace building. I think these are the main lessons that perhaps we need to have.
Right now, I think for the case of Sudan, hopefully if this conflict is resolved and the demilitarization of the Sudanese politics was addressed and a full civilian government came to power. The civilian itself, even after this tragic experience, if they did not learn the lesson that actually we have to have a decentralized political economic system that gives power and resources to the various regions and so on, I'm afraid that actually we will still might face another setback.
Hisham Yousif:
So there are kind of getting towards the current situation and maybe a perspective look to what you think how this is going to develop, there are two questions that I think are important. One is how you've observed the civilian government after you left it, that observation of it all the way to the coup, there was a chance for the Prime Minister to come back, which he did, but he didn't have civilian support, which led him to resign again. And so, that's probably the point where we can mark the loss of civilian influence in the Sudanese government. Then it gave us about a year, year and a half, or however long it was of where the military kind of took over and decided to talk about transitions, which is ending in the military breakdown in this fight between these two factions. So to get us to where we are today, just a word on how the civilian relationship splintered and failed, and then how this military relationship is splintering.
Ibrahim Elbadawi:
Actually, what has happened is that after the Juba Peace agreement, especially given the context behind the agreement, the government was transformed from a technocratic to a large extent apolitical government as it's supposed to be during the transitional period. To a government of political parties and freedom fighters movement or rebel movements. And so, I think to a large extent, the authority of the Prime Minister was diminished because the reference point for these ministers are their movements that actually, or parties, and I think that was a major or a fatal setback to the meritocracy and efficiency of the government. Obviously as a result of that transition, the situation did not improve and the progress was actually was halted.
One important milestone basically was like the straw that broke the back of the camel, which was that the leadership of the Council of Sovereignty was supposed to be moved from the military to the civilian. That was actually the trigger of the unfortunate developments that took place, that actually the military leadership and of course with the support of their new alliances of the signatories of Juba, they wanted to retain the leadership of the Council of Sovereignty. They also were not keen about, there was a major thing which is related to the investigation committee that supposed charged with investigating the violent disbanding of the setting, which was the epicenter of the revolution. As you know, there were so many atrocities and this violent disbanding by the military forces and also some elements from the so-called National Islamic Front and so on, was to be investigated. But then nobody want to touch it. The committee was phoned, but they never really came up with any reports or anything like that.
So all of these issues prompted the army or the leadership of the army to mount the coup, even though being fair to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister was trying actually to mediate these conflicts, these divergent views between the FFC and the military and so on. But then, I think after coup, the fatal mistake I think that the Prime Minister committed was actually to give in to the army and sign this agreement before asking for an opportunity to explain to the youth and the freedom and democracy camp about why he wanted to do that. That actually created the condition that deprived the new deal between the Prime Minister, between Dr. Hamdok and General Burhan of support by the general public. And so, it ignited actually counter actions through protest in the streets and what have you, and obviously also the international community were not convinced that actually this is a return to the constitutional process, which actually eventually obviously forced the Prime Minister to resign.
Since then, there was no any constitutional process. The head of the army was the ultimate ruler. He was actually ruling by decree and there was no any constitutional process until actually we reached this stage. Before that obviously because of the pressure and the economic crisis, that became so clear. Basically Sudan was returned back as a result of the coup to the last phase of the former regime. And so, the military leadership was forced to come back to the table of negotiations and the process was going fine. But then an issue that was not really discussed before was who should control the military? That is when the two branches of the military see themselves in huge difference.
Obviously before this fight happened, everybody was stalking arms and fighters and so on. So the atmosphere was very clear. And this is very important point, but the trigger, lots of evidence which was conveyed in social media and everywhere during the last 10 days of the holy months of Ramadan, the National Islamic front and the followers of the former regime who were disgruntled and never accepted that there was a revolution that deposed them. And famously, the former leader, the late Sadiq al-Mahdi, he described them as the disgruntled far right. And so, this disgruntled far right basically seized the opportunity that actually now the military itself found itself divided and in discord and so on. And so, it is widely discussed now in the media that actually the bullet was fired by the brigades of these followers of the former regime at the camps of the Rapid Support Force, which then ignited the conflict between the two who caused the Rapid Support Force attack the army garrisons and so on, and that was the beginning.
So I think any kind of credible, viable resolution has to also account for who started this and to be held accountable legally and politically. Because I think as long as this subversive element continue to operate freely, the future of Sudanese democracy and transformation will be in doubt, even if the military finally come to terms with an agreement that a unified force professional army will be formed. Because as long as their elements are in the army, the future democracy of Sudan will never be secured. Not only him, but of course all the politically motivated elements in the army.
Hannah:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Dr. Abraham Elbadawi. This episode was produced and edited by Hannah Balochi and Nishita Karu. Thank you to our interviewers Hisham Yousif and Kirgit Amlai. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit their website, thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter at pearsoninst, inst spelled I-N-S-T. Thanks.
Root of Conflict
07.03.23
Precarious Protections | Chiara Galli
Reema Saleh:
Hi, this is Reema and you are listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You are listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world, and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world.
Reema Saleh:
Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
Reema Saleh:
What is the human toll of the US immigration bureaucracy? In this episode, we speak with Dr. Chiara Galli, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. Her latest book, Precarious Protections chronicles the experiences and perspectives of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they navigate the asylum process and pursue refugee status in the United States.
Reema Saleh:
Spanning six years of research between the Obama and Trump administrations, her ethnographic research examines the paradoxical and precarious criteria that decide who is deserving and who must we protect. We talk about how US asylum laws often fail to help children who are escaping life-threatening violence, how new immigration changes are impacting unaccompanied minors and how Chicago will grapple with an unanticipated influx in migration.
Natalie Reyes:
I am Natalie Reyes. I'm a first year MPP student at the University of Chicago, and I'm also a Pearson Fellow.
Gabriela Rivera:
And my name is Gabriela Rivera. I'm a one year student at the MA and I'm from Guatemala. I'm a lawyer, so it's amazing for me to be here today.
Reema Saleh:
And my name is Reema. I'm the producer of Root of Conflict and I'm a second year at Harris.
Chiara Galli:
My name is Chiara Galli. I'm assistant professor of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. I'm the author of Precarious Protections: Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in the US.
Reema Saleh:
Yeah. So you joined the Chicago faculty pretty recently, right?
Chiara Galli:
Yeah, I just moved here, what was it? Last summer. So this is my first year joining U. Chicago. Yeah, it's been a great year thus far.
Reema Saleh:
Yeah. What brought you here kind of as a sociologist here in the Comparative Human Development department?
Chiara Galli:
Well, they hired me, so I was very glad to come and accept their offer.
Reema Saleh:
How did you first get involved in kind of international migration studies?
Chiara Galli:
Well, so I'm an immigrant myself. I migrated to the US as a child with my parents, and actually we came to the northern most suburbs of Chicago. So for me, coming to U Chicago is kind of a homecoming of sorts, you know I spent my life between suburban Illinois and Rome, Italy where I'm originally from. So I've been interested in immigration from like my personal experience for a long time. And I worked in the immigration policy world in the European Union before starting grad school. But I was really interested in being able to ask my own questions and define my own research agenda, which is why I chose to pursue a PhD.
Reema Saleh:
So what brought you to the topic of Central American migration and unaccompanied minors?
Chiara Galli:
Yeah, so I've been interested in Latin American studies for a long time, and that was kind of the focus of my bachelor's degree in development studies and then in my master's degree as well. And I'm fluent in Spanish, so I'm really a believer that you need to be to speak the language really well in order to do good in depth
ethnographic field work. So it was kind of my draw towards studying Latin American populations, and I was interested in immigration policy and how it impacts people's lives because of my experience in the policy research realm. But to be completely honest with you, I kind of stumbled upon the topic of this book. It was my very first year in grad school and I had just moved to Los Angeles and I needed to find a field site for my ethnographic field methods class where we would do hands on, learning the method by doing ethnography.
Chiara Galli:
And so I reached out to a lot of nonprofit organizations in Los Angeles offering to volunteer with my Spanish skills in exchange for research access. And so I heard back from an organization that had a long history of helping Central American seek asylum in the US. And so this was what was happening at the time. It was just shortly after summer of 2014 when the Obama administration declared that a humanitarian crisis was underway as increased arrivals of children and families from Central America arrived at the border, these asylum seeking kids and families. And it seemed to me that this was such an important and understudied topic. And so after having fortunately stumbled upon it, I decided to stick with it and I ended up doing six years of research on the topic.
Reema Saleh:
So let's talk about your book. What first drew you to begin writing after you had started this field work?
Chiara Galli:
So this book is born out of my dissertation, and initially I actually started doing the research with asylum seekers from Central America of all ages. And it was only later on during the course of my dissertation that I decided to really center in on the case of children. And that was both because I noticed that not very much had been written on the topic, whereas there's quite an extensive literature on asylum seeking adults. And this was despite the fact that increasing numbers of children are migrating alone to seek asylum worldwide in rich countries like the United States.
Chiara Galli:
But I really think that the case of children in the asylum process is an interesting one for the purposes of thinking through theories of immigration as well, because you know we have this contrast between these two forces, these two competing forces at play in countries that are liberal democracies that receive asylum seekers.
Chiara Galli:
On the one hand, on the face of it, we say that we respect human rights and the rule of law, but on the other hand, very much receiving countries of immigration want to be able to control their borders, regulate immigration flow, and exclude those categories whom they see as undeserving or undesirable. And so you know when human rights belong to foreigners, then it brings this tension into play. And I think that not just in the US but really in countries all over the world, including in Europe, the rights of asylum seekers have been chipped away at more and more because of this tension.
Chiara Galli:
But in the case of children, it's a lot harder to do that, right? Because we widely agree upon the fact as an American society that children should be protected. And so this is what gives rise to these protections for this population of unaccompanied minors in the US asylum process. But unfortunately, I show in the book that when they're implemented, they're precarious protections in practice because we're still trying to chip away at them in various ways. And so this is what leads a lot of kids to actually not be eligible for asylum and not obtain the protection that our laws promised despite the fact that they escaped from violence in Central America.
Gabriela Rivera:
Well, first of all, as a Central American, and I must say that I really appreciate you writing about Central America. As you very well said, it is an understudied area. So really thank you very much. So one of the things I found more interesting in your book is that through all of these stories that you heard from minors, you found that there's not only a lot of suffering, but there is also a lot of strategies that the families and the kids themselves have to make in order to show exactly what types of suffering they lift and the amount of suffering, the intensity of the suffering to be able to be protected by law. So what are other categories that you think should be introduced in asylum law in the US or in the process to be able to capture these particular types of suffering these kids are going through?
Chiara Galli:
Yeah, so in the book, basically, I argue that these children are defacto refugees, right? Because they flee conditions of life-threatening violence in Central America, which is a place where you know teenagers are especially at risk. And one of the things that they're especially at risk at of is forced gang recruitment and being targeted and victimized by gangs, which is not a valid reason to seek asylum in the United States under the current state of our case law.
Chiara Galli:
So this is what kind of leads attorneys to have to search for other eligibility grounds that do satisfy existing case law, such as child abuse, such as persecution on account of one's race, which is sometimes a type of case that indigenous Central Americans pursue. So a very kind of straightforward fix would be to recognize these experiences of forced gang recruitment and victimization as eligible for asylum. And indeed, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, they believe that those experiences should count as valid reasons to be granted asylum. So really the United States has a more restrictive interpretation of refugee law than the UNHCR recommendation.
Chiara Galli:
So that's one thing. And then more generally, I think that we should have an asylum law that protects people who are fleeing their homes, and that seems like a pretty straightforward point to make. But the truth of the matter is that our asylum law currently does not protect those individuals who are fleeing violence, including children.
Gabriela Rivera:
And in your book you talked about introducing this concept of humanitarian capital and how minors and the people representing them gather this in order to make them eligible for differently held protections. Could you tell us more about this concept of humanitarian capital?
Chiara Galli:
Yeah, so this humanitarian capital is kind of drawing on a Bourdieusian framework, and I define it as a form of symbolic capital that lawyers activate as they interview their clients in order to make their suffering legible to the decision makers who have such great powers over their lives and can decide whether or not to grant them relief on humanitarian grounds based, yes, on formal criteria and legal definitions, but also on a host of discretionary criteria that really hinge on these evaluations of who is deserving, who is compassionate and whom we should protect.
Chiara Galli:
So I think the concept was helpful to me in explaining the process because it allows me to highlight all of the paradoxical ways in which human suffering is translated and then counts or does not count in helping people obtain protection. So a good example of this is, you mentioned that children and their families have a lot of strategies. For example, also in planning escape from the home countries, they have to navigate and mitigate conditions of violence, and they do so in several ways, for example, by helping kids go into hiding while they accrue enough resources and savings and loans to pay smugglers to get them out alive, Right?.
Chiara Galli:
So of course, these strategies are carried out by family members who love and want to protect their children, but then these go on to carry unexpected weight in the asylum process and play out in negative ways. Because the paradox is that if you flee too soon and before anything really bad happens to you and before the right, the correct type of bad thing happen to you, then you might not have enough humanitarian capital to make a case that you've suffered enough to meet this bar of persecution. So these decisions that these loving caretakers make to protect their children then go on to actually harm their chances to get protection in the US asylum process.
Natalie Reyes:
You actually talked about this a little bit in your previous question, and it's something that Gabrielle and I have been talking about, so there's this enormous dichotomy between the adult responsibilities given to the minors and then fulfilling the necessary expectations of what childhood is supposed to look like Right?, to extract the compassion from those in the immigration system. What results have you seen on the development of these kids?
Chiara Galli:
Well, so that's a hard question in the sense that to be able to really answer that question, I will have to write a second book after following the respondents for a long time. And the adaptation trajectories and how they lead to positive or negative outcomes in terms of the integration of immigrants is one of the key questions that interest sociologists who study immigration. So you know to really answer that question, someone will have to do the research in the future, but I do identify some mechanisms that I think do give us a hint as to what the effect might be.
Chiara Galli:
So for example, in the book I write about this process of legal socialization, which is how kids learn about the law and acquire all sorts of values and attitudes about their law, their position in society, their relationship with the state and the rights that they have or do not have. And they undergo this process of legal socialization really quickly because from the moment when they first step foot on US soil, they're channeled through this complex bureaucratic maze. They interact with all of these actors from border patrol officers in holding facilities at the border, office of refugee resettlement, so-called shelters, which are detention facilities. They go to court, they interact with immigration judges, with asylum officers, they interact with their immigration attorneys, they're integrated into migrant community.
Chiara Galli:
So all of these adults who are surrounding these kids are sending them different messages about what it means to be a newcomer in this society, what it means to be an asylum seeker, and how they should behave if they want to have a good chance of being able to stay. So this is where all of these kind of infantilizing messages and these contradictory messages come into play.
Chiara Galli:
So kids are told to behave in an innocent way, to not demonstrate adult-like desires or aspirations. They're told to be very compliant and well behaved. And attorneys also tell them about their rights that they have because they are a protective category in the US. But what I found unfortunately is that kids retain much more the information that they received about how to be well behaved, how to be good kids, and they retain far less information about their rights as a protective category. And so I think that this really shows that undergoing this asylum system is a disempowering process. It's not a process that will produce a lot of activists or a lot of people who will want to change American society. Rather it's going to produce people who will be very afraid of being deported, very fearful, who will know that they have to be exceptional and exceptionally compelling to win asylum and also unlike people like them.
Chiara Galli:
So it also creates these discourses of distancing from other individuals in communities and kids reproduce these discourses of, "I'm not like those other bad immigrants, or I'm not like those other bogus refugees." So in this sense, I think that this kind of foreshadows some of the things that we might expect about this population and their long-term trajectories in the United States.
Natalie Reyes:
So this actually brings me to my next question. So throughout the book you talk about how the minors internalize all of these stigmas about, quote, unquote, "bad immigrants, bogus refugees, and then the deviant Latino teens", and they learn to perform their deservingness in contrast to these identities. So how do you see this mental narrative influence how they then interact with other groups once released?
Chiara Galli:
So this is also a tricky question. So something I had wanted to do for the study that I wasn't able to do was actually, because of course, one can never do everything when writing a book, but I really wanted to embed myself more in the communities of these children and their everyday lives, and I would've very much liked to be present during their peer to peer interactions. So that just didn't end up being feasible. First of all, just to the sheer scope of the project, I ended up focusing much more on children's relationship with the state as it was mediated by these attorneys and these nonprofit organizations.
Chiara Galli:
So I got to see kids kind of reproduce these narratives and perform these behaviors in these spaces of the nonprofit of the legal clinic. And then really the only glimpse that I got into kids' everyday lives was through a formal research interview, sort of a formal research encounter. And as much as I made a lot of efforts to make that as informal as possible in the sense that I didn't want to reproduce the encounter that kids had with their immigration attorneys and these interviews that have the goal of producing an asylum narrative, because those are very re-traumatizing interviews, they're very anxiety filled encounters.
Chiara Galli:
So I met with them in local parks, sometimes in their homes, oftentimes at Starbucks. That was a very popular meeting place, and we spent a lot of time chatting and getting to know each other before getting onto to actually addressing the research questionnaire. So beyond the fact that they kind of reproduce some of these narratives with me, and they said that they did that when they were in other spaces, including community spaces, I really can't answer that question. And I guess this is a limitation of the study or a study that can be taken up by another scholar who will do an ethnography that's less kind of an ethnography of the state or an ethnography of the law in action and more an ethnography embedded in migrant communities. And that's very difficult to do with teenagers because the age difference creates a big power differential.
Chiara Galli:
I mean, there's always a power differential between the researcher and the research subject, but the age issue kind of heightens that. So someone would need to come up with an innovative research design to do that. And people have done studies of children.
Natalie Reyes:
Okay. Yeah. Thank you. So I'm going to go ahead and change the subject to something that you've mentioned a little earlier, and that was the Office of Refugee Resettlement Shelters or detention facilities like you said. There was a section where you described how militaristic they are. There was an alarming rigidness about the rules, even arbitrary ones in which girls weren't allowed to hug one another or even brush each other's hair. And that made me curious because when there are plenty of opportunities implement rules regarding schedules appropriate activities, why do you think these shelters feel the need to intervene in such emotional or personal interactions?
Chiara Galli:
Well, what I argue in the book is that it's by design to teach compliance to these kids. And this kind of resonates with the messages that shelter staff give them. They give them a lot of advice about how to be well behaved, how to stay on the state's radar, show up to courts, make sure they don't get in trouble. So teaching compliance is part of the institutional kind of mandate or agenda of the office of Refugee resettlement as is caring for children. And in some way, these two things do overlap. I mean, I think that in some ways it's not just, let's say like an evil agenda. We do tell children what to do to protect them as adults. And I think that the shelter staff could probably come up with reasons and rationales for why they do this. I know that they're very concerned about kids harming themselves or each other.
Chiara Galli:
So they're trying to limit interpersonal contact without supervision. They have to manage a large number of kids in these facilities. But the truth of the matter is it does teach key lessons about compliance. And most importantly, unaccompanied minors, they experience these rules in a way that's kind of punitive and constraining and frustrating and arbitrary. So they would complain about the shelters to me. I mean, I will say that there are different types of facilities from more emergency facilities, which are on the far side of the spectrum, like the famous tent court in Hampstead, Florida, which are really abysmal conditions. One of my respondents told me that several children fainted every day because it was so hot under the tents.
Chiara Galli:
Then there's more like mid-range facilities, which have a lot of kids in them, and they have these kinds of arbitrary rules like no touching each other or braiding each other's hair, things like that. And then there's more foster care like arrangements. And I will say that some of the kids who I interviewed describe these arrangements as something like when you do study abroad and you stay with a family, they reminisced about these kind families taking them on field trips. So there was a spectrum of treatment, of objective treatment.
Chiara Galli:
But I think that a quote by one of my research participants says it best, he called the shelters a fancy prison, and he said, because they treat you well, but it's a prison, right? Because you can't leave. So we can't forget that these are detention facilities, these are facilities that are surveilling children where their liberty is deprived. They're not free to leave. And so even though we have some protections, it stemming from the florist settlement, this key lawsuit that created a series of legal protections for children in US detention facilities that adults don't benefit from. So that's improved conditions and some care must be provided, some schooling must be provided. They're still fit prisons despite the fancy aspects that some of them might have.
Gabriela Rivera:
So we saw in the book that a lot of the minors spend a lot of time in these facilities, but then eventually go out and they have access to legal services. And you spend a lot of time shadowing these interactions between the lawyers, the paralegals, and these kids. And I must say that as a lawyer, I felt very validated when you explained this work of legal translation that lawyers and paralegals do.
Gabriela Rivera:
So was that very different? Do you think that's very different to the general idea people have about lawyers? How was your experience shadowing these interactions? Because we all think about lawyers as just people in a fancy office just signing contracts all day and not doing all of these different things that you talk about in the book.
Chiara Galli:
Well, first of all, I'm very glad to hear that you felt validated as a lawyer in reading the book because that means a lot to hear that. It means I did a decent job in describing, as you say, this crucial role of legal translation that these individuals do. So I mean, first of all, just a briefly about the context. I mean, immigrants are not guaranteed free legal representation in the United States, and this includes children. So in some ways, the children who I followed were somewhat privileged because they had gotten access to services from nonprofit organizations. And these lawyers, their place of work and what they do does look pretty different from what people imagine in the sense that their offices are really not fancy. These nonprofits, they're strapped for resources. They're working with very limited resources and trying to represent as many kids as they can with a lot of resource constraints.
Chiara Galli:
So in the organizations where I did my work, lawyers could represent as many as 70 or 80 cases of kids at the same time. So it's very difficult work. Lawyers report a lot of secondary trauma, burnout. They're doing exceptional work considering the very scarce resources at their hands. And I think that there's another way in which the legal translation work that these lawyers do is fundamentally misunderstood by the general public.
Chiara Galli:
So President Donald Trump called asylum lawyering a big fat con job, and he said, "Lawyers sell asylum seeker's story." So I think that this is a widely held misconception among the American public and also in other countries. But it's not at all true that lawyers sell their clients' stories. Rather what they do is they try to ascertain which facts in their clients' narratives of escape fit with our existing interpretation of refugee law, which is an exceptionally narrow definition, which doesn't guarantee that if you escape from life-threatening violence, you are going to qualify. And they don't make anything up. They just ask questions until they can find some detail that fits.
Chiara Galli:
So for example, when a child fled force game recruitment, that is not an eligible experience for asylum, but if that child also suffered severe child abuse at home, then that is an eligible experience. And so they'll focus the legal narrative on that. So it's their job to teach kids what asylum eligibility is so they can volunteer relevant facts about their experiences and then to make these experiences eligible. And that's central to their legal translation role. And sometimes all they can do is tell their clients, I'm sorry, you don't qualify. And that's that.
Gabriela Rivera:
Yeah, that was very interesting to read when you highlight that the reason why they end up applying for asylum or for any kind of labor protection is often not the exact reason why they left their countries. And as I read it, it seems like it's a very surprising moment for a lot of these kids to realize that their reasons are not necessarily the useful ones. How did you see this moment of surprise? Because sometimes culturally, a lot of the things that are considered serious harms against a young person here are culturally acceptable in Central America, or at least in the context where these kids lived. So how did you see that process of realizing, well, maybe my whole life made me eligible for one of these protections and I didn't even know it.
Chiara Galli:
This is a big issue, I mean, there's a level of normalization of violence within vulnerable low income children and indigenous children in central America. And that stems from a longer history of violence becoming normalized is since the civil wars. And so a lot of the things that may seem commonplace to these children, they wouldn't even think to disclose them. So something that's child specific is the example of child abuse.
Chiara Galli:
So some form of corporal punishment may seem appropriate according to their perspectives. It's something that is part of child rearing practices. It's something that they've seen in families around them, and so they wouldn't necessarily disclose that. Another example that is really interesting where kids really pushed back is so these children not, these children not only apply for asylum, but they also apply for this form of relief called special immigrant juvenile status, which is a form of protection for children, abandoned, abused, or neglected by one or both of their parents.
Chiara Galli:
So the neglect category was fascinating because the definition of neglect is a definition that comes from state law. So in the case of where I did my research in California law, and the parent doesn't need to have had an intent to harm the child for the lawyer to be able to prove neglect and get relief for the child. And so one of the things that constitutes parental neglect is working from a very young age or working in certain types of jobs or working in dangerous conditions. And so that was extremely perplexing to kids.
Chiara Galli:
And attorneys would ask them things like, well, they would ask him things like, how young were you when you started working? What kind of work did you do? And they would never portray this as something that they didn't want to do as something that they were forced to do. For boys in particular, it was a source of pride to be able to enter the labor market to support their families. It was something that they wanted to do. And they found satisfaction in these jobs, even sometimes in very exploitative or intense jobs that they did in their home countries. And attorneys would ask some things like, did you enjoy work? And they would say, yes, I did enjoy work and no one forced me to work. So that was a real moment, kind of a major dissonance between children's subjective understandings of their lives and these narrow legal categories.
Chiara Galli:
And then attorneys would make a big effort to try to tell kids, it doesn't matter that you didn't feel this way, but for the purposes of your eligibility and being allowed to stay, you still qualify under US law. But there was a lot of perplexity that you could read with body language. There was a lot of pushback too. Kids didn't want to speak ill of their caretakers. They had complex relationships even with abusive family members. There was love and abuse in families happening at the same time oftentimes.
Chiara Galli:
And then finally, kids had a lot of trouble. And this comes back to for asylum eligibility, they had a lot of trouble focusing not on why they fled, which oftentimes was because the gangs wanted to kill me, but rather on describing the persecutors motivation for targeting them. So this is required in order to satisfy the refugee definition that requires that you show not only that you were persecuted, but that you were persecuted on account of a protected ground like race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group. So that's where the describing the why of the persecution is really important, and that's just not something that makes a lot of common sense to a person of any age, but even less so to a young person.
Gabriela Rivera:
Do you think these categories are so narrow or there is an element of the historical bias against Central American migrants? What keeps these legal categories so narrow that a lot of these experiences can't fit?
Chiara Galli:
Yes, absolutely. This is crucial. So we have a long history of denying asylum to Central Americans in the United States. Since the 1980s, especially Guatemalans and Salvadorans were fleeing these right-wing regimes that were being supported by US funding in the Cold War era. It was a very deliberate denial of asylum to Central Americans. Only about 2% were granted asylum at the time. And this was in the context of the geopolitics of the Cold War era where you would deny asylum to people fleeing your allied countries and granted to those fleeing enemy regimes such as the Soviet unions such as Cuba.
Chiara Galli:
And things have changed somewhat since then, and they've changed thanks to the legal advocacy that's been done since trying to get protection for people who are fleeing violence. So for example, so matter of ARCG was a case law that was a result of 20 years worth of advocacy to protect women fleeing domestic violence. And there were cases of women, Central American and Mexican women that contributed to this case law.
Chiara Galli:
So while the current context isn't as restrictive, the grant rates are higher, the fact that the refugee definition isn't expanding is absolutely a product of that longer history. And if you see the legal battles to where the particular social forced game recruitment, attorneys are trying to argue that this should be a recognized particular social group in the courts. And you read the written decisions of judges in these cases, the narrative, the justification for denying is that they're worried of opening the floodgates to excessive numbers of arrivals. And this isn't happening in a vacuum. When they talk about floodgates, they have particular people in mind and they have Central Americans in mind. So in this sense, this is a population that's seen by the US government as undesirable and a population to be excluded. So that's absolutely rooted in this longer history of exclusion of Central Americans in the United States.
Natalie Reyes:
So I'm going to back up here and try to tie in your tides to you talked a little bit about EU migration, and it was funny because throughout the book I was reminded of The Swimmers. I'm not sure if you've seen the Netflix movie about the Syrian sisters who make their way from Syria to first Greece and then Germany. Would you anecdotally be able to compare how legal socialization differs for unaccompanied minors in Europe versus the US?
Chiara Galli:
So initially I wanted to do a comparative study actually, of the reception of unaccompanied minors in Europe and the US and then for pragmatic reasons of kind of resource and time scarcity, I decided to focus on the US because there's so much to say just on this context alone. But I do have some insights because I did spend some time thinking about this.
Chiara Galli:
So first of all, generally the European Union countries actually provide more protections to unaccompanied minors than the United States. So for example, countries like Italy, they give unaccompanied minors a work and residency permit. So they have the right to reside legally in the country until age 18, and they get access to all sorts of benefits in the meantime, including housing. And this is not detention, this is housing where people are free to come and go and leave. They get access to Italian schools, vocational training, access to legal services, so all sorts of things.
Chiara Galli:
So the legal context in European countries is more protective than it is in the US. Of course, the major contradiction arises when these kids turn 18 and age out of the protections very abruptly. And it's then where they really have to fight for their right to stay. And different countries have different ways in which unaccompanied minors are able to do so. In the Italian case, they can apply for asylum and they can try to apply for a work permit if they're able to find jobs in different sectors. And there is some support for, as I said, vocational training to try to help them have that transition, make that transition successfully rather. And of course, there's always a big gap between the law on the books and the law and practice. So it's not like everything is rosy there, but it does matter that legal protections are more protective on paper.
Chiara Galli:
And that I do think has an impact on how people perceive their relationship with the state and the kinds of messages that they receive. So based on what I've read, based on other people's work, and there's a very rich scholarship on unaccompanied minors treatment in different European countries.
Chiara Galli:
In a country like Italy, people aren't really worried about deportation because we don't really have a deportation machine of the same magnitude of the United States that's so well funded. So it's much more rare for people to actually be deported. So kids, as they come of age, they face a series of vulnerabilities and they're very much at risk of kind of blending into the larger undocumented population, but they're not so much at risk of be being returned. And that of course shapes the decisions that people make.
Chiara Galli:
But there was a very interesting book that compared the treatment of unaccompanied minors in the UK and Italy and what they've found, because since the UK does carry out deportations of minors who come of age, what they've found is that some of these kids who come of age as unaccompanied minors in the UK, they turn 17 and a half, 18, they then migrate to Italy to avoid deportation.
Chiara Galli:
So migrants learn about the law and they strategize. They make decisions for their life, their life course trajectories, and in order to work around these laws that really constrain the choices that they have at their disposal and that they learn about in imperfect ways. So there's never 100% transparency and knowledge of the law, which is what I talk about in my book, that's also very much true in the European context, but migrants learn what they can about the law and then they make decisions accordingly.
Reema Saleh:
We're hoping to kind of talk a little more about current border policy and how that's impacting unaccompanied minors. We've all been hearing about the expiration for Title 42 just happening tomorrow, May 11th. Could you tell us a little about what is Title 42, who does it apply to, and how has it impacted unaccompanied minors?
Chiara Galli:
Yeah, so Title 42 is an obscure public health policy that ostensibly has nothing to do with border enforcement, that the Trump administration strategically mobilized and decided to use to close off the US Mexico border just one month into the Covid Pandemic. And what was interesting about the use of Title 42 is that the Trump administration had experimented with all sorts of new policies to curtail the rights of protected groups, including asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors.
Chiara Galli:
But really in terms of being able to access the border, unaccompanied minors had been spared from the worst of these attacks because we have this law, the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which says that unaccompanied minors from non-contiguous countries are allowed to be admitted without undergoing any hurdles such as the credible fear interviews that adults have to undergo before being allowed entry into the United States. So what non-contiguous countries means is essentially kids from everywhere but Mexico because there aren't a lot of Canadian unaccompanied minors seeking entry to the US obviously, because we're similarly rich countries, et cetera.
Chiara Galli:
So Title 42 applied to everyone. It was a hard closure of the border that really violated the United States' commitment to the non-refoulement principle, the idea in international refugee law that you should not expel someone to a country where they fear persecution, where their lives are at risk. This policy essentially functioned as a state of exception. So the Covid Pandemic was framed as this crisis that required the border to be closed off despite the fact that public health experts actually never supported the policy. They thought that actually it would backfire by pushing people into crowded refugee camps in Mexico, and that would actually promote viral spread. You can't control a pandemic based on national borders because viral spread doesn't take a person's passport into account.
Chiara Galli:
But that's what the Trump administration did. And so they excluded everyone coming in at the border, including unaccompanied minors. And something like 10,000 kids, I believe were expelled in the first few months of the implementation of Title 42. And by kids, I mean unaccompanied minors.
Chiara Galli:
And I know that the Biden administration likes to say that it exempted unaccompanied minors from the policy. But the truth of the matter is that unaccompanied minors started to be exempted from Title 42 in November of 2020 because of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU. And so this shows you kind of the power of advocacy work, right? The ACLU said that the Title 42 was unlawful, that it was a violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. And so since then, unaccompanied minors have actually been allowed to enter the US and to seek asylum, but Title 42 remained in place for asylum seekers from many, many other countries. So this had the interesting effect of producing a situation in which for months on end, really the only asylum seekers being allowed entry into the US were children.
Chiara Galli:
And then the Biden administration entered office, it decided to continue not applying Title 42 to unaccompanied children, and then it started applying Title 42 with caveats. So giving quite a bit of discretion to the border patrol to decide who to let in, when to apply Title 42, and when not to apply it. So some people have been able to gain admission at the border such as Ukrainians, for example, for a period Venezuelans and Cubans were allowed in, but that's no longer the case.
Chiara Galli:
And now, tomorrow, as you said, Title 42 is set to expire. And what's very unfortunate is that the administration has been trying to find other ways to curtail access to the US asylum process by essentially resuscitating the, what advocates called the Trump era asylum bans, right? The idea that if you transit through a country that is a signatory of the UN Refugee Convention and you should have applied for asylum there, you don't have a right to apply for asylum in the US. And there's nowhere in refugee law that says that this should be the case or to make people who cross between ports of entry ineligible to apply for asylum.
Chiara Galli:
So these are policies that the Trump administration experimented with first that were struck down by the courts, and that the Biden administration is trying to reintroduce with a series of caveats for vulnerable populations, for populations who use this CBP One app at the border. But really, I mean, the substance of the policy is very similar. Right?
Reema Saleh:
Yeah, no, it's definitely interesting to see how a lot of Trump era border policies just kind of came back in different forums. I keep reading about just app crashes for the CBP One app and just that being required now for authorized entry, and it's definitely strange to see it happening. Yeah, I guess this is kind of impossible to ask, but what do you expect that people will start to see in the near future for people at the border?
Chiara Galli:
Well, I can't predict the future, but I mean, I will say this, I think that the Trump administration set a series of dangerous precedence by really curtailing the rights of asylum seekers by undermining our commitment to non-refoulement. And so this puts us in a very dangerous territory, and I know that advocates are very well organized. They were energized initially during the Trump administration, maybe now, well actually, I know that towards the end of the Trump administration, people were exhausted, right? Because they felt like they were fighting all of the time through impact litigation on behalf of their clients that they represented individually. But the work that advocates do, and this is one of the messages that I try to send with my book, it's so important because if it weren't for advocates, trying to keep the government accountable, we really would see human rights be dismantled much, much more.
Chiara Galli:
So that's happening on the one hand. On the other hand, the Republican Party has now introduced a bill that's taking us in a very, very concerning direction, which is not expected to pass, but it does kind of signal the movement in which a segment of the American political system and specifically the Republican Party, would like to go in, which is essentially an end to asylum. And there's a provision in that bill that would do away with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, protections for unaccompanied children, the ones that allow them to be admitted at the border.
Chiara Galli:
So while it's unlikely that that act will pass, it is concerning that it's being proposed. I will say this, I mean, it's not the first time that Congress tries to do away with TVPRA protections. Asylum has already been under attack once before in the 90s when there were debates leading up to the illegal immigration reform and what is it, IRIRA, a series of restrictive policies that were introduced in the 90s to limit access to asylum.
Chiara Galli:
And this is what I was so interested about, the reason that I wrote this book, to see the interaction between these protective and exclusionary forces. This is not new. This is kind of a constant in the US immigration system, but just how that will play out in the years to come is quite concerning because each time you set a precedent undermining human right, it becomes that much easier for future administrations to do this. So I've purposefully not made any concrete predictions because I don't have a crystal ball, but we'll all be following the news very closely in these upcoming weeks to see what actually happens. But it's not a time to take a vacation from advocacy work, that's for sure.
Gabriela Rivera:
So you were talking about all of these different types of barriers that the US puts on immigrants. Some are physical borders, some are legal barriers, try to deter people from coming, and they have changed in time and increased, but also in the time period that you tracked in your book, the amount of unaccompanied minors coming into the US has also increased steadily and sharply. So what do you think this means, what it represents, that all of these different measures seem to be failing, right? Because the amount of children that are coming to the US is not decreasing. All of these deterrence policies are not being reflected in the amount of children that are coming. So are they failing? What is it that policymakers in the US are not seeing?
Chiara Galli:
Well, in some ways, a lot of our policies are actually producing more unaccompanied minors because when you have a system in place at the border where it's easier to gain admission as an unaccompanied minor than it is for an entire family who's traveling with their kids, this leads families to make really difficult decisions sometimes to send their children to the border alone, to save their lives. And they do this because they have no other option. These aren't easy decisions. These aren't decisions that families want to make, but we're really tying their hands with our policies.
Chiara Galli:
So for example, when the Trump administration introduced the migrant protection protocols, forcing asylum seekers to apply from tent courts in Mexico, and unaccompanied minors weren't subject to that policy, asylum seeking families found themselves in a situation of real danger. Being stuck in transit is very dangerous. There's been reports by human rights watch, a lot of kidnappings, rape, extortion, deaths happening in Mexico to Central Americans who are extraordinarily vulnerable.
Chiara Galli:
So of course, families would send their kids alone to the United States. So that's part of it. Another part of it is the fact that the border was closed for a long time due to Title 42. People were traveling less because of Covid. And so now we're kind of seeing a backlog too, of people including children who want to seek refuge and a better life in the United States. And there's also some interesting research that shows that when you have increased rates of violence in specific sending communities, this creates a spike in out migration. But then that out migration stream balloons over time. So there's a snowball effect.
Chiara Galli:
So of course these flows will increase over time. And this similar things happen for voluntary migration. Once migration starts, it's a process that tends to sustain itself over time. People create migrant networks, they make connections, and all of these things kind of ease the constraints on exit, migrants loan each other money to pay for smugglers, et cetera.
Chiara Galli:
And all of this is happening while, of course, we spend more and more money on the externalization of border control, and we've been funding Mexican border enforcement to apprehend and deport Central Americans on route to the US and now Guatemala border enforcement as well. But the fact of the matter is that people who are fleeing violence will continue to flee violence regardless of our immigration policies. So even though we try to regulate, we try to externalize enforcement, we give Mexico money to apprehend and the poor Central Americans. If the conditions of exit don't change, people will continue to flee their homes and children continue to be at the risk in Central America today.
Natalie Reyes:
So bringing our focus back to the process in the US, you focused on LA as a research site, but I was wondering if you could comment on or maybe compare the advantages or disadvantages between Los Angeles and other cities, maybe Chicago for example. How is the immigration advocacy landscape different here than it is in other cities?
Chiara Galli:
Well, so in many ways, Los Angeles was a best case scenario to study this phenomenon. So I think it's telling that I tell a relatively bleak story in the book about our protections and our humanitarian laws failing to protect many children when they're implemented in practice. But I also do tell a somewhat optimistic story about the power of legal advocacy to help kids who would otherwise not have a chance of getting asylum and to stop the government from implementing policies that chip away at established protections and human rights.
Chiara Galli:
And I think I was able to observe that because as I said, LA is in many ways a best case scenario, and that's for several reasons. First of all, it's a sanctuary city in an immigrant friendly state. So people aren't afraid to go to engage with the court system to seek out legal representation. The state and the city funded nonprofits providing legal services to immigrants, but particularly so providing legal services to unaccompanied minors. So there was enough funding that there was actually an organizational landscape that could provide legal services for these kids. It wasn't enough to go around. Not everyone was represented, but there was a far more access to legal representation than, for example, in a rural area or in an anti-immigrant state.
Chiara Galli:
I have a new project where we're comparing state level representation rates, and we're seeing that in Republican states, unaccompanied minors access to legal representation is much lower than it is in states like California. LA also has a long history of immigration advocacy, immigrant rights organizing, and this long history of the sanctuary movement, the movement that helped Central Americans who were fleeing violence in the 1980s. So all of that legal infrastructure kind of dates back to that movement, to this longer history. And so these advocates know what they're doing. They have a lot of expertise to deal with this population.
Chiara Galli:
Many of them are second generation immigrants, Latinos, the children of Central American asylum seekers in some cases. And who selected into this profession because of their social justice motivations to give back to their community. So they have the linguistic skills necessary to do this work. They have the cultural competencies necessary to do this work. So you can imagine that in a rural area, an immigration attorney who doesn't speak Spanish, who's representing their first Central American cases would have a lot more trouble. It probably wouldn't be such high quality representation.
Chiara Galli:
So I think it's interesting that this is the kind of a best case scenario. And it's also finally, I'll just say it was in some ways a best case scenario also in terms of the institutions who decide cases, because the Los Angeles asylum office does have a reputation for being staffed by liberal young asylum officers, some of whom have gone to law school or some of whom have sociology or anthropology degrees. And this is very different from other asylum offices. There was a report that was recently published on the Boston Asylum Office where virtually everyone is denied asylum because institutional culture is important because discretion plays a big role in these decisions. Who the decision makers are really matters for whether people get protection or not.
Chiara Galli:
And there's always more immigrant friendly and anti-immigrant decision makers in courts and asylum offices all over the US There was just a higher concentration of individuals who wanted to grant cases using the legal protections at their disposal if they could compared to other parts of the country. But all of these differences, I think, create a lot of interesting research opportunities for people who want to do the next ethnography on unaccompanied minors experiences. I think there's really interesting comparative work to be done taking into account, particularly I think rural-urban comparisons or comparisons of different cities, right? Cities where there's fewer migrant networks, where there isn't a strong community of Central Americans, like the one that exists in cities like LA, Washington DC, that all have really strong, for example, Salvador and immigrant communities.
Reema Saleh:
So Chicago has seen a pretty big increase in migration, partly because Texas Governor Abbott is busing migrants here. And I think generally city officials, like the departments seem kind of unprepared. People kind of comment a lot that there's not the same infrastructure here as in other cities for housing migrants and delivering services. I guess, what does Chicago have to do to adapt to this?
Chiara Galli:
Well, I think we're experiencing a very interesting moment because it's actually never been the case that we have housed migrants and asylum seekers. I mean, we've detained them, but we haven't given them housing. So I actually think that it's exceptional what's happening in this city of Chicago and seeing these reception centers and these shelters being set up to house asylum seekers whose cases are pending. This is actually much more similar to the European bottle in which asylum seekers are not only detained, but they're frequently housed in facilities where it's not like they have amazing conditions and they're particularly fancy, but they're not detention centers. They have the right to come and go as please and to leave.
Chiara Galli:
So really, I think it's quite interesting, this historical moment in which we're seeing that a lot of resources like the state of Illinois has invested quite a lot of resources to support this population that's been bused in from the border. And I think that in part has to do with the political differences of takes of the Democratic and Republican parties on immigration. There's a desire to present the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago as a welcoming place for immigrants because I do think that that plays into the national politics of immigration that has become such a contested issue.
Chiara Galli:
Now, of course, again, there's a resource scarcity. The city was unprepared. This tends to be the case generally when asylum seekers arrived to new places. I mean, during the course of my field work, there had been some people who had been bused into LA. So this kind of scrambling to find support is kind of a key characteristic of the phenomenon of trying to help immigrants. And there isn't a very institutionalized system of reception in the US. So really we're seeing something new that I think in many ways is encouraging the fact that the city and the state have been trying to find ways to house asylum seekers and provide them at least a short term place to stay while they adapt to their new homes.
Chiara Galli:
Of course, there's lots of things that we could do to provide more support. For instance, providing housing for a longer period of time. I know that in some of the shelters, they're now requiring asylum seekers to leave after 30 days. That's really not enough time for people to get on their feet and find jobs and find housing, particularly so because it's taking forever for asylum seekers to get work permits right now. Asylum seekers have the right to get a work permit once they apply, and usually the so-called clock would start upon their applications and they would get their permits after six months. But because of a series of changes the Trump administration made, now it's looking more like nine months to a year.
Chiara Galli:
So there's a real mismatch between the amount of time you get a roof over your head and the amount of time it takes for you to get a work permit that's going to enable you to get a job where you can actually pay rent in the city of Chicago. So perhaps we should be housing people for a longer period of time, but the fact of the matter is that there's very scarce resources to go around. So I think the city is trying to distribute those resources as it can because people continue to arrive.
Gabriela Rivera:
So we have been talking about all of these difficult topics, violence and this difficult journey to the US and the super complicated conditions that people face when they come into the US. But what I think makes your research so fascinating is the fact that you decided to focus in this group of people that are going through this intense period of their lives. Most of them are teenagers. So how was it to work with teenagers going through these very complicated period in their lives and going through all of these incredible changes at the same time?
Chiara Galli:
I think that teenagers are a fascinating group, right? Because not only were they in a state of legal limbo between the potential promise of protected refugee status and the risk of being denied asylum and potentially becoming undocumented or being deported back to their home countries, but they were also in a liminally social position in the life course. A teenagers are kind of in a hybrid state between childhood and adulthood. And so they're very interesting group of people to work with. And they exhibit inherently both kind of what we think of as childlike dependent traits and adult-like traits of wanting independence, of seeking independence.
Chiara Galli:
I mean, of course, disadvantaged poor indigenous kids tend to grow up much more quickly in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras than teenagers do in the US where they're much more sheltered. And of course, I mean, there's a racial dynamic to this. There's a class dynamic to this, but white middle class kids are especially sheltered in the US, less so for a working class minority kids. But in Central America, kids do tend to grow up more quickly than they do in the US, which is why they feel infantilized by this need to show their childlike innocence, et cetera.
Chiara Galli:
But in some ways they also do retain some childlike trade. So for example, a lot of my research participants were hoping that they would be supported by their family members when they got here. Some of them actually wanted to stay in school and continue to pursue their education, and they were quite disappointed when they realized that the family members, sometimes aunts and uncles who they didn't really know well, they hadn't had a lot of contact with prior to migration. These individuals had promised, "You can leave ORR and I'll help you finish school and you can live with me." And then they found out that actually they would have to work to support themselves because their aunts and uncles that were supporting their own kids in Guatemala, so they couldn't afford to have them continue in this childlike dependent role of being in school and then continuing on to get their education in college.
Chiara Galli:
So they felt betrayed and they felt a lot of a sense of strong responsibility, a big burden on their shoulders because they had to work, provide themselves, sometimes send remittances back home, payback debt they had incurred due to their migration. So all of these adult-like responsibilities weighed really heavily on their shoulders. At the same time, they had all of the wonderful dreams and aspirations that teenagers have. I think teenagers are very future oriented. They dream about the future. They dream about who they want to be as adults, what are their aspirations for the kinds of jobs they want to do, the kinds of things they want to study, the kinds of people they want to be.
Chiara Galli:
And so something the kids would talk about, I have a story in the book about this Honduran girl who I call Linda, she wants to feel womanlike and she wants to buy things that will make her feel sexy essentially, right? Stiletto heels, mini skirts. And so this nonprofit organization where I was doing research told Linda, "We have these volunteers that want to give donations to kids, so what do you want?" And so she made this list that had these items on it, the stiletto heels, the platforms, the miniskirt. Because she had just turned 18, of course, she wanted those things. When we're teenagers, you're trying to signal that you're adult-like. It's part of your metamorphosis process as you try to look like an adult, to behave like an adult. You have your romantic relationships, et cetera. And it was very sad because the organization told her, "There's no way people are going to want to donate these items to you because you're an unaccompanied minor. You're a poor kid. They're going to want to give you things that you need, not things that you want."
Chiara Galli:
So I thought these teenagers are really not allowed to have the wants and desires that teenagers have as they transition to adulthood. At least not in any formal capacity. When they're trying to get help, they're trying to get support, they're trying to get legal status, they have to perform the childlike state in that space. And then of course, in their everyday lives, they very much signal the adult-like behaviors. And they're very much teenagers in the sense that they dress quite fashionably when they have little bit of money to do so.
Chiara Galli:
But it's a really fascinating population to work with, and they're a very inspiring group of young people. So I think that if only we did a little bit more to support them and a lot less to make their lives impossible by making it so hard for them to undergo this legal system with so few resources, they could really thrive and contribute in amazing ways to American society.
Reema Saleh:
So after spending so much time with unaccompanied minors and the immigration system, how would you say that things need to change? If there is anything that policymakers should take from your book, what should it be?
Chiara Galli:
So, well, they should read the policy recommendations that I make in the conclusion. And there's lots of things that should change. First of all, we need to completely rethink the immigration system in the sense that I make a case in the conclusion that I think that protections for vulnerable categories, including unaccompanied children, should be supplemental to a basic human rights protections for all immigrants. And this is really in line with the spirit of the convention of the rights of the child that says, children have human rights like all individuals, but in addition, we give them supplemental protections because they need protections due to their unique vulnerabilities because of their stage in the life course, their position in society, their developmental needs.
Chiara Galli:
So I think that this should be the logic of the immigration system, and that's not what the current logic of the US immigration system is, but also it's not the logic of what the European immigration systems is, which is to kind of chip away at the basic rights of immigrants, do away with asylum protections with access to asylum, make it harder and harder, and then create spaces of exceptions for vulnerable categories such as children, unaccompanied minors. In the European Union, there's some exceptions for migrants who are ill, for pregnant women, but really those protections need to be supplemental on top of what we give basic human rights guarantees for everyone. So this is a huge systemic change that I think needs to happen in the US and worldwide.
Chiara Galli:
And then the asylum system needs to change. I think that we should interpret refugee law to protect people who are fleeing life-threatening violence in their homes. And we've seen some evolution of the refugee law in the past that's been encouraging, such as protections for victims of gender-based violence, particularly domestic violence. And so this shows that these changes are possible. It is possible for the interpretation of the refugee definition to expand, to better reflect the conditions that are pushing people to flee their homes today. So we need to continue to do that work. And then finally, I mean, I have many, many ideas, but just to say one more, I think that we need a universal legal representation system for people who are facing deportation proceedings, removal proceedings in immigration court.
Chiara Galli:
And I say people and not children because I think that no one can prepare their asylum case on their own because it's exceptionally difficult to do so because of the complex nature of the law and our bureaucracies. And so we don't have a public defender system in the immigration courts because ostensibly these are civil proceedings. But if you think about it, really the impacts that the outcomes of these proceedings have on people's lives are much more similar to criminal proceedings. It's the deprivation of liberty. You can literally lose the right to stay in the United States and be sent back to a country where you might be facing life-threatening violence. So we should, at the very least, give people the resources that they need to actually fight their case in court and qualify for protections that they might very well qualify for. And because we know that the impact of legal representation is really important in producing these positive outcomes in the immigration system, and there's a lot of research to back that up.
Reema Saleh:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Chiara Galli. This episode was produced and edited by Reema Saleh and Ricardo Sand. Thank you to our interviewers, Natalie Reyes, Gabriela Rivera, and Reema Saleh. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit the pearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.
Root of Conflict
05.04.23
Geography is Destiny | Ian Morris
Root of Conflict
04.04.23
Decolonizing Palestine | Somdeep Sen
Root of Conflict
03.06.23
The Troubles | Jon McCourt
Root of Conflict
02.06.23
Everyday War | Greta Uehling
Root of Conflict
01.05.23
Somaliland’s Independence | Bashir Goth
Root of Conflict Podcast
Episode: Somaliland’s Independence
featuring
Bashir Goth
interviewed by
Deqa Aden and Joshua Charles
October 26, 2022
Full Transcript
Reema Saleh: Hi. This is Reema, and you’re listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts.
Reema Saleh: You’re listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you’ll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
Reema Saleh: The Republic of Somaliland is a de facto sovereign state in the Horn of Africa. Declaring independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland is a self-governing country with democratic elections and a distinct history on the continent, but it’s still considered part of Somalia by the international community. In this episode, we speak with Bashir Goth, the head of the Somaliland Mission in the United States about how Somaliland has navigated state building without international recognition. We talk about democracy and development, and what Somaliland has to offer the world in the coming decades.
Deqa Aden: I’m Deqa Aden, a second year Master of Public Policy student and a Pearson Fellow.
Bashir Goth: I’m Bashir Goth, a Somaliland Representative to the United States.
Joshua Charles: I’m Joshua Charles. I’m a second year Master of Public Policy candidate and Pearson fellow.
Reema Saleh: Hi, my name is Reema. I’m a second year Master student and Pearson Fellow.
Joshua Charles: I think to begin, could you introduce yourself? What do you do? What’s your background?
Bashir Goth: Okay. Currently I’m the representative of Somaliland to the United States. You can say an ambassador. So, I do what any ambassador in the world does. Before that, I was working in different areas. I work in the oil industry as a corporate communication advisor. I work in the media as a journalist. And I worked in international organizations also as a communication advisor. That’s my background.
Joshua Charles: Okay. That’s quite dynamic. And so given that you have extensive experience working in the intersection within the policy space,