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Contributor(s): Dr Brett Heasman, Paula Kiel, Brian D. Earp | Welcome to LSE's award-winning podcast, LSE IQ, where we ask leading social scientists - and other experts - to answer an intelligent question about economics, politics or society. No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. So wrote John Donne in 1624. Almost 400 years later, the value we place on relationships is more tangible than ever. In 2016, the British public voted the smartphone as the 21st century's most important invention. From Facebook and WhatsApp to Tinder and Twitter, the modern world reflects our desire for friendships, relationships and professional networks. But does the modern world enhance or inhibit our ability to build and maintain meaningful relationships? Is society making us more facile and selfish? In this episode, James Rattee asks 'How does the modern world affect relationships?' – looking at how the digital realm is extending our relationships beyond death, whether drugs can improve our romantic relationships, and how we can all learn to become more empathetic. This episode features the following LSE academics: Dr Brett Heasman, LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, Paula Kiel, LSE Department of Media and Communications and Brian D. Earp, The Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. For further information about the podcast visit lse.ac.uk/iq and please tell us what you think using the hashtag #LSEIQ.

It is hard to overstate the impact of digital transformation on democracies and the daily lives of citizens around the world. The developing world is coming online at an extraordinary pace; there are places in which NDI works that are receiving the most significant innovation of the 20th century – electrification – at the same time as that of the 21st – instant global communications. Past technology revolutions such as the printing press or broadcast media have transformed democracy and politics in rapid, profound, and hard to anticipate ways. While disruptive, innovations can reinforce existing power structures: dominant languages are magnified; usage reflects traditional gender imbalances surveillance is automated. Recognizing this incredible rate of change, NDI is changing the toolkit of approaches we use in our programs, embracing new forms of political engagement, and changing the ways we manage the nuts and bolts of international development.
Technology is as much a social, economic, and political phenomenon as it is code or engineering. The democracy community, therefore, cannot afford to treat it as a single issue and must approach it with a nuanced understanding of the range of ways it is changing society and democracy:
The internet has become critical infrastructure for democracy, – and it is under attack. Organizing, advocacy, and political communication are increasingly digital, and so preserving a democratic internet is core to the success of all other social change goals - however, many of the trends are negative. The internet needs to be accessible and available to all, free of unjustified censorship, surveillance, or punitive taxes. Organizations need to be able to maintain a digital presence without fear of having their content destroyed or confidential data shared. An information space choked with disinformation and the chilling effects of hate speech robs individuals of informed choice. The digitization of all human activity as data creates new potential for authoritarians to track citizens and perpetuate discriminatory systems. Incredible power is now vested in the hands of the major technology platforms. Through NDI's work with the Design 4 Democracy Coalition, grassroots civic groups around the world are working together to ensure that the technology sector plays a role in supporting democracy.
Policymakers and citizens need to be better informed. Making the internet safe for democracy requires supportive digital policy at the global, corporate and domestic level. Legislators and political leaders are often lacking in basic knowledge of technology to regulate them appropriately or to procure tech; easy solutions often include subsidized Chinese surveillance state-in-a-box tools or commercial offerings that may turn around and monetize citizen data. Tech companies may not understand the impacts of their products. Too often, new regulation is used as a trojan horse for anti-democratic legislation, as with cybersecurity or "fake news." Successful political engagement in the internet age requires digital literacy of citizens: effectively using tools, understanding rights, keeping themselves safe, and to be intelligent consumers of information. As with most things in the technology space, the details of the topic may be new but the concept is not; NDI has always focused on education on citizen's rights in a democracy and how to engage with existing power structures.
New forms of democracy, governance and citizen engagement are possible. There are radically new capabilities for partners who are pillars of democracy using new communication systems, more data applied in radically different ways, and new ways to gather and sort citizen preferences. Further, new forms of human organization have emerged, such as Hong Kong's leaderless protest movement, that would have been impossible without the internet. Any new innovations, even if well-meant, will have unintended consequences that NDI and partners need to be able to foresee and if possible avoid. Other technologies will may provide compelling features for citizens or governments -- but entrap them with built-in surveillance capabilities, the monetization of citizen data by corporations, or new forms of government control. NDI works with civic innovators around the world, including shepherding the Code for All Network and engaging with leaders who are building new forms of citizen engagement such as Audrey Tang in Taiwan.
Tech specifics matter but there are no easy solutions. The difference between an accurate understanding of how a technology works instead of a general one can make the difference between having a positive impact and an extremely negative one. Often, emergent technologies are misunderstood based on conceptual oversimplification or slick sales pitches. Given the trend toward integrated data, mass surveillance, and ever more powerful analysis tools, it is critical for organizations that hope to make change or mitigate democratic harm to have the ability to understand technical specifics. Conversely, changemaking organizations must be wary of tech solutionism and create internal capacity to tie technology to mission. The complexity of technology requires cultivating relationships with new actors, including academic institutions and corporations – but communicating with them requires mastery of the technology under discussion, the ability to speak to them in their language, and to engage at their cadence. The internet is privately owned, from cables in the ground to the servers on which systems run to the devices in our pockets and the apps sitting on them. Therefore, tech firms are critical to the conversation -- though engagement does not imply approval of all their activities.
Change will continue. A new range of technologies such as AI, augmented reality, voice assistants and ubiquitous sensors are here today. When widely applied, this new generation of tools will continue to reshape politics and the relationships between citizens and their governments. In the period when they are emerging, there is time to mitigate foreseeable negative consequences and aid positive ones.
Conclusion. It can be tempting to ignore the technology transformations sweeping the world in the context of international development and democracy, attempting to continue with traditional programs. Alternatively, one can look at technology as an unalloyed evil, focusing on the negatives and attempting to push back in as many ways as possible. NDI has taken a more realistic approach. The tech revolution is here to stay, and the pace of change will only continue. As our lives change based on the tools we use, so does the nature of democracy – and the threats it faces. NDI will continue engaging with our partners on the ground and helping them build more just societies based on the realities of life in the digital age.


Women in Zambia during the 2016 General Elections.

Democracy and Technology, #NDI #National Democratic Institute #democracy #technology

Eyal
Weizman on the Architectural-Image Complex, Forensic Archeology and Policing
across the Desertification Line







Incidents
in global politics are usually apprehended as the patterned interaction of macro-actors
such as states. Eyal Weizman takes a different tack—an architect by training,
Weizman tackles incidents through detailed readings of heterogeneous materials—digital
images, debris, reforestation, blast patterns in ruins—to piece together concrete
positions of engagement in specific legal, political, or activist controversies
in global politics. In this Talk,
Weizman—among others—elaborates on methods across scales and material
territories, discusses the interactions of environment and politics, and traces
his trajectory in forensic architecture.




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What
is—or should be—according to you, the biggest challenge, central focus or
principal debate in critical social sciences?



We
live in an age in which there is both a great storm of information and a
progressive form of activism seeking to generate transparency in relation to government
institutions, corporations or secret services. These forms of exposure
exponentially increase the number of primary sources on corporations and state
and provide also rare media from war zones, but this by itself does not add
more clarity. It could increase confusion and increasingly be used disseminate
false information and propaganda. The challenge is to start another process to
carefully piece together and compose this information.



I'm
concerned with research about armed conflict. Contemporary conflict tends to take
place in urban environments saturated with media of varicose sorts, whenever
violence is brought into a city, it provokes an enormous production of images,
clips, sounds, text, etc.



As
conflict in Iraq, Syria, Missouri and the Ukraine demonstrate, one of the most
important potential sources for conflict investigations is produced by the very
people living in the war zones and made available in social networks almost
instantly. The citizens recording events in conflict zones are conscious of
producing testimonies and evidence, and importantly so, they do so on their own
terms. The emergence of citizen journalists/witness has already restructured
the fields of journalism with most footage composing Al Jazeera broadcasts, for
example, being produced by non-professional media. The addition of a huge
multiplicity of primary sources, live testimonies and filmed records of events,
challenge research methods and evidentiary practices. There is much locational
and spatial information that can be harvested from within these blurry, shaky
and unedited images/clips and architectural methodologies are essential in
reconstructing incidents in space. Architecture is a good framework to
understand the world, alongside others.



Whereas
debates around the 'politics of the image' in the field of photography and
visual cultures tended to concentrate on the decoding of single images and
photojournalistic trophy shots we now need to study the creation of extensive
'image-complexes' and inhabit this field reconstruct events from images taken
at different perspective and at different times. The relation between images is
architectural, best composed and represented within 3D models. Architectural
analysis is useful in locating other bits of evidence—recorded testimonies,
films and photos—from multiple perspectives in relation to one other bits of
evidence and cross referring these in space.



But
'image complexes' are about interrogating the field of visibility it is also
about absence, failures of representation, blockages or destruction of images.





How
did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about global
politics?



I'm
an architect, and my intellectual upbringing is in architectural theory and
spatial theory. I tend to hold on to this particular approach when I'm entering
a geopolitical context or areas that would otherwise be the domain of
journalists and human rights people, traditional jurists, etc. Architecture taught
me to pay attention to details, to materiality, to media, and to make very
close observations about the way built structures might embody political
relations.



When I study political situations, I
study them as an architect: I look at the way politics turns into a material—spatial
practice—the materialization, and at the spatialization, of political forces. Architectural
form—as I explained many times—is slowed-down force. My thinking is structured
around a relation between force and form. And form, for an architect, is an
entry point from which to read politics. So when I look at matter and material
reality—like a building, a destroyed building, a piece of infrastructure, a
road or bridge, a settlement or suburb or city—I look at it as a product of a political
force field. But it is never static. A city always grows, expands or contracts
recording the multiple political relations that shaped it.



Buildings
continuously record their environment. So one can read political force on buildings.
In taking this approach, I am influenced by building surveyors, and insurance
people going into a building to look at a scratch in a wall to piece together
what might have happened, and what might still happen. So I feel like a kind of
property surveyor on the scale of a city at times of war. But in practicing
this forensic architecture
I also work like an archaeologist: archaeology is about looking at material remains
and trying to piece together the cultural, political, military, or social spheres.
But I'm an archaeologist of very recent past or of the present. While
some of my investigations will always retain a haptic dimension based on
material examination, much of it is an analysis of material captured and
registered by various medias. Verify, locate, compose and cross-reference a
spatial reality from images of architecture.





What
would a student need to become a specialist in your field or understand the
world in a global way?



The institutes I run do not recruit
only architects. We need to open up the disciplinary bounds of education. We work
with filmmakers and architects and with artists.



It embodies a desire to understand
architecture as a field of inquiry, with which you can interrogate reality as
it is effectively registering material transformation. I see architecture as a
way of augmenting our way of seeing things in the world, but it's not for me a
kind of sacred field that should not be touched or changed.



But I'm also using architecture
across the entire spectrum of its relation to politics, from the very dystopian—with
forensic architecture, a kind of architectural pathology—to the utopian. I have
a studio in Palestine with Palestinian partners of mine, and internationals.
Alessandro Petty and Sandi Hilal
are in this group, which is called Decolonizing Architure. It's this group that is engaged in
very utopian projects for the West Bank and Palestine and the return of
refugees and so on. So I use architecture across the entire spectrum, from the
very dystopian to the very utopian. Architecture is simply a way of engaging
the world and its politics. Space is the way of establishing relations between
things. And actually space is not static, it is both a means of establishing
relations between people and objects and things. Just as material itself is
always an event, always under transformation. So that is something I have taken
from architecture and try to bring into politics, but not only in analyzing
crimes, but in producing the reality yet to come.



So what we
need from people is the desire to understand aesthetics as a field of inquiry,
not simply as a pleasurable play of beauty and pleasing kind of effect, but as
a kind of very sensorial field, sensorium, in which you can interrogate reality
as it is effectively registering material transformation. So I would look
simply for that kind of sensorial intensity and high critical approach and
understanding and speculating of how it is we know what we think we know. Of
course, you cannot see, or you do not know what you see, you do not have the
language to interpret or question what it is you 'see' without abstract
constructs. This means I don't necessarily look for theoretical capacities in
people: I see theory as a way of augmenting our way of seeing things in the
world, of registering them, of decoding them, but it's not for me a kind of
sacred field to which I submit in any way.







So
what is it you work on now?



I'm mostly trying to establish forensic architecture as a
critical field of practice and as an agency that produce and disseminate
evidence about war crimes in urban context. Recent forensic investigations in Guatemala
and in the Israeli Negev involved
the intersection of violence and environmental transformations, even climate
change. For trials and truth commissions, we analyze the extent to which
environmental transformation intersect with conflict.



The imaging of this
previously invisible types of violence—'environmental violence' such as land degradation, the destruction of fields and forests (in the tropics), pollution
and water diversion, and also long term processes of desertification—we use as new type of evidence of processes dispersed across time
and space. There are other conflicts that unfold in relation to climatic and
environmental transformations and in particular in relation to environmental
scarcity.



Conflict has reciprocal
interaction with environment transformation: environmental change could
aggravate conflict, while conflict tends to generate further environmental
damage. This has been apparent in Darfur, Sudan where the conflict was
aggravated by increased competition over arable due to local land erosion and desertification.
War and insurgency have occurred along Sahel—Arabic for 'shoreline'—on the
southern threshold of the Sahara Desert, which is only ebbing as million of
hectares of former arable land turn to desert. In past decades, conflicts have
broken out in most countries from East to West Africa, along this shoreline:
Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal.
In 2011 in the city of Daraa, farmers' protests, borne out of an extended cycle
of droughts, marked
the beginning of the Syrian civil war. Similar processes took place in the
eastern outskirts of Damascus, Homs, al-Raqqah and along the threshold of the
great Syrian and Northern Iraqi Deserts. These transformations impact upon
cities, themselves a set of entangled natural/man-made environments. The conflict
and hardships along desertification bands compel dispossessed farmers to embark
upon increasingly perilous paths of migrations, leading to fast urbanization at
the growing outskirts of the cities and slams.



I'm
trying to understand these processes across desert thresholds. There has been a
very long colonial debate about what is the line beyond which the desert begins.
Most commonly it was defined as 200 mm rain per annum. Cartographers were
trying to draw it, as it represented, to a certain extent, the limit of
imperial control. From this line on, most policing was done through bombing of
tribal areas from the air. Since the beginning, the emergence of the use of air
power in policing in the post World War I period—aerial control, aerial
government—took form in places that were perceived, at the time, as lying
beyond the thresholds or edges of the law. The British policing of Iraq, the
French in Syria, and Algeria, the Italians in Libya are examples where control
would hover in air.



Up
to now I was writing about borders that were physical and manmade: walls in the
West Bank or Gaza and the siege around it—most notably in Hollow Land (2007, read the introduction here).
Now I started to write about borders that are made by the interaction of people
and the environment—like the desert line—which is not less violent and brutal. The
colonial history of Palestine has been an attempt to push the line of the
desert south, trying to make it green or bloom—this is in Ben Gurion's terms—but
the origins of this statement are earlier and making the desert green and
pushing the line of the desert was also Mussolini's stated aim. On the other
hand, climate change is now pushing that line north.



Following
not geopolitical but meteorological borders, helps me cut across a big
epistemological problem that confines the writing in international relations or
geopolitics within the borders organize your writing. Braudel is an
inspiration but, for him, the environment of the Mediterranean is basically
cyclically fixed. The problem with geographical determinism is that it takes
nature as a given, cyclical, milieu which then affects politics—but I think we
are now in a period where politics affects nature in the same way in which
nature affects politics. The climate is changing in the same speed as human
history.





What does your background in
architecture add to understanding the global political controversies you engage
in?



We are a forensic agency that
provides services to prosecution teams around the world. With our amazing
members we ran 20-odd cases around the world from the Amazon to Atacama, for
the UN, for Amnesty, for Palestinian NGOs, in Gaza of course, West Bank, issues
of killings, individual killings in the West Bank that we do now, and much more
drastic destructions.



Forensic Architecture is unique in using
architectural research methodologies to analyze violations of human rights and
international humanitarian law as they bear upon the built environment—on
buildings, cities and territories, and this is why we get many commissions. We
produced architectural evidence for numerous investigations and presented them
in a number of cases in national and international courts and tribunals. We
were commissioned by the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights to study single
destroyed buildings, as well as patterns of destruction, resulting from
drone warfare in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Gaza. This study was presented at
the UN General Assembly in New York. We developed techniques to locate the
remains of buildings and villages overgrown by thick rain forests and presented
this material as evidence in the genocide trial of former president Efraín Ríos
Montt in the National Court of Guatemala and the Inter-American
Court. We quantified and analyzed levels of architectural destruction in Gaza
after the 2014 conflict for Amnesty International. We provided architectural
models and animations to support a petition against the wall in Battir
submitted to the Israeli High Court, helping to win the case.



Recently, we use and deal with the
reconstruction of human testimony. Witnesses to war give account of the worst
moment of their lives; times when their dear ones have died or hurt. Their
memory is disturbed, and tends to be blurred. We have developed a way of very
carefully interviewing and discussing with witnesses. Together with them, we
build digital models of their own homes. So we can see a very slow process of reconstruction
of the relation between memory space and architecture. And events start coming
back, through the process of building.



In order to develop this, we needed
to explore the historical use of memory and architecture, such as Frances Yates'
The Art of Memory (read it here), as well as different accounts on
the use of trauma, and bring them into the digital age, bring an understanding
of the relation of testimony and evidence into contemporary thinking. Single
incidents tend to be argued away as aberrations of 'standard operating
procedures'. To bring charges against government and military leaderships, it
is necessary to demonstrate 'gross and systematic' violations.
This means finding consistent and repeated patterns of
violations. Architectural analysis, undertaken on the level of
the city is able to demonstrate repetition and transformations in patterns of
violation/destruction in space and time—within the battle zone along the
duration of the conflict. Architectural analysis is useful not only in dealing
with architectural evidence—i.e with destroyed buildings—but also helpful in
locating other bits of evidence—testimony films or photos—in relation to one
other bits of evidence, and cross referring these in space.



Urban violence unfolds at different
intensities, speeds and spatial scales: it is made of patterns of multiple
instantaneous events as well as slower incremental processes of 'environmental
violence' that affects the transformation of larger territories. We aims to analyze
and present the relation between forms of violence that occur at different
space and time scales. From eruptive kinetic violence of the instantaneous/human
incident through patterns of destruction mapped across and along the duration
of urban conflict, to what Rob Nixon calls the 'slow violence' of environmental
transformation (read the introduction of the eponymous book here,
pdf).





Last question. How does your approach to research relate to, or differ
from, approaches to international politics?



To study conflict as a reality that unfolds across
multiple scales, we use the microphysical approach—dealing with details,
fragments and ruins—as an entry-point from which we will unpack the larger
dynamics of a conflict. We reconstruct singular incidents, locate them in space
and time to look for and identify patterns, then study these patterns in
relation to long terms and wide-scale environmental transformations. This
approach seeks to make connections between, what Marc Bloch of the Annales
School called 'micro- and macro-history, between close-ups and extreme long
shots' in his thesis on historical method. This topological approach is
distinct from a traditional scalar one: the macro
(political/strategic/territorial) situation will not be seen a root cause for a
myriad set of local human right violations (incidents/tactics). In the complex
reality of conflict, singularities are equally the result of 'framing
conditions' and also contributing factors to phase transitions that might
affect, or 'de-frame' as Latour has put it, changes occurring in wider areas.
Instead of nesting smaller scales within larger ones, our analysis will seek to
fluidly shift from macro to micro, from political conditions to individual
cases, from buildings to environments and this along multiple threads,
connection and feedback loops.



While in relation to the single
incident it might still be possible to establish a direct, liner connection
between the two limit figures of the perpetrator and the victim along the model
of (international) criminal law, evidence for environmental violence is more
scattered and diffused. Instead, it requires the examination of what we call
'field causalities'—causal ecologies that are non-linear, diffused,
simultaneous, and that involve multiple agencies and feedback loops,
challenging the immediacy of 'evidence'. 




Establishing field causalities requires the
examination of force fields and causal ecologies, that are non-linear,
diffused, simultaneous and involve multiple agencies and feedback loops.
Whereas linear causality entails a focus on sequences of causal events on the
model of criminal law that seeks to trace a direct line between the two limit
figures of victim and perpetrator field causality involves the spatial
arrangement of simultaneous sites, actions and causes. It is inherently relational
and thus a spatial concept. By treating space as the medium of relation between
separate elements of evidence brought together, we aim to expand the analytical
scope of forensic architecture. It is inherently relational and thus a spatial
concept. By treating space as the medium of relation between separate elements
of evidence brought together, field causalities expands the analytical scope of
forensic architecture.



Let me illustrate this a bit. Forms
of violence are crucially convertible one to another. Drying fields along the
Sahel or the Great Syrian Desert, for example, reach a point in which they can
no longer support their farmers, contributing to impoverishment, migration to
cities, slumnization and waves of protest that might contribute to the eruption
of armed conflict. These layers call for a form of architectural analysis able
to shift and synthesize information at different scales—from single incidents
as they are registered in the immediate spatial setting, through patterns of
violations across the entire urban terrain to 'environmental violence'
articulated in the transformation of large territories.





Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Visual Cultures and director
of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Since 2011 he also directs the European Research Council funded project, Forensic
Architecture - on the place of architecture in international
humanitarian law. Since 2007 he is a founding member of the architectural
collective DAAR in Beit
Sahour/Palestine. Weizman has been a professor of architecture at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Vienna and has also taught at the Bartlett (UCL) in London at
the Stadel School in Frankfurt and is a Professeur invité at the École des
hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He lectured, curated and
organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include Mengele's
Skull (with Thomas Keenan at Sterenberg Press 2012), ForensicArchitecture (dOCUMENTA13
notebook, 2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (Nottetempo
2009, Verso 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), A
Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003), the series Territories 1,2
and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines
and edited books. 



Related links





Facultyprofile at Goldsmith
Forensic Architecture homepage
Read
Weizman's introduction to Forensis
(2014) here
(pdf)
Read
Weizman's Forensic Architecture: Notes
from Fields and Forums (dOCUMENTA 2012) here
(pdf)
Read
Weizman's Lethal Theory (2009) here (pdf)
Read
the introduction to Weizman's Hollow Land
(2007) here
(pdf)


Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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Navigating challenging and complex civic spaces is nothing new for local organizations working to advance the rights and inclusion of LGBTI communities. Join NDI Senior Program Officer for Citizen Participation for a conversation with three partners from across the globe working to sustain their advocacy for equality and inclusion, while tackling some of the unprecedented challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Find us on: SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | Google Play
Whitney Pfeifer: Navigating challenging and complex civic spaces is nothing new for local organizations working to advance the rights and inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex communities. Regardless of the levels of tolerance and legal protection in a country, these groups know how to quickly adapt and utilize innovative approaches to maintaining their work and advocating for change.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has forced organizations to cancel Pride events, training, and in-person advocacy efforts, LGBTI organizations have been quick to respond and adjust, playing an integral role in meeting the basic needs of LGBTI individuals while utilizing online creativity to stay connected and sustain LGBTI community building.
Today, we are joined by three partners from across the globe, each working to sustain their advocacy for equality and inclusion, while tackling some of the unprecedented challenges posed by the pandemic.
We'll be speaking to each of these local partners to discover how they have successfully built digital communities that achieved real-life results. Welcome to DemWorks.
In Panama, Fundación Iguales is working to shift social attitudes towards greater respect and acceptance of LGBTI communities. Part of this process includes collecting stories of how LGBTI communities are being impacted by COVID-19 and its response, demonstrating that as humans, we are all impacted by the pandemic, regardless of how we identify. We spoke with Ivan to learn more. Ivan, thank you for joining us.
Ivan: Thank you.
WP: Could you tell us a little bit more about the LGBTI community in Panama and the types of challenges LGBTI individuals face in building and maintaining a community?
I: We are a country between Costa Rica, who just last month legalized civil marriage for same sex couples, and Colombia, a country with equal marriage since April 2016. We're a part of that less of the 30% of Latin Americans who live in a territory where marriage equality is prohibited. Moreover, are known for public policies that takes into consideration LGBTI persons.
The challenges, there are many. As a gay person, for example, I'm not protected by any non-discrimination law, or the gender identity of the trans community is not part of what is respected by the government. There is unfortunately still a lot of stigma and discrimination for being queer.
We're a small country where there's a strong control from conservatives and religious groups, but what are the good news, I guess? The civil society is finally organized, and organizations like Fundación Iguales are doing a marvelous work promoting the respect of our human rights, creating community, helping the LGBTIQ community to be more visible, and therefore more respected by the general public.
We start a legal process to have marriage equality in Panama since 2016. We are very optimistic we will conquer in the courts and in the public opinion, by strategic innovative and emphatic messages of equality.
WP: You alluded briefly to how Fundación is contributing to building and strengthening the community in Panama. Could you discuss the facts a little bit more about how Fundación is contributing to and strengthening during these uncertain times?
I: First of all, with positive messages and with a clear presence in national conversations about the measures during the pandemic, highlighting the reality of LGBTI persons. We have had a very tough situation with restriction based on sex to restrain mobility of people here in Panama, and that had impacted dramatically the trans community and the nonbinary community of Panama, in some cases affecting their access to food and medicines. Yes, to be able to even go to the supermarket and buy bread and milk.
We decided to join forces with other organizations, specifically with an organization called Hombres Trans Panamá. It's an organization conformed by trans men to create a solidarity network. The network was created for two main activities. The first one, it is to assist directly trans and non binary people who register for humanitarian assistance. We already covered 120 people who were in need of food and medicines.
The second part of that program is an online survey to register discrimination cases for the trans community during the quarantine time. We have already had the report of 26 cases, mostly of trans person who were restricted to enter supermarkets to buy food because their gender identity or expression did not match what the police "expect" from them that day. That report was sent to the government, to regional organizations that monitor human rights, and we hope that impact possibly their lives.
For other programs that Fundación Iguales is promoting during this times of pandemic, one that is very important is a series of podcasts called Panademia LGBTIQ+, a program of Fundación Iguales with [foreign language 00:06:20], which is an independent group of journalists to highlight stories of LGBTI persons during these times, telling their stories, especially the trans community.
WP: That sounds like a lot of excellent work and strengthening the collaboration between groups has been really effective, I think, in this COVID pandemic situation.
I: Indeed.
WP: You alluded briefly to these podcasts. Are there other forms of technology that Fundación is using to continue the work that you're doing?
I: Yes, and that's very interesting because we have to reinvent our work, basically. Just before COVID, we finished a super nice, unprecedented program going through the different provinces of Panama that we call the human rights tour, with the idea to be more democratic on the contents of human rights, specifically talking about Inter-American Court of Human Rights decision on equal marriage and gender identity, the Advisory Opinion 24. It was such a success and we planned to right away continue around the whole country. With this situation we have, being confined at home with mobility restrictions, we have to change all that, but we were lucky to have a strong presence in social media with a robust content that we were able to share and build from it. Also, our capacity of doing initiatives jointly with other NGOs like I mentioned before and you highlight, were also key to show the work that we were doing on respecting human rights.
That coordination and collaborations, like the podcast example, the solidarity network, the level of infographic videos and social media interactions of Fundación Iguales are very solid. Since we dedicate an important part of our work to be present in national and international platforms for political participation, that allowed us to be more visible and not to be forget during these complicated times,
WP: It sounds that you've been able to pivot pretty smoothly and quickly, despite I'm sure what have appeared to be challenges that we're all facing during the pandemic.
Would you be willing to talk about kind of the role and benefits of partnering with international organizations such as NDI in your work?
I: When I started Fundación Iguales, I was very privileged to know that working with international organizations like NDI was essential. I lived almost eight years in Washington, D.C., And before that I studied in New York City, and I worked for almost eight years in multilateral organizations. That experience gave me a different look to understand how, and how specifically a country like Panama, a country with so many challenges, with the lack of the government support and local support, I would say, organizations and enterprises and so on ... so for me, it was very important to know that a key part of my work was to knock some doors abroad because it's essential to boost the work that we do here. Definitely, without the help, assistance, donations and more important, the moral support of embassies and organizations like NDI, our work would have been way more difficult than what actually is.
WP: As NDI, we like to partner and collaborate with our partners and recognize you as the experts and provide the technical assistance and guidance as needed. So it's good to hear that this has been beneficial for Fundación. My last question is about what's next for Fundación?
I: We're very focused that we want a social change for our country in a social change for good. We want a Panama where all persons will be respected and where they can all be happy. We want Panama to join the club of countries where same sex couples can have the support and protection of the government, and more importantly, where society in general welcomes their families. We're trans persons can fully live and decide about their dreams and lives. And we're going to conquer that by strategic campaigns, with messages, with empathy.
WP: Thank you, Ivan, for taking the time to speak with us. We look forward to seeing what Fundación is able to do in creating a safer and more equal space for LGBTI communities in Panama.
I: Thank you, it's been a pleasure.
WP: For more than 35 years, NDI has been honored to work with thousands of courageous and committed democratic activists around the world to help countries develop the institution's practices and skills necessary for democracy's success. For more information, please visit our website at www.ndi.org.
You've heard about how an organization is engaging with communities and collecting stories to plan for future advocacy efforts from Fundación Iguales. But what happens when you are in the middle of a project, when things get disrupted? LGBTI communities in Romania successfully organized to prevent an amendment to the constitution that would ban same sex marriage that was put to a referendum in 2018. In the aftermath of these efforts, there was a need to establish priorities moving forward and create space for dialogue within the community about the next steps for the overall movement. Mosaic organized different segments of the LGBTI community, including transgender communities, LGBTI, Roma, women, and older people to build consensus around an advocacy agenda moving forward.
In the midst of these community outreach efforts, COVID-19 happened. Vlad Viski, executive director of MosaiQ is with us. Vlad, thanks for joining us.
Vlad Viski: Thank you for having me.
WP: Can you tell us a little bit more about your project?
VV: Between 2015 and 2018, in Romania, there was a national campaign to change the constitution and ban gay marriages, initiatives which were supported by conservative groups and a large share of the political party. For three years, in Romania, society has been talking, probably for the first time in a very serious manner, about LGBTI rights, about the place for the LGBT community in society. This conservative effort ended with a failure at the polls for the referendum to change the constitution, only 20% of Romanians actually casting the vote for this issue when the minimum threshold of votation, of turnout, was 30%.
This was possible with quite a successful campaign coming not from not only from MosaiQ but from other LGBTI organizations in Romania throughout the country. We all kind of went on the boycott strategy, we're actually asking people to boycott the referendum because human rights cannot be subject to a popular vote.
Once the referendum in 2018 failed in Romania, there was a question in the community. What should we do next? How should our agenda look like for the next couple of years? We at Mosaic, we really tried to focus and we really thought the issue of intersectionality as being extremely important. This is how the idea of this project started, Engage and Empower was the name of the project. It focused on six groups within the LGBT community: transgender people, LBTQ women, elderly, people living with HIV, Roma LGBT people, and sex workers.
WP: Could you talk a little bit more about how the organization is trying to maintain momentum in this community building efforts, despite what's going on with the pandemic?
VV: We at MosaiQ, we had to reimagine some of the projects that we were involved in, so that included canceling events or postponing them or rescheduling for the fall. But the problem is also that we don't really know the timeline for this story or when it will end. We've had issues related to personal issues of people in the community. People living with HIV were not getting their treatment due to the fact that hospitals were closed except for the coronavirus. Then we've had issues related to sex workers not being able to work anymore. The issue of poverty has been quite an important issue. A lot of people have been laid off, a lot of people were not able to pay rent, a lot of people were either in unemployment benefits, and so on.
At the personal level for us and as an organization, all of a sudden we got a lot more messages from people asking for help. We've tried to help them on a case by case basis. We are not a social health kind of organization, but we've tried to fix as many problems as we were able to. Then throughout this, and actually talking about issue of intersectionality and the issue of the project and the way we work with the Roma LGBT community, what we've witnessed throughout this pandemic and the lockdowns, especially, was an increase in violence, against Roma people from the police. So together with colleagues from civil society, especially Roma groups, we had to monitor hate speech in the media, monitor cases of abuse and violence from the police, and also make statements and letters to official institution, to the president and the prime minister and so on. So for us, it was an issue of also solidarity with other groups affected by the pandemic.
WP: I believe that you've had to move some of your activities online, correct?
VV: That was another part, which we kind of tried to make the best out of the situation. We felt that there were a lot of young kids, for example, who, because schools were closed, they had to go back and live with their homophobic parents. A lot of organizations, LGBT organizations in Romania were not able to have the Zoom meetings with their volunteers because they were living with homophobic or transphobic parents so they could not reveal what they were doing or who they were talking to. So the issue of depression and psychological pressure that comes on people being locked down, people trying to survive throughout this pandemic, we decided to have a campaign online, which was called MosaiQ Quarantine, and that included parties online in order to support queer artists who were not able to earn any money because there were no gigs. We organized these online parties and we paid them and we supported their work.
Then we had the zoom talks with, or like talks online, with all of the organizations and groups in Romania, LGBT groups, to kind of better see the situation on the ground in different cities in Romania. That was for us extremely important because we felt like there was a need to have this dialogue within the community.
Then we had the all sorts of posts on social media and different kinds of events. We also talked with organizations from the region, from the US, from Moldova, from Russia, to kind of see what the feeling also over there.
So for us, it was quite an exercise to take advantage of the fact that using social media and using online tools, we were able to reach out to people who otherwise would not have been able to participate in our events, being so far away.
WP: It sounds like Mosaic has certainly stepped up to the challenges. Could you just briefly talk about what NDI support has meant to Mosaic?
VV: I think the project funded by NDI was extremely important, both for the community ... right now, we have an active Roma LGBT group. We have all of these, the issue of intersectionality being put on the agenda. We have the [inaudible 00:19:36] sports, which is a sports club run by women who is also trying to grow based also on the support that Mosaic has offered through NDI. We've had, at the Pride last season, the first Roma LGBT contingent putting the issue on the agenda. So for us, in many regards, this project kind of focused us more on this intersectional approach to activism and the need to include all voices within the community. The trust that they had in us was very important.
WP: I'm glad to hear that it's been a fruitful partnership, both for NDI and Mosaic. Vlad, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
VV: Oh, that's it.
WP: We'll be back after this short message.
To hear more from democracy heroes and why inclusion is critical to democracy, listen to our DemWorks podcast, available on iTunes and SoundCloud.
Before the break we heard from two partners using digital platforms to create and support communities. But how are groups sustaining their online networks and communities once created? Rainbow Rights trained paralegals in the Philippines on legal issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity and how to support LGBTI communities. Through Google Classroom, these paralegals formed an online network to help communities facing discrimination and violence. Eljay, welcome to our podcast. Could you tell us a little bit more about the paralegal support project?
Eljay: Yeah. One of the main components of our community paralegal program is to create a national online platform wherein all of the trained paralegals of our organization will be able to share their experiences, their cases, and they could also refer some of the difficult cases to us. So that's the main idea. It's just that it gained a deeper significance in this COVID-19 pandemic that we're experiencing because a lot of legal organizations hurried to do to do what we had been doing in the past year, which is to create an online platform.
Right now, even though there's a lot of problems in the Philippines barring the central autocracy, we have been maintaining the platform. People are still referring cases to us and we are working on those cases. Part of the deeper significance that it has is in the Philippines, human rights violations have increased because of the lockdown. So it became a source of reporting documentation for these human rights violations during the lockdown. We did not expect that it will evolve that way but we're happy that it has, and despite some connectivity issues in the Philippines, it has been reaping as well.
WP: So when you're talking about the program, there've been increased human rights reports, is that generally more broad human rights abuses? Or are we talking specifically to the LGBTI community?
E: Yeah, we accept every report on numerous violations, but we take on the LGBTI human rights violations specifically. When we receive human rights violations that is not really in our lane, so to speak, we refer them to bigger organizations. We have seen increased numerous violation against the LGBTQI community here.
WP: You had mentioned that Rainbow Rights fortunately had organized the training for the paralegals before the pandemic hit and already have a plan in place to use online platforms, which was Google Classroom, to create this network across the country. You've briefly referenced what the current situation is like now, but could you go a little deeper into that? What kind of challenges is Rainbow Rights facing in continuing to engage with the community?
E: As I have mentioned, maybe a bigger challenge is the connectivity issues in the Philippines. We don't have good internet here, and that's a challenge. It's also challenged to keep the interest level of our paralegals and keep them engaged. That is also challenged because they have bigger problems now. Because of the pandemic, they're thinking of their health, they're thinking of their livelihoods, and that is a challenge during these times.
However, before the pandemic, we also saw that we had to be creative at the level of interest, so that's a challenge. The situation, it's working. Overall situation's working. We have referrals, we continue to share modules in our platform, refreshing their memory on the training. We also try to be light. There are some light moments so that they be so that they keep themselves also, the interest level is high and that they see us and they trust us in maintaining this platform.
WP: You alluded to the fact that it's often difficult to maintain interest of your paralegals when engaging online.
E: Basically, we had a two-pronged approach on this. One is to find the people who has a genuine interest to serve the community. So in our selection process, we have chosen people who have track records of service in their communities. The other side of the approach is to build on the spirit of camaraderie, friendship, and community solidarity between us. So even before the pandemic, we have been setting up calls and checking on them, even adding them on Facebook and Twitter just to continually engage with them. I think that's a big part of our strategies. We're also looking to ... I think in my personal view, I think a lot of what they do is labor, so I think in the future, we will be able to compensate them for their efforts in their community and we're looking into that as well.
WP: That's really interesting. Could you speak a little bit more to the role and benefits of partnering with international organizations such as NDI in your work and as well as helping to sustain this national network?
E: Yeah. I think it's invaluable. Foreign support, foreign funding support such as the NDI had been really great for us. We have been envisioning this project for a long time and NDI gave us the opportunity to really implement it. They also gave us a level of freedom in how to execute the program because there's a recognition that we in the ground know how to solve our problems. But there's also a lot of technical support aside from the funding. Like in digital security, NDI has given us a lot of resources, even given us a training for this and how to secure our online platforms. They also provided a lot of coalition building resources. So there, and I think we are also sharing what our experience with NDI to our other funders, because I think with NDI, we had a lot of freedom and we had a lot of support because you guys always check on us, so that's great.
WP: Well, I'm glad to hear that NDI is taking care of our partners. Thinking about how June is Pride Month for a lot of communities around the world, and Pride is often equated to the community of LGBTI people around the world how would you say Rainbow Rights efforts have contributed to strengthening the community in the light of the violence and the discrimination that LGBTI people face on a daily basis in the Philippines?
E: Since 2005, Rainbow Rights has been doing this approach wherein we come ... a top down approach at the policy level, but we also complement it with from the grassroots, bottom up approach. We make sure that whatever we bring at the policy level, it is informed by our grassroots services. I think that's one of our biggest contribution, is to really complement policy with experience on the ground. Most of the policies that we've pushed for is really coming from what our experiences and what are the real needs of the people that we serve in the communities. I think that's one of our biggest contributions in our approach. We're not just the legal, we don't just bring cases to court. We don't just bring legal expertise, but we also inform it with community level approaches and grassroots approaches.
WP: Well, thank you LJ again for taking the time to speak with us and telling us a little bit more about how Rainbow Rights is contributing to a holistic support system to the LGBTI community in the Philippines.
E: Thank you so much for this opportunity.
WP: Thank you to Ivan, Vlad, and Eljay for sharing their experiences and for the work you're doing to advance LGBTI equality and inclusion, and thank you to our listeners. To learn more about NDI or to listen to other DemWorks podcasts, please visit us at ndi.org

Rainbow Rights Paralegal Training



A Conversation With LGBTI Activists on Community-Building

Democracy (General), Podcast Listen LGBTI Pride National Democratic Institute NDICountries: All Regions

Keith Hart on the
Informal Economy, the Great Transformation, and the Humanity of Corporations














International Relations
has long focused on the formal relations between states; in the same way,
economists have long focused exclusively on formal economic activities. If by
now that sounds outdated, it is only because of the work of Keith Hart. Famous
for coining the distinction between the formal and the informal economy in the
1970s, Hart is a critical scholar who engages head-on with some of the world's
central political-economic challenges. In this Talk, he, amongst others, discusses the value of the distinction 40
years after; how we need to rethink The
Great Transformation nearly a century later; and how we need to undo the
legal equivalence of corporations to humans, instituted nearly 150 years back.














Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is, according to you, the
central challenge or principal debate in International Relations? And what is
your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?







I think it is the lack of fit between politics, which
is principally national, and the world economy, which is global. In particular,
the system of money has escaped from its national controls, but politics, public
rhetoric aside, has not evolved to the point where adequate responses to our
common economic problems can be posed. At this point, the greatest challenge is
to extend our grasp of the problems we face beyond the existing national
discussions and debates. Most of the problems we see today in the world—and the
economic crisis is only one example—are not confined to a single country.







For me, the question is how we can extend our research
from the local to the global. Let the conservatives restrict themselves to
their national borders. This is not to say I believe that political solutions
to the economic problems the world faces are readily available.  Indeed, it is possible that we are entering
another period of war and revolution, similar to 1776-1815 or 1914-1945. Only
after prolonged conflict and much loss might the world reach something like the
settlement that followed 1945. This was not only a settlement of wartime
politics, but also a framework for the economic politics of the peace,
responding to problems that arose most acutely between the wars.  It sounds tragic, but my point in raising the
possibility now is to remind people that there may be even more catastrophic
consequences at stake that they realize already. We need to confront these and
mobilize against them. When I go back in history, I am pessimistic about
resolving the world's economic problems soon, since the people who got us into
this situation are still in power and are still pursuing broadly the same
policies without any sign of them being changed. I believe that they will bring
us all into a much more drastic situation than we are currently facing. Yet in
some way we will be accountable if we ignore the obvious signs all around us.











How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?







My original work in West Africa arose out of a view that
the post-colonial regimes offered political recipes that could have more
general relevance for the world. I actually believed that the new states were
in a position to provide solutions, if you like, to the corrupt and decadent
political structures that we had in the West. That's why, when we were demonstrating
outside the American embassies in the '60s, we chanted the names of the great
Third World emancipation leaders—Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Fidel Castro, and so
on.







So for me, the question has always been whether
Africans, in seeking emancipation from a long history of slavery, colonialism, apartheid
and postcolonial failure, might be able to change the world. I still think it
could be and I'm quite a bit more optimistic about the outcome now than I have
been for most of the last fifty years. We live in a racialized world order
where Africa acts as the most striking symbol of inequality. The drive for a
more equal world society will necessarily entail a shift in the relationship
between Africa and the rest of the world. I have been pursuing this question
for the last thirty years or more. What interests me at the moment is the
politics of African development in the coming decades.







Africa began the twentieth century as the least populated
and urbanized continent. It's gone through a demographic and urban explosion
since then, doubling its share
of world population in a century. In 2050, the UN predicts that 24% of the world
population will be in Africa, and in 2100, 35% (read the report here, pdf)! This is because Africa is growing
at 2.5% a year while the rest of the world is ageing fast. Additionally, 7 out
of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are now African—Asian
manufacturers already know that Africa holds the key to the future of the world
economy.







But, besides Africa as a place, if you will, a number
of anti-colonial intellectuals have played a big role in influencing me. The
most important event in the twentieth century was the anti-colonial revolution.
Peoples forced into world society by Western Imperialism fought to establish
their own independent relationship to it. The leading figures of that struggle
are, to my mind, still the most generative thinkers when we come to consider
our own plight and direction. My mentor was the Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James, with whom I spent a
number of years toward the end of his life. I am by temperament a classicist; I
like to read the individuals who made a big difference to the way we think now.
The anti-colonial intellectuals were the most important thinkers of the 20th
century, by which I mean Gandhi, Fanon and James.







But I've also pursued a very classical, Western
trajectory in seeking to form my own thinking. When I was an undergraduate, I
liked Durkheim and as a graduate student Weber. When I was a young lecturer, I
became a Marxist; later, when I went to the Carribbean, I discovered Hegel,
Kant and Rousseau; and by the time I wrote my book on money, The Memory Bank,
the person I cited more than anyone else was John Locke. By then I realized I
had been moving backwards through the greats of Western philosophy and social
theory, starting with the Durkheim school of sociology. Now I see them as a set
of possible references that I can draw on eclectically. Marx is still probably
the most important influence, although Keynes, Simmel and Polanyi have also shaped my
recent work. I suppose my absolute favorite of all those people is Jean-Jacques
Rousseau for his Discourse on Inequality and his inventive
approach to writing about how to get from actual to possible worlds.











What would a student need (dispositions, skills) to become a specialist
in IR or understand the world in a global way?







In your 20s and 30s, your greatest commitment should
be to experience the world in the broadest way possible, which means learning
languages, traveling, and being open to new experiences. I think the kind of
vision that I had developed over the years was not one that I had originally
and the greatest influence on it was the time I spent in Ghana doing my
doctoral fieldwork; indeed, I have not had an experience that so genuinely
transformed me since!







Even so, I found it very difficult to write a book
based on that fieldwork. I moved from my ethnographic investigations into a
literature review of the political economy of West African agriculture, and it
turns out that I am actually not an ethnographer, and am more interested in
surveying literature concerning the questions that interest me. I am still an
acute observer of everyday life; but I don't base my 'research' on it. Young people
should both extend their comparative reach in a practical way and dig very
deeply into circumstances that they encounter, wherever that may be. Above all,
they should retain a sense of the uniqueness of their own life trajectory as
the only basis for doing something new. This matters more than any professional
training.











Now we see spectacular
growth rates in African countries, as you mentioned, one of which is the DRC.
How can we make sense of these formal growth rates: are they representative of
the whole economies of these countries, or do they only refer to certain
economic tendencies?







The whole question of measuring economic growth is a
technical one, and it's flawed, and I only use it in the vaguest sense as a
general indicator. For example, I think it's more important that Kenya, for
example, is the world leader in mobile phone banking, and also a leader in
recycling old computers for sale cheaply to poor people.







The political dispensation in Africa—the combination
of fragmented states and powerful foreign interests and the predatory actions
of the leaders of these states on their people -- especially the restrictions
they impose on the movements of people and goods and money and so on – is still
a tremendous problem. I think that the political fragmentation of Africa is the
main obstacle to achieving economic growth.







But at the same time, as someone who has lived in
Africa for many years, it's very clear that in some countries, certainly not
all, the economies are very significantly on the move. It's not--in principle—that
this will lead to durable economic growth, but it is the case that the cities
are expanding fast, Africans are increasing their disposable income and it's the
only part of the world where the people are growing so significantly. Africa is
about to enter what's called the demographic dividend that comes when the
active labor force exceeds the number of dependents. India has just gone
through a similar phase.







The Chinese and others are heavily committed to taking
part in this, obviously hoping to direct Africa's economic growth in their own
interest. This is partly because the global economy is over the period of
growth generated by the Chinese manufacturing exports and the entailed infrastructure
and construction boom, which was itself an effect of the greatest shift from the countryside to the city in history. Now, the Chinese
realize, the next such boom will be—can only take place—in Africa.







I'm actually not really interested in technical
questions of how to measure economic growth. In my own writing about African
development, I prefer anecdotes. Like for example, Nollywood—the Nigerian film industry—which has just past
Bollywood as the second largest in the world! You mention the Congo which I
believe holds the key to Africa's future. The region was full of economic
dynamism before King Leopold took it over and its people have shown great
resilience since Mobutu was overthrown and Rwandan and Ugandan generals took
over the minerals-rich Eastern Congo. Understanding this history is much more
important than measuring GDP, but statistics of this kind have their uses if
approached with care.











Is it possible to
understand the contemporary economic predicament that we are seeing, which in
the Western world is referred to as the "crisis", without attributing it to
vague agencies or mechanisms such as neoliberalism?







I have written at great length about the world
economic crisis paying special attention to the problems of the Eurozone. My belief
is that it is not simply a financial crisis or a debt crisis. We are actually
witnessing the collapse of the dominant economic form of the last century and a
half, which I call national capitalism—the attempt to control markets, money
and accumulation through central bureaucracies in the interests of a presumed
cultural community of national citizens.







The term neoliberalism is not particularly useful, but
I try to lay out the history of modern money and why and how national
currencies are in fact being replaced. That, to my mind, is a more precise way
of describing the crisis than calling it neoliberal. On the other hand, neoliberalism does refer to
the systematic privatization of public interests which has become normal over
the last three or four hundred years. The bourgeois revolution claimed to have
separated public and private interests, but I don't think it ever did so. For
example, the Bank of England, the Banque de France, and the Federal Reserve are
all private institutions that function behind a smokescreen of being public
agencies.







It's always been the case that private interests
corrupted public institutions and worked to deprive citizens of the ability to
act purposefully under an ideological veil of liberty. But in the past, they
tried to hide it. The public wasn't supposed to know what actually went on
behind the scenes and indeed modern social science was invented to ensure that
they never knew. What makes neoliberalism new is that they now boast about it
and even claim that it's in everyone's interest to diminish public goods and
use whatever is left for private ends—that's what neoliberalism is.







It's a naked grab for public resources and it's also a
shift in the fundamental dynamic of capitalism from production for profit
through sales tow varieties of rent-seeking. In fact, Western capitalism is now
a system for extracting rents, rather than producing profits. Rents are income
secured by political privilege such as the dividends of patents granted to Big
Pharma or the right to control distribution of recycled movies. This has got
nothing to do with competitive or free markets and much opposition to where we
are now is confused as a result. Sometimes I think western capitalism has
reverted to the Old Regime that it once replaced—from King George and the East
India Company to George W and Halliburton. If so, we need another liberal
revolution, but it won't take place in the North Atlantic societies.











In your recent work,
you refer to The Great Transformation, which invokes Karl Polanyi's famous
analysis of the
growth of 19th century capitalism and industrialization. How can Polanyi
help us to make sense of contemporary global economy, and where does this
inspiring work need to be complemented? In other words, what is today's Great Transformation
in light of Polanyi?







First of all, the
Great Transformation is a brilliant book. I have never known anyone who
didn't love it from the first reading. The great message of Polanyi's work is
the spirit in which he wrote that book, regardless of the components of his
theory. He had a passionate desire to explain the mess that world society had
reached by the middle of the 20th century, and he provided an
explanation. It's always been a source of inspiration for me.







A central idea of Polanyi's is that the economy was
always embedded in society and Victorian capitalism disembedded it. One problem
is that it is not clear whether the economy ever was actually disembedded (for
example capitalism is embedded in state institutions and the private social
networks mentioned just now) or whether the separation occurs at the level of
ideology, as in free market economics. Polanyi was not against markets as such,
but rather against market fundamentalism of the kind that swept Victorian
England and has us in its grip today. The political question is whether politics
can serve to protect society from the excesses produced by this disembedding;
or whether it lends itself to further separation of the economy from society.







And I would say that Polanyi's biggest failure was to
claim that what happened in the 19th century was the rise of "market
society". This concept misses entirely the bureaucratic revolution that was
introduced from the 1860s onwards based on a new alliance between capitalists
and landlords which led to a new synthesis of states and corporations aiming to
develop mass production and consumption. Polanyi could not anticipate what
actually happened after he wrote his book in 1944. An American empire of free
trade was built on a tremendous bureaucratic revolution. This drew on
techniques and theories of control developed while fighting a war on all
fronts. The same war was the source of the technologies that culminated late in
the digital revolution. Karl Polanyi's interpretation of capitalism as a market
economy doesn't help us much to understand that. In fact, he seems to have
thought that bureaucracy and planning were an antidote to capitalