Isabella Nascimento:

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 its 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 School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

This episode features Professor Roger Myerson thousand seven Nobel Laureate and professor at the University of Chicago. His research uses game theory to analyze how institutions, political systems, and economic mechanisms shape incentives and outcomes when individuals have different information and limited trust. In this episode, he will discuss his perspective on the ongoing warning in Ukraine.

Note, this episode was recorded on March 7th. This was one week after the Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelenskyy. At the time, Russian forces had launched a large missile and drone attack across Ukraine and Ukrainian defenses intercepted part of it. The US had also suspended Ukraine's access to Maxar satellite imagery. Everything we talk about in this episode reflects that moment.

Hi everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Isabella Nascimento. I'm a second year master of public policy candidate at the University of Chicago, and I am a Pearson Fellow.

Viktoriia Shcherba:

Hello everyone. My name is Victoria Shcherba and I'm second year master of Public Policy student at the University of Chicago, and I am Ukrainian.

Roger Myerson:

I'm Roger Myerson. I'm the David Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago, and I'm proud to be associated with this institution also.

Viktoriia Shcherba:

So let's jump right in. Professor Myerson, you have visited Ukraine multiple times since the beginning of the war, and you also have strong personal and professional connections to Ukraine. Can you tell us about it?

Roger Myerson:

I first went to Ukraine in September of 2014. That is after the beginning of the limited war in Donbas. I originally went really to be an advocate for democratic decentralization reforms that the country actually did implement between 2015 and 2020. In 2014, Ukraine had a very well established democratic system. Elections to the legislature, Verkhovna Rada and presidential elections were very competitive. Presidential elections were competitive we know because presidents often lost the reelection. Although there were also local elections at the provincial district and municipal levels, the municipalities had no funding and the district and provincial councils had essentially no power at all, so that actually everything was centralized from the capital, from Kiev.

And I consider this to be a problem and I discussed it with many people in Ukraine in 2014 and thereafter. And not necessarily because of any efforts of mine, people worked hard in Ukraine to make decentralization reforms work. And there were, over a period of five years from 2015 to 2020, a very substantial fraction, about 20%, 25% of the public budget was decentralized by objective non-political formulas to some new locally elected local councils, the hromadas or community level. There are 1400 of these local governments. And it's widely recognized in Ukraine that it's not only provided better public goods and public services at the local level in the two or three years that it existed before the full scale war, but at the beginning of the war, when Russian troops surprise attacked, the local resistance that slowed down this Russian advance was often organized by locally elected mayors and counselors and the local leadership that had the confidence of people in the communities all over Ukraine has widely been recognized as being an important part of the resilience that's enabled Ukraine to withstand this attack and to organize it as a nation, to resist it in the years since,

Isabella Nascimento:

Thank you. Having been in Ukraine multiple times since the beginning of the war, what key changes have you observed in the country's political and social landscape?

Roger Myerson:

Let me just say, when I first went to Ukraine in 2014, the question of whether people should care about the balance of power between their locally elected representatives and their nationally elected representatives was something that very sophisticated Ukrainians who I talked to seemed to not understand why did it matter local versus national? Why was a balance needed? This is something that's existed in American democracy since before the Declaration of Independence. But everything I said then now is a cliche. Everybody knows that. I was at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Berlin in 2024, 10 years after I first went there, that was last summer. And everybody from Ukraine, everybody from the European Union knew that it was important that this democracy in Ukraine is not just national, but local.

Americans who have only learned about Ukraine from the television set. Sometimes think Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Ukrainian democracy. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the president and a very highly regarded leader of Ukraine, but Ukrainians, when they fight for democracy, are not just fighting for Zelenskyy and for their right to be represented in the national assembly, but also for their mayors and their locally elected local counselors. Democracy is deep and thick and Ukraine, and that is a great gain. I know Zelenskyy was elected in 2019 by overwhelming majorities in all parts of Ukraine. Then as President, he did things that are controversial as presidents always do because power is complicated and his popularity went down. I was pleased to see that after this traumatic ambushing of him in the US White House just a week or so ago, his popularity in Ukraine has gone up. And that is right, he's working hard to represent his country in the world as the country faces the greatest challenge any country can, a powerful threat to, its very existence. And he's doing the best he can and I think the people of Ukraine are honoring that.

In the last three years, there's been a war between Ukraine and Russia like no war before there. This is a war that's, on the one hand being fought in trenches like in my grandparents' generation fought in World War I, but on the other hand, it's being fought with drones and satellite observability, very much an air war like no air war before. And there are only two countries in the world that have had a, for better or for worse, a master class in how to fight in this kind of new military environment. And one is the Russian army and the other is Ukrainian army. It is astonishing to me that the President of the United States seems to want to make peace by making one of those nations subject to the other nation so that both armies would be under the command of the Kremlin.

And why he thinks that the Ukrainian people have no cards when they have one of the most powerful armies in the world and an army that understands this new environment better than US serving military officers today, who I've been in the room with US active duty and recently retired military officer of the United States, talking to Ukrainians, who they've confessed that the Ukrainians understand better this military than they do. That is an important change. Nobody in Ukraine wanted to become masters of the new drone trench warfare technology, but they are.

And if the United States wants to be a powerful military factor in the world, which I think even the Trump administration seems to want, although they differ from previous administrations in many of their goals, an engagement with Ukraine is important because the Ukrainians have some very important assets. They are a great people. It's a great nation, it's a great country for producing food, but it also is a country that has, against their own personal desires I'm sure, learned a great deal about warfare in the 21st century. This is terrible knowledge to need to have, but they have it. And that, the Europeans understand is a great asset that the Ukrainians bring to any alliance that help them in their struggle for freedom.

Viktoriia Shcherba:

I think it's important to highlight to our listeners that we are recording this podcast exactly one week after President Trump's Oval Office meeting with President Zelenskyyy. Since that meeting, Trump has announced that he's halting all US military aid to Ukraine and suspending intelligence sharing with Kiev. We understand that by the time we're listening to this, the situation may have evolved. But for context, this is the state of affairs as we record.

In view of this, Professor Myerson, what is next for Ukraine given the radical shift in the US policy from President Biden to President Trump's approach to the war?

Roger Myerson:

War is terribly difficult and when an important ally, suddenly changes course as the United States under President Trump has, this is obviously terribly difficult. The Ukrainians have great assets. The Ukrainians are still a strong people. They're probably more united than ever, I believe, from afar. I know the Europeans are more united than ever. I should say I think that when Zelenskyyy... I think it's been about two weeks since the Munich Security Conference where JD Vance chose to ignore security and talk about what he considered censorship in Europe. Whereas President Zelenskyyy of Ukraine gave a speech that I thought was speaking very truly to the Europeans. He obviously was presenting a truth that is also in the interests of Ukraine because he's a representative of his country, not a professor. But it was truth.

And the truth was that Europe has enormous power that it has neglected to develop in the military area, which is not a bad thing. Much of the 20th century was about the Europeans building great military systems that then engaged in bloody conflict. And it's not a bad thing that the Europeans chose to spend less on military in the late 20th and early 21st century because they could rely on American protection. However, Europe is capable of making itself one of the, or the greatest military power in the world, if they work together. They know it is in their interest to do so. It has become an imperative to do so because of the American shift.

I fear the American shift looks to me like nothing I've seen in history since Peter III of Russia changed sides in the Seven Years' War in 1762. And that didn't go well for Tsar Peter. I think the people of Ukraine will recognize the need for expanding the army, for military recruitment to be made more strict. The Europeans will deliver the weapons that the Ukrainians need. And when they can't deliver because they're still building developing new production capabilities, the Ukrainians will suffer. People in Ukraine will suffer. But the loss of American support if this really endures, is going to be very costly in human lives in Ukraine. But Ukraine is a great nation, and I believe the Ukrainian people have not forgotten that the last time they allowed themselves to be conquered by a Russian army in 1921, the result was within a dozen years, Kremlin sponsored starvation, the Holodomor, in which literally 10% of the Ukrainian population may have starved to death at the orders of the Kremlin because the Kremlin found it inconvenient to tolerate free thinking in Ukraine.

So that's a history that is not forgotten, and this is a people that's willing to pay some costs. The White House seems to think that Ukraine cannot defend itself, cannot resist without American support. That certainly neglects all kinds of groups such as the Taliban, that without great power support, we're able to prevail in national struggles, but at a great cost. And that cost has been increased.

Isabella Nascimento:

So given this turbulence of the shift in US policy, what strengths or weaknesses do you see in how Ukraine can manage this period?

Roger Myerson:

I persist in hoping that my country, the United States of America, I'm a citizen, which I've lived all my life, will be a positive force for democracy in the world and for peace in the world. Siding with a authoritarian aggressor against an people trying to defend its independence and its democracy is the wrong way to go. But I believe the Europeans and the Ukrainians, at greater cost, can continue to resist Russian dominance. If they don't, war is unpredictable. The possibility of a Ukrainian victory and a breakdown of Putin's regime, for example, is always possible. The possibility of a Russian breakthrough and a demoralization that leads to panic in Ukraine, that could happen. Nobody knows in war. Any political victory by the Russians in Ukraine will have devastating consequences for every other part of the world. They begin in Europe.

But the loss of the principle that nations should not try to increase their domination, their territory by military action, that was a norm that largely guided international relations from 1945 until 2022. The loss of that principle encourages powerful nations to build their armies, to take advantage of this new freedom to beat up on their weaker neighbors, but weaker neighbors then will spend more to increase their capacity to resist. And a good defense always involves the potential for a good offense. So as one country arms to protect itself against one possible threat, that scares other countries into increasing their armaments. So all over the world, we're going to see a ricocheting of increased military spending.

The Trump campaign ran for won the election last year, among other things, with an argument that the United States shouldn't pay the price of being the world peacemaker. And certainly the price the United States spent on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq was something the American people should regret having devoted real resources to. And that was misguided, misdirected and was a huge cost. And if that's part of what they were arguing against, then people were right to be sympathetic with that argument. However, that's one thing to say we're not going to be the spend that much on being with the world peacemaker. It's another thing to say we're going to spend nothing and we're going to be supporters of those who violate the old world order.

And just to put the economics in American terms, the United States was spending during both the 1970s and 1980s, about 7.3% of its GDP on defense. This was under both Democratic and Republican administrations, and both parties agreed that that was an appropriate amount to spend. In the nineties, that went down to 5.3%. That's 2% of GDP, 1/50th of everything we produce got taken out of the defense budget. Between the eighties and the nineties. What changed? What changed was the Soviet Russian threat to the world vanished, and that saved the American taxpayer 2% of the total domestic product of the United States of America. That's a huge saving. The United States, both military plus economic aid to Ukraine never was more than 3/10ths of 1% since the war began.

So US support for Ukraine was of the order of 3/10ths of 1% of GDP. When I talk about costs like that, it's important to keep the timescale right. The two percentage points that we saved from having a safer world after 1990, with the end of an aggressive Russia, with a vanishing of an internationally aggressive force from Moscow, that was a long-term cost. And so even a long-term stalemate in Ukraine that required the American taxpayers to spend 3/10ths of 1% of their country's national income on Ukraine, that's what we were spending. And it was never more than that, sometimes less during the years since the war began, since 2022, that would be much better than the 2%.

And I should say sometime last year, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee suggested essentially a two percentage of GDP increase in defense spending as being necessary in the world we now face. Mr. Trump might be right, that if the United States simply ignores everything and hides behind our great oceans, then maybe we could spend less. But the consensus of both Democrats and Republicans for two or three generations from the end of World War II until very recently was that we needed to spend more than that on defense. And by those historically prevalent standards in American political decision-making, it's going to cost a lot more to let Russia win this war than it is to prevent Russia from winning this war by giving Ukraine what it needed to defend itself.

Viktoriia Shcherba:

Let's talk about security guarantees. You've argued that Ukraine's long-term security depends on international guarantees. NATO membership is one option, however not viable at the moment. But what alternatives could also work?

