Reema Saleh:

Hi, this is Rima and you are listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast. You are listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the study in resolution of global conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

What mental models underpin international development and how do they hold back actors working in conflict affected countries? In this episode, we speak with Dr. Mareike Schomerus, author of 'Lives Amid Violence' and Vice President of the Busara Center, one of the first behavioral science research labs in the global south. Drawing from 10 years of research by the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium, she argues that the international development sector in its current form often fails to take into account the experiences and perspectives of people living in violent contexts. And she offers a new language for transforming development in the wake of conflict. We talk about the colonialist thinking that underpins international development, how the sector's unflinching faith in causality creates blind spots for practitioners, and what it means to envision this space anew.

Hannah Balikci:

The following is a PSA from the University of Chicago's Pearson Institute for the study and resolution of global conflicts presenting the Pearson Global Forum. A thin line divides human realities. The fundamental desire for simple human existence remains the same, yet reality is dramatically disparate for many. Join us on Friday, October 20th to hear from global experts as they discuss the topic of disparity and how it impacts people around the world in places like Iran, Afghanistan, and Mexico. This in person and virtual event is free and open to all. You can find more information at the pearsonglobalforum.org. Thank you.

Reema Saleh:

Hi, my name is Reema. I'm a Pearson fellow and a student at Harris.

Julia Higgins:

Hi there. My name is Julia Higgins, I'm an MPP student at Harris as well, and also a Pearson fellow.

Umama Zillur:

Hi everyone. My name is Umama Zillur. I'm also a student at Harris and a Pearson fellow.

Mareike Schomerus:

And hi, I'm Mareike Schomerus. I'm a visiting lecturer at Harris and also Vice president at Basara.

Reema Saleh:

Alrighty. So can you tell us a little more about why are you here this quarter at Harris? What courses are you teaching?

Mareike Schomerus:

So this is my third time that I'm teaching at Harris in the spring term, and I teach two courses this time. I teach qualitative research, which is of course within Harris, a little bit of a novelty since this is not a very qualitative environment. So I think it's one of the few courses that you can take at Harris where you learn qualitative research and get to do a little experimentation with your own qualitative interests and approaches and so on. And the second course I teach is a hybrid course that we teach across Busara, which is my home organization in Kenya and here. Where we have people design a behavioral experiment, and the actual part that we do in class is the so-called formative research. So where people set up the first round of research where they're trying to understand what really is the context like in which they're going to implement this hypothetical experiment. And so we do a little bit of data collection so people can actually experience what it's like to design an interview instrument, analyze qualitative formative data, and then how to use that for experimental design later on.

Reema Saleh:

Can I ask what first drew you to this intersection of behavioral science and conflict studies?

Mareike Schomerus:

Yeah, it piqued my interest probably by now six, seven years ago. In fact, after I did a lot of ethnographic field work, very qualitative field work in conflict resolution and peace protest and armed groups and so on. And it really became very clear to me from reading more and more about behavioral science and from cognitive biases and cognitive processes, and primarily actually the point where it becomes very clear that people start remembering things very differently as time passes and change their own recollection of what it is that brought them to a particular place. And which I had seen a lot happening if you do qualitative conflict research, you see that, of course you see people changing their stories and so on. And I thought, I wonder what that is. And I've read a lot more on behavioral science and then thought, I think qualitative conflict studies is really missing a big perspective or it doesn't engage more with behavioral science.

Because behavioral science, at the time even more so than now, sits very separately, sits as a mainly quantitative discipline still, even though it's also hugely qualitative and anthropology is often very behavioral and so on. And so I started looking into what kind of research could be really useful to try and interlink a very serious qualitative perspective, which is what I bring, and a very serious behavioral science perspective. And it turned out there wasn't a lot of that around. And so I set up a little research project to try a particular approach, which we then implemented, and that's kind of how I ended up at Busara.

Reema Saleh:

That's amazing. Can I ask how that's informed? We'll be talking a lot about your book, 'Lives Amid Violence'. How did that inform or what inspired the book project in the first place?

Mareike Schomerus:

So the book project was inspired by a very technical requirement. I was the research director of a big research consortium, the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium, which ran for 10 years. Was hosted at ODI in London, funded by, at the time, the Department for International Development, which is the UK's development secretary really at the time was called DFID. And it was looking into that seemingly very simple question of how people survive in situations of violent conflict. And survivor being quite a holistic category, not just security wise, but also in terms of really income, food, services, health services, education, things like that. How do they manage in these situations?

And I took over as the research director for my predecessor in 2017, something like that. And then the project came to a close in 2021, and the final deliverable for the final research director was to step back and answer the big question. Say, well, if we do 10 years of research with really dozens of partner organizations all over the world, we have over 150 outputs from that particular research consortium. All very specific on many, many different aspects of this question in many nuanced ways.

But really what is a big picture answer that you can give about what you learn? Which is actually a really tricky question to answer. You have a huge amount of material from very, very different methodological perspectives, very different voices and so on. And so that task fell to me as the research director. And I guess the only way that I could answer that question really was to do something very different. I wouldn't have been in a position to really summarize the research. It's too nuanced, and I make that point very often in the book that really each individual piece of research stands alone. And if you're interested in a particular part of this broad range of questions, you would really need to go and read the research on this.

So I wanted to look at patterns of insights that arise from this. And the patterns of insights that were really striking to me were that over these 10 years, these many outputs, the recommendations that almost every piece of research has to the policy makers, decision makers, program designers and so on, were very, very similar. They hardly ever seemed to change. And yet also alongside the hardly ever change in recommendations, hardly anything else ever seemed to change either. And so I thought, well, why it? Why can you keep saying the same things over and over again and nothing seems to shift in this? And so that's my inspiration for what the book actually ended up being, was recognizing these big patterns.

Reema Saleh:

That makes sense. Can I ask where kind of the title came from originally

Mareike Schomerus:

The title of the book? So 'Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict'. So 'Lives Amid Violence', I think came to me quite early because it was very clear that I wasn't going to write actually primarily about the people whom the research was about, the people who were living in situations of violence. But also a lot about the people who were on the other side, on the implementing side, on the side of trying to deliver development programs and so on to support those other lives of people who were living amidst violence. And so I thought that was a phrase that caught both the fact that everyone's lives gets wrapped up in these situations and in often very unhelpful ways.

But it also, I really wanted to have an emphasis on this understanding that amid violence lives also go on, they continue. They are often brutally interfered with, interrupted sometimes, but remains really crucial to pay attention to how people live. And I think that's particularly crucial for the people who then make decisions over how to support those people. Because I would argue that very often their decisions are a bit misguided, because they interpret things in a particular way that is not very helpful.

The second part of the title, which is a bit grandiose, transforming development in the wake of conflict, I actually mentioned that in the book that I had to say that out loud quite a few times to myself to see whether that sounded completely ridiculous. Because everything that has transforming in the title is a little bit cringe worthy to me, but it's also important to highlight what direction the book is going in. And so from a publisher's point of view, it's very important that people know that this is about international development and that this is in the wake of conflict.

So it doesn't do that division between we're now in conflict and we're now post conflict, which is usually the jargon that is used. And the transforming part, I think the publisher, who was very supportive of this title, felt that it is a book that called for a genuine transformation. And that it's quite serious about this despite the fact that I find it quite hard to let the word transforming come out of my mouth. But it is, it's asking for a real shift. And so that's how the title comes about. But negotiating a title is also not something that the author does alone, I'm just saying. So I think my very original title was a lot more creative, which would've never made it to the bookshelves.

Reema Saleh:

Oh, can we know what it is?

Mareike Schomerus:

Yeah, I don't remember embarrassingly, I shouldn't have said that. But it was definitely something more creative.

Reema Saleh:

Oh, we'll definitely follow up. We won't. No, but to me, I admit it always struck me as, because I feel like the book writes a lot about, it's hard to define when a conflict starts or when it ends for people. So it kind of captured that for me.

Mareike Schomerus:

Great. I'm delighted to hear. So it does work kind of.

Reema Saleh:

So I think we're definitely going to get through what needs to be transformed about development and how we think about aid, state building kind of things. But first, can you walk us through what is a mental model? And what about the mental model underpinning international development needs to change?

Mareike Schomerus:

So this is exactly where I landed when I looked at all these many outputs and recognized this pattern of recommendations were always the same. And they were basically in one way or another, every recommendations were saying, you have to work being politically aware, things have to be context specific and context appropriate, and any planning needs to be flexible and it needs to work with local realities. And I mean, these are very common policy recommendations that you see and yet they never really changed. And so I thought, well, why is that? And as I was trying to understand, literally letting it emerge. People can't see me, but I'm grasping things in the air with my hands, which is very much actually a reenactment of how this process felt like. Because I was sitting often and I was walking around talking to myself and trying to really grasp what it was that I was seeing.

And at some point it was very, very clear to me that what I was seeing was a mental model underpinning these international engagements in conflict situations that wasn't ever going to be appropriate for what the realities were. And so what that means is, so a mental model is something that we all have in multiple layers and multiple versions, which is basically our go-to, often subconscious or unconscious explanations of how things work. So you fall back onto, you make sense of the world through the interpretative patterns that you have ingrained in yourself based on your personality, based on your background, your upbringing, your culture, your surroundings, your learnings and whatever. And you just apply that very snappy and say, "Okay, this is why these things are in a particular way."

And so mental model aren't, it's not correct to say this is your way of thinking because it's much more visceral than that. If it was your way of thinking, it would be much easier to say, "Oh, let's articulate this thinking and now let's rethink," which is how this is often done. But a mental model is deeper than that. It's the blood that flows through that thinking where people say, "But I'm deeply convinced that there's one particular way in which something works and the mechanisms through which something works." And the way I unpack that in the book is through looking at what some of the major approaches are in these situations of violent conflict. And why in a way they never really change in their approaches despite the calls for being context specific, despite the calls for being politically appropriate and aware and so on.

And how that emerged to me in front of, as I was grasping with my hands in the air for explanations, was that I realized that the language in which international intervention of development speaks about this sounds like you're talking to a bunch of engineers. So it's almost like you're sitting in a room with people who've written a blueprint on how to now create a post-conflict society. And I say this a little bit flippantly, but actually it's not that flippant. It's quite stark.

If you look at the language that's used in this, it's state building and institution building and building blocks and blueprints and pathways. And I mean it's all very, very technical engineering language. And what that does is it really speaks to one mental model, which is the need for certainty. So there's a real deep need I think for people who work in that field to feel somewhat able to say, "No, we're on top of this situation. We're in control of this situation. We have a plan, we have sequencing."

So yes, clearly we need to, this is a situation that was, for example, a peace deal has been signed, so now we need to go into the institution building and we need to stabilize this. Again, stabilization, like build a foundation that can't slide. Very, very architectural. We need to stabilize this. We need to build these institutions. These institutions then need to become accountable. They need to then start acting on behalf of their citizens, at which point the citizens then stop contesting the legitimacy of these institutions. And that's how you bring about a peaceful society.

And that mental model of this engineering mindset, I think for starters is really misleading. The second part of the mental model is that ultimately all of this thinking that happens and the many nuances in, for example, a state building effort and so on, really speaks to an idea that deeply believes that economic growth in one way or another will solve all problems, is completely necessary to solve very complex social problems. And that also with the idea that economic growth and economic resources is the most important thing for people, everything becomes a transactional relationship rather than a social relationship where people maybe build an economic transaction on top of a social relationship.

The mental model of international development flips it and says, "Well, the most important thing for people is resources, material wealth." And that's interesting because we see time and time again that this very established idea of the hierarchy of needs, where always the economic need is the big foundation of the pyramid gets flipped in situations of violent conflict. Or contestation where actually people put other needs, where they forego economic opportunities for social connections, for example. And this mental model that ultimately, in really bare bones words, it's the mental model that informs still the idea of homo-economicals, the rational driven by the aim to get the best economic decisions done and gain the most benefit from these decisions. That is still a mental model that underpins a lot of the analysis of these contexts.

Umama Zillur:

So on that train of thought, and just maybe looking at a more long-term view of this, all of this I think is... I mean, my original question was, what's wrong with international development and its relationship to colonialism and ongoing conflict? But I want to rephrase that and ask you, do you think the relationship is a prominent part of the development economic discourse currently? And then unpack why that link or the fact that the link is missing is an issue.

Mareike Schomerus:

The relationship to colonialism. So I think that well, colonialism had has at its heart the same mental model. And so let me nuance that a little bit more what I mean by that. So colonialism, I think often when people speak about it, they think of it actually weirdly, again, the mental model of engineering and administrative things. So very often when people speak about decolonization, they think about the administrative parts of this. The first wave of debate on de-colonialization was countries becoming independent. So actually a very technical administrative act. And now I think the debate has moved on, luckily, a lot more and has realized that there's also deep thought patterns, deep prioritizations of what kind of knowledge is important, what kind of knowledge is even readable to people. And sometimes readable quite literally, whatever is written down still holds a lot more power than something that is spoken and so on.

And so I think the relationship that I see between colonialism and these mental models of international development is, I guess has a couple of elements to it. One is economic growth, trying to get the best economic gain out of a situation. I would argue it's really profoundly part of colonial thinking. I would also argue that the idea that you can put people's experiences into certain boxes of administrative units is also part of a colonial... Colonial administration, that's how they administered people, by segmenting them by populations, segmenting them, even within one person there would be segmentation of what this one person was about. So it wasn't a very holistic view of humans, not a very holistic view of human experience. And I think in so many ways, development replicates that.

So you have that replicated through the various sectors. It's very hard for me to really understand how you can separate the health sector from education or how can you separate health and water and sanitation. These two are very intertwined, yet they're completely different sectors in international development. The second way I think, in which or third way maybe in which this is replicated, is in this really, really difficult subject of targeting. Of how NGOs, non-governmental organizations actually deliver their programs to people.

They always do this by identifying categories of people that are most, in their view, most eligible or most needy, most in need of what they want to implement. Which sounds like exactly the right way of doing it, because it kind of seems very commonsensical. You identify who's in need and then you deliver your program. But in this categorization, actually a lot of thought patterns I think continue that take people out of the entirety of the holisticness of their being, their nuances into a very, very narrow identities that aren't necessarily reflective of how people feel.

And the work I used there is from a colleague who worked in Uganda a lot, and he gave us an example that in Uganda, a lot of programs would target female headed households. So women who were the head of the family for whatever reason, and they were often targeted with a very particular set of programs, non-food items, so wash basins and soap, and sometimes also food items and so on. But his argument was that a lot of them were actually embroiled in land conflicts, and they were trying to battle the right for their land, which they had lost. And really what they needed was legal advice, legal support. And so while they took the non-food items, it didn't really gel with how they themselves experienced themselves.

And so this fragmentation of identities into these very operationally, easily implementable categories, I think also is very much part of this relationship between international development and colonialism. Because that was an element of control during colonial times was to say, "Let's segment people. Let's put them into categories." I mean, categorization along administrative lines was a pretty popular tool in colonial administration. So that I think indeed would be one of those mental models that categorization is a necessity to implement anything. That is quite a challenging one.

Umama Zillur:

Thank you. That's a really helpful way to look at that link, I think. And do you think that that link is now a prominent part of the discourse when it comes to international development?

Mareike Schomerus:

I think it depends. It can be and then it also isn't. So it can be, let's start with a more constructive one. I think it can be because, well, weirdly, I think, sorry, let me rethink how I start this because this is complicated stuff. So it can be when people make it visible that some of these thought patterns still continue. That is definitely, I think, very helpful. I think it's very helpful that there's definitely an awareness now that the model of implementing programs that are designed in New York or Washington, Brussels or London or Oslo or wherever, and then they've flown into any other part of the world and implemented in similar ways. I think that is very much established now that that's really not the way to do it.

It gets more complicated in many other ways. The first way in which it gets more complicated is that of course a lot of the debate continues to be held along the lines of categories. So weirdly, and this is what's so fascinating and so frustrating and also necessary to have about this identity debate. I would say that the debate that says, we need to really make sure that the discourse on international development isn't held by western people, but weirdly that still works with categories. Really, that is still quite an unnuanced and quite clunky way of actually thinking about what does collaboration between people need to look like. Collaboration, that from where I stand, has to rest in the realization that some countries are where they are right now because they took from other countries. So I think that's, for me, that's a very, very good platform for which to have that debate.

The then very categorical debate is trickier, because on the one hand I understand it, I can even support it. On the other hand, I find that it does replicate some of these patterns that aren't particularly helpful. But that's a difficult debate to have. I think we need to engage on the substance of this, and we need to try and figure out ways in which some of these power relationships become very visible. How identity-based directions are guided in certain ways in certain traditions that replicate power patterns. All of that is hugely important. But I don't know whether we get that far if we are simply doing this based on identities. Because the dirty history doesn't get changed by that, but the future truly has to be collaborative. There's just no other way on this planet, that's the only way that we can work together. So I'm very torn about how to have this in the best possible way.

And then of course, I'm also very aware that based on my own identity, it's tricky for me to be the one to say how this debate should be held. So this is the cycle in which I then get caught up. And then at the same time, I also think it's too important for people not to show up for it. So that then also includes me. So this is really very nuanced and contradictory. But I want to say that also one of the things that I feel is a mental model that's not helpful is to try and get rid of contradiction, which a lot of international development tries to do. It tries to find the one way in which it seems seemingly this is the right way, and that is very problematic. It will always be contradictory. It'll often always be ambivalent, ambiguous. It will feel uncertain and it will be uncomfortable. So in my own learning with this debate, I also try to then remind myself that I truly believe that it needs to be uncomfortable and contradictory. And it often is.

Umama Zillur:

I think it makes sense to be torn about something like this, because it is tricky and it is difficult. I know you touched a little bit about this, but at the core of the two books and just your life's work is that we need to handle the experiences and perspectives of the people living in context of violence and conflict with care. Can you walk us through your vision for how to transform development in the wake of conflict? And what does responsible engagement in these spaces look like for you? What are some of the ways you hold yourself accountable when existing in this space?

Mareike Schomerus:

Yeah, I mean always in incomplete ways, that is I think also true. So what does transformation really look like? Again, I can only, truly I can only speak from my perspective and I can only say that I think it requires an acute awareness of these mental models. It requires an acute almost check-in mechanisms with oneself. And this is where it gets, again, very tricky because sometimes when I talk about this, you can feel a palpable sense in the room where people go, "Oh my God, she wants to sit around the campfire and sing songs." I'm like, "No, this is not a touchy-feely thing. It's really a necessity to understand why you are seeing certain things in the world in the way that you do." To really recognize that that is also shaped very much by, not just by personality, but by background and culture and education and all these kinds of things.

And then take that as a real invitation for self-awareness and say, "But where's my role in this? Why am I pushing for something like this? Is it because my mental model that I fall back on? Is it because it's my sense of this is my seat at the table, so let me take that seat at the table?" So these processes are really important. They have nothing to do with me going and hugging a tree, because they're actually very, very incomplete in a lot of these processes. So that is where I would argue that's where their transformation really needs to start.

And then bringing the perspectives in of the people, again, is one of those seemingly really obvious things to say. And then once you put it into practice, it gets very tricky. So a lot of the times people say, "Well, that requires spending more time with people where you're doing research so that you do better research." That is true, but that doesn't then give me the license to claim that I've now adopted the perspective of someone. It's also true that simply by virtue of someone being from the same country then doing research in the same country, that person isn't necessarily closer to the people with whom they're doing research. Because stratification doesn't just happen along national borders.

So this idea that prospective representation is a straightforward thing by allowing others to speak through you is a little bit simplistic, because the whole point of research is the research creates the knowledge, they become the interpreter. And it's tricky when they start speaking for the people with whom they conducted research, because there is always a translation process. So I would embrace the imperfection there and do by all means everything that is possible. And obviously our research methods are a lot more aware of this now, we have much more participatory methods and so on. But I think it also remains the case that the process of research of someone else coming in and working with people to ultimately extract information about their lives from them, there is always a certain power of relationship in this. And then being the one person who is then able to write that down in a linear story that then somewhere else can read.

So this is I think another moment of embracing contradiction and trying to do the best that you can. And the best that you can, the accountability that you were asking about I think just comes from continuing to check, continuing to reflect on why I have certain perspectives. I grappled with that a lot and really also stopping myself often and taking a step back. And I had a jargon dictionary while I was writing this, and I wrote the first draft and also realized that there were many things that I couldn't explain without the typical international development jargon. So I kept a note and then at the end when it was almost finished, I did a word search of the whole document to try and get rid of the jargon that I really find awful, like beneficiary and all these kinds of things.

But actually, I also realized that very often once I got rid of the jargon, I mean I didn't have the vocabulary anymore. So even being aware of this, that sometimes I use language that I dislike because it's the only way that I can speak about this, because I'm so embedded in this system as well. Is a contradiction that is one to then make visible, but not necessarily one that I can get rid of. So that to me is very important that it will always be imperfect. And I fall on the side of saying, "It's still worth trying with the imperfection." Others fall on the side of saying, "It's not, you shouldn't try that. But that's a good debate to have, I think.

Umama Zillur:

Yeah, I think the love hate relationship with academia is something a lot of people can relate to.

Julia Higgins:

I think this whole conversation really illustrates how insidious colonial legacies are in development work and how complex engaging with these ideas can be. To shift gears a little bit now, I think a theme that really shines through in your writing is the fact that relationships are really crucial to state building and institutional capacity development. Can you walk us through exactly how relationships function as currency in post-conflict settings? And if I recall correctly in the book, you focused on a couple of really interesting case studies in the DRC and Afghanistan.

Mareike Schomerus:

So there's many elements to this. So the engineering mindset of state building is very much based on this idea that you build an institution, and an institution in that image is almost imagined as being quite literally the building. And fill it with administrative processes, which is where this notion of capacity building comes in very strongly. So building a capacity for a country means to train civil servants to do the very technical aspects of their job. I mean, a lot of capacity building is done on spreadsheet training and things like that. Very technical stuff.

And it really overlooks that, of course, institutions always are hardware and the software and that what the building projects very often is very different from what happens inside. And that's true for anywhere in the world. There's the hardware and the software version of the institution. And the common capacity and state building approaches have overlooked that a little bit. And they've overlooked it, because I think as a little sideline, because I think they took Max Weber's ideas about the state a little bit too seriously and a little bit seriously too long over a century, saying, "This is the only way that a state should look." I think that's a tricky one.

But also because the idea of the state in that particular imagery is one of a leveler and a neutralizer. And it really is the idea that the institution should try and counter the social relationships that might've existed in situations where there isn't a democratically elected government, but that's not the format of governance. So this idea of the neutralizer and leveler still underpins this and often is projected as so often these things are in international development into an infinite future. At some point in the infinite future, this institution will function so that it pays equal attention to all citizenry in the country. But when exactly that future will happen, we don't really know.

And yet what we see, of course, that in a lot of situations of violent conflict, the very same structures and dynamics that created the conflict in the first place, and often conflicts are very long-running. They will of course continue once there is a state building effort and humans are very clever. So they will usurp the state institutions to make sure that they function in the interest of the people who held the power before a conflict officially ended. They will make very sure that that continues to be the case.

And so what that also means is that despite institutions being built, there will be continued relationships, and this relationship, state run on relationship is very important. And the example that you're alluding to in the DRC was done by two scholars who did this very interesting work where they unpacked the relationships that provincial governors had with the capital in Kinshasa. And then tested this relationship often based on length of knowing the president and so on against how efficient their provinces were run, their districts were run. And efficiency being measured in the ability to pass legislation and budgetary resources and so on. And that it turns out that the stronger your relationship is, the more efficient you can become.

So relationships are a real capacity builder, of course, in the kind of state building mindset that's the worst version. Because the way I described it, is one way to describe it, the other way to describe it is patronage. And that's the one thing that the idea of the state as a neutralizer and balancer wants to avoid. But it actually is the more efficient way to govern, if you are allowing the inside that relationships are capacity, that they aren't just something that needs to be neutralized and controlled away, but that they can be a real engine.

And that's very tricky because of course these relationships are often held amongst elites. And the international state building effort wants to make sure that the elites don't run the country to their own interests only. But that's again, one of those contradictions that requires a little bit of unpacking in each needs context. Now, is it ultimately maybe better for the populations that are removed from the elites, if the elites feel secure in the resources they have access to, and actually it is better for ordinary citizens? Or is it ultimately better for ordinary citizens if the state building efforts continue to try and break the grip of elites on the state resources, possibly then continuing battle for authority and resources and ultimately continuing conflictual dynamics?

Julia Higgins:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really interesting to think about relationships as a tool to pull us out of this infinite future that you've referenced and into more of a concrete present. Very interesting.

So again, to pivot to a little bit of a different topic here, in your previous work you've engaged pretty extensively with the violent conflict in Northern Uganda, between the government and the Lord's Resistance Army. And in the context of that work, you and your research team applied the concept of a mental landscape, which I think is pretty closely intertwined with the mental model framework that you were describing previously as well. But essentially how I understood it was that it is how people perceive, interpret, and experience their circumstances today and how that can be shaped by legacies of war or violence in their particular setting. So I'm wondering, can you speak a bit how you utilized these mental landscapes to contextualize your work in Uganda specifically, and also how you apply that framework to other conflict settings?

Mareike Schomerus:

Yeah, so the mental landscape conflict as a concept is a concept redeveloped through this work. And it really came out of this realization that was quite confusing, that some of our survey work showed that even in situations where the hard indicators had measurably improved for people. So it was measurably more secure, there weren't any more attacks. People were walking at night on the street, there were streets where there hadn't been streets before. People were growing crops that needed longer to mature, all the kind of indicators that you would look at to see whether a security situation is improving. And so even in situations where we saw that, when you ask people whether their lives were improving, they were saying, "Well, no, they're not."And this was actually one of the moments where I thought, this is where we need to bring in behavioral science into this conflict study, because we don't get far enough by asking people because it's confusing. The answer is confusing, contradictory yet again.

And so we basically went in with this question to say, is there something specific about people who have been through a very multi-layered experience of conflictual dynamics, of vulnerability, of uncertainty that makes it harder for them to experience their own recovery? If that's how you want to call it. Because arguably, if you can't experience your life getting better, then it's not getting better. It doesn't matter whether I tell you 10 times that "No, your situation has improved." And so that's when we used people's own stories of...

We didn't even use their own stories of conflict. We asked a group of people whether they could tell us something that was important to them or that happened that was important to them during the time of the conflict. And then we asked another group of people whether they could tell something that was important to them two weeks ago, very, very recently. Because you have to think very, very carefully of how you talk about these things in an ethical way. And then we asked people to make decisions through some very established behavioral games on altruism and their risk preferences and so on. And we saw that even on this tiny little difference of asking people to situate a particular memory, and not everything that people talked about who talked about the time of the conflict was specifically about the conflict. That there was a noticeable difference in how they made decisions.

And so that's where the concept of the mental landscape was born, because we then did a lot of qualitative interviews as well. And it's very clear how people carry many, many layers of memories and sense-making with them at all times. And some of them are contradictory again. And we know, I mean, there's a lot of very quantitative research done on the question of whether the experience of violence changes your behavior and your preferences. But to me, that question is almost too narrow. So I wanted it to be a little bit wider, and I thought, but it's more than the experience of a particular violent act. It is your individual memories, your communal memories. It is your own experience of being able to access a particular resource or not.

So a continued experience of marginalization, which you then might explain through one of your individual memories, so it becomes reinforcing. So it's really complicated. And it also changes, because if somebody, for example, has a religious faith, they then interlace their own sense-making a lot with their religious faith. So it's very complex, changeable, movable landscape that really has seasonality. Like every landscape has, where sometimes the mountain looks very gray on a day, and then the next day it looks very green.

And I find this a very helpful way of thinking about this, that moves us away from the much more bare bones perception survey. Which basically asks people, how do you perceive your situation to be and demands of them to give you a snapshot of what it is in that particular moment. And this mental landscape where you also then say, "But what are some of your communal memories? Why do you think this is the way things are for your community? Why do you think this is the way things are for you? What kind of also disappointments have you had, for example, with generations of international development programs?" Who very often come in and offer a lot of hope and a lot of promise of a better, again, future somewhere in the far, far future. Which then cannot deliver this?

So you have an added layer of people being permanently disappointed and needing to preserve for themselves their sense of hope. So they become very reluctant often to engage in the next round of program. And because hope is a precious currency, you can't spend it freely because you need it to keep going. That things will ultimately be okay, is really an important thing to carry with you. So the mental landscape one is trying to nuance a lot more what prior was only ever captured in really quite dry perception surveys. And tries to very explicitly what I've mentioned earlier, bring the many, many elements of humans back together in a way that is still graspable.

This is also my problem with, even though I kind of came up with this concept as a mental landscape, and I need to work on it and nuance it much more. I also find it really difficult, because of course, at the same time, it still tries to capture, give a catchy term to something that is very, very nuanced and multilayered and complex and changeable. So while I'm trying to say, "No, there's a lot of fluidity and it's nuanced," I'm also saying, "And here's the label, the one label that makes it really comfortable to talk about it." So again, it's tricky, but if it helps towards an understanding, even in this one element of communal versus individual memories, then I think that's already much, much more than we have right now.

Julia Higgins:

Yeah, much more comprehensive.

Umama Zillur:

In 'Lives Amid Violence', in one section you describe the success of peace building as being presented as an Excel table that shows the number of attendance at a meeting. I think that this really captures how much of the current practices surrounding evaluation of development projects really miss the mark. Because we want to quantify impact and change, we only look for things that are quantifiable and in the process, what ends up happening is we're missing rich insight into actual impact. Whether that's positive or negative. So I want to ask, how can those working at the intersection of evaluating peace building efforts strike a balance between measuring progress with precision and avoiding the flattening of personal stories and structural narratives? And that's already a long question, but I want to add onto that. Do you think the broader friction between qualitative and quantitative research feeds into this reality?

Mareike Schomerus:

So I want to preface what I say by saying on any of the points that I make, there are always good examples. And I say that because I know that a lot of organizations also do fantastic work. And wouldn't measure their peace building efforts in attendance at meetings, but many also do. And a few good stories don't make an approach a successful thing. So this is very, very important. And often obviously people come back to me and say, "But this particular program, it did great work." I'm like, "Yes, I don't dismiss that at all. But there are still underpinning mental models that primarily then make many more programs look in this other way."

So how can organizations counter this? I don't know whether the burden is necessarily just on the organizations, because this is another thing that I write about, and this is a very established area of discourse in international development. Is the cognitive dissonance with which many international development professionals operate, where they implement things, do things, count attendance at meetings so that they can put it on the M&E spreadsheet, while knowing that that's ultimately meaningless.

It's really, I think, not to be underestimated how many people work with that permanent cognitive dissonance, because they also believe that the small parts of some of the efforts ultimately are a good thing to do. Or a lot of people also buy themselves some freedom by delivering the spreadsheet based M&E and say, "Well, once that's okay, nobody will look too closely in what I'm doing, so here's what I'm actually doing." And that I think is quite constructive. So that cognitive dissonance is not to be underestimated.

But I also think that the main responsibility on changing this isn't really necessarily just with the implementing organizations, because all implementing organizations look to their funders. And the funders will often request these things, will often want reassurance. And there it is again, the mental model of certainty and reassurance, and also of that tricky bit of trust. How much do they trust the implementing organizations to really do something constructive? They get a bit of reassurance from seeing the spreadsheet in which the attendance was marked. And that's complicated to change, because the funders then sit in the treasury of donor countries and ultimately at some point in time get called in front of parliament and say, "This is why we're spending money on this."

And there's work on this political narrative that needs to really change in this, which is that the idea of the money that is built as foreign aid isn't money that is so directly improving people's lives. But it's really a political tool of the donor countries as well. And once that narrative would be shifted towards that, then it would be much easier to account for it in parliament, and a lot of these slightly performative practices might change. So a lot of this I think needs to change also in the donor implementing relationship.

And then I forgot now the second part of your already very long first question, but just remind me.

Umama Zillur:

How does the broader friction between qualitative-

Mareike Schomerus:

How I forget? How could I forget that question? So the interesting thing is, the friction for me is not as frictious as it might sound to you. Because for me, no method is perfect and they all need to speak to each other. And despite the fact that I'm a qualitative researcher, I'm really no purist on this. And I really think of the way I teach qualitative research is to say there are certain questions and certain types of answers that you can only elicit through certain kinds of methods. And some of them are very suitable for just quantitative approaches, and it's very helpful to have a quantitative answer to establish obviously the scale of a phenomenon and things like that. But that's not particularly valuable if you don't then also pay attention to saying, "Well, why do these things happen?" And even in the quantitative work continue to highlight that this doesn't yet help us with understanding the nuance.

So the two methods really speak to each other. And so for me, that divide actually, despite the fact that I am quite at home in the qualitative methods, that's actually quite a helpful contradiction rather than a friction. Because it also allows these broader questions that need to be asked about, when is knowing the scale actually important? Is knowing the scale part of a political theater that allows for the very quick soundbitey, election driven arguments and policies? If that's the answer to this, then that's a very, very useful insight to have and say, "But then we need to change that that's what people want to hear." And at the same time, we can say, "But when is something that we know for a fact is only been experienced in a particular way by one person," because we only ask this one person. When is something like that so powerful and resonant that it can actually change people's minds more broadly, and it's completely irrelevant whether this is a phenomenon experience by one person or by 2 million people? That to me then recreates exactly the humanity that we talked about.

But the two need to speak to each other, need to work in tandem with each other. And they also, as philosophical approaches really benefit from having a conversation with each other. We wouldn't have had the kind of insights that we had without both a quantitative survey and then a lot of qualitative and ultimately also some experimental work, and without a lot of conversations between people. This is the other thing that's always underestimated. Research is not a lonely undertaking. It becomes a lot better if you speak to each other.

Reema Saleh:

So what are the biggest takeaways that you think policymakers should take away from this book? And what should we have asked you in our hour together?

Mareike Schomerus:

What are the biggest takeaways? So I would say this idea of a takeaway is a very, very unhelpful mental model, because it always... No but it's, I know everyone's laughing and I'm laughing at myself, but it's true. Because ultimately it again tries to head us towards some sort of certainty, some sort of nugget of insights, some sort of solid ground on which to work. I had a one-hour conversation and I walk out with five takeaways, which is exactly the kind of thing that is really unhelpful because you can't condense this complexity endlessly. You can't endlessly synthesize.

So actually, I would say that a good takeaway is one where everything feels a bit unsettled. So not one in the lines of recommendation and, "The government should do this, and the implementers should do this." But in the line of, "Wait a second, what am I listening to? Why am I doing the work that I'm doing? What can I contribute? What can I not contribute? What fulfills me in this that then might become helpful to others? What fulfills me and might not be helpful to others?" I think are really useful questions to ask. And continuing to ask oneself, "Why do I believe that things work in the way they do? Why do I fall back on certain explanatory patterns? Why are they so ingrained in me?"

So the main takeaway is uncertainty and contradiction, but that's a really, really tricky thing to get your head around. And it feels weirdly unsatisfying when people walk out of an event and go, "Well, that was a bit fluffy. Well, she didn't really tell us what to do." People very often ask me, "So what's the solution?" I'm like, "Yeah, that's the mental model, the solution." How could there be one solution? These are complex, long, deeply rooted thing. There isn't one solution beyond continued engagement and learning and discussion and realization and so on.

Reema Saleh:

I feel like it almost reminds me of, there's a Susan Sontag quote that often comes back. "The only good answers are the ones that destroy the questions," it kind of reminded me of that. But I don't know, it's a scary thing. How do you even know what is underpinning your own mental model? How do you go beyond just rethinking it?

Mareike Schomerus:

It's very scary. It's very scary to me, and it was very, very hard for me to write this and to also say, "No, this is really what I think. This is actually how I think about these things." Because it's very clear to me that some people will really like it and others will think this is really naive. I had a comment from someone who said, "But your whole idea that this is not about economic growth unless redistributed properly, otherwise nobody can benefit. But don't you understand that that means some people will have less?" I'm like, "No, I do understand. That's the whole point of redistribution." So it's not as if I make some naive suggestions here, but I do understand completely that for some people, this idea that deeply the mental model isn't always applicable to every concept, it's very, very challenging.

And I catch myself out all the time. I almost would've given you five takeaways here because I'm so conditioned for this as well. And obviously my own mental models can be ripped apart by someone else on a daily basis. So it does feel very scary, and it feels also, I don't know, the way I then always think about this is to say, some people listen to me and go, "Oh, that's a bit naive and cute." And I'm like, "Yeah, but people still talk about trickle-down economics as workable." That's pretty naive and cute. But nobody talks about it in this way. For some reason that's an accepted way of thinking about this. So I'm trying very hard, and I don't mean to suggest that I succeed all the time, but I'm trying very hard to embrace that, that it feels scary and uncertain and that I can be attacked and that I represent contradiction in this. And that that has to be part of this as well.

Reema Saleh:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Mareike Schomerus. This episode was produced and edited by Rima Sala and Nishita Karun. Thank you to our interviewers, Julia Higgins, Rima Sala, Umama Zillur. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Hannah:

Hello, this is Hannah and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You are listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

What does an interrupted democratic transition look like? In this episode, we speak to Dr. Abraham Elbadawi, Managing Director of the Economic Research Forum, and former Minister of Finance and Economic Planning in the Republic of Sudan. In May, Dr. Elbadawi joined us in Chicago at the 6th Annual Reverend Doctor Richard L. Pearson Lecture to discuss Sudan's political transition and economic policymaking. The lecture took place just weeks after violent conflict erupted in Sudan. Fighting between two military factions has forced millions of Sudanese to flee the violence and cast a shadow of uncertainty over Sudan's ambitions to transition to a civilian-led democracy.

Hisham Yousif:

My name is Hisham Yousif. I'm a second year MPP here at Harris. I'm also a Pearson fellow.

Kirgit Amlai:

I'm Kirgit Amlai. I'm a first year MPP and also a Pearson fellow.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

My name is Ibrahim Elbadawi. I am currently the Managing Director of the Economic Research Forum for the Middle East and North Africa. I joined this forum back in 2017. It's a forum of distinguished economists from the region and outside the region. It's really a very interesting forum that produces research and reports on the development and public policy issues. Before that, I was Director of Research at the Dubai Economic Council in Dubai, which is a semi-government institution on policy-oriented economic research. However,

the majority of my professional experience was developed while at the World Bank Development Economic Research Group, which I joined in '89 and then I resigned in 2009 and came back to the region.

I was a graduate of the University of Khartoum and then I had a PhD from Northwestern University and North Carolina State University. So we lived in Evanston for two years and my wife and I and our elder daughter who is with us here, Dr. Lina Elbadawi, she's a medical doctor, was born in Evanston. So it's really a great pleasure to be back here in Chicago. When I was a graduate student, we used to come to the Department of Economics of University of Chicago to attend some seminars and so on. So I've always been impressed by University of Chicago.

Hisham Yousif:

All right, so before we start with the questions, just kind of a framing, we have as our kind of working title, a retrospective on democratic transition interrupted. Many people studying conflict and folks that listen to this podcast, the civilian transition after the toppling of a dictator obviously is the most sensitive and fragile part of the transition. That process of democracy, you got headwinds of entrenched former regime elements, you got the army, you have various civil interests, you have protestors out in the street. So ultimately, we'd like to hear what it was like to be in Khartoum during that transition in a place of sensitive posts during that period, and how we got to where we are today. Obviously, you can't flip on the news without hearing what's going on in Sudan.

But before we get to that, tell us about your upbringing. Where are you from in Sudan and how was it like growing up in good old Sudan?

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

Despite the political instability and what we come to know in our kind of political culture as the Sudanese political syndrome, which are all of these coups and uprising and the alternation between short-lived democracies and long-reigning dysfunctional authoritarian military regimes.

Nonetheless, for my generation, we lived in a country that enjoyed a legacy of strong institutions, educational system, efficient bureaucracy, and to a large extent, a judiciary system and services. I enjoy it actually as the rest of my generation the benefits of meritocracy and being able to study at the University of Khartoum.

Of course, before that I was raised in a medium-sized city in central part of Sudan, in the region of Kordofan, which is a region that reflect the mixture of various cultures at the crossroads of various tribes and communities. And so, I studied my pre-university in my city, in my home city, and then I moved to the capital to study at the University of Khartoum, which was then in the late-70s or mid-70s was considered one of the best learning higher learning institutions in Africa and the Middle East.

For example, one of my professors, he was a physicist who actually became so renowned in his research on astrophysics so much so that he was contributing research to NASA at that time. I remember in the early 70s when I was a student majoring in mathematics at the university, he gave a talk about general relativity. And of course, we didn't understand much, but it tells you about the standard. We have an Arab linguist who was considered one of the major contributor to the history of the Arabic literature and so on and forth. And as well, as of course, economists, because I transferred to economics after my first year in mathematics. So what I was saying is that actually it was really great growing at that time, despite the fact that they were coups and militaries and so on.

The major setback to the Sudanese society and politics as a nation was the coup of 1989. That coup actually reflected or came as a result of a movement that we call in Sudan now an Islamawest. Not an Islamic because actually that movement effectively used the great religion which constitute the face of the majority of the population in order to advance very narrow-minded sectarian kleptocratic gains or agenda. Since then, actually Sudan was never before.

I personally was fortunate because in '89, I got an offer from the World Bank to join the Research Department of the World Bank. So six days after the coup in June 30th, 1989, I left the country. But my colleagues who were there, they really suffered. Because I used to teach at the University of Gezira, which is the second largest university in Sudan. They actually basically mismanaged everything. For example, they thought that they will feed themselves so the country will feed itself, so they destroyed the cotton industry and tried to grow wheat in a climate that's not conducive to high-productivity wheat. That's just one example. This is in one of the major agricultural projects in the country, the so-called Gezira scheme. Two million acres of irrigated agriculture, which was a backbone, so they destroyed that. That's just one example.

The Sudan Shipping Corporation that used to have a thriving maritime transport capacity, they basically sold that. Privatized and sold at fair sale prices to their membership. They did the sort of privatization that very much akin to what happened in the former Soviet Union when the former Soviet Union collapsed and chronic capitalism emerged. They disseminated the army and the civil service so much so that during the waning days of the regime, many of the leaders of that movement, they regretted what they have done. So it was a situation where you have kleptocratic ideologues taking over a country and destroying the elements of vitality in that country and that society.

That is why when the youth who were basically raised under the reign of that regime, 30 years and below, because that regime survived for some 30 years between early 90s up to 2018 when the revolution started in December, 2018. So these very youth who were raised under that regime, they actually they were the one who rebelled against the regime. The stories abound about their bravery and patriotism and their lyrics and literature and all of the wonderful things that the social media have reflected.

So myself, and my generations, who felt really challenged by what this new generation have done and that we failed to do, we've looked to serve in all capacities, including in myself. In my case, I resigned from my, I would say, comfortable position as Managing Director of a major research center based in Cairo to join the transitional government.

Hisham Yousif:

So before we get to that point, it was good timing on the World Bank that you were able to leave right as that regime took hold. A family member has described that period of time of they had an energy, but it was all directed in the wrong place. The privatization or the intensification of the war in the South or like you said, the destruction of the military and then having these parallel militia groups essentially where a lot of young people were conscripted. The 90s was a rough time for the Sudanese population. During that time, where were you headquartered? With the World Bank? Were you in ... ?

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

Headquartered at the World Bank. But like all Sudanese in the diaspora, we were not oblivious about what was happening, the atrocities in Darfur, the religious war in the south and the persecution and brutalization of the political movements and so on. So what we did was, or in fact personally I did, was to join the opposition in my own teams. Obviously as an academic and a researcher writing papers and participating in discussions about how to develop, for example, an alternative economic agenda, national agenda.

Then in 2005, an opportunity came for me to be directly involved from my perspective of the World Bank, which was the peace agreement between the Sudanese People Liberation Movement of the late Dr. John

Garang. With the support of the international community and the US and other members of the UN Security Council, a peace agreement was arranged between the then government of General Omar Bashir and the Sudanese People Liberation Movement. I was invited and asked to actually join the international group to support this process.

So I used to travel to Nairobi where we met with the two delegations, the government and the rebel SPLA movement, and we discussed issues about the future in terms of economic agenda, and the needs and the support that the World Bank and the UN system could provide in terms of technical support, in terms of training officials from both institutions, from the government institutions and their counterpart in the South. And so, that was a great opportunity for me to be involved and the first time actually in my lifetime to visit South Sudan. Because Sudan is a huge country, so I never had a chance to go to the south. The amazing thing is that we were staying for two weeks at the headquarters of Dr. John Garang, SPLM, the Sudanese People Liberation Movement, and then they were cattle rusting in the neighborhood. So we came with a plane from Kenya, but the weather actually, there was a storm, and so the plane could not come back. By the way, this is the same area where Dr. John Garang actually died as a result of an airplane crash.

Hisham Yousif:

That's right.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

It's called New Site. So we spent two weeks providing training and discussions with the technocratic leadership of the Sudanese People Liberation Movement. And so on the way back, the commander of that camp or the base decided to actually escort us with the Sudanese People Liberation Army.

Hisham Yousif:

Oh wow.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

And so, when I went back to Kenya in a town near by the border Sudanese/Kenyan border, that was a kind of an interesting point of discussion with my friends about that it was the first time for somebody like me to be escorted by the Sudanese People Liberation Army, which in the north, or at least the discussion was that this is an army of the rebels and what have you.

Hisham Yousif:

The enemy for a long period of time.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

But it's amazing that it's so unfortunate that the SAOs has to succeed as a result of the policies of the former regime. Because the young man that I was actually sitting by him and he was driving the car was playing Sudanese music, a famous singer, the late Mohammed Wardi, who was very popular in Sudan.

Hisham Yousif:

Oh, wow.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

This is supposed to be the rebel movement that was supposed to articulate grievance and a different culture and so on. So there were so much in common. If, for example, the thinking was right about their Sudan is ultimately a multicultural, multi-ethnic society, and we need this political system that actually accommodate all of these diversity.

Hisham Yousif:

It truly was a lost opportunity, unfortunately. The fact that as Bashir came to power, you were able to jump to the World Bank. That in retrospect is actually a positive thing in the sense that you were able to escape the closed environment that gets created in a dictatorship like that. So when an opportunity presents itself for services to the country, after the regime gets toppled, you were able to create these alternative ways of looking at the economy or rendering services, a thought process that happens outside of the country. And so, you have a very interesting journey here. So describe to us how you came to be in a position to be in the Finance Ministry, the Finance Minister, during such a pivotal moment playing such an important part after Bashir was gone.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

I think obviously part of it is that, as I said, like many Sudanese professionals in the diaspora, I was quite concerned Sudanese first and foremost, but also a quite concerned professional economists who would like to help. Therefore, I was involved in a variety of activities during the 30 years, attending opposition events and presenting papers. And so, there was almost like a consensus about that I was a person that might actually be a good choice to lead the economic agenda, especially since the regime actually destroyed the economy, and it was by its own politics because of the sanctions and the listing of Sudan in the state-sponsored terrorist list. But also because of the mismanagement of the economy and especially the fact that they were unprepared for what we call in Sudan ... sorry, in economics, the sudden stop. The sudden stop is that when you have an economy that depended on a resource, whether capital flows by investors or an actual resource, and suddenly that stream of income stopped.

So what happened was that actually most of the oil more than 70%, or in fact 75% of the oil proceeds come from oil wells produced in the South. So when the South succeeded, they thought the ideologues of the so-called Islamic front who controls the government then, they saw that this is a time for them to exercise full control on Northern Sudan as an Arab Muslim country. But then they didn't really, their economic calculus did not really take into account the huge implications that an economy will suddenly lose this significant resource. That is why that the beginning of the end for them economically. Obviously the revolution was a revolution for dignity and freedom and so on, but it was aided by economics, economic crisis.

And so, when the transitional government or when the agreement, when the revolution succeeded, and the coalition that came out to be known the FFC, the Forces of Freedom and Change, which is a large coalition of freedom forces and political parties and civil society and so on, they decided to form a government for two years in order to prepare the country for elections and democratic transition, but then also in the interim, to manage an economy and to prepare the legal infrastructure for election, for the systems of government and what have you. I was one of those who were considered most qualified to lead that agenda. I'm quite grateful for the opportunity given to me.

I think despite the political instability and the setbacks and so on, the economic agenda that actually I was responsible for as the Senior Minister in charge of the economic sector remains the best hope for Sudan to chart a path of renewal and nation building.

Hisham Yousif:

Sure.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

Right now, I think there is a general consensus that hopefully when we return back to the constitutional process, we will go back to the same agenda, the unfinished agenda.

Hisham Yousif:

So before we actually get to that agenda and that period of time, which is pretty interesting, you also had the military kind of in the background. So one of the interesting things that I think people want to know is how much freedom was there to be able to implement such an agenda during the transition? But how did you come to the attention of the Forces of Freedom and Change, the FFC? How did that transition come about? How were you able to join the government in that direction?

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

Because of my activism during the period, the 30 years period. For example, as early as 1994, I presented a paper about the alternative economic agenda at the Sudanese Democratic Forum then in the 90s. Then in 2011, in Sudan, after the peace agreement and some opening up of the political system, I went to Sudan and there was a major, major conference or workshop organized by the Umma Party, which is one of the largest party in the country. Even though I'm not really an explicit political activist, but I am associated with the Umma Party.

Hisham Yousif:

I see.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

And so, I presented the alternative economic agenda in 2011, which basically constituted the basis for the program that I tried to implement during my reign as a Minister of Finance.

Kirgit Amlai:

Wow, I mean, that's interesting, with years of experience and all you've been able to contribute. I just wanted to, if you could share more back in 2021, the Juba Power Sharing Peace Agreement, which you talked a little bit about it. We know that it was designed to promote peace and democratic transition in Sudan, and evidence showed that provision of effective inclusion of previously marginalized ethnic groups could increase chances of peace. What went wrong? Any hope for this agreement to move forward?

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

Actually, perhaps maybe the intentions were good. The expressed intentions. But really the Juba Peace Agreement entailed much more than meet the eye. The Juba Peace Agreement, it started when I was a minister. It was basically overtaken by the military partners in the government. And it turns out that actually the reason why they pushed for the Juba Peace Agreement was that they wanted actually to reorder or to move the balance of power towards their hidden agenda, which is basically to disrupt the civilian democratic transition by building alliance with the so-called what we call in Sudan freedom fighters. But they're really leaders of militias who proclaim to represent the aspirations of the marginalized people. Of course, they fought and paid heavy prices, their armies, but at the end of the day, they were also military institutions.

They were not sure about their political power base, civilian power base, even in places like Darfur or the Sudan Blue Nile or the Sudan Kordofan. That actually created a dilemma for the Sudanese political discourse because they basically were quite ready to concoct a deal with the military leadership in Khartoum. Except for one leader, all of them, they actually joined the coup that took place in October, 2021. That was a litmus test as to their commitment to the democratic process and to the true aspirations of the people of the marginal

right regions. Unfortunately though, they remain powers to contend with because they have fighting forces and so on.

But I think the future, thinking ahead, the Juba Peace Agreement has to be integrated into a national peace conference in which all the stakeholders, civilian stakeholders, should have a seat in the table. That is the only way to ensure that peace is a democratic peace. Because actually what was happened in Juba was essentially, as in hindsight now we know, was basically a collusion of military institutions, military forces in Khartoum in terms of the army and the rapid support force, which is of course now they are fighting it out in Sudan and in the capital on one hand, and the rebel movements. And so, that actually kind of repeat the experience of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Sudanese People Liberation Movement and the regime of Omar Bashir.

Because when you confined, in fact, I wrote a paper and presented it at the Copenhagen Consensus Forum, which is a forum in Copenhagen concerned with peace and development. I criticized the agreement then of the 2005 as an agreement between two military protagonists who eventually will control the process and exclude the civilian stakeholders who have every right and legitimate right to be part of the process. So I think my answer to the question is that while it was a process that at least silenced fighting, but it wasn't enough, and it should have been integrated into a broader context. Unfortunately, part of the hidden objectives was actually to consolidate the militarization of Sudanese politics

Kirgit Amlai:

Considering your experience over the time both in Sudan and outside of Sudan, in every conflict there are always stakeholders be it within and external. If you could just share more, what has been the role of external actors such as neighboring countries, regional organizations, and international communities in responding to the crisis in Sudan and how their actions have influenced the trajectory of the crisis.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

This is a very important question, I think. The external actors have substantially influenced development in Sudan and will continue to do so. I think if I take the African Union, I think in Sudan and in all of Africa, I think the African Union has come a long way. The African Union actually has now matured and emerged as a respectable, genuine regional organization that actually promotes peace and security and development.

Obviously, not all African countries are democratic, but it is very clear that Africans as a collective body of people and political discourse and culture, I think they are much closer to democracy and democratization through the various interventions like for example, not recognizing a government produced by a coup. That has been very helpful for the case of Sudan after the 25th October, 2021 coup that reversed the political process.

I think the UN system obviously is impaired by the lack of consensus in the Security Council and the role that the autocrats in the Security Council play. Because China and Russia, they basically prioritize sovereignty, national sovereignty, and economic agenda over human rights and political rights and so on. But then also, I think probably the West also has own some other interests that may not necessarily align with these ideals. But by and large, I think the European Union and the US have played a very positive role in supporting the democratic process in Sudan, has provided immensely needed resources to support the program that I have

been responsible for, which I understand I can speak about later. So I would say that the external influence, largely positive.

The Arab countries obviously are not as advanced in terms of embracing democracy and democracy ideal as the African part of our belonging as Sudanese. But nonetheless, I think the more recent role of Saudi Arabia is really very commendable and supportive and neutral. Working with the United States now is, I would say, the only hope for the Sudanese people to help stop this violence. Because right now this violence is not like a

standard civil war. It's actually a high intensity military conflict between two branches of the armed forces. And so, this is the sovereign institution fighting it out. So it does require positive neutral external intervention to stop the war first. Then, we're very heartened actually the vibes that come out of the two sponsors, the recent reiteration of commitment by the Secretary of State, that the ultimate goal is not just to stop the fight, but also to ensure that there is a democratic transition. And I think he went further, which is really very encouraging, that actually the security reform should be under the auspices of the civilian administration. That's really very important.

Hisham Yousif:

Looking at the situation now and see that these two branches, as you call it, of the military fighting it out, they've had control of this situation or at least the government for a while. So while the Secretary of State Antony Blinken talks about having security reforms under a civilian transition, we're kind of a long way from that. Before we get to that point, we need to understand that what happened the last time the civilians were in control and how that kind of unraveled.

And so, there's going to be two questions here. One is going to get us to the role of the civilian institutions, whether it be the Sudanese professional association or the forces of freedom of change and how they did not want to support President Hamdok on the second try when he came back after reversing the coup. But before we even get to that, the period of transition where the Hamdok regime was in power, they were met with a lot of resistance, secret resistance from the army. And one major part of that is that the army has a large stake in the economy. Being a Finance Minister responsible for jump starting this economy, you must have had bumped up against that obstacle.

So can you tell us about that transition period? Because it started off very optimistic, there was a lot of energy and President Hamdok was saying all of the right things and the civilians were moving in the right direction. If you can take us from those first optimistic days to right before the eve of that coup in October and how it all unraveled.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

Actually, as you said, the revolution itself, or what we call in Sudan, the Glorious December Revolution itself, injected huge feeling of optimism about the future of the country. I was going to say tomorrow in my speech about the meeting that I had with some group of staffers from the Congress who actually requested a meeting with me when I came in September, 2019 to attend the annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. I was really pleasantly surprised about their knowledge about Sudan and also about their admiration of the Sudanese youth and their expression of support. That makes me feel quite confident that actually the US and other countries that really wanted Sudan to move forward as an example of a democratic system. And it did happen obviously in terms of the various programs that they supported. So all that, in addition, in fact first and foremost, the support of the Sudanese youth and commitment and so on, not only actually filled us with optimism, but it was in the first place the reason why we flocked to support the new system.

Unfortunately, I think the impact of isolation has actually created a huge impediment to us in the government. As a Minister of Finance, I had to deal with two major sources of headwinds. The first one obviously and the most challenging one is the military itself, as you said. But we thought that we will be able to overcome that through the agreement with the IMF. The staff-monitored program is a famous agreement that usually the IMF try to arrange with countries coming out of conflicts that are highly indebted countries or countries that are highly indebted in economic crisis and dysfunctional kleptocratic system, like what we experience.

One of the clauses in that agreement, which I think was the genesis or the beginning of the motivation for the coup of 2021, was that in June, 2020, I signed a framework agreement with the IMF in which in addition to

the standard economic reform, there was a clause that stipulates that the HIPC program, the High Indebted Poor Countries program that was going to actually provide unprecedented debt relief for Sudan. Actually the HIPC was going to reduce the debt of Sudan from 64 billion or above 60 billion to less than 15 billion. About 50 billion will be relieved. That would constitute one-third of all the resources is spent in the HIPC program since it was established in 1996. So this is a really, really huge deal. This will open up opportunities in terms of investment, in terms of attracting businesses, in terms of a huge transformation in the very well-endowed Sudanese economy.

I thought as a Minister of Finance that will be enough to convince the military. I tried to actually, because as a Minister of Finance, I was a member at a very important forum, which is called the Security and Defense

Council. I was also a member of the Supreme Peace Council. These are all led or chaired by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan as the Chairman of the Council of Sovereignty. We used that as a way of introducing, of course in addition to our normal business at the Council of Ministers, the Civilian Council of Ministers. I was presenting this program as a program that is going to enhance and enlarge the economy, and therefore the share of resource allocation to all functions of government including the military. I was one of those who thought that this will be enough to convince them that you go for the bigger pie in the future in lieu of a smaller pie that eventually will not be sustainable.

I think that particular clause, if you think about it and how two main actors react to it, I think will give you an idea about the challenge and why eventually things collapse. That the military for some reason, they don't seem to be willing to abdicate their hegemony on the economy and the illicit activities in the gold sector, as well as of course the budget, and so on. That is one major impediment. This is because of kleptocracy. I think the Sudanese situation teaches us that when you have a kleptocratic regime that remains in power for so long, it creates a culture of kleptocracy and of kind of political marketplace in which the actors basically corner the resources and their political calculus that let us stay with the current and the future is uncertain. So, they don't really gamble on a prosperous future. They want to retain what they have in a very kind of myopic scheme of thinking.

The other actually impediment was the isolated political class, especially the left-wing Sudanese political class, especially like the Communist Party and the Arab Ba'ath Party and so on, who were actually very influential in the FFC, in the Forces of Freedom and Change. They didn't see the agreement with the IMF, which came by the way as a result of a national vision that actually we developed very carefully as Sudanese economists and Sudanese thinkers, that actually we need to undertake reforms because actually these reforms were not sustainable. The country was spending deficit financing through deficit financing, one third of the budget on fuel subsidies.

I was very embarrassed really when the visiting Minister of Energy from UAE, from United Arab Emirates, who is a very good engineer and told me about the prices of energy in the world, and that Sudan, Iran, and Venezuela where the three countries that provide the cheapest energy prices, sell energy at the cheapest prices in the world. Iran and Venezuela are major energy producing countries, but Sudan, he just mentioned that to

me. I knew about it but the lessons became very clear. How would you actually expect us to support you if we are actually pricing energy at a more costlier and more realistic price than yourself?

So basically we came up with a communication strategy that I tried to preach very widely in Sudan through the radio and television and so on, was that we are not lifting subsidies. We are actually graduating from supporting commodity subsidies to directly empowering Sudanese people. Our two main instruments for that empowerment was a very comprehensive salary review program that basically addressed the distortions in the

salary structure, and also increasing salary in order to actually meet the high expenses, the living expenses. The share of salaries and benefit in the government in Africa was on average about between 8% to 10%. We inherited a share of about 3% to 5%, which shows the impoverishment of the civil service as well as the military rank and file in Sudan. So, we have to address that.

Then also, the Family Support Program, but which I can speak to, but I think your question is geared to different angles. So I would say that you'll find the military on one hand, and supposedly the supporters of the revolution and the political parties, some of them, very opposed to any kind of reform. But nonetheless, of course, even though I left the government, but the program that I was responsible for was implemented later.

Now when I go back to Sudan, or have been going back to Sudan actually recently, everybody I meet in Sudan as well as outside Sudan in the diaspora, almost everybody, especially the young educated people, they would tell me that that was a learning process. But unfortunately that learning process was slow. But everybody now seems to be in agreement about the agenda that we had to do. But unfortunately, the lack of support by the military as well as by some partners in the civilian camp basically created a situation of apathy and undermined the hopes and aspiration, and I think contributed to the coup.

Hisham Yousif:

By the way, I think that's an element of transitions that are not talked about enough in the sense that there is two parallel from what you just told me. There's a mirror ring that happens. So the army and the kleptocratic regime is afraid of economic reform because they don't want to give up what they have now for positive things later in the future.

But there is a parallel to that in the civilian population as maybe isolated elements, left-wing elements of the civilian coalition, that there is a subsidy dependence. There is no way that they can give up the security in such a precarious economic situation to be able to get economic growth, which they see on charts. They really don't understand what that means. And so, being able to get to that democratic transition is not just ballot boxes or economic opening. It's convincing two different elements, kleptocratic and civilians that are concerned about subsidies being lifted. And that's a really difficult challenge that I don't think many people understand that democratic transitions have to go through, and it opens up a lot of difficult questions and difficult decisions, and how can you implement unpopular policies that are good for the long-term that are not good in the short-term that creates an effect.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

If I may very quickly, I would say that-

Hisham Yousif:

Please.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

... we basically were very aware about this dilemma. That's why we introduced the Family Support Program, which by the way was very successful. The international community provided about 800 billion ... 800 million, sorry, $800 million for this program. $400 from the World Bank and the other $400 from the bilateral donors.

The start of this program was based on creating direct links with the families, and if the time allows, I'll tell you a nice story about that when I presented this program at the Security and Defense Council. One of the top leaders, I won't mention his name, but he's now one of the top leaders who are now involved in this unfortunate conflict, asked me about how much we are going to give to the families. I told him that we will be giving about $5, which then would be about 500 Sudanese pounds.

I went on to explain, a family of six will be receiving about 3,000 Sudanese pounds per month. Imagine a family in isolated village in Darfur, that family, the only thing that they remember or they experience vis-a-vis the central government is conflicts and warfare and atrocities and what have you. That event, the head of the family, the woman, the mother or the father receiving the 3,000 will be the most important event for them. And that will be tantamount of a new social contract. That is how I try to present it. You know what that leader told me? He said, "If you really manage to do that effectively," and that was before the Juba agreement, "those rebel movements will not find fighters to fight for them."

So it was really a big deal. But unfortunately, people who were isolated for a very long time, it's hard for them to appreciate the potential. In fact, I will tell you that I had a discussion with the Director of the World Bank, the Regional Director of the World Bank for Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, who actually, he's from Senegal, who was actually transferred from Vietnam. He was the Director of the World Bank office in Vietnam. When I actually explained to him that I'm facing some difficulties, and I believe these difficulties is because of the isolation and some of political activists could mostly really appreciate the potential, he said, "How about actually inviting some Vietnamese officials from this Vietnamese Communist Party to come to the Sudan and explain their experience?" And so, you have a very powerful ruling communist party in Vietnam, and of course before that, in China, who really understood because of the elongated experience they went through, that actually they need to reform the economy and they need actually to have an efficient economy in order to finance the social agenda that they care for.

Hisham Yousif:

And so, that requires certain innovations in communication with the population, certain ways to persuade that this is how we're going to deliver. What happened?

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

What happened, of course, I left the government. Before, I had my own differences with the Prime Minister, but because maybe I was hoping actually to move forward as quickly and on the agenda before, and because maybe the divisions within the FFC itself kind of complicated the process. But right now, I think the main point really is that now the real concern is the military. But actually, If you manage to get an agreement whereby the military, and that's a different story, but the military is cleansed from this Islama west group that actually ignited this conflict in the various place. Also, the other branch of the military, the Rapid Support Force to be integrated into a unified professional military. I think the politics now is fully aligned. I think everybody now, almost everybody now understands that the program that I tried to implement is really the way to go. The Sudanese people themselves now I think will be very much from this experience. Perhaps maybe you have to go through this experience to be able to appreciate the end result.

Hisham Yousif:

Especially the kind of a missed opportunity. So the next time it comes around, I think everybody will seize it. So you said you had differences with the Prime Minister and you left the government. I think, what, about three months before the coup? Is that right?

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

No, I left actually in July, 2020.

Hisham Yousif:

Ah, I see.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

So much later. By the way, I will tell you also that actually after the Prime Minister resigned, I was approached by the military leaders to come as a Prime Minister, and of course I declined.

Hisham Yousif:

Fascinating

Kirgit Amlai:

Wow.

Hisham Yousif:

Go ahead.

Kirgit Amlai:

I mean, we've had a lengthy discussion about economy. I know the issue of subsidy in most African oil-producing countries is like a major, major issue, but it's something that I know we're not really going to delve into, but I just want us to just look at other things. Earlier we were having a conversation how Sudan was once the largest country in Africa, which you also kind of give us some details how the separation affected the economy and so on and so forth. But I wanted to ask, Sudan fought one of Africa's longest civil war. The first one was in 1955 to 1972. The second was the largest that lasted 22 years. With all the things that happened, I just wanted to ask just what are the lessons learned? What were the mistakes that led to what is happening now? How can Africa learn to avoid issues like this moving forward? Because it is a global issue now and almost everyone is watching and it's a learning curve for almost every African country. I was just wondering if you could just shed more light on this.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

Thank you. This is a very important issue. I remember in 2000, the World Bank, I was a task manager for a project that produced a widely circulated and discussed report called Can Africa Claim the 21st Century? That was the name, that was the title of the report. One fundamental conclusion or message from this report was that unlike the historical Asian experience where an authoritarian regime, developmental authoritarian regime, could be counted on to actually create huge economic transformation, eventually subsequently leading to democratization, as in for example, Taiwan and Korea, this experience is not transferable to the case of Sudan ... sorry to the case of Africa, as well as the Arab world, by the way, because of Africa is dominated by social diversity and in many countries actually social polarization. And so, even if you have a developmental authoritarian regimes, and there are quite a few of them, take the example of Ethiopia, that regime under Meles Zenawi was able to transform Ethiopia in about 15 years where the economy grew more than four times from 2000 to 2018.

Nonetheless, at the end, because of lack of democracy, a civil war erupted as we know, and Ethiopia had to deal with warfare and conflicts and so on along ethnic lines and so on. So I think what we need in Africa is really is to give much more premium to the importance of democracy. But not democracy as electoral competition. It has to be democracy as an instrument, as a platform for discussing how to develop resources and how to distribute these resources. And so, I think we need an economic legitimacy for democracy.

That has been actually for the cause of Sudan one of the problems that Sudan inherited from the British system, a west ministerial democracy. And we had elections in 1954. It's one of the early elections, fair and elections and open in Africa. But because it was a system imposed on a backward society and kind of primitive economy, it did not survive. And there was a disconnect between the educated minority kind of

class in the center of power in the Nile River region of Sudan and the rest of the country, especially the marginalized regions, the far reaches of the country in Darfur and the south and so on. And so, uneven development was the main cause behind the conflict. Then when the conflict was resolved temporarily as part of disagreements that we talked about, it was not a democratic peace building. It was a militarized peace building. I think these are the main lessons that perhaps we need to have.

Right now, I think for the case of Sudan, hopefully if this conflict is resolved and the demilitarization of the Sudanese politics was addressed and a full civilian government came to power. The civilian itself, even after this tragic experience, if they did not learn the lesson that actually we have to have a decentralized political economic system that gives power and resources to the various regions and so on, I'm afraid that actually we will still might face another setback.

Hisham Yousif:

So there are kind of getting towards the current situation and maybe a perspective look to what you think how this is going to develop, there are two questions that I think are important. One is how you've observed the civilian government after you left it, that observation of it all the way to the coup, there was a chance for the Prime Minister to come back, which he did, but he didn't have civilian support, which led him to resign again. And so, that's probably the point where we can mark the loss of civilian influence in the Sudanese government. Then it gave us about a year, year and a half, or however long it was of where the military kind of took over and decided to talk about transitions, which is ending in the military breakdown in this fight between these two factions. So to get us to where we are today, just a word on how the civilian relationship splintered and failed, and then how this military relationship is splintering.

Ibrahim Elbadawi:

Actually, what has happened is that after the Juba Peace agreement, especially given the context behind the agreement, the government was transformed from a technocratic to a large extent apolitical government as it's supposed to be during the transitional period. To a government of political parties and freedom fighters movement or rebel movements. And so, I think to a large extent, the authority of the Prime Minister was diminished because the reference point for these ministers are their movements that actually, or parties, and I think that was a major or a fatal setback to the meritocracy and efficiency of the government. Obviously as a result of that transition, the situation did not improve and the progress was actually was halted.

One important milestone basically was like the straw that broke the back of the camel, which was that the leadership of the Council of Sovereignty was supposed to be moved from the military to the civilian. That was actually the trigger of the unfortunate developments that took place, that actually the military leadership and of course with the support of their new alliances of the signatories of Juba, they wanted to retain the leadership of the Council of Sovereignty. They also were not keen about, there was a major thing which is related to the investigation committee that supposed charged with investigating the violent disbanding of the setting, which was the epicenter of the revolution. As you know, there were so many atrocities and this violent disbanding by the military forces and also some elements from the so-called National Islamic Front and so on, was to be investigated. But then nobody want to touch it. The committee was phoned, but they never really came up with any reports or anything like that.

So all of these issues prompted the army or the leadership of the army to mount the coup, even though being fair to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister was trying actually to mediate these conflicts, these divergent views between the FFC and the military and so on. But then, I think after coup, the fatal mistake I think that the Prime Minister committed was actually to give in to the army and sign this agreement before asking for an opportunity to explain to the youth and the freedom and democracy camp about why he wanted to do that. That actually created the condition that deprived the new deal between the Prime Minister, between Dr. Hamdok and General Burhan of support by the general public. And so, it ignited actually counter actions through protest in the streets and what have you, and obviously also the international community were not convinced that actually this is a return to the constitutional process, which actually eventually obviously forced the Prime Minister to resign.

Since then, there was no any constitutional process. The head of the army was the ultimate ruler. He was actually ruling by decree and there was no any constitutional process until actually we reached this stage. Before that obviously because of the pressure and the economic crisis, that became so clear. Basically Sudan was returned back as a result of the coup to the last phase of the former regime. And so, the military leadership was forced to come back to the table of negotiations and the process was going fine. But then an issue that was not really discussed before was who should control the military? That is when the two branches of the military see themselves in huge difference.

Obviously before this fight happened, everybody was stalking arms and fighters and so on. So the atmosphere was very clear. And this is very important point, but the trigger, lots of evidence which was conveyed in social media and everywhere during the last 10 days of the holy months of Ramadan, the National Islamic front and the followers of the former regime who were disgruntled and never accepted that there was a revolution that deposed them. And famously, the former leader, the late Sadiq al-Mahdi, he described them as the disgruntled far right. And so, this disgruntled far right basically seized the opportunity that actually now the military itself found itself divided and in discord and so on. And so, it is widely discussed now in the media that actually the bullet was fired by the brigades of these followers of the former regime at the camps of the Rapid Support Force, which then ignited the conflict between the two who caused the Rapid Support Force attack the army garrisons and so on, and that was the beginning.

So I think any kind of credible, viable resolution has to also account for who started this and to be held accountable legally and politically. Because I think as long as this subversive element continue to operate freely, the future of Sudanese democracy and transformation will be in doubt, even if the military finally come to terms with an agreement that a unified force professional army will be formed. Because as long as their elements are in the army, the future democracy of Sudan will never be secured. Not only him, but of course all the politically motivated elements in the army.

Hannah:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Dr. Abraham Elbadawi. This episode was produced and edited by Hannah Balochi and Nishita Karu. Thank you to our interviewers Hisham Yousif and Kirgit Amlai. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit their website, thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter at pearsoninst, inst spelled I-N-S-T. Thanks.

Reema Saleh:

Hi, this is Reema and you are listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You are listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world, and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world.

Reema Saleh:

Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Reema Saleh:

What is the human toll of the US immigration bureaucracy? In this episode, we speak with Dr. Chiara Galli, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. Her latest book, Precarious Protections chronicles the experiences and perspectives of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they navigate the asylum process and pursue refugee status in the United States.

Reema Saleh:

Spanning six years of research between the Obama and Trump administrations, her ethnographic research examines the paradoxical and precarious criteria that decide who is deserving and who must we protect. We talk about how US asylum laws often fail to help children who are escaping life-threatening violence, how new immigration changes are impacting unaccompanied minors and how Chicago will grapple with an unanticipated influx in migration.

Natalie Reyes:

I am Natalie Reyes. I'm a first year MPP student at the University of Chicago, and I'm also a Pearson Fellow.

Gabriela Rivera:

And my name is Gabriela Rivera. I'm a one year student at the MA and I'm from Guatemala. I'm a lawyer, so it's amazing for me to be here today.

Reema Saleh:

And my name is Reema. I'm the producer of Root of Conflict and I'm a second year at Harris.

Chiara Galli:

My name is Chiara Galli. I'm assistant professor of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. I'm the author of Precarious Protections: Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in the US.

Reema Saleh:

Yeah. So you joined the Chicago faculty pretty recently, right?

Chiara Galli:

Yeah, I just moved here, what was it? Last summer. So this is my first year joining U. Chicago. Yeah, it's been a great year thus far.

Reema Saleh:

Yeah. What brought you here kind of as a sociologist here in the Comparative Human Development department?

Chiara Galli:

Well, they hired me, so I was very glad to come and accept their offer.

Reema Saleh:

How did you first get involved in kind of international migration studies?

Chiara Galli:

Well, so I'm an immigrant myself. I migrated to the US as a child with my parents, and actually we came to the northern most suburbs of Chicago. So for me, coming to U Chicago is kind of a homecoming of sorts, you know I spent my life between suburban Illinois and Rome, Italy where I'm originally from. So I've been interested in immigration from like my personal experience for a long time. And I worked in the immigration policy world in the European Union before starting grad school. But I was really interested in being able to ask my own questions and define my own research agenda, which is why I chose to pursue a PhD.

Reema Saleh:

So what brought you to the topic of Central American migration and unaccompanied minors?

Chiara Galli:

Yeah, so I've been interested in Latin American studies for a long time, and that was kind of the focus of my bachelor's degree in development studies and then in my master's degree as well. And I'm fluent in Spanish, so I'm really a believer that you need to be to speak the language really well in order to do good in depth

ethnographic field work. So it was kind of my draw towards studying Latin American populations, and I was interested in immigration policy and how it impacts people's lives because of my experience in the policy research realm. But to be completely honest with you, I kind of stumbled upon the topic of this book. It was my very first year in grad school and I had just moved to Los Angeles and I needed to find a field site for my ethnographic field methods class where we would do hands on, learning the method by doing ethnography.

Chiara Galli:

And so I reached out to a lot of nonprofit organizations in Los Angeles offering to volunteer with my Spanish skills in exchange for research access. And so I heard back from an organization that had a long history of helping Central American seek asylum in the US. And so this was what was happening at the time. It was just shortly after summer of 2014 when the Obama administration declared that a humanitarian crisis was underway as increased arrivals of children and families from Central America arrived at the border, these asylum seeking kids and families. And it seemed to me that this was such an important and understudied topic. And so after having fortunately stumbled upon it, I decided to stick with it and I ended up doing six years of research on the topic.

Reema Saleh:

So let's talk about your book. What first drew you to begin writing after you had started this field work?

Chiara Galli:

So this book is born out of my dissertation, and initially I actually started doing the research with asylum seekers from Central America of all ages. And it was only later on during the course of my dissertation that I decided to really center in on the case of children. And that was both because I noticed that not very much had been written on the topic, whereas there's quite an extensive literature on asylum seeking adults. And this was despite the fact that increasing numbers of children are migrating alone to seek asylum worldwide in rich countries like the United States.

Chiara Galli:

But I really think that the case of children in the asylum process is an interesting one for the purposes of thinking through theories of immigration as well, because you know we have this contrast between these two forces, these two competing forces at play in countries that are liberal democracies that receive asylum seekers.

Chiara Galli:

On the one hand, on the face of it, we say that we respect human rights and the rule of law, but on the other hand, very much receiving countries of immigration want to be able to control their borders, regulate immigration flow, and exclude those categories whom they see as undeserving or undesirable. And so you know when human rights belong to foreigners, then it brings this tension into play. And I think that not just in the US but really in countries all over the world, including in Europe, the rights of asylum seekers have been chipped away at more and more because of this tension.

Chiara Galli:

But in the case of children, it's a lot harder to do that, right? Because we widely agree upon the fact as an American society that children should be protected. And so this is what gives rise to these protections for this population of unaccompanied minors in the US asylum process. But unfortunately, I show in the book that when they're implemented, they're precarious protections in practice because we're still trying to chip away at them in various ways. And so this is what leads a lot of kids to actually not be eligible for asylum and not obtain the protection that our laws promised despite the fact that they escaped from violence in Central America.

Gabriela Rivera:

Well, first of all, as a Central American, and I must say that I really appreciate you writing about Central America. As you very well said, it is an understudied area. So really thank you very much. So one of the things I found more interesting in your book is that through all of these stories that you heard from minors, you found that there's not only a lot of suffering, but there is also a lot of strategies that the families and the kids themselves have to make in order to show exactly what types of suffering they lift and the amount of suffering, the intensity of the suffering to be able to be protected by law. So what are other categories that you think should be introduced in asylum law in the US or in the process to be able to capture these particular types of suffering these kids are going through?

Chiara Galli:

Yeah, so in the book, basically, I argue that these children are defacto refugees, right? Because they flee conditions of life-threatening violence in Central America, which is a place where you know teenagers are especially at risk. And one of the things that they're especially at risk at of is forced gang recruitment and being targeted and victimized by gangs, which is not a valid reason to seek asylum in the United States under the current state of our case law.

Chiara Galli:

So this is what kind of leads attorneys to have to search for other eligibility grounds that do satisfy existing case law, such as child abuse, such as persecution on account of one's race, which is sometimes a type of case that indigenous Central Americans pursue. So a very kind of straightforward fix would be to recognize these experiences of forced gang recruitment and victimization as eligible for asylum. And indeed, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, they believe that those experiences should count as valid reasons to be granted asylum. So really the United States has a more restrictive interpretation of refugee law than the UNHCR recommendation.

Chiara Galli:

So that's one thing. And then more generally, I think that we should have an asylum law that protects people who are fleeing their homes, and that seems like a pretty straightforward point to make. But the truth of the matter is that our asylum law currently does not protect those individuals who are fleeing violence, including children.

Gabriela Rivera:

And in your book you talked about introducing this concept of humanitarian capital and how minors and the people representing them gather this in order to make them eligible for differently held protections. Could you tell us more about this concept of humanitarian capital?

Chiara Galli:

Yeah, so this humanitarian capital is kind of drawing on a Bourdieusian framework, and I define it as a form of symbolic capital that lawyers activate as they interview their clients in order to make their suffering legible to the decision makers who have such great powers over their lives and can decide whether or not to grant them relief on humanitarian grounds based, yes, on formal criteria and legal definitions, but also on a host of discretionary criteria that really hinge on these evaluations of who is deserving, who is compassionate and whom we should protect.

Chiara Galli:

So I think the concept was helpful to me in explaining the process because it allows me to highlight all of the paradoxical ways in which human suffering is translated and then counts or does not count in helping people obtain protection. So a good example of this is, you mentioned that children and their families have a lot of strategies. For example, also in planning escape from the home countries, they have to navigate and mitigate conditions of violence, and they do so in several ways, for example, by helping kids go into hiding while they accrue enough resources and savings and loans to pay smugglers to get them out alive, Right?.

Chiara Galli:

So of course, these strategies are carried out by family members who love and want to protect their children, but then these go on to carry unexpected weight in the asylum process and play out in negative ways. Because the paradox is that if you flee too soon and before anything really bad happens to you and before the right, the correct type of bad thing happen to you, then you might not have enough humanitarian capital to make a case that you've suffered enough to meet this bar of persecution. So these decisions that these loving caretakers make to protect their children then go on to actually harm their chances to get protection in the US asylum process.

Natalie Reyes:

You actually talked about this a little bit in your previous question, and it's something that Gabrielle and I have been talking about, so there's this enormous dichotomy between the adult responsibilities given to the minors and then fulfilling the necessary expectations of what childhood is supposed to look like Right?, to extract the compassion from those in the immigration system. What results have you seen on the development of these kids?

Chiara Galli:

Well, so that's a hard question in the sense that to be able to really answer that question, I will have to write a second book after following the respondents for a long time. And the adaptation trajectories and how they lead to positive or negative outcomes in terms of the integration of immigrants is one of the key questions that interest sociologists who study immigration. So you know to really answer that question, someone will have to do the research in the future, but I do identify some mechanisms that I think do give us a hint as to what the effect might be.

Chiara Galli:

So for example, in the book I write about this process of legal socialization, which is how kids learn about the law and acquire all sorts of values and attitudes about their law, their position in society, their relationship with the state and the rights that they have or do not have. And they undergo this process of legal socialization really quickly because from the moment when they first step foot on US soil, they're channeled through this complex bureaucratic maze. They interact with all of these actors from border patrol officers in holding facilities at the border, office of refugee resettlement, so-called shelters, which are detention facilities. They go to court, they interact with immigration judges, with asylum officers, they interact with their immigration attorneys, they're integrated into migrant community.

Chiara Galli:

So all of these adults who are surrounding these kids are sending them different messages about what it means to be a newcomer in this society, what it means to be an asylum seeker, and how they should behave if they want to have a good chance of being able to stay. So this is where all of these kind of infantilizing messages and these contradictory messages come into play.

Chiara Galli:

So kids are told to behave in an innocent way, to not demonstrate adult-like desires or aspirations. They're told to be very compliant and well behaved. And attorneys also tell them about their rights that they have because they are a protective category in the US. But what I found unfortunately is that kids retain much more the information that they received about how to be well behaved, how to be good kids, and they retain far less information about their rights as a protective category. And so I think that this really shows that undergoing this asylum system is a disempowering process. It's not a process that will produce a lot of activists or a lot of people who will want to change American society. Rather it's going to produce people who will be very afraid of being deported, very fearful, who will know that they have to be exceptional and exceptionally compelling to win asylum and also unlike people like them.

Chiara Galli:

So it also creates these discourses of distancing from other individuals in communities and kids reproduce these discourses of, "I'm not like those other bad immigrants, or I'm not like those other bogus refugees." So in this sense, I think that this kind of foreshadows some of the things that we might expect about this population and their long-term trajectories in the United States.

Natalie Reyes:

So this actually brings me to my next question. So throughout the book you talk about how the minors internalize all of these stigmas about, quote, unquote, "bad immigrants, bogus refugees, and then the deviant Latino teens", and they learn to perform their deservingness in contrast to these identities. So how do you see this mental narrative influence how they then interact with other groups once released?

Chiara Galli:

So this is also a tricky question. So something I had wanted to do for the study that I wasn't able to do was actually, because of course, one can never do everything when writing a book, but I really wanted to embed myself more in the communities of these children and their everyday lives, and I would've very much liked to be present during their peer to peer interactions. So that just didn't end up being feasible. First of all, just to the sheer scope of the project, I ended up focusing much more on children's relationship with the state as it was mediated by these attorneys and these nonprofit organizations.

Chiara Galli:

So I got to see kids kind of reproduce these narratives and perform these behaviors in these spaces of the nonprofit of the legal clinic. And then really the only glimpse that I got into kids' everyday lives was through a formal research interview, sort of a formal research encounter. And as much as I made a lot of efforts to make that as informal as possible in the sense that I didn't want to reproduce the encounter that kids had with their immigration attorneys and these interviews that have the goal of producing an asylum narrative, because those are very re-traumatizing interviews, they're very anxiety filled encounters.

Chiara Galli:

So I met with them in local parks, sometimes in their homes, oftentimes at Starbucks. That was a very popular meeting place, and we spent a lot of time chatting and getting to know each other before getting onto to actually addressing the research questionnaire. So beyond the fact that they kind of reproduce some of these narratives with me, and they said that they did that when they were in other spaces, including community spaces, I really can't answer that question. And I guess this is a limitation of the study or a study that can be taken up by another scholar who will do an ethnography that's less kind of an ethnography of the state or an ethnography of the law in action and more an ethnography embedded in migrant communities. And that's very difficult to do with teenagers because the age difference creates a big power differential.

Chiara Galli:

I mean, there's always a power differential between the researcher and the research subject, but the age issue kind of heightens that. So someone would need to come up with an innovative research design to do that. And people have done studies of children.

Natalie Reyes:

Okay. Yeah. Thank you. So I'm going to go ahead and change the subject to something that you've mentioned a little earlier, and that was the Office of Refugee Resettlement Shelters or detention facilities like you said. There was a section where you described how militaristic they are. There was an alarming rigidness about the rules, even arbitrary ones in which girls weren't allowed to hug one another or even brush each other's hair. And that made me curious because when there are plenty of opportunities implement rules regarding schedules appropriate activities, why do you think these shelters feel the need to intervene in such emotional or personal interactions?

Chiara Galli:

Well, what I argue in the book is that it's by design to teach compliance to these kids. And this kind of resonates with the messages that shelter staff give them. They give them a lot of advice about how to be well behaved, how to stay on the state's radar, show up to courts, make sure they don't get in trouble. So teaching compliance is part of the institutional kind of mandate or agenda of the office of Refugee resettlement as is caring for children. And in some way, these two things do overlap. I mean, I think that in some ways it's not just, let's say like an evil agenda. We do tell children what to do to protect them as adults. And I think that the shelter staff could probably come up with reasons and rationales for why they do this. I know that they're very concerned about kids harming themselves or each other.

Chiara Galli:

So they're trying to limit interpersonal contact without supervision. They have to manage a large number of kids in these facilities. But the truth of the matter is it does teach key lessons about compliance. And most importantly, unaccompanied minors, they experience these rules in a way that's kind of punitive and constraining and frustrating and arbitrary. So they would complain about the shelters to me. I mean, I will say that there are different types of facilities from more emergency facilities, which are on the far side of the spectrum, like the famous tent court in Hampstead, Florida, which are really abysmal conditions. One of my respondents told me that several children fainted every day because it was so hot under the tents.

Chiara Galli:

Then there's more like mid-range facilities, which have a lot of kids in them, and they have these kinds of arbitrary rules like no touching each other or braiding each other's hair, things like that. And then there's more foster care like arrangements. And I will say that some of the kids who I interviewed describe these arrangements as something like when you do study abroad and you stay with a family, they reminisced about these kind families taking them on field trips. So there was a spectrum of treatment, of objective treatment.

Chiara Galli:

But I think that a quote by one of my research participants says it best, he called the shelters a fancy prison, and he said, because they treat you well, but it's a prison, right? Because you can't leave. So we can't forget that these are detention facilities, these are facilities that are surveilling children where their liberty is deprived. They're not free to leave. And so even though we have some protections, it stemming from the florist settlement, this key lawsuit that created a series of legal protections for children in US detention facilities that adults don't benefit from. So that's improved conditions and some care must be provided, some schooling must be provided. They're still fit prisons despite the fancy aspects that some of them might have.

Gabriela Rivera:

So we saw in the book that a lot of the minors spend a lot of time in these facilities, but then eventually go out and they have access to legal services. And you spend a lot of time shadowing these interactions between the lawyers, the paralegals, and these kids. And I must say that as a lawyer, I felt very validated when you explained this work of legal translation that lawyers and paralegals do.

Gabriela Rivera:

So was that very different? Do you think that's very different to the general idea people have about lawyers? How was your experience shadowing these interactions? Because we all think about lawyers as just people in a fancy office just signing contracts all day and not doing all of these different things that you talk about in the book.

Chiara Galli:

Well, first of all, I'm very glad to hear that you felt validated as a lawyer in reading the book because that means a lot to hear that. It means I did a decent job in describing, as you say, this crucial role of legal translation that these individuals do. So I mean, first of all, just a briefly about the context. I mean, immigrants are not guaranteed free legal representation in the United States, and this includes children. So in some ways, the children who I followed were somewhat privileged because they had gotten access to services from nonprofit organizations. And these lawyers, their place of work and what they do does look pretty different from what people imagine in the sense that their offices are really not fancy. These nonprofits, they're strapped for resources. They're working with very limited resources and trying to represent as many kids as they can with a lot of resource constraints.

Chiara Galli:

So in the organizations where I did my work, lawyers could represent as many as 70 or 80 cases of kids at the same time. So it's very difficult work. Lawyers report a lot of secondary trauma, burnout. They're doing exceptional work considering the very scarce resources at their hands. And I think that there's another way in which the legal translation work that these lawyers do is fundamentally misunderstood by the general public.

Chiara Galli:

So President Donald Trump called asylum lawyering a big fat con job, and he said, "Lawyers sell asylum seeker's story." So I think that this is a widely held misconception among the American public and also in other countries. But it's not at all true that lawyers sell their clients' stories. Rather what they do is they try to ascertain which facts in their clients' narratives of escape fit with our existing interpretation of refugee law, which is an exceptionally narrow definition, which doesn't guarantee that if you escape from life-threatening violence, you are going to qualify. And they don't make anything up. They just ask questions until they can find some detail that fits.

Chiara Galli:

So for example, when a child fled force game recruitment, that is not an eligible experience for asylum, but if that child also suffered severe child abuse at home, then that is an eligible experience. And so they'll focus the legal narrative on that. So it's their job to teach kids what asylum eligibility is so they can volunteer relevant facts about their experiences and then to make these experiences eligible. And that's central to their legal translation role. And sometimes all they can do is tell their clients, I'm sorry, you don't qualify. And that's that.

Gabriela Rivera:

Yeah, that was very interesting to read when you highlight that the reason why they end up applying for asylum or for any kind of labor protection is often not the exact reason why they left their countries. And as I read it, it seems like it's a very surprising moment for a lot of these kids to realize that their reasons are not necessarily the useful ones. How did you see this moment of surprise? Because sometimes culturally, a lot of the things that are considered serious harms against a young person here are culturally acceptable in Central America, or at least in the context where these kids lived. So how did you see that process of realizing, well, maybe my whole life made me eligible for one of these protections and I didn't even know it.

Chiara Galli:

This is a big issue, I mean, there's a level of normalization of violence within vulnerable low income children and indigenous children in central America. And that stems from a longer history of violence becoming normalized is since the civil wars. And so a lot of the things that may seem commonplace to these children, they wouldn't even think to disclose them. So something that's child specific is the example of child abuse.

Chiara Galli:

So some form of corporal punishment may seem appropriate according to their perspectives. It's something that is part of child rearing practices. It's something that they've seen in families around them, and so they wouldn't necessarily disclose that. Another example that is really interesting where kids really pushed back is so these children not, these children not only apply for asylum, but they also apply for this form of relief called special immigrant juvenile status, which is a form of protection for children, abandoned, abused, or neglected by one or both of their parents.

Chiara Galli:

So the neglect category was fascinating because the definition of neglect is a definition that comes from state law. So in the case of where I did my research in California law, and the parent doesn't need to have had an intent to harm the child for the lawyer to be able to prove neglect and get relief for the child. And so one of the things that constitutes parental neglect is working from a very young age or working in certain types of jobs or working in dangerous conditions. And so that was extremely perplexing to kids.

Chiara Galli:

And attorneys would ask them things like, well, they would ask him things like, how young were you when you started working? What kind of work did you do? And they would never portray this as something that they didn't want to do as something that they were forced to do. For boys in particular, it was a source of pride to be able to enter the labor market to support their families. It was something that they wanted to do. And they found satisfaction in these jobs, even sometimes in very exploitative or intense jobs that they did in their home countries. And attorneys would ask some things like, did you enjoy work? And they would say, yes, I did enjoy work and no one forced me to work. So that was a real moment, kind of a major dissonance between children's subjective understandings of their lives and these narrow legal categories.

Chiara Galli:

And then attorneys would make a big effort to try to tell kids, it doesn't matter that you didn't feel this way, but for the purposes of your eligibility and being allowed to stay, you still qualify under US law. But there was a lot of perplexity that you could read with body language. There was a lot of pushback too. Kids didn't want to speak ill of their caretakers. They had complex relationships even with abusive family members. There was love and abuse in families happening at the same time oftentimes.

Chiara Galli:

And then finally, kids had a lot of trouble. And this comes back to for asylum eligibility, they had a lot of trouble focusing not on why they fled, which oftentimes was because the gangs wanted to kill me, but rather on describing the persecutors motivation for targeting them. So this is required in order to satisfy the refugee definition that requires that you show not only that you were persecuted, but that you were persecuted on account of a protected ground like race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group. So that's where the describing the why of the persecution is really important, and that's just not something that makes a lot of common sense to a person of any age, but even less so to a young person.

Gabriela Rivera:

Do you think these categories are so narrow or there is an element of the historical bias against Central American migrants? What keeps these legal categories so narrow that a lot of these experiences can't fit?

Chiara Galli:

Yes, absolutely. This is crucial. So we have a long history of denying asylum to Central Americans in the United States. Since the 1980s, especially Guatemalans and Salvadorans were fleeing these right-wing regimes that were being supported by US funding in the Cold War era. It was a very deliberate denial of asylum to Central Americans. Only about 2% were granted asylum at the time. And this was in the context of the geopolitics of the Cold War era where you would deny asylum to people fleeing your allied countries and granted to those fleeing enemy regimes such as the Soviet unions such as Cuba.

Chiara Galli:

And things have changed somewhat since then, and they've changed thanks to the legal advocacy that's been done since trying to get protection for people who are fleeing violence. So for example, so matter of ARCG was a case law that was a result of 20 years worth of advocacy to protect women fleeing domestic violence. And there were cases of women, Central American and Mexican women that contributed to this case law.

Chiara Galli:

So while the current context isn't as restrictive, the grant rates are higher, the fact that the refugee definition isn't expanding is absolutely a product of that longer history. And if you see the legal battles to where the particular social forced game recruitment, attorneys are trying to argue that this should be a recognized particular social group in the courts. And you read the written decisions of judges in these cases, the narrative, the justification for denying is that they're worried of opening the floodgates to excessive numbers of arrivals. And this isn't happening in a vacuum. When they talk about floodgates, they have particular people in mind and they have Central Americans in mind. So in this sense, this is a population that's seen by the US government as undesirable and a population to be excluded. So that's absolutely rooted in this longer history of exclusion of Central Americans in the United States.

Natalie Reyes:

So I'm going to back up here and try to tie in your tides to you talked a little bit about EU migration, and it was funny because throughout the book I was reminded of The Swimmers. I'm not sure if you've seen the Netflix movie about the Syrian sisters who make their way from Syria to first Greece and then Germany. Would you anecdotally be able to compare how legal socialization differs for unaccompanied minors in Europe versus the US?

Chiara Galli:

So initially I wanted to do a comparative study actually, of the reception of unaccompanied minors in Europe and the US and then for pragmatic reasons of kind of resource and time scarcity, I decided to focus on the US because there's so much to say just on this context alone. But I do have some insights because I did spend some time thinking about this.

Chiara Galli:

So first of all, generally the European Union countries actually provide more protections to unaccompanied minors than the United States. So for example, countries like Italy, they give unaccompanied minors a work and residency permit. So they have the right to reside legally in the country until age 18, and they get access to all sorts of benefits in the meantime, including housing. And this is not detention, this is housing where people are free to come and go and leave. They get access to Italian schools, vocational training, access to legal services, so all sorts of things.

Chiara Galli:

So the legal context in European countries is more protective than it is in the US. Of course, the major contradiction arises when these kids turn 18 and age out of the protections very abruptly. And it's then where they really have to fight for their right to stay. And different countries have different ways in which unaccompanied minors are able to do so. In the Italian case, they can apply for asylum and they can try to apply for a work permit if they're able to find jobs in different sectors. And there is some support for, as I said, vocational training to try to help them have that transition, make that transition successfully rather. And of course, there's always a big gap between the law on the books and the law and practice. So it's not like everything is rosy there, but it does matter that legal protections are more protective on paper.

Chiara Galli:

And that I do think has an impact on how people perceive their relationship with the state and the kinds of messages that they receive. So based on what I've read, based on other people's work, and there's a very rich scholarship on unaccompanied minors treatment in different European countries.

Chiara Galli:

In a country like Italy, people aren't really worried about deportation because we don't really have a deportation machine of the same magnitude of the United States that's so well funded. So it's much more rare for people to actually be deported. So kids, as they come of age, they face a series of vulnerabilities and they're very much at risk of kind of blending into the larger undocumented population, but they're not so much at risk of be being returned. And that of course shapes the decisions that people make.

Chiara Galli:

But there was a very interesting book that compared the treatment of unaccompanied minors in the UK and Italy and what they've found, because since the UK does carry out deportations of minors who come of age, what they've found is that some of these kids who come of age as unaccompanied minors in the UK, they turn 17 and a half, 18, they then migrate to Italy to avoid deportation.

Chiara Galli:

So migrants learn about the law and they strategize. They make decisions for their life, their life course trajectories, and in order to work around these laws that really constrain the choices that they have at their disposal and that they learn about in imperfect ways. So there's never 100% transparency and knowledge of the law, which is what I talk about in my book, that's also very much true in the European context, but migrants learn what they can about the law and then they make decisions accordingly.

Reema Saleh:

We're hoping to kind of talk a little more about current border policy and how that's impacting unaccompanied minors. We've all been hearing about the expiration for Title 42 just happening tomorrow, May 11th. Could you tell us a little about what is Title 42, who does it apply to, and how has it impacted unaccompanied minors?

Chiara Galli:

Yeah, so Title 42 is an obscure public health policy that ostensibly has nothing to do with border enforcement, that the Trump administration strategically mobilized and decided to use to close off the US Mexico border just one month into the Covid Pandemic. And what was interesting about the use of Title 42 is that the Trump administration had experimented with all sorts of new policies to curtail the rights of protected groups, including asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors.

Chiara Galli:

But really in terms of being able to access the border, unaccompanied minors had been spared from the worst of these attacks because we have this law, the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which says that unaccompanied minors from non-contiguous countries are allowed to be admitted without undergoing any hurdles such as the credible fear interviews that adults have to undergo before being allowed entry into the United States. So what non-contiguous countries means is essentially kids from everywhere but Mexico because there aren't a lot of Canadian unaccompanied minors seeking entry to the US obviously, because we're similarly rich countries, et cetera.

Chiara Galli:

So Title 42 applied to everyone. It was a hard closure of the border that really violated the United States' commitment to the non-refoulement principle, the idea in international refugee law that you should not expel someone to a country where they fear persecution, where their lives are at risk. This policy essentially functioned as a state of exception. So the Covid Pandemic was framed as this crisis that required the border to be closed off despite the fact that public health experts actually never supported the policy. They thought that actually it would backfire by pushing people into crowded refugee camps in Mexico, and that would actually promote viral spread. You can't control a pandemic based on national borders because viral spread doesn't take a person's passport into account.

Chiara Galli:

But that's what the Trump administration did. And so they excluded everyone coming in at the border, including unaccompanied minors. And something like 10,000 kids, I believe were expelled in the first few months of the implementation of Title 42. And by kids, I mean unaccompanied minors.

Chiara Galli:

And I know that the Biden administration likes to say that it exempted unaccompanied minors from the policy. But the truth of the matter is that unaccompanied minors started to be exempted from Title 42 in November of 2020 because of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU. And so this shows you kind of the power of advocacy work, right? The ACLU said that the Title 42 was unlawful, that it was a violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. And so since then, unaccompanied minors have actually been allowed to enter the US and to seek asylum, but Title 42 remained in place for asylum seekers from many, many other countries. So this had the interesting effect of producing a situation in which for months on end, really the only asylum seekers being allowed entry into the US were children.

Chiara Galli:

And then the Biden administration entered office, it decided to continue not applying Title 42 to unaccompanied children, and then it started applying Title 42 with caveats. So giving quite a bit of discretion to the border patrol to decide who to let in, when to apply Title 42, and when not to apply it. So some people have been able to gain admission at the border such as Ukrainians, for example, for a period Venezuelans and Cubans were allowed in, but that's no longer the case.

Chiara Galli:

And now, tomorrow, as you said, Title 42 is set to expire. And what's very unfortunate is that the administration has been trying to find other ways to curtail access to the US asylum process by essentially resuscitating the, what advocates called the Trump era asylum bans, right? The idea that if you transit through a country that is a signatory of the UN Refugee Convention and you should have applied for asylum there, you don't have a right to apply for asylum in the US. And there's nowhere in refugee law that says that this should be the case or to make people who cross between ports of entry ineligible to apply for asylum.

Chiara Galli:

So these are policies that the Trump administration experimented with first that were struck down by the courts, and that the Biden administration is trying to reintroduce with a series of caveats for vulnerable populations, for populations who use this CBP One app at the border. But really, I mean, the substance of the policy is very similar. Right?

Reema Saleh:

Yeah, no, it's definitely interesting to see how a lot of Trump era border policies just kind of came back in different forums. I keep reading about just app crashes for the CBP One app and just that being required now for authorized entry, and it's definitely strange to see it happening. Yeah, I guess this is kind of impossible to ask, but what do you expect that people will start to see in the near future for people at the border?

Chiara Galli:

Well, I can't predict the future, but I mean, I will say this, I think that the Trump administration set a series of dangerous precedence by really curtailing the rights of asylum seekers by undermining our commitment to non-refoulement. And so this puts us in a very dangerous territory, and I know that advocates are very well organized. They were energized initially during the Trump administration, maybe now, well actually, I know that towards the end of the Trump administration, people were exhausted, right? Because they felt like they were fighting all of the time through impact litigation on behalf of their clients that they represented individually. But the work that advocates do, and this is one of the messages that I try to send with my book, it's so important because if it weren't for advocates, trying to keep the government accountable, we really would see human rights be dismantled much, much more.

Chiara Galli:

So that's happening on the one hand. On the other hand, the Republican Party has now introduced a bill that's taking us in a very, very concerning direction, which is not expected to pass, but it does kind of signal the movement in which a segment of the American political system and specifically the Republican Party, would like to go in, which is essentially an end to asylum. And there's a provision in that bill that would do away with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, protections for unaccompanied children, the ones that allow them to be admitted at the border.

Chiara Galli:

So while it's unlikely that that act will pass, it is concerning that it's being proposed. I will say this, I mean, it's not the first time that Congress tries to do away with TVPRA protections. Asylum has already been under attack once before in the 90s when there were debates leading up to the illegal immigration reform and what is it, IRIRA, a series of restrictive policies that were introduced in the 90s to limit access to asylum.

Chiara Galli:

And this is what I was so interested about, the reason that I wrote this book, to see the interaction between these protective and exclusionary forces. This is not new. This is kind of a constant in the US immigration system, but just how that will play out in the years to come is quite concerning because each time you set a precedent undermining human right, it becomes that much easier for future administrations to do this. So I've purposefully not made any concrete predictions because I don't have a crystal ball, but we'll all be following the news very closely in these upcoming weeks to see what actually happens. But it's not a time to take a vacation from advocacy work, that's for sure.

Gabriela Rivera:

So you were talking about all of these different types of barriers that the US puts on immigrants. Some are physical borders, some are legal barriers, try to deter people from coming, and they have changed in time and increased, but also in the time period that you tracked in your book, the amount of unaccompanied minors coming into the US has also increased steadily and sharply. So what do you think this means, what it represents, that all of these different measures seem to be failing, right? Because the amount of children that are coming to the US is not decreasing. All of these deterrence policies are not being reflected in the amount of children that are coming. So are they failing? What is it that policymakers in the US are not seeing?

Chiara Galli:

Well, in some ways, a lot of our policies are actually producing more unaccompanied minors because when you have a system in place at the border where it's easier to gain admission as an unaccompanied minor than it is for an entire family who's traveling with their kids, this leads families to make really difficult decisions sometimes to send their children to the border alone, to save their lives. And they do this because they have no other option. These aren't easy decisions. These aren't decisions that families want to make, but we're really tying their hands with our policies.

Chiara Galli:

So for example, when the Trump administration introduced the migrant protection protocols, forcing asylum seekers to apply from tent courts in Mexico, and unaccompanied minors weren't subject to that policy, asylum seeking families found themselves in a situation of real danger. Being stuck in transit is very dangerous. There's been reports by human rights watch, a lot of kidnappings, rape, extortion, deaths happening in Mexico to Central Americans who are extraordinarily vulnerable.

Chiara Galli:

So of course, families would send their kids alone to the United States. So that's part of it. Another part of it is the fact that the border was closed for a long time due to Title 42. People were traveling less because of Covid. And so now we're kind of seeing a backlog too, of people including children who want to seek refuge and a better life in the United States. And there's also some interesting research that shows that when you have increased rates of violence in specific sending communities, this creates a spike in out migration. But then that out migration stream balloons over time. So there's a snowball effect.

Chiara Galli:

So of course these flows will increase over time. And this similar things happen for voluntary migration. Once migration starts, it's a process that tends to sustain itself over time. People create migrant networks, they make connections, and all of these things kind of ease the constraints on exit, migrants loan each other money to pay for smugglers, et cetera.

Chiara Galli:

And all of this is happening while, of course, we spend more and more money on the externalization of border control, and we've been funding Mexican border enforcement to apprehend and deport Central Americans on route to the US and now Guatemala border enforcement as well. But the fact of the matter is that people who are fleeing violence will continue to flee violence regardless of our immigration policies. So even though we try to regulate, we try to externalize enforcement, we give Mexico money to apprehend and the poor Central Americans. If the conditions of exit don't change, people will continue to flee their homes and children continue to be at the risk in Central America today.

Natalie Reyes:

So bringing our focus back to the process in the US, you focused on LA as a research site, but I was wondering if you could comment on or maybe compare the advantages or disadvantages between Los Angeles and other cities, maybe Chicago for example. How is the immigration advocacy landscape different here than it is in other cities?

Chiara Galli:

Well, so in many ways, Los Angeles was a best case scenario to study this phenomenon. So I think it's telling that I tell a relatively bleak story in the book about our protections and our humanitarian laws failing to protect many children when they're implemented in practice. But I also do tell a somewhat optimistic story about the power of legal advocacy to help kids who would otherwise not have a chance of getting asylum and to stop the government from implementing policies that chip away at established protections and human rights.

Chiara Galli:

And I think I was able to observe that because as I said, LA is in many ways a best case scenario, and that's for several reasons. First of all, it's a sanctuary city in an immigrant friendly state. So people aren't afraid to go to engage with the court system to seek out legal representation. The state and the city funded nonprofits providing legal services to immigrants, but particularly so providing legal services to unaccompanied minors. So there was enough funding that there was actually an organizational landscape that could provide legal services for these kids. It wasn't enough to go around. Not everyone was represented, but there was a far more access to legal representation than, for example, in a rural area or in an anti-immigrant state.

Chiara Galli:

I have a new project where we're comparing state level representation rates, and we're seeing that in Republican states, unaccompanied minors access to legal representation is much lower than it is in states like California. LA also has a long history of immigration advocacy, immigrant rights organizing, and this long history of the sanctuary movement, the movement that helped Central Americans who were fleeing violence in the 1980s. So all of that legal infrastructure kind of dates back to that movement, to this longer history. And so these advocates know what they're doing. They have a lot of expertise to deal with this population.

Chiara Galli:

Many of them are second generation immigrants, Latinos, the children of Central American asylum seekers in some cases. And who selected into this profession because of their social justice motivations to give back to their community. So they have the linguistic skills necessary to do this work. They have the cultural competencies necessary to do this work. So you can imagine that in a rural area, an immigration attorney who doesn't speak Spanish, who's representing their first Central American cases would have a lot more trouble. It probably wouldn't be such high quality representation.

Chiara Galli:

So I think it's interesting that this is the kind of a best case scenario. And it's also finally, I'll just say it was in some ways a best case scenario also in terms of the institutions who decide cases, because the Los Angeles asylum office does have a reputation for being staffed by liberal young asylum officers, some of whom have gone to law school or some of whom have sociology or anthropology degrees. And this is very different from other asylum offices. There was a report that was recently published on the Boston Asylum Office where virtually everyone is denied asylum because institutional culture is important because discretion plays a big role in these decisions. Who the decision makers are really matters for whether people get protection or not.

Chiara Galli:

And there's always more immigrant friendly and anti-immigrant decision makers in courts and asylum offices all over the US There was just a higher concentration of individuals who wanted to grant cases using the legal protections at their disposal if they could compared to other parts of the country. But all of these differences, I think, create a lot of interesting research opportunities for people who want to do the next ethnography on unaccompanied minors experiences. I think there's really interesting comparative work to be done taking into account, particularly I think rural-urban comparisons or comparisons of different cities, right? Cities where there's fewer migrant networks, where there isn't a strong community of Central Americans, like the one that exists in cities like LA, Washington DC, that all have really strong, for example, Salvador and immigrant communities.

Reema Saleh:

So Chicago has seen a pretty big increase in migration, partly because Texas Governor Abbott is busing migrants here. And I think generally city officials, like the departments seem kind of unprepared. People kind of comment a lot that there's not the same infrastructure here as in other cities for housing migrants and delivering services. I guess, what does Chicago have to do to adapt to this?

Chiara Galli:

Well, I think we're experiencing a very interesting moment because it's actually never been the case that we have housed migrants and asylum seekers. I mean, we've detained them, but we haven't given them housing. So I actually think that it's exceptional what's happening in this city of Chicago and seeing these reception centers and these shelters being set up to house asylum seekers whose cases are pending. This is actually much more similar to the European bottle in which asylum seekers are not only detained, but they're frequently housed in facilities where it's not like they have amazing conditions and they're particularly fancy, but they're not detention centers. They have the right to come and go as please and to leave.

Chiara Galli:

So really, I think it's quite interesting, this historical moment in which we're seeing that a lot of resources like the state of Illinois has invested quite a lot of resources to support this population that's been bused in from the border. And I think that in part has to do with the political differences of takes of the Democratic and Republican parties on immigration. There's a desire to present the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago as a welcoming place for immigrants because I do think that that plays into the national politics of immigration that has become such a contested issue.

Chiara Galli:

Now, of course, again, there's a resource scarcity. The city was unprepared. This tends to be the case generally when asylum seekers arrived to new places. I mean, during the course of my field work, there had been some people who had been bused into LA. So this kind of scrambling to find support is kind of a key characteristic of the phenomenon of trying to help immigrants. And there isn't a very institutionalized system of reception in the US. So really we're seeing something new that I think in many ways is encouraging the fact that the city and the state have been trying to find ways to house asylum seekers and provide them at least a short term place to stay while they adapt to their new homes.

Chiara Galli:

Of course, there's lots of things that we could do to provide more support. For instance, providing housing for a longer period of time. I know that in some of the shelters, they're now requiring asylum seekers to leave after 30 days. That's really not enough time for people to get on their feet and find jobs and find housing, particularly so because it's taking forever for asylum seekers to get work permits right now. Asylum seekers have the right to get a work permit once they apply, and usually the so-called clock would start upon their applications and they would get their permits after six months. But because of a series of changes the Trump administration made, now it's looking more like nine months to a year.

Chiara Galli:

So there's a real mismatch between the amount of time you get a roof over your head and the amount of time it takes for you to get a work permit that's going to enable you to get a job where you can actually pay rent in the city of Chicago. So perhaps we should be housing people for a longer period of time, but the fact of the matter is that there's very scarce resources to go around. So I think the city is trying to distribute those resources as it can because people continue to arrive.

Gabriela Rivera:

So we have been talking about all of these difficult topics, violence and this difficult journey to the US and the super complicated conditions that people face when they come into the US. But what I think makes your research so fascinating is the fact that you decided to focus in this group of people that are going through this intense period of their lives. Most of them are teenagers. So how was it to work with teenagers going through these very complicated period in their lives and going through all of these incredible changes at the same time?

Chiara Galli:

I think that teenagers are a fascinating group, right? Because not only were they in a state of legal limbo between the potential promise of protected refugee status and the risk of being denied asylum and potentially becoming undocumented or being deported back to their home countries, but they were also in a liminally social position in the life course. A teenagers are kind of in a hybrid state between childhood and adulthood. And so they're very interesting group of people to work with. And they exhibit inherently both kind of what we think of as childlike dependent traits and adult-like traits of wanting independence, of seeking independence.

Chiara Galli:

I mean, of course, disadvantaged poor indigenous kids tend to grow up much more quickly in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras than teenagers do in the US where they're much more sheltered. And of course, I mean, there's a racial dynamic to this. There's a class dynamic to this, but white middle class kids are especially sheltered in the US, less so for a working class minority kids. But in Central America, kids do tend to grow up more quickly than they do in the US, which is why they feel infantilized by this need to show their childlike innocence, et cetera.

Chiara Galli:

But in some ways they also do retain some childlike trade. So for example, a lot of my research participants were hoping that they would be supported by their family members when they got here. Some of them actually wanted to stay in school and continue to pursue their education, and they were quite disappointed when they realized that the family members, sometimes aunts and uncles who they didn't really know well, they hadn't had a lot of contact with prior to migration. These individuals had promised, "You can leave ORR and I'll help you finish school and you can live with me." And then they found out that actually they would have to work to support themselves because their aunts and uncles that were supporting their own kids in Guatemala, so they couldn't afford to have them continue in this childlike dependent role of being in school and then continuing on to get their education in college.

Chiara Galli:

So they felt betrayed and they felt a lot of a sense of strong responsibility, a big burden on their shoulders because they had to work, provide themselves, sometimes send remittances back home, payback debt they had incurred due to their migration. So all of these adult-like responsibilities weighed really heavily on their shoulders. At the same time, they had all of the wonderful dreams and aspirations that teenagers have. I think teenagers are very future oriented. They dream about the future. They dream about who they want to be as adults, what are their aspirations for the kinds of jobs they want to do, the kinds of things they want to study, the kinds of people they want to be.

Chiara Galli:

And so something the kids would talk about, I have a story in the book about this Honduran girl who I call Linda, she wants to feel womanlike and she wants to buy things that will make her feel sexy essentially, right? Stiletto heels, mini skirts. And so this nonprofit organization where I was doing research told Linda, "We have these volunteers that want to give donations to kids, so what do you want?" And so she made this list that had these items on it, the stiletto heels, the platforms, the miniskirt. Because she had just turned 18, of course, she wanted those things. When we're teenagers, you're trying to signal that you're adult-like. It's part of your metamorphosis process as you try to look like an adult, to behave like an adult. You have your romantic relationships, et cetera. And it was very sad because the organization told her, "There's no way people are going to want to donate these items to you because you're an unaccompanied minor. You're a poor kid. They're going to want to give you things that you need, not things that you want."

Chiara Galli:

So I thought these teenagers are really not allowed to have the wants and desires that teenagers have as they transition to adulthood. At least not in any formal capacity. When they're trying to get help, they're trying to get support, they're trying to get legal status, they have to perform the childlike state in that space. And then of course, in their everyday lives, they very much signal the adult-like behaviors. And they're very much teenagers in the sense that they dress quite fashionably when they have little bit of money to do so.

Chiara Galli:

But it's a really fascinating population to work with, and they're a very inspiring group of young people. So I think that if only we did a little bit more to support them and a lot less to make their lives impossible by making it so hard for them to undergo this legal system with so few resources, they could really thrive and contribute in amazing ways to American society.

Reema Saleh:

So after spending so much time with unaccompanied minors and the immigration system, how would you say that things need to change? If there is anything that policymakers should take from your book, what should it be?

Chiara Galli:

So, well, they should read the policy recommendations that I make in the conclusion. And there's lots of things that should change. First of all, we need to completely rethink the immigration system in the sense that I make a case in the conclusion that I think that protections for vulnerable categories, including unaccompanied children, should be supplemental to a basic human rights protections for all immigrants. And this is really in line with the spirit of the convention of the rights of the child that says, children have human rights like all individuals, but in addition, we give them supplemental protections because they need protections due to their unique vulnerabilities because of their stage in the life course, their position in society, their developmental needs.

Chiara Galli:

So I think that this should be the logic of the immigration system, and that's not what the current logic of the US immigration system is, but also it's not the logic of what the European immigration systems is, which is to kind of chip away at the basic rights of immigrants, do away with asylum protections with access to asylum, make it harder and harder, and then create spaces of exceptions for vulnerable categories such as children, unaccompanied minors. In the European Union, there's some exceptions for migrants who are ill, for pregnant women, but really those protections need to be supplemental on top of what we give basic human rights guarantees for everyone. So this is a huge systemic change that I think needs to happen in the US and worldwide.

Chiara Galli:

And then the asylum system needs to change. I think that we should interpret refugee law to protect people who are fleeing life-threatening violence in their homes. And we've seen some evolution of the refugee law in the past that's been encouraging, such as protections for victims of gender-based violence, particularly domestic violence. And so this shows that these changes are possible. It is possible for the interpretation of the refugee definition to expand, to better reflect the conditions that are pushing people to flee their homes today. So we need to continue to do that work. And then finally, I mean, I have many, many ideas, but just to say one more, I think that we need a universal legal representation system for people who are facing deportation proceedings, removal proceedings in immigration court.

Chiara Galli:

And I say people and not children because I think that no one can prepare their asylum case on their own because it's exceptionally difficult to do so because of the complex nature of the law and our bureaucracies. And so we don't have a public defender system in the immigration courts because ostensibly these are civil proceedings. But if you think about it, really the impacts that the outcomes of these proceedings have on people's lives are much more similar to criminal proceedings. It's the deprivation of liberty. You can literally lose the right to stay in the United States and be sent back to a country where you might be facing life-threatening violence. So we should, at the very least, give people the resources that they need to actually fight their case in court and qualify for protections that they might very well qualify for. And because we know that the impact of legal representation is really important in producing these positive outcomes in the immigration system, and there's a lot of research to back that up.

Reema Saleh:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Chiara Galli. This episode was produced and edited by Reema Saleh and Ricardo Sand. Thank you to our interviewers, Natalie Reyes, Gabriela Rivera, and Reema Saleh. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit the pearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Root of Conflict Podcast

Episode: Somaliland’s Independence

featuring

Bashir Goth

interviewed by

Deqa Aden and Joshua Charles

October 26, 2022

Full Transcript

Reema Saleh: Hi. This is Reema, and you’re listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts.

Reema Saleh: You’re listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you’ll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Reema Saleh: The Republic of Somaliland is a de facto sovereign state in the Horn of Africa. Declaring independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland is a self-governing country with democratic elections and a distinct history on the continent, but it’s still considered part of Somalia by the international community. In this episode, we speak with Bashir Goth, the head of the Somaliland Mission in the United States about how Somaliland has navigated state building without international recognition. We talk about democracy and development, and what Somaliland has to offer the world in the coming decades.

Deqa Aden: I’m Deqa Aden, a second year Master of Public Policy student and a Pearson Fellow.

Bashir Goth: I’m Bashir Goth, a Somaliland Representative to the United States.

Joshua Charles: I’m Joshua Charles. I’m a second year Master of Public Policy candidate and Pearson fellow.

Reema Saleh: Hi, my name is Reema. I’m a second year Master student and Pearson Fellow.

Joshua Charles: I think to begin, could you introduce yourself? What do you do? What’s your background?

Bashir Goth: Okay. Currently I’m the representative of Somaliland to the United States. You can say an ambassador. So, I do what any ambassador in the world does. Before that, I was working in different areas. I work in the oil industry as a corporate communication advisor. I work in the media as a journalist. And I worked in international organizations also as a communication advisor. That’s my background.

Joshua Charles: Okay. That’s quite dynamic. And so given that you have extensive experience working in the intersection within the policy space, and when thinking about the relationship between Somaliland and Taiwan, it’s pretty clear that there is a synergistic dynamic that mutually embraces each country’s path towards independence. To what extent does Somaliland have similar relationships in place that are a characteristic of the country’s relationship with Taiwan?

Bashir Goth: Taiwan’s relationship was a very strategic decision for Somaliland. We are two countries which are in similar situations, political and geopolitics also. We are both existing states in the world, democratic states, but not recognized internationally. Both of us are bullied by bigger countries, China in terms of Taiwan, and for us, although they kind of bully us, we’re very weak, our neighbor, but they claim Somaliland as part of their country. So that’s what brought us together. And not only that, but we have common values, like democracy and human values and free market economy and all kinds of things have brought us together. So that’s how we established ties with Taiwan.

Deqa Aden: Are there any other states like Taiwan that are also seeking independence that Somaliland attempted to build a relationship in?

Bashir Goth: No, actually, because Somaliland has a unique status, a unique situation, historical background, and the only one that’s actually similar is Taiwan. But other countries that are struggling… they have their own problems that are quite different from Somaliland. Somaliland was an existing state before, during colonialism, and after colonialism they became independent, and now they just went back to their past status. Taiwan is almost the same. Taiwan was ruling China, and then during the Civil War the rulers of China were defeated, and they ran to Taiwan and kept the Chinese government in Taiwan. So actually, they claim that they are the real Chinese government and represent the Chinese people. And they were representing China in the Security Council in the United Nations until 1971, when the United States recognized China, and then China took the United Nations seat. So, we are similar states, but we don’t reach out to other countries which are in a different situation.

Joshua Charles: Wow, and so when thinking about Somaliland’s path to independence, do you believe there… What do you think is required to get there? And do you believe that a strategic partnership with Taiwan will be significant to Somaliland attending its independence?

Bashir Goth: No, they will not, because we are both struggling for independence. We are both struggling for international recognition. So that’s what brought us together. But Somaliland relations with Taiwan can play another role, which is Taiwan is a very, very close friend of the United States, both economically, strategically, and politically. And they have a great influence in the United States also. So that could play a role in bringing the United States closer to Somaliland, because any country that establishes relations with Taiwan will definitely be, by default, a friend of the United States, because the United States cares about that. And any country that actually severs or cuts relations with Taiwan, the United States gives them [a] hard time also. So that’s one way, but the search for independence will just go on in its own way and through different other channels.

Deqa Aden: Just to follow up on that, I think it was very important that you highlighted that shared interest and similar stories are important for Somaliland, which is why also Taiwan’s path is quite similar to Somaliland as well. And since this relation that has been formulated very recently: in what ways has Somaliland benefited from Taiwan’s strategic partnerships? In what way did Taiwan benefit from Somaliland as well?

Bashir Goth: Somaliland benefited definitely. Taiwan is an economic giant in the world today, especially in what you call information technology. It is one of the leading countries in semiconductor and chips and making things like that. And in that way, Taiwan is helping Somaliland in different areas, in agriculture, in health, in IT. Recently, they started actually something that’s similar to a technology park in Somaliland. In training our coast guards… even yesterday some members of the Taiwanese coast guards arrived in Somaliland, and they were in Berbera. So, they’re helping Somaliland in different ways, in different sectors economically and in investment also. They’re investing in Somaliland energy, they’re starting oil exploration in different parts of the country very soon, next year actually, in collaboration with an international energy company. And that’s what they’re doing. So, they’re helping Somaliland in different ways.

Bashir Goth: Taiwan is also benefiting from Somaliland, because Taiwan needs a foothold in Africa. And they have relations with only one country in Africa, that’s Eswatini. No other country. So, when they establish relations with Somaliland, that gives them a foothold in that strategic area of the Horn of Africa. And then at the same time, Somaliland can play a role in winning friends for Taiwan from our neighboring countries, and that’s another way. One particular thing is that China is in Djibouti. They have a big base in Djibouti. So, when Taiwan is in Somaliland, and they’re watching what China is doing there, it’s just next door. So, they have a lot of benefits also from there strategically.

Joshua Charles: So, it’s quite interesting to hear that within Somaliland there will be oil exploration in the next year. Aside from oil, what other commodities and materials are untapped right now?

Bashir Goth: Somaliland is basically a virgin country. It’s untapped. We have a lot of minerals, we have a lot of resources that are buried underground, and it has to be tapped. And currently we know that we have oil and probably gas. It’s a great potential for that. But the economy of the country, actually the backbone of the country’s economy, is livestock. We export a lot of livestock on the hoof—that means live animals—to the Gulf countries, especially to Saudi Arabia. So mostly we earn our economy from livestock, and we have some other local companies that produce for domestic use, domestic consumption, but not for export. Usually for export for the country also depends on the diaspora remittance, which actually is like $800 million a year of remittance. That plays a huge part also. And then the local revenue, whatever. Berbera Port is a growing port and a very important port. It’s going to be a hub in the Horn of Africa soon, and that will actually be a game changer for the economy of Somaliland and for the whole region.

Deqa Aden: Speaking of economy, one of the main reasons people are always impressed with Somaliland is how self-sustaining it is, because Somaliland doesn’t get any foreign investment, it doesn’t have a seat in any of the major multilateral organizations. The question is, how does Somaliland manage to do that? And I’ve seen and heard that you are very much about Somaliland sustaining the way it is. And to quote what you said earlier, which is really a beautiful statement, is that we don’t want aid, we just want partnerships. And I think that is something that’s quite unheard of. I was just curious if you can just touch base on that a little bit more, for the people to know more about it as well.

Bashir Goth: Somaliland has actually proven that any African country can live without aid. It’s really a real example, if you want to see a country that’s surviving without aid, and we did it. We did it because Somaliland… Number one, there is a will. The will of the people, that they have to live with the conditions that they have. They found themselves in this condition by default. They found themselves that they cannot access international financial organizations. Then they have to find a way to live. That’s human innovation. Where there’s a need… necessity is the mother of invention. So they decide, the government of Somaliland and the people of Somaliland, decided that they have to live by their own means. So the revenue the government generates goes to usually public things like the government employees’ salary, the armed force salary, and some kind of public services. But the country actually survives by the private sector. We have a free market economy. So the free market, the private sector plays a big role. Almost 80% of the country’s economy is run by the private sector. That’s how we survive.

Joshua Charles: Wow, and so when thinking about the need for investment and thinking about the potential or a current existence of a domestic bond market, what does that look like at the moment? And if the domestic bond market isn’t developed at the moment, do you see that being a tangible solution to address some financial deficits?

Bashir Goth: We have a domestic market and a domestic private economy that’s actually ready for international partnership. They’re ready. They can do anything. They have the latest technology, they have a lot of money, they deal with the world, private sector. So they’re ready for partnerships. So the moment Somaliland gets international investors, the atmosphere, the environment’s ready. So that’s what we are counting on. Already there are some companies have come, and others are now on the way. And I think very soon Somaliland will have very good investment and partnership from the world.

Deqa Aden: Other economic partnerships that came to my mind is UAE, which has built a port in Somaliland, which has shown a great interest in the region, and DP World as well. And this made me think of this world of international affairs, where if you made an ally in one space, then you are also sending signals to also their enemies at times, or maybe their competitors in the market as well. Has there been ways where, when Somaliland partnerships with one state economically, that other states may reach out as well and show an interest?

Bashir Goth: Yes. For example, number one, DP World of the United Arab Emirates was the first one that broke the taboo that nobody can deal with Somaliland, because how can you have a signed international agreement with the country that’s not internationally recognized? Because later on, if there are problems, where are you going to go for and things like that? So that was a problem. Dubai DP World is a world port operator. They have I think they operate more than 83 ports all over the world, including ports in the United States. So, they know how to work, and they know Somaliland because Somaliland people and the United Arab Emirate people had a long history together of migration, working together, all kind of things. So they know the Somaliland people.

Bashir Goth: So they came, they saw the port, they saw the potential of the port in the whole region, and where it’s placed historically. Berbera Port in the ‘80s and Berbera Airport also in the ‘80s, it used to be a Soviet base. Then when the Soviets left, it has become an American port base during the Carter administration. Berbera Airport has the longest runway in Africa. One of the longest… Actually, it’s the longest when you look at the part that’s not run by plane, it is the longest runway in Africa. And the United States used that runway at one time as an emergency landing for the Space Shuttle in the ‘80s. So, Dubai came, they saw the potential of this and said we’re going to invest money in this. And the signed an agreement with the Somaliland government. They’re spending $450 million on that in two phases. First phase is over, second phase will be finished next year, and then it’s going to be state of the art port in the whole region. That’s number one.

Bashir Goth: Then the UK, after Brexit, they were looking for markets. They came to Berbera, and they know Somaliland. There’s nobody who knows Somaliland more than the British. And they said, “Okay, we are joining hands with DP World and we are going to invest in five even African ports, including in Berbera in Somaliland.” One in Egypt, one in Senegal, and some others, but Berbera was one of them. And the British are spending like 200-something million dollars for Berbera Corridor, roads coming from Berbera all the way to Ethiopia. And others will follow. I cannot say it now exactly, but I know that when I was talking to the Minister of Investment and Minister of Trade, they told me there is a number of companies that approach Somaliland for investment. So, it’s coming. It’s coming.

Joshua Charles: That’s exciting. That’s exciting. So, when thinking about UK’s relationship with Somaliland, it’s clear that there’s been some type of financial incentive for the UK to operate or to allocate capital to Somaliland projects. But outside of that financial relationship, politically, culturally, is there any type of dynamic that is of interest to you?

Bashir Goth: Yes. Culturally there is because Britain used to be the colonizer of Somaliland during the colonial period. There is a huge Somaliland diaspora in the UK, and Somalilanders have been in UK for a long, long time. Since 19th century, Somaliland seaman have been… They have established even areas in UK where they’re known. So culturally, there are long cultural ties. But yes, UK is after its own economic interest, but at the same time its strategic interest, because the place where Somaliland is located in the Horn Africa, the Gulf of Aden… You know, the Gulf of Aden sea coast, more than 11% of international oil tankers pass through that. Imagine that. So it’s a very strategic place, why all these countries are coming to have bases, for example, in Djibouti and other areas, because this is an economical nerve for the whole world. So they have an eye on that also. So a lot of things…

Deqa Aden: Going back to my also previous question. With all these new partnerships and all these companies coming from these different countries, you don’t also have to answer it either, has there been any negative consequences from building partnership with their opposing allies as well, or that’s not the case…

Bashir Goth: Not yet. Not yet.

Deqa Aden: Okay. That’s good.

Bashir Goth: Because we don’t have that many companies that have come. So not yet.

Deqa Aden: Okay. That’s good. That’s good to know. Now, moving back from economy to democracy, I think one of the most fascinating things about Somaliland is the latest freedom health score in 2022, which Somaliland scored higher than a lot of sub-Saharan African countries, including the Middle East, also including UAE as well and Qatar. And that is something that a lot of academics are really fascinated with. So, first question is, how did Somaliland build this democracy that people are just fascinated with?

Bashir Goth: Somaliland has actually built a democracy that’s a blend or a mix between traditional way that Somalilanders used to run their affairs and modern democracy. So, after the Civil War and the collapse of the former central government of Somalia, and when the people came together and they reclaimed their independence, they had to build their country back. So, they have to resort what they knew. Resorting to what they knew is how they used to run their country. So Somaliland people used to have a kind of pastoral democracy, which was natural democracy. People come, sit together under a tree, discuss things, no age barrier, sometimes gender barrier, everybody will have a voice. And then they will discuss, they’ll make a decision, and then that decision will be binding for everybody. And that’s how we have to do. When there is, for example, a conflict between clans, that’s how they used to solve. So that is our tradition.

Bashir Goth: And then with modern democracy, which we have to give credit to our founder, a guy who considered as a founder of Somaliland, who is Muhammad Ibrahim Egal, he was our independence leader in 1960, the first prime minister. And he was one of the independence leaders in Africa at that time. So he was a man who knew how democracy works. He was a man who went through this struggle of independence. So he became the president and he laid the foundation of Somaliland, modern democracy, and he knew how to deal with traditional… and win the trust of people, and he worked with that. So it was not a one person, but he was the leader, and the leader makes a difference everywhere. Mandela made a difference for South Africa, for example.

Bashir Goth: So he actually led this democratization of Somaliland. The Somaliland people were willing to do that, they adopted democracy. And over the last 31 years, there are more than five presidents that peacefully took over from each other the power. We are the only country in the Horn of Africa, for example… The second country could be Kenya. Kenya from 1963 when they became independent until now, there are only five presidents. Somaliland in 30 years, half of Kenya’s age, there are five presidents that replaced each other by universal election. One man, one person, one vote. That’s how we do it every time. Our parliament, our presidents.

Bashir Goth: And the unique thing about Somaliland, which is actually the only country that did that, the whole world, is we do our elections by… We use iris recognition, biometric identification. So that rules out any irregularities or rigging the election or things like that. So we are the first country in the world to use that biometric iris recognition. So international observers come to our elections, and there is not a single time that the international observers, including the IRA, which was the first to come, there is not a single time they did not testify that Somaliland elections was free and fair. Yes, in any election there’ll be some little here and there irregularities and problems, anywhere in the world. We have here in the United States, and we know that. But Somaliland actually has a very good record in that.

Bashir Goth: And that’s how the freedom… We have other problems also, for example. Freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is very, very good in Somaliland. Anybody can say anything against the government, against any institution, and against any organization. And we actually say in Somaliland we have more freedom than necessary, because anybody can say anything. But at the same time, we are a young democracy, so sometimes we have issues. For example, some reporters may be detained by the government because they said something, but that’s not literally because the government is against criticism, but it’s because we are fragile state, surrounded by a very tough neighborhood. These young reporters who are mostly unprofessional and untrained can just go to anybody and interview somebody who can say any flagrant statements that he wants to say against another clan, and that could cause a clash. That’s the time for some that person is detained. So things like that happen, which we don’t like, because freedom of speech has to be freedom of speech. But comparatively in our neighborhood, actually we’re the best.

Joshua Charles: Wow, that’s quite interesting. When considering the evolution of a democracy, like you mentioned, there will always be some issues that remain unaddressed in America. You have it within the politically elected officials, the representation can be more proportionate to the actual American population. Within Somaliland, from my understanding, there’s a lack of female representation within parliament. When that translates to policy, to the policy making process, what are some of the consequences of that, and what are some of the policies in place to amplify female representation within politics?

Bashir Goth: So generally, you’ll talk about political inclusiveness, inclusive politics, whether it’s female or any other people. Let me first go back a little and answer the question Deqa asked me. There [is a] very important factor I forgot. In Somaliland, we did not just dream when they came up with democracy. It went through a long process. And this long process was, for example, after we reclaimed our independence, we had more than probably ten community conferences in different parts of the country, where people came together to resolve local conflicts and local issues and things like that. And these went through states until it came to the grand meeting in Burao in 1994, where all the clans and everybody came together and they drafted the national charter for Somaliland, and Egal was elected. So it went through… It was a community-based process that started from the grassroots and then grew up all the way to the top.

Bashir Goth: Coming back to your question, political inclusiveness is always not an easy job. It’s a very, very difficult thing. You cannot satisfy all people all the time. There will always be gaps that has to be... There will always be improvements to be done. So we have these gaps, we have these shortcomings, but we try our best, and think all the communities are represented in Somaliland political institutions and political bodies. There are not elected women in our parliament, but they’re also represented in the government. They are in different parts of the government and departments and organizations and civil societies. Actually, women are very, very strong in civil societies. They have the strongest voice in civil societies. So they will come also to the political leadership one day, and they’re fighting for that, and we are helping them. But otherwise, we are moving forward. That’s what I can say.

Deqa Aden: I think just to build up on all the things you’ve said, mass misinformation is a threat to democracy, not only in Somaliland, across the world, and even the U.S. also struggling with social media and how that’s a threat to their strong democracy, which complicates freedom of speech. So this struggle you mentioned, it’s a struggle that a lot of countries have, and there’s a lot of debates about it, of how do we move forward? Because we want people to know the correct information and wouldn’t want misinformation to be the cause of civil war. As you said, we are a fragile state itself, and we’re right next to Somalia. And I think that’s really important to highlight, so I just wanted to also reemphasize that.

Deqa Aden: But going back even before that, I think the history of Africa in academic context, or in this part of the world, somehow it starts colonial times, as if there was no Africa before colonial times. So to me, it was really important when you mentioned that there was pastoral democracy even before colonial times, and there was Somaliland before the British came, and then that was part of the ingredients that made the democracy that we have right now. So the unfinished part of democracy, because there’s always going to be an unfinished part, and there’s the part we always admire, I’ve always been one of those people who admires Somaliland’s democracy because just no one knows about it, and it’s really fascinating. Where should the unfinished part focus on in the next couple of decades? Where should Somaliland’s unfinished democracy should work on… And as you said, democracy’s a project…

Bashir Goth: Yeah. Exactly.

Deqa Aden: It’s always constantly improving. So the unfinished part, how should we envision Somaliland in the next couple of decades?

Bashir Goth: The most important part for the unfinished parts would be women participation in Somaliland policymaking or decision making. That’s number one. Number two will be general political inclusiveness, which there are always grievances in Somaliland. Another thing will be, for example, every country has a constitution, but the constitution is a living document. It has to go through change all the time. Somaliland, over the last 30 years, we did not look back at our constitution. And that has to be done, and that will address a lot of constitutional problems in democracy of Somaliland. So I think these are the areas that we have to go through in the coming decade or years.

Bashir Goth: And another one will be youth employment. That’s a problem not only in Somaliland, but all over of Africa. By 2050, predictions are African population will be like 4 billion, and maybe 80% of that will be below 30. Imagine. How are you going get employment for that? It’s called the youth bulge. And the other African countries are suffering from that, and unemployment is really very high. What do you think of Somaliland, which doesn’t have access to international financial markets? It’s pretty difficult. So that’s another area also that we have to actually address.

Deqa Aden: Mm-hmm. Definitely.

Joshua Charles: Right. Youth, that’s the future of any society, and I have quite a few friends who live in Uganda, and one of my friends, she just graduated from Makerere University within the last few months. She jokes around and she says, “I’m an unemployed youth.” But that’s an unfortunate reality for many people within that region of the world. So thinking about… Okay, it’s clear that Somaliland is not well integrated into the international financial system, but there is certainly potential. From the government’s perspective, what can be done to enhance the job market for youth? What are some of the strategic partnerships that can be in place to actually support the youth employment?

Bashir Goth: For now, what Somaliland government is doing, not only Somaliland government, but Somaliland government and together with the private sector, they are trying to do a lot of things actually. Number one is employment, whoever they can employ. That’d be a very small number. The private sector can employ more. That’s one thing. At the same time, it’s giving skills to young people, young graduates for example, skills that they can start their own businesses. So that’s another one. Give them small loans that they can start their own small businesses. That’s another way they can do it. And attracting international investment, which is a huge thing, because once investment comes to, for example, now Berbera Airport. It’s employing a lot of youth who have been trained and skilled, and they’re working there. So when investment comes, it will generate a lot of employment. So, when the economy grows, employment also grows with it.

Bashir Goth: So that’s what we are trying to do a lot of… but it’s very difficult to catch up, because thousands of students graduate every year, just like any other country. And they come to the market, and the market is very small, so imagine. But we are trying to find ways actually, every single day the government and private sector are coming up with new ideas and new ways. Even the youth are coming up with their own new ideas. So we’ll think that some of these will work out. Maybe like we survive without international aid, maybe we can also teach the world how to create employment for the youth… Could be.

Deqa Aden: Absolutely. Another point that I thought of was… I was also in Somaliland last year, especially working on a business incubator for youth for finding jobs. And it was shocking to me because oftentimes we market Africa as a… “There’s no education. We have to educate women. We have to educate the youth.” And I was like, no, education was never the problem. In fact, education itself is the problem, because you have a mass of graduates who are really high skilled, who are ready and want to use their skills. And that can lead to a lot of frustration, so sometimes the youth just want to leave the country and want to come to this part of the world where they can put their education to use. Has illegal migration… Has it been a problem? Because I couldn’t pinpoint, with just knowing how unemployment is such a big deal, where are these youth going?

Bashir Goth: Somaliland actually never had that big a problem with mass youth immigration, illegal immigration. We had some of our young people who actually went through illegal immigration, and they traveled through, for example, Ethiopia, Sudan, and from Sudan to Libya, and all the way to the Mediterranean, taking boats from the Mediterranean, from Libya. Some of them did that. A number of them did that, actually. But usually, we didn’t have that mass migration like other African countries have. For example, like the Sahel countries that thousands of young people, hundreds of young people, are every day crossing the Mediterranean and dying many of them there. We don’t have that. We don’t have that.

Bashir Goth: But the good thing about Somaliland is that we are a very close-knit community, so people help each other, families help each other, communities help each other. So young people don’t get actually… They may be unemployed, but they will always have a place to sleep, a place to eat something, a little pocket money. They will always have that, because their family, their larger family, will be helping, whether they are in the diaspora or inside or wherever. So the social cohesion of the Somaliland people is very important and helps them. But that will only take you so far, actually…

Deqa Aden: Only so far.

Bashir Goth: If you know the Middle East, what actually caused the Arab uprising was youth unemployment. And the Arabs have a lot of money, but because of the political system, youth could not get employment. So that’s what caused the Arab Spring. But then when the Arab Spring took place, then it ended up with a disaster, because when there is a movement and there’s no leadership and vision, then it ends up with chaos. So that’s also a good lesson for other countries, so Somaliland youth also see that. And I don’t expect anything like that happening in Somaliland, or maybe anywhere in Africa in the future. But it’s a problem worldwide, even in the United States. We have a lot of unemployment here, especially now. So that’s a big problem.

Joshua Charles: True. Especially within the last three years, unemployment rates have skyrocketed within America as well as in other parts of the world. When I have conversations about Africa, it seems that many people find it easy to generalize certain characteristics of individuals within the continent. But in reality, there are so many different identities, just like any other part of the world. So when thinking about the communal aspect of Somaliland, how do you think religion reinforces that propensity of the collective society?

Bashir Goth: Religion was traditionally part of our culture. It was just part of the Somaliland people’s culture. Religion was never a problem. It was not something that was separate from the Somaliland culture. But in the ‘90s and after the ‘90s, an alien type of Islam came to the Somaliland people from Arabia, like anywhere else in the world, and that infiltrated into the community. And what you see today in Somalia and Al-Shabaab is actually an alien culture, alien kind of Islam that came to our region, came from Arabia, especially from Saudi Arabia, called Wahhabism. And that’s a radical school of Islam that doesn’t tolerate any other lifestyle.

Bashir Goth: So actually, we suffered from that for quite some time, but because of our traditionally strong foundations of Islam, we came over that. So we don’t have that problem. That’s why we don’t have in Somaliland any radical violence in our country. We don’t have that. So our traditional Islam came back, that’s a Sufi Islam, traditional Islam, that was part of the people’s culture that was spiritual. And we live with that. That’s our culture. That’s our culture.

Deqa Aden: Mm-hmm. And I think that’s also another shock to the world, how is Somalia a hub for one of the biggest terrorist organizations, and Somaliland is nothing like that, and they’re right next door to one another? So I’m glad you mentioned that it somehow all comes down to culture and the traditions and the infrastructure that was there before all these problems.

Bashir Goth: Exactly.

Deqa Aden: Speaking of research, one of the main gaps across Africa, even the most developed countries, is lack of investment from the government to invest in research. And research is the bridge that takes the continent and shares that information with the rest of the world. So often when people ask me, “What’s a Somalilander?” They always say, “We’re interested, but we know nothing.” And I always say, me too, I just know my lived experiences, but there’s not a book that I could recommend or something strong. Do you see any future for Somaliland investing in its own research? Because with all this wisdom you share today, or lessons, we have to put that into writing, for a book for the world to read.

Bashir Goth: That’s actually an advice that I always give to Somaliland universities when I meet them. Whenever I go back to the country and I meet them, I always tell them research, research, research. Because a university without research will not benefit the community in which they exist. Because they have to look at the community, look at the problems with the community, and they have to make research about it. Governments rely on universities for their policies. For some, like your school here, probably you produce so many papers on different policies of the United States. So this probably would be taken by the Congress or by politicians, and then they implement it. And that that’s very important. Whether it’s science, whether it’s political science, whether it’s art, everything.

Bashir Goth: So we are very weak in research. We have to build our research capabilities. We have to find funding. Public funding would be the best, because when you have private funding, then there will be an interest in that. But also, private funding will come on board. So I know for example now the universities of Amoud and Hargeisa, actually they started their own research departments, and they have went through a lot of training, and they’re doing good work now, but it will take some time until they pick up. I think Amoud and Hargeisa, both of them now produce some kind of journals, research journals where they publish their papers, and I hope that increases also. It will come.

Bashir Goth: But that’s actually what… Not only Somaliland but all Africa suffers from that. And I was actually thinking, probably Africa has to create their own research or scientific journals. Because if the best African paper comes out from any university in Africa, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to publish in one of these scientific or academic journals in the Western world, because they have their own… It’s like clubs. So you have to be a certain race, you have to be certain something. You know, you guys. Otherwise, you cannot publish it. I have read a story where two actual researchers, they were Europeans, made research about that, and they couldn’t publish their papers. Then they took the names of famous, well-known academics, scholars, and they sent their papers with the name of these scholars, and they were published. Same papers. So, there is a racism and discrimination also in academic journals in the world. So probably it’s time that Africa, Latin America, whoever, have to create their own.

Joshua Charles: That would certainly change the tides of the academic space, especially how people from abroad, they often come to America, go to Europe, to advance their education, to get master’s degrees, PhDs, LLMs. But if there are some opportunities within Africa to contribute to the academic space in a meaningful way, in lieu of taking a trip outside of the continent, then I think there would be a lot of incentive from citizens from Somaliland, as well as from other citizens across the continent.

Joshua Charles: So just thinking about… Shifting gears a bit to the Central Bank. Infrastructure development… it sounds like there is tremendous potential for infrastructure development, and there are currently a lot of large projects in place that are scheduled to be done in the next year. Political stability is crucial to seeing the completion of these projects, as well as in the case of force majeure, say war or something like that, it’s crucial that infrastructure projects have a way to cross the finish line. So just thinking about the role of the central bank, what are some strategies in place that can be employed to actualize some of these infrastructure projects that are on the to-do list? And in what ways can these projects be employed that appeals to stakeholders like America, continued support from the UK, from UAE?

Bashir Goth: Actually, we have a central bank, but the Central Bank doesn’t have any role or have oversight on projects. They control the financial system of the country, for example. They looked at the country’s inflation, they have to control the inflation. They have to control the currency and the rate of the currency. They have the money of the state. They can give loans to the state or even private sector who wants that. And that’s their role as a central bank, like any other bank in the world does. But the oversight of projects and infrastructure and all these things have other departments, whether it’s ministries or independent departments, there are departments who are looking on that.

Deqa Aden: Mm-hmm. And now I’m going to ask you the last question. I think it seems like Somaliland is a really young country, and the current leadership and the previous one, you guys have sacrificed a lot to sustain the way it is right now. It’s a hypothetical question. If Somaliland was the most developed country in the world and you didn’t have to sacrifice anything, what path of career you would have chosen for yourself? And what would Ambassador Bashir would have been, if Somaliland was the most developed country?

Bashir Goth: Professor.

Deqa Aden: Professor?

Bashir Goth: Of a university. Especially on literature and probably international relations, but mostly on literature. Because that’s my…

Deqa Aden: Your passion.

Bashir Goth: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That was my actual ambition when I was a student. But then when I finished university in Somalia and I left the country and I went to the Middle East and I was on my way to the United States, my father got sick. And I was the eldest of the family. All my brothers and sister were in the middle of school, and who would take care of them? That’s why I just started to work. But my intention was to be a professor. I was a good student. So that was my… But I did not stop. I’m a lifelong learner. So I don’t have the title, but I do a lot of things, so I don’t regret that.

Reema Saleh: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Bashir Goth. This episode was produced and edited by Reema Saleh and Ricardo Sande. Thank you to our interviewers, Deqa Aden and Joshua Charles. Special thanks to UC3P and The Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on The Pearson Institute’s research and events, visit thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Episode: Gender and Conflict

featuring

Lina Haddad Kreidie, political psychologist and academic director of gender studies at the Lebanese American University

interviewed by

Hannah Balikci and Zareen Hussain, Pearson Fellows

Thursday October 13, 2022

Full Transcript

Reema Saleh: Hi, this is Reema and you’re listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You’re listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. In this series, you’ll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

How do war and displacement disproportionately impact women? In this episode, we speak with

Dr. Lina Haddad Kreidie, a political psychologist and academic director of gender studies at the Lebanese American University. Her research centers marginalized communities, mainly displaced and refugee women in the Middle East. We discuss her work with the Intisar Foundation, studying drama therapy as a mental health intervention for refugee women and how it’s impacted communities within the camps.

Zareen Hussein:

Hello, my name is Zareen Hussein. I am a second-year public policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy.

Hannah Balikci: And I am Hannah Balikci. I’m a first-year student at the Harris School of Public Policy.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: My name is Lina Haddad Kreidie and I am the academic director of Gender Studies at the Lebanese American University. And I am a research consultant for an NGO for the Intisar foundation. Intisar Foundation works with women empowerment for socioeconomically disadvantaged women who are impacted by war and violence.

Zareen Hussein: Could you tell us how you came to your work? What brought you to this intersection between gender, mental health, and conflict?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Just to rewind a bit, my degree is in political science, and I did a concentration in political psychology. So my gender focus and work on women came as a result, what we call experiential learning. And based on my own experiences and my own observations and analysis of the different theories and readings I went through. I found that women are invisible, mainly in the political field. And even when they are in, they are subordinated, they are used as tokens and not as effective decision makers.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So this brought me to try to explore more on the causes and the barriers that lead to such gender discrimination. I also wanted to see this in different cultures. So I’ve read a lot about gender inequality in the western world, but it was not enough explanatory basis to understand the gender inequalities in the Arab world. And my work now, I moved from University of California Irvine to Lebanon to do the work on conflict management and to teach in political science. But I wanted to base my research on gender, starting with women. But with my new position, I’m expanding to look at all marginalized communities and intersectional inequalities where we use race, ethnicity, class, disabilities, and women and men, because gender is not only about women. So this is where my research is landing now, and my academic and intellectual work is at the University. My teaching and the student-based learning process that’s taking place on campus is also linked to my work with Intisar Foundation and the approach of empowering women.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: And I noticed that this drama therapy intervention, which I was suspicious at the beginning, of its effectiveness, is an excellent and effective approach that brings in not only psychoanalysis, which I’ve read a lot about, and cognitive behavioral therapy and EDMR and all those individual approaches to helping people with psychological issues and specifically people who are impacted by compounded traumas.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: In cultures where psychological counseling is considered a stigma and where women are, and men, usually don’t see psychologists or psychiatrists because they would be stigmatized as crazy, and men would with their hyper masculinity, “No, I’m not crazy,” And women would be afraid to do so. And in academia also I noticed that even in my promotions and academic life, because I got married young and I had children, I would see myself and all the women around me as delayed in their progress. This is at the workplace sector.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: In the humanitarian field, I noticed that women are prominent and specifically in Lebanon where CSOs and the NGOs took the place of the government in terms of providing services. And it was usually women who started and founded and are active in such NGOs. So I noticed that there is a parallel of the role of women where in some sectors they are subordinated, they’re weak, but they are given the care, which is also the associated role that was subscribed to them since birth. Women are the caring, men are the providers. So yes, this is what’s happening, this dualism in functions in Lebanon where the NGOs are run by women, they are the ones who keep the social fabric of the society in a country that is broken by divisiveness.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So not to expand too much on this but to focus on mainly marginalized communities, which is a subject you are interested in, the Intisar foundation is the field work where I felt myself, I’m not only needing analyzing and writing policy recommendations based on synthesizing literature, but also I am doing it in the field. This is what really brought me to Intisar Foundation and this work.

Hannah Balikci: How did you first get involved with the Intisar Foundation?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: It was in a meeting at the Lebanese American University. Actually, my husband, who’s a neurologist and a psychiatrist, met with the CEO of the foundation and they were talking about their work to him because he’s a neurologist, and he said, “No, no, my wife is best, she’s a political psychologist, she’s interested in women empowerment and she keeps talking about gender issues,” so here comes the man. He said, “This is women empowerment, this is not my job,” although they wanted to recruit him. So he referred them to me and this is where we found each other, actually. And it was the best time where I could translate my work on the ground. And I met Sheikha Intisar AlSabah, who is the founder. She’s from the royal family of Kuwait. And one would think that they are not involved with the people, but she’s very much involved with the people. And for children we manage bullying, but for women it’s the drama therapy intervention.

Zareen Hussein: Before we get into understanding what drama therapy is, can you help, for those who don’t know, what is political psychology?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Excellent. Political psychology is a field that focuses on the micro level of analysis When we are analyzing any issue, whether it’s electoral issue, electoral campaign, leadership, decision making at the level of the government, the behavior of individuals and groups, political psychology explains the why question. Meaning, for example, to explain terrorism, we don’t judge, we explain why those groups chose to do this. So we look at the emotions, we look at the psychology of fear, we look at identity politics, we look at the cognitive behavioral aspects in the sense of the group-think aspect, the conformity aspect, what we consider as cognitive dissonance, meaning we have mental schemas, we have norms. So when something happens that contradicts our mental schema, we give it the deaf ear and the blind eye. And how we build empathy and altruism, and all those factors are part of explaining conflicts and other issues pertaining to human interaction.

Zareen Hussein: And that’s really interesting because, for example, when talking about ISIS, the uninformed thought is that it’s just extremists joining an extremist group where there’s a lot more caveats to that.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yes.

Zareen Hussein: So Dr. Lina, could you give us an example on everything you’ve just said, maybe in Lebanon or with ISIS specifically?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: You know, I will start with my own. As I mentioned, everything comes with experience. When I was in Lebanon in the ‘80s, I saw around us that religiosity has been increasing, and there is a resurgence of Islamist groups, Muslim Brotherhood and others. And women who did not wear any covers, we started seeing more women with cover. I said, “What’s happening? Why is this happening?” And then there was the political tension between the US and certain groups in Lebanon, and we started seeing hostages taken.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: And at every corner of the road, it’s the Islamists. It’s the Islamists who are doing the harm and so on. And I believe this because we saw that there is this. And Libya came to train certain Islamist groups. Iran came to train other Islamist groups, and the whole region was involved in Lebanon. And this is during the Civil War. So I wanted to do this study, but I could not because of the threats the professors had from Islamist groups. The professor I was working with was a British guy: he was kidnapped in Lebanon, and I thought it was because of the study he was helping me with, and it was not.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So I had the question of why blame Islamist groups? So to make the story short, to understand I wanted to look at the economic, the political situation. I could not find the right answer. It was always insufficient. So I thought into that. I went into the individual level of analysis, to understand the difference between how they view the world versus how the West views the world. For example, what does terrorism mean to them? What does self-sacrifice, a freedom fighter versus terrorist? What does democracy mean to them? Because we’ve learned that there is no democracy in Islam, but they do have an understanding of democracy completely different. They base it on justice, while in the US we base it on individual freedoms. So there are different understandings. So this was based on my political psychology background.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: For the ISIS situation, also the concept of yes, there are Islamist groups who are using Islam as a political tool, and they are vulnerable because of the marginalization they lived in. So whether they are men and women, who lately started joining ISIS, because we have these misperceptions that only men do that, but also women, yes with a lesser number, because they felt they were marginalized in their communities and they found an answer in this ideological, religious, emotional attachment. This could be an example, but the Palestinian camps and the Syrian camps are hubs of extremism. So when you have extreme poverty, marginalization, certain perceptions of people as being prone to being terrorists. So when you give them a certain role, they become the role, and it becomes them. So political psychology helps us understand how to explain, so we can solve the problem better. That’s the idea behind political psychology.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: In addition to, we did analysis of the Gulf War. And how a country like the US where we have leaders who are in power and they are supposedly intellectuals and the best in making decisions, they come up with defective decision making and it’s based on certain phenomenon that’s called groupthink. When you are working in a group and you want to belong into the group, even if they’re making a bad decision, the misperceptions of the situation, the in-group, out-group, “I love my in-group, I hate the other group.” So you tend to make defective decision makings and personalities and the right-wing authoritarianism and all of this.

Zareen Hussein: So definitely an us-versus-them mentality?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: It is the us-versus-them mentality.

Hannah Balikci: In regards to what you were mentioning about refugee camps, we know that women and children make up over half of all refugees, internally displaced and stateless people. Why is bringing a gender perspective to conflict and displacement important in the context of refugees, and what happens when it’s not taken into account?

Zareen Hussein: And also definitely in political psychology, why are the women not in that discourse?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Men usually are the ones in the war. So when there is displacement and forced migration, the majority are women who leave. And during that time women are disproportionately impacted because they are the ones who take care of the house. They are the ones who take care of the children. So when their husbands are not around, they have a double burden. They have to provide, and they have to care. So it’s both jobs are done on them.

Zareen Hussein: So it’s a shift in the gender roles, almost.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Exactly. There’s a shift. So this is one. On the other hand, if men are also with the woman in the house, and she’s not a single mom, as we mentioned, his role becomes less because humanitarian agencies with their mindset that we have to help the women. So it’s not the right approach because when you give the woman, I remember from my work in Jordan with refugees, the woman would get the 20 dinar to spend, and the male is sitting at home and he feels “What happened to my role? I am the man of the house.”

Zareen Hussein: Demasculinization.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Exactly. Demasculation. And his hyper-masculinity gets attacked and hurt, and this is where the toxic masculinity starts to work and he transfers it on his wife and children, mainly girls. And this is where domestic violence rises at times of crisis. So there is a need to definitely support men and women, but more so women because they are disproportionally impacted, and they are the backbone of the family.

They do both jobs when needed. They do revert to informal jobs, and they don’t ask for much, which is something that’s not good. Because they are used to, “I have to do it. I am the mother, I sacrifice.” Most of their work is unpaid, but they try to do everything when they need to. So it becomes their motherly work and their informal work where they get paid less. So they tend to be the ones hired more than men, but this adds to their trauma, this adds to their bad relationship at home with their husbands and brothers.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So there is a need, and supporting women meaning supporting the family and supporting the community. And I believe, if the mother is able to listen to her husband, not in the sense of being obedient, in the sense of understanding the background of his violence and being able to communicate with him better and not accepting what he does by being more self-confident, by reporting if she has violence, if there’s any violent attacks against her.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Because usually woman in those communities tend to be afraid of reporting because this might increase their violence. So with the drama therapy we do, we help them report. So it is important to make those communities more peaceful, to reduce the vulnerability to extremism so their children would learn from them the significance of communication, the significance of speaking up, the significance of finding other ways of expressing their anger. It doesn’t have to be transferring it on other people and so on. So yeah, that’s mainly some of the factors that are helpful.

Hannah Balikci: Great. You’ve said previously that women who have experienced trauma, such as war and displacement, usually don’t seek help because of their inability to know that they need help. What are the consequences, like you were just mentioning about the effects on their children, what are the consequences of not taking this trauma and how it impacts people into consideration?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: I think it is very important. First, to bring awareness to all, and more so to women because women are suppressed and, as I mentioned, they don’t report their situation. They feel that they are responsible, and they have to take it in: “I’m not going to get angry at my husband or report because I have to keep the peace in the house.” But they are actually destroying themselves from within. So they need to be become more aware of the need for psychological help. And this is something that needs to be done via NGOs or even for girls at school to start with this. So as this will bring more awareness and then the way they raise their children, the way they speak to their husbands and to their community, would be more effective. Just if you want to repeat the question because I think I missed an aspect of it.

Hannah Balikci: What are the consequences of not taking this trauma, and how it impacts people, into consideration?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: If you don’t treat psychological illnesses, they could become more physiologically destructive. Meaning, for example, post-traumatic stress disorder, the more it becomes severe, the more it impacts the brain, it affects the memory, it affects the emotions, they become more angry because of the low impulse control, they tend to be aggressive. I did a study on the link between post-traumatic stress disorder and violence, and there was a significant correlation between PTSD and aggression because people tend to react with anger and they regret it after, but they keep repeating it and they know that they did something wrong, but they cannot control their emotions. So imagine a community where, like among Syrians, every three Syrians in Lebanon, one has PTSD. Every four, one has generalized anxiety.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So if you have a community with all those psychological disorders, then you have a tendency for more violence. I know there are many studies on the macro level that blame Islam or blame the culture or blame economic situation. Yes, these could be factors, but if you have a healthy mental health or a healthy psychology, then you don’t have any psychological disorders, then you can manage the situation better. You can manage your poverty better, you can manage marginalization. We all, as women, we go through this. If we have the ability to deal with it in a healthier way, then we reduce use the problems of... There are many studies done in the US on the veterans with PTSD when they come back from war, and we have higher rates of suicide, we have high rates of domestic violence, specifically because the government is not spending enough to support them.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Imagine in countries like Lebanon or Syria or Iraq or Yemen where the government is lacking and they’re not providing. If NGOs are not active, or any institution, in helping such communities, then we are leading those countries into disasters. So yes, mental health is very important. I think reconstruction of zones of conflict or when you want to build peace, you cannot have peace if the levels of psychological traumas or compound traumas are not relieved, then we don’t build highways if we don’t have people that are productive and healthy.

Zareen Hussein: Absolutely. And I think using the US veterans example is perfect because I know our conversation is about women and how they respond to the lack of resources while also experiencing PTSD, like you said, there’s violence, domestic violence. But imagine on the flip side, men who are also in this exact same situation. There’s an immense high rate of suicide amongst US veterans, and they’re going through the similar things: PTSD, lack of resources. So it’s almost not even a binary gender situation, it’s just a humanitarian issue, but we’re addressing it through a gendered lens.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Exactly.

Hannah Balikci: Would you say that the PTSD levels of refugees in camps is a factor in terms of the gender-based violence that is... We know that gender-based violence surged during COVID-19 as a shadow pandemic, and it’s also very prevalent within refugee camps in general. Is the factor of PTSD amongst the camps, do you think, related to the increase in gender-based violence in refugee camps?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: There’s a variable, or a confounding variable. For the patriarchic system and the masculinity factor, it becomes toxic at times of crisis. Refugees live in crisis. When they live in a camp, it’s a crisis situation. And when males are unable to provide, so their masculinity factor impacts their relationship with their wives, and even boys who are seen as lesser than them. So definitely the gender factor, the patriarchal system. But then PTSD is an added factor because they have low impulse control, they have been going through trauma. And the trauma, it could be war and violence, but it could be also their inability to meet the masculinity expectations. So this is an added trauma for men, which I think should be also resolved.

Zareen Hussein: And Hannah, just going off of what you asked, I can also see how those suffering from PTSD in these camps are attracted to extremism. Because like you said, they’re demasculinized, they have these violent tendencies. And I’m talking about both men and women in this situation because a lot of women, young women, joined ISIS.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yeah, I agree 100%. And there are other psychological disorders, but there are studies that have proven that there is a link between PTSD and violence because of the low impulse control, and it depends on the level of PTSD, the severe ones versus mild or moderate ones. So yes, it is a factor.

Zareen Hussein: Dr. Lina, we’ve been talking a lot about what happens when there’s a lack of resources. You, alongside the Intisar Foundation, you work a lot on drama therapy as a, not necessarily alternative to CBT or EMDR but a…

Lina Haddad Kreidie: An intervention, a group therapy intervention versus an individual-based intervention. Definitely, psychoanalysis or the couch psychoanalysis or the CBT or the EDMR can help. Some of them, they have to be within a short period of time. For example, with PTSD, if you don’t really treat the person who witnessed aggression or who suffers from drama within a certain period of time, it’s helpless. It does not help, psychoanalysis or CBT.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Drama therapy applies also for people where the witnessing of the event passed for some time, so it has an added value. And it is group therapy, which is one of the criteria also from reading the VA history, that social cohesion, social support, is very important. In the US, we know that they talk about it in the family, it’s well reported, but in refugee camps they keep it a secret, they don’t even know about it. So when they are suffering from a problem and they go to an NGO for help, they start becoming aware. They tell them, “Oh, you need counseling,” or “You have depression,” or “You could have the PTSD.” And definitely the diagnosis is built only on clinical and not the other factors. So when we are using drama therapy, we are basing it on clinical analysis done by other NGOs and psychiatrists and psychologists. So it’s an intervention approach that has its own value on its own, because it can happen after a long period of time. It doesn’t have to be within this short period after the event itself.

Hannah Balikci: And I think it’s an interesting point you’ve made about drama therapy and the group aspect of it. How has it made an impact within the refugee communities you worked in and how do you evaluate? If you’re taking into drama therapy, how do you evaluate the pre and post impacts of it within the communities that you’ve worked in?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Drama therapy in itself is a very intensive program and the main purpose of this is to improve emotional awareness and self-awareness, to create a sense of belonging. Something that refugees, men and women, in our case, the women, have an identity crisis. In Lebanon, specifically, they are displaced. They’re considered internally displaced because Lebanon is not a signatory to the refugee situation, and Lebanon and Syria have a kind of relationship of less borders. They go into this dilemma, so they needed a sense of belonging, and drama therapy tackles negative psychological symptoms, focusing on providing structured and sequential mental health intervention.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: And there is a five-phase model, the way we do the drama therapy. The first phase... Do you want me to explain? Okay, the first phase, which is a dramatic play. It allows the group to develop a rapport and to build trust among each other and the facilitator. We have a drama therapist. The same one goes for the 12 sessions because they build trust with the woman. During this phase, what happens is name games. They get to know each other, and they would say, “What do you want to call yourself?” So they give, other than the real name, how they see themselves. And then we try to bring the women—first, there’s an individual meeting and then group meeting with everyone. And this game encourages participants to gradually build towards personal disclosure as they see and hear others in the group sharing their life details. There is one of the games that’s called image, where smaller subgroups are tasked with using their bodies and working together to create a still image that presents a certain concept.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: For example, I mentioned the example of four, and they would do the image and they would stand still. And you would be the ones watching me, then you would imitate me. And there is a group who’s not seeing but from what they are feeling, then they would do the same thing just from what they heard. And this is—we kind of train the memory from just using their sensories, like their hearing sense. And “What do you think?” So they would stand up and try to imagine what the people were doing, the other women were doing.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So it’s a game of senses, the vision, the listening, and then trying to revive their memories and to use their collective memories in explaining what certain concepts mean, what certain situations mean. For example, we show them a picture of people moving as refugees from, let’s say, from Ukraine, not the Syrian, and how would they see this? Do they see it as similar to their situation or is it different? So it’s bringing the reality on the stage and how they respond to it. So this is the first phase. The second is the scene work where we use games to introduce the participants to theater techniques that help them better manage and understand their emotions. To express yourself, how can you do it better? How can you manage your emotions? How you can explore yourself when I say anger, when I say being happy, all those terms, how do you express it? Then we do certain forms of meditation and the breathing exercises, certain physical relaxation exercises.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Then comes the third phase, which is the role play, which encourages the use of imagination to distance oneself from their own issues, to gain a different perspective, play the role of someone else, and then to build more group solidarity and sense of community. And here comes also guided meditation is used to encourage the participants to discover areas of themselves that they do not speak about or acknowledge openly. And here we have more advanced games like the life map, typically used where one participant uses the space within the room to map out her life in a monologue style, highlighting the life-defining events that she experienced. This exercise is performed while the rest of the group seated in an audience formation as witnesses, which introduces the participant to the idea of exposing more personal aspects of her life to others, so this kind of exercise. The fourth phase, which is culminating enactments, uses previously developed skills such as personal insight, memory, recollection, and trust in the group to give the participant a safe space to openly express their personal issues and experiences. And this is where the play comes and how they act their experiences.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Which takes us to that dramatic ritual, either by singing… There is Fairuz, in Lebanon, a very well-known singer, and her songs come from themes. So we use the theme of her song, and we give them different songs and then we ask them, “Which one would you choose?” And interesting that they choose the ones that after we have looked at them and analyzed, we think that this is the song that would fit or this kind of group game that would fit, and they would choose the same one. So after this song time then we kind of create a play or a collection of vignettes.

Zareen Hussein: Dr. Lina, I think it’s really interesting that you bring up Fairuz, who is such a famous singer in the Middle East and originally from Beirut. Which leads me to ask, when you’re doing drama therapy in the five phases, how important is it to consider cultural context and cultural nuances? Because in America, mental health is getting more and more recognized day by day, but still a long way to go, whereas in some countries it’s nonexistent. So using Lebanon as an example, can you talk to us more about the controlled context that’s considered while treating people with drama therapy?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yes, I think this is very important. Drama therapists that do the work are trained using books that come from the western world so-

Zareen Hussein: In Western, in America?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: American, European. There are more European works on drama therapy and art therapy. So this is one aspect of it. Then they have to take this and customize it to really the fit the group of women they are helping. And believe it or not, it’s not only about the Arab culture or the Islamic culture or the patriarchic system in that part of the world, although there is this big umbrella of such a culture. But doing drama therapy in Chatila camp is different than doing drama therapy in the north in Tripoli, in Akkar, or doing drama therapy in a town in the mountains.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: They have based on different religious backgrounds and sectarian backgrounds and ethnic backgrounds and different socioeconomic needs. So we customize to that level and this customization does not happen before, it happens after we meet the woman. We do the biographic background and listen a bit to them. And of course, the drama therapists who are doing the work are from Lebanon and they know the cultures and they work in theaters and they do playbacks. They are highly involved in aspects of coexistence and helping resolve conflicts, so they are experts on this. So yes, definitely, the cultural nuances are very important. We cannot parachute norms, values, ways of dealing with people.

Hannah Balikci: Going through the different cultural differences within Lebanon itself points us to the fact that Lebanon currently hosts the largest number of refugees per capita and per square kilometer in the world, currently estimated at 1.5 million Syrian refugees and around 300,000 Palestinian refugees, if I’m correct. Do you have any insights, or I think, could you go through just the general background of the camp that you were working in with drama therapy and the different populations you were working with and similarly to the cultural questions, how the camps…

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Culture?

Hannah Balikci: Yeah. Could you go through how, within the camps, the cultures of the different communities that are living there coexist and how drama therapy has impacted the communities?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: I think this is an excellent question. I mentioned that there are different ethnographic cultural differences within Lebanon, based on the geographical location, based on the class level or sectarian or religious background. The camp is a small area, let’s say Chatila camp, because we did another camp. Chatila camp hosts Syrian, Palestinian refugees. Palestinian refugees are as old as 1948. Syrian refugees started to come to Lebanon in 2012. And Lebanese who are below subsistence level, who have no ability to rent or buy outside the camp, and they usually go and live anywhere. It’s not that you have to pay. In addition, all those who are running from justice or criminals who hide in the camp because they get the protection there. Nobody would come, the police, no one will go in to take them. So it’s not secure place. But all those challenges, all those, I would say traumas, live together in this community. So how to deal with that culture.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: The first study we did, we on purpose chose only Syrian refugees. Then in the second group we have second Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese women. The first phase when we met them individually, they would talk about their life, their situation in the camp and each would blame the other. So they were blaming each other. “They took my space and this is where we live…” The Palestinians talking about the Syrians and the Syrians saying that the Palestinians hate us and then the Lebanese say, “This is our land.” All of this was happening.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So the challenge was putting them together and creating a common space for people of different perceptions, different fears. They have traumas, violence, displacement, etc., etc. But they all have comparing themselves to the outside world in the sense of outside the camp. So we started telling them, “You have similar situation.” And then we would shed light on their humanity and on their needs. So we bring them together on that factor and then they start feeling comfortable and this becomes a safe space. And at some point, we allow them to tell the other why they hate them, to speak openly about that, and this creates tension. But then they started laughing at this situation. “How come we all have the same problems? You have the same problems with kids. I have the same problems with my husband and with the Lebanese people,” and so on. So they started taking it with more manageable way, and it created friendships and trust. And this is where we would like to follow up on this later on after we finish the sessions. We don’t want this to be stopped there.

Hannah Balikci: Great. It sounds very cathartic, especially for women. It’s like going through, as you were going through with the five phases, women unpacking trauma, especially older women have more trauma, we know.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yes.

Hannah Balikci: Did you find that between the ages of the women that you were working with that it was more impactful for, say, older women versus younger women or the ranges that you were working with?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: In the first two studies, we noticed, based on observation, that young women tend to be easier and faster in responding to our goals. However, the study that we are doing now to compare different groups and to compare different age groups to see the significance of the change pre and post the therapy. Sometimes young people can make it a fun thing and dancing and playing games and maybe at the end the impact is not that high. But while older women, when they are so impacted, a 20% change might be a relief, might be a positive, might be more significant. So this is the psychometric analysis we’re doing now to see the pre and post change, based on the age and different demographics.

Zareen Hussein: Dr. Lina, this week you’re at University of Chicago as part of the Pearson Global Forum, a day-long conference at the university on discrimination and marginalization. You’re speaking on a panel focused on the past few years, addressing the crisis that is going on in Lebanon. Firstly, could you give us some contextual information? So for those who don’t know, what has been happening in Lebanon over the past years, and then what are you going to be speaking at the Pearson Forum?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Lebanon, you said the past few years, but I could go back to the days of the inception of what’s called the Nation State of Lebanon. Since its inception in 1943, Lebanon was created on the wrong foot, meaning the different religious groups were not taken into consideration in a way where they would come together as a nation. And it was done by the French for Lebanon. So the Lebanese elites and the Lebanese people were not involved in the Sykes-Picot agreement, and they did not sit at the table. It was decided upon them, with the context that we need to protect the Christians in Lebanon because the Christians in Lebanon represent the Eastern Christians and Lebanon is the symbol for that.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: And the Maronites were good collaborators with the French, so give them some benefits, while the rest would be added to the system. So by having such a confessional start, they called it consociational democracy. They thought we are in Belgium, but it’s not because it only divided the political representation and among the elites of the Lebanese, so the elite Maronites, elite Sunni, elite Shia, elite Roman Orthodox, the Jews. So it did not take into consideration how this could circle from the top elite to the people.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: And so the elites took over in building the relationship with the people. So the relationship was the clientele system. Each felt that there’s a threat from the other sect. So they need to collaborate to create an equation where they politically can work together. And they all had, they were on the verge of “If I don’t protect my sect…,” but actually they were protecting their own self-interest to stay in power, “then someone will take over.”

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So this inequality between the different sects, mainly between, let’s say, all Muslims and all Christians, was more obvious when the Palestinians came to Lebanon and they were allowed in to form a military movement, with the Arabs accepting this, with the Americans and the Europeans saying okay, not explicitly saying but implicit, by not saying no. So the Palestinians formed the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon, and they started their mission of fighting Israel from Lebanon. At the same time, the Lebanese government did not give the Palestinians who came to Lebanon their rights as human beings. They only dealt with them as refugees who have a cause for right of return.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So if you give them citizenship, if you give them work permits, if you give them all those aspects, they wouldn’t go back. So this will take away from the cause. This led to marginalization. This is the Palestinians. It led to the Civil War. This is a factor. The inequality between the different Lebanese sects, the poverty, the elites were in power were rich, the rest were poor. So we have a recipe of a civil war, and this is what happened during the Civil War. So when the Civil War ended, to solve this problem, they managed this problem by keeping the same war lords in power and creating a new agreement called the Taif Accord, which they said, “Equal representation between the different sects in the government,” but the president is Maronite, the prime minister is Sunni, the Speaker of the House is Shia, so a confessional system… saying in the Taif Accord, “But we need to abolish the confessional system, gradually.”

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Never happened, because managing the problem with the same people who were the warlords stayed in power. They have no interest in changing the system that makes them superior to the people under them, the constituencies. “I’m protecting our sect.” You know, now every time a politician is blamed of corruption, if he’s Maronite, the patriarch will come out say, “He’s a red light. You cannot touch this person.” If he’s as Sunni, the Grand Mufti of the Sunnis will say, “No, this is our…” So you cannot reach them because of the fear aspect that’s present and the people would come and stand by them because—

Zareen Hussein: Tribalism, almost.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Exactly, it’s like tribalism, but based on this confessional sectarian fear. This is where political psychology comes. So every time the problem is managed, it’s managed in a wrong way, by keeping the confessional system, by maintaining the corruption system where the elites use their dirty games by saying, “I’m helping my community,” but at the same time, they’re actually stealing the money. They’re using victimization and fear to promote their own interests rather than the public interest. Same applies for those political elite, they not only rule in the public space, but they also own banks. They have shares in the banks, they have shares in every big business where the public benefits from. Because in Lebanon the electricity is public, the water provision is public. There’s a social security system, of course, that is definitely government. But this social security system is also very discriminatory because you only provide social security to people who are employed. So I am employed, I pay, I get social security.

Zareen Hussein: And I imagine that excludes the refugees.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Exactly. It excludes refugees, it excludes people who work in private businesses. Because of that corruption, there is avoidance of paying taxes, so you don’t pay social security. And if I have a private business, I hire people for three months, I fire them, I rehire them, so I don’t pay social security fees. See? So there is this culture of corruption that’s adding to marginalization and to setting the foundation of conflict and instability and fragility of the government and the country.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So even when Rafic Hariri, late prime minister, came to Lebanon to save Lebanon, to reconstruct Lebanon, also he reconstructed Lebanon on a wrong basis because he turned Lebanon into a corporation. Many people owned property in the downtown area that was completely destroyed during the war. And he built a beautiful facade, beautiful buildings, and roads, but the Lebanese people cannot afford to live there anymore and to even go to a restaurant there. So it’s not for the Lebanese, it’s  for the image of Rafic Hariri and the elite in Lebanon. And it was mainly personified in him and in his entourage. So some actually called his work as effective corruption, which is still, but you’re feeding the people at the same time. It’s not Robin Hood because he made so much money out of—

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yeah, he just made so much money out of it. And that, the Lebanese government, 100 times more than it used to be before.

Zareen Hussein: It’s almost as if the twisted assumption of what people think socialism is.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Exactly.

Hannah Balikci: Given the current situation in Lebanon, we also wanted to give you the chance to share briefly about both your fears and hopes for the country. What is the biggest challenge and fear at this point, and what is your biggest hope?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Okay. Definitely, Lebanon is in almost a failed state. The only foundation that’s kept in Lebanon is the military. Lebanon was based on the banking sector, the tourism sector, the health sector, the educational sector. The educational sector is losing a lot. The banking sector is down. The health system is unable to provide for the people, only the military. So there is hope in keeping the military standing, although there is a lot of dissatisfaction among the soldiers and the people in the military because their salaries, if they used to get paid five million, five million was around $3,000. Now it’s $125. And the prices in Lebanon are international because we are not a country of industry. We are a country of services. And if you don’t produce, you buy everything. We import most of the products, so they are poor.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: There are some external supports. The US supports them, literally just to keep them standing. So we need to build on this. But at the same time, the banking sector, the IMF is highly involved in putting conditions on the same political elite to reform the country before any loan can be given to the country. And I have a problem with those two. First, the political elite have no interest in reforming something that threatens their power. Two, I have no hope that a new liberal system that takes away the support of the government and by making people pay more taxes to be able to pay back the loans will really help.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Because we have many examples of where the IMF came up with solutions for underdeveloped countries or countries in conflicts that really flourished. So actually, it maintains the status quo of poverty and just live and let others live in a way, just barely minimal. I have hope in the Lebanese people that are trying to manage their everyday life. I know that everyone… there is a few who have abilities, who have the fresh, what we call the fresh dollar, the money that comes from abroad versus the dollars that were put in the banks before 2019 and are stuck in the banks, because the banks loaned them to the government, the government went bankrupt, so there’s no money to give back to the people.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So there is a bubble. There’s something happening on the bottom of the country where people are managing their situation. So what they need is external support, not the way it’s being conditioned. Because even with their power to adapt and build, they still live in this culture of corruption. So they’re survival of the fittest. It’s the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest. This is what’s happening in Lebanon. So to create a new system where what people are doing becomes institutionalized in good governance.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: We need new policies, we need new political establishment to say, call it establishment. We had hope in the 2022 elections to have a change. But it seems that the fear of each other made many of the people who went to the revolution… we thought that this would be the change. And it failed drastically with very minimal… I would say changes only from a woman’s perspective. Because women became more seen and their issues became more on the table, to be discussed. They’re still on the menu, but women are not sitting at the table to make decisions.

Zareen Hussein: Not yet.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Not yet. No, not yet. Even now we have many women ran for candidacy, but they did not make it because they need the financial abilities, they need networking and so on. So not to delve into this, there is hope in the people. There is hope in the Lebanese expats. There has been a major exodus of highly educated Lebanese people who still have hope to send back money and help Lebanon. But this is not enough. We need more institutionalization of good governance from the bottom up.

Zareen Hussein: And just a background for American listeners: Dearborn, Michigan is the highest concentration of Lebanese expats and diaspora outside of Lebanon.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yes.

Zareen Hussein: So their work connects back to Lebanon country.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yes, yes. A lot. Many of the Lebanese, not only in Dearborn. There are 12 million Lebanese expats all over the world. In the US, I don’t know how many, I don’t know the number, but there’s a good number of Lebanese who actually send money to their families. After September 11, this became less so because of the fear of money transfer.

Zareen Hussein: Of course.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: And, “Oh, you’re sending to Lebanon. Who are you sending to?”

Zareen Hussein: Of course.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So there was those restrictions, but still family support more than big money that’s coming in. But what we need is our projects… first of all to get those political elites in power out. It’s time. It’s time.

Zareen Hussein: It’s time. It’s been 80 years?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yeah.

Zareen Hussein: It’s time for an overthrow.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: It’s enough. Yeah, exactly. The same warlords, the same families, little change, but still, as if you go into the swamp and you become part of this culture.

Zareen Hussein: Thank you, Dr. Lina.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Thank you.

Zareen Hussein: It’s been insightful, impactful, and as women in the public policy sphere working on conflict and refugees and just two days ago was World Mental Health Day.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yes. Monday. Yep.

Zareen Hussein: The intersection has been profound. Thank you so much.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Thank you.

Zareen Hussein: I’m Zareen Hussein.

Hannah Balikci: I’m Hanna Balikci.

Zareen Hussein: And thank you, Dr. Lina Haddad Kreidie.

Reema Saleh: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict, featuring Lena Haddad Kreidie. This episode was produced and edited by Reema Saleh and Ricardo Sande. Thank you to our interviewers, Hannah Balikci and Zareen Hussein. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute’s research and events, visit thePearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Reema Saleh: Hi. This is Reema, and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy

Podcasts. You're listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and

the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and

practitioners who conduct research, implement programs and use data analysis to address some of

the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P, in

collaboration with The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research

institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Reema Saleh: The following is a PSA from the University of Chicago's Pearson Institute for the

Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, featuring The Pearson Global Forum, an in person and

virtual convening on discrimination and marginalization. Join us to hear from global experts as they

discuss various topics, including the social cost of discrimination, the crisis in Lebanon, and bias in

media coverage of conflict. This event is free and open to all on October 14th. More information at

ThePearsonGlobalForum.org.

Reema Saleh: How does African philosophy shape African political institutions, and how have they

evolved separately from European models of statehood and development? In this episode, we speak

with Dr. Francis Njoku, professor of philosophy at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and a visiting

scholar at the Harris School. We talk about his research and how homegrown solutions to African

problems can come from within.

Christelle Inema: Hello, my name is Christelle and I'm a first year MPP student at the University of

Chicago. I'm originally from Rwanda, and my policy interests are at the intersection of data analytics,

social equity, and development.

Dr. Francis Njoku: Hello, my name is Francis Njoku, professor of philosophy from the University

of Nigeria, Nsukka. Presently I'm here doing a one-year sabbatical at the Harris School, and it's been

a very great experience.

Christelle Inema: So it's very nice to have you here and to get to interview you as a professor and

also a visiting scholar. So my first question is: you're a visiting scholar with The Pearson Institute.

Can you talk more about your work here at the University of Chicago, like the classes you're

teaching, the research you're doing?

Dr. Francis Njoku: Yeah. When I arrived here in January, so we started a course on African political

economy or political theory. I taught with Professor James Robinson, and it was quite an interesting

course. We were able to discuss part of African philosophy, African political theory and some of

them deal with African existential problems. It was interesting, we were able to interact: it was

audited by a diversity of students, and it was very enriching, I know. So I think so far my experience

has been great, and our research has continued on African themes like religion, politics and race and

African philosophy. Because I've always thought that part of the way to solve an African problem is

to find the elements from within and then address them. It must be a solution from one who's an

insider actually. So that's what the research is going in on looking in Africa, the non-philosophical

purpose of materials in Africa, see how they can indicate towards a way to solve an African

problems, especially sociopolitical problem.

Christelle Inema: Yeah, that's an amazing answer and to that I have a couple follow-up questions.

The first one, what does it mean to examine African philosophy and how do you define it? And then

the second one that actually ties into using African philosophy, in terms of thinking about

development. Why is it important to examine the philosophy underpinning African development,

and how have you done that in your research and your work?

Dr. Francis Njoku: So I don't have to take a [inaudible]. Well, African philosophy is a certain

gateway to human reality. As I start to say that, everyone deserves to know, while you say that, but

to know this or that is a situated experience. So to talk about African philosophy is to take a

standpoint, look at the universal human reality from a particular perspective, because you can't begin

from nowhere, there is no place or position exposition. So if we move from African experience,

African environment and there is the universal human reality, then Africa will make her own specific