Roger Myerson:

During this war, Ukrainians, for many very good reasons, have expressed an unwillingness to allow Russian aggression to seize their territory. They care about the people who live under Russian occupation. Therefore, their fellow countrymen. And international negotiations over territory are very difficult to begin because once one starts talking about changing a boundary, it's very hard to see where it ends. Certainly one precedent Americans should remember is what happened in the 1938 disaster at Munich, the negotiations between Hitler and his Democratic Western adversaries in France, Britain and Czechoslovakia was that the adversary said, "Well, just give a little territory of Czechoslovakia to Germany and that should settle everything." And of course, once the bomb restarted moving, within a matter of weeks, the Germans had taken over the whole country.

We need to understand this war is not being fought over territory. And the Kremlin's goal, it's hard to say because they lie and it's hard to look inside their heads, and Michael McFaul and Robert Pearson, who have written about this looking at the history of when Putin has been most aggressive and when he has not been aggressive against his neighbors. The Kremlin is motivated by preventing success of democracy in a Slavic nation which is very closely related culturally and historically to the Russian nation because democracy in Ukraine, a kindred Slavic country, makes it harder for the Kremlin to rule Russians autocratically. That is the fundamental motivation for this war. It's very difficult for Mr. Putin to go to his people and say, "You should support me in destroying Ukraine because otherwise you'll get an example of a different kind of government that might be inconvenient to me." So he has to find some other reason. That's why he talks about, among other things, NATO expansion.

NATO expansion is not what Putin is afraid of. It's not what motivates him. It is something he has used to convince the Russian people that they are threatened. And certainly we should all understand that the idea of a foreign military alliance being able to place its large armies within a day's drive of the battlefield of Stalingrad could easily be a hot button issue for mobilizing Russian people to support military of their country. So it's important that the West, anybody outside of Russia should make it clear that there is no desire and no plan to invade Russia ever. And that's credible. I'm not privy to planning and the Pentagon, of course I don't have military secrets. How do I know? Because the Russians have one of the best nuclear deterrents in the world, and that nuclear deterrent deters anybody from thinking, let's go send an army towards Moscow. You don't do that. No. So no, nobody's going to start a war to destroy Russia. And it's a lie to the Russian people that there is a NATO threat against Russia. There isn't.

I should say also, we should recognize the Russians have never attempted to annex Belarus. And there have been occasional negotiations to form a union between Russia and Belarus, but they fall flat. And why doesn't Putin push it if he wants territorial expansion? Because he doesn't care, as long as Belarus is under a dictator. Then it's fine. It doesn't matter. If Ukraine is under a dictator, then it would be fine also. So he wants his puppet in Kiev. He doesn't care about the boundaries of the Russian Federation compared to the Ukrainian nation.

But on the other hand, as long as Ukraine remains an independent nation by military force, by subversion, the Kremlin will do everything it can to destroy Ukraine. As an independent democratic nation. As a dependent puppet state, it's fine, but as an independent democratic nation, they will continue to aggress against it. One of the precedents we should remember is the First Chechen War that ended in 1996 was restarted by Putin just as he was coming to national power in 2000. And in the Second Chechen War, the Russians came back having prepared better during the interval of a few years of peace. They were much better prepared to come in and totally destroy Chechnya and set up a local Chechen warlord as their puppet ruler of that district, that province. That's the threat.

And the Ukrainians cannot talk about allowing the Russians to remain on Ukrainian territory peacefully without counter force from the Ukrainian army, unless there is some credible guarantee that Putin will not use the period of peace to build up his army, increase his defenses, his fortifications, invest in improved aggressive offensive capabilities, and then reopen the fighting when it serves him to finish off the sovereign existence of a democratic Ukraine. And the fear of that may motivate some Ukrainians to think that their political future could be reached by making themselves agents of the Kremlin and helping it to subvert Ukrainian independent democracy.

So they're going to fight on two levels, and the Ukrainians need some confidence that a peace can be a peace that is real and credible and can be relied on and invested on, and people can go about their lives investing in improving their lives, confident that their country will remain independent and democratic. That confidence needs some international support because there is no political constraint on Putin's Kremlin to force them to comply with any promises that they would make in any treaty. And past history shows Putin and his people don't mind saying one thing and then doing whatever is more convenient for them later on. The only thing that will enable the Ukrainians to agree to a ceasefire even has to be that there is some credible international support for Ukraine's continued existence on the territory that they occupy, that they have defended successfully, and that the peace is not going to be made an opportunity for the Kremlin to prepare for finishing off Ukraine in the future.

Isabella Nascimento:

So do you think the international community has already missed the optimal moment for ceasefire? Or is there still a viable path to the negotiated resolution that ensures Ukraine's security and sovereignty?

Roger Myerson:

I wish that the international community would've put more emphasis on its determination to help Ukraine defend itself, distinguishing that from any threat against Russia. I am not sure when there was an opportunity that was missed. I am not aware of anything. I have been assured by people who know Russia better than I do, that it's very difficult to get a message to the Russian people that contradicts what they hear on state-sponsored television in their country. But the truth is that when the masters of the Kremlin and their television propagandists tell the Russian people that there is a NATO threat against Russia that is existential, that could strike at the heart of their civilization, that is a lie, unless the heart of their civilization is that they accept rule from a small cabal around Vladimir Putin.

And that is a lie. And as I say, it's not credible because nobody would want to attack a nuclear power like Russia. And it's a lie because the Biden administration was compelling the Ukrainians to use American-supplied weapons in explicitly limited ways that were meant to demonstrate tangibly that many supporters of Ukraine have criticized the Biden administration for imposing restrictions on how the Ukrainians use their weapons. Maybe the war could have gone better for the Ukrainians if they had gone otherwise. But those restrictions were a costly signal that the United States was making to the Russian people saying America really seriously is not interested, has no desire and indeed to threaten Russia. Indeed, we want to be viewed as a country that wants to live with Russia. And this is our way of showing you this, by giving the Ukrainians weapons in a form that we consider defensive, but not to allow them to use the weapons in a way that we consider offensive. And what is the line in war between offense and defense is a hard line to draw.

But that message clearly did not get through to the Russian people. Is there something the diplomats and heads of state could have done differently to get that message through? I don't know. That's what I think might have been missed, restrictions that Americans were putting on the use of Ukrainian weapons might have been something that, if we somehow could have gotten the word to the Russian people about, "Look what we're doing to try to not threaten you," maybe that could have reduced support for Putin and his regime and its war effort.

Isabella Nascimento:

And hypothetically, if a ceasefire happened tomorrow, what would be needed for a peace to endure after.

Roger Myerson:

That's easy. Somebody outside Ukraine needs to make a credible commitment to helping Ukraine in the way a nation of that size needs to survive, to know it and its democratic system can survive in this world. That shouldn't be that hard. The Europeans can do it. I think Turks are involved in a way that is very promising. And the Europeans in this effort will have a very great reliable supporter in the North American continent, at least in Canada. And it is profoundly troubling to me as an American that I can't be confident today in March of 2025 that my country will be part of that because I thought I could take that for granted. And in re-electing President Trump, the people of my country have told me that I can't be so confident and I shouldn't be so confident. Well, I accept that as an unfortunate reality. Still love my country, but it makes it a little more painful.

Viktoriia Shcherba:

Professor Myerson, you have slightly touched upon European reliance on US military. So I would love to come back to that. We know that Europe's total GDP is five times more than that of Russia's. Numerically, Europe should have the upper hand. Why do you think this economic strength hasn't fully translated into military power?

Roger Myerson:

I think a general rule we've seen in the last century or two is that GDP does translate into military power very well, and in the medium and to long-term, but it takes some time. It is a surprise, I think to almost everybody that in the 21st century, the ability to manufacture artillery shells, for example, would become a crucial part of effective military technology. And I've been told on good authority that the United States is ramping up its ability to produce artillery shells by some factor that I think is of the order, I'm not sure what it is, but I think two or three times what it was at the beginning of the war. It's a great accomplishment for the Pentagon. I don't understand why it's that difficult to make artillery shells. I understand why it's difficult to make aircraft carriers, but I don't understand why artillery shell production can't be just ramped up. But then I'm a professor, not a captain of industry.

The Europeans have been investing elsewhere in other forms of production and it has taken time for them to reprioritize. I think they've had some warning. We had a very bleak period at the end of 2023 and early 2024 when the United States also paused its aid to Ukraine. Congress was about to pass a bill that would've included aid for Ukraine for the Biden administration near the end of 2023. And then former President Trump, not in office, started calling people up and telling Republicans in Congress to torpedo that bill and it vanished. And so Europeans had some warning that they needed to maybe rely on their own military production for the defense of their continent.

But it's striking that, for example, the United States went from almost no military production to being the great producer in World War II. And that is ultimately how the Axis powers were defeated/ during World War I, the countries that did best in the long run were those that were well organized economically in general, and therefore were able to invest more of their productive capability in the military. So basic financial capacity and basic general industrial capacity seems to be very important factor even in the medium term, and certainly in the long term in determining how much in this modern technological and industrial age a country can produce militarily. We should recognize of course also that for example, from the Taliban's success in Afghanistan with very little production capability, with no production capability, but with people who are willing to fight and risk their lives for a political cause in their nation that they believe in that, that even the best of weapons can falter and fail to prevail. And so Ukraine's human ability to fight is also important.

But the Ukrainians are also a serious factor in world production. And the fact that there were no military drones being produced in Ukraine before the war, and now Ukraine, I don't know, is the greatest or one of the greatest producers in the world of military drones that are an important factor in the war. My understanding is that even joint ventures between Ukraine and other countries are being produced in Ukraine. Why not produce them outside of Ukraine and ship the drones in? Because then you might avoid the risk of your facility being bombed by the Russians if they could find out where it was. Well, because the drones need to be manufactured close to where the people are who are using them on the front lines because the technology is changing so quickly and that you need to be able to have that communication.

And that says that we should recognize that among other capabilities, because the Ukrainians are people who are talented, who have human talents in many ways, and economic skills and productive skills, that they are able to innovate to produce drones, which is not just a matter of wiring things to together and welding and putting together a peace of machinery, but also of designing a technology that responds to the rapidly evolving situation in a front line where both sides are trying to counter the other's innovation as fast as they can. And the Ukrainians have shown that they have mastered the art of learning in that, and that is making them a force in the world that is very important.

Isabella Nascimento:

Changing the topic a little bit. An article released by The Economist has raised concerns about efforts to reshape Ukrainian identity in Russian-occupied territories. The report highlights actions such as replacing Ukrainian schoolbooks with Russian curricula, encouraging educators to adopt new teaching methods and integrating children into Russian educational and cultural programs. Based on your experience, how could the international community respond and ensure the protection of Ukrainian identity in this war?

Roger Myerson:

In 1991, when there was a plebiscite in Ukraine about independence, in every province of Ukraine, a majority voted for independence. They said, "We believe we need to be part of an independent Ukraine, not part of a Russian Federation." That was the vote. The majorities were overwhelming in some parts of Western Ukraine, and in Eastern Ukraine, they were smaller majorities, but they were majorities. In an independent Ukraine, yes, there was government corruptions, and sometimes the government performed badly, and some people may have looked at the Russian Federation and thought maybe that would be a better alternative. Certainly we know that in 2005, 2010 presidential elections, a pro-Kremlin candidate who became president won majorities in the east and the south of the country. However, with beginning of the conflict in the Donbas, Ukrainians came to understand the threat that the Kremlin posed and treasured their independent identity more I believe.

I think that's evidence I can see from the electoral data because Poroshenko won his election with majorities in provinces in all parts of Ukraine, and then Zelenskyy won in 2019 with majorities, I think in almost every province of Ukraine. So we know that Ukrainians believe in their country overwhelmingly, as much as any country and more than many today. And maybe we can thank Vladimir Putin for some of that increase in understanding and the value of being Ukrainian to the extent that it also means not being ruled by the Kremlin. What the Russians will do in occupied territory is something that should be protested against when they're kidnapping children. I've already said, I think that their lies to their people are dangerous to everybody, the lies to everyone under the control of Russia, of the Kremlin.

The Kremlin is telling the Russian people that there is... In order to cover themselves for having made a tactical... a major, not a tactical, a major strategic error in starting this war that they thought would be a cheap victory, but it proved to be a very costly campaign for Russia. Their starting this full-scale war in February '22 was a mistake. So they want to cover that mistake. They don't want people to blame them for making a mistake. So what they do is they have been telling people for three years now in their country that the West has this existential threat to destroy Russia. And that's a lie. But it tells the Russian people that they should make any investment necessary in militarizing their nation to conquer Ukraine.

That lie is an extremely dangerous one, because it means that even if Putin died tomorrow, people who succeed him would be tempted to build on what the country already understands, which is that they have to be ready to tighten their belts, to stop using their productive capabilities to help human welfare, but use it instead to build a destructive army capable of threatening and enslaving whole nations that border Russia. And that is, to me, the greatest danger. The fact that they are of course doing that also in occupied Donbas and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia I'm sure that bothers by Ukrainian friends, particularly because those are their countrymen. But to me, those are human beings. And the human beings also in Russia who are beings told this terrible lie that tells them not to ask their government to provide things to help them enjoy their lives and live better lives with their families, but that their continued existence depends on militarizing themselves and making sacrifices to build a conquering army is a frightening thought. If we have peace tomorrow, it will still need some time to undo it.

Viktoriia Shcherba:

Yes. As we are wrapping up the episode, I have a final question for you. What is something you wish we would have asked you but we didn't?

Roger Myerson:

On the NATO guarantees, you didn't ask me about the op-ed that I wrote in the Kiev Post in December 2014 about urging the United States should freely offer the Russians a promise that Ukraine would never join NATO. But, and but is the important part, but interpret the Budapest Memorandum as having given the United States a commitment to give Ukraine the large-scale military assistance that it then in 2014 needed to defend its eastern provinces against this Russian sponsored aggression, the subversion of their territory. I wish you'd asked me about the Budapest Memorandum, which is now largely forgotten. The Ukrainian nation came into existence with a large fraction of the old Soviet nuclear arms based on its territory, which meant it became a major nuclear power at birth. And in 1994, under pressure from the United States and Russia, the Ukrainians agreed to give up those nuclear weapons and to send them back to Russia, give them to the Russian Federation in exchange for a promise by the Russians and the Americans and the British to guarantee Ukraine's sovereign independence.

The Russians clearly have violated that because they've invaded Ukraine. But how much tangible assistance was the United States committing itself to by that agreement was ambiguous. It was a masterpiece of diplomatic verbiage that could be construed as saying to the Ukrainians that America would help them defend themselves against Russian aggression. But it could also be construed to US senators as saying, "No, no, it doesn't commit us to doing anything."

So I wish that we had interpreted, we Americans had interpreted as committing ourselves to give massive military assistance to Ukraine when there was clear and immediate threat to their sovereign territory. And that could have been a way of the US guaranteeing Ukrainian independence in a way that could not be construed as a threat to Russia, because that treaty was co-signed by the Russian Federation, and it was part of a deal to give the Russians a regional nuclear monopoly to guarantee that they wouldn't have a neighbor who had nuclear weapons. So Putin couldn't have used US assistance under the Budapest Memorandum as propaganda to mobilize his people. But he could use NATO membership for Ukraine as a propaganda item to mobilize his people.

So we had instead the worst possible combination of a promise... an assertion actually, in Bucharest in 2008, again, there was an assertion that Ukraine would eventually join NATO by the United States and its allies. But there was no such membership, so the Ukrainians got no real guarantee of any assistance at the. And yet Putin got something that he could use to tell the Russian people, "As long as Ukraine is an independent nation, there's a threat. It may become part of a hostile military alliance against us." So we could have talked about that. The Budapest Memorandum, I guess it's now in the dustbin of history, as somebody used to say, but it had real potential and I wish we had used it aggressively to reinterpret... we Americans had reinterpreted it as obligating us to something that the Ukrainians believed we were obligating ourselves to in 1994.

Viktoriia Shcherba:

We would love to thank Professor Myerson for this amazing podcast. Your insights are very valuable to our audience.

Isabella Nascimento:

Yeah, thank you very much, Professor.

Roger Myerson:

Thank you for having me. It's great to be here at the University of Chicago with you.

Isabella Nascimento:

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Root of Conflict featuring Professor Roger Myerson. This episode was produced by Isabella Nascimento and edited by Megha Viswanath. Thank you to our interviewers, Victoria Shcherba 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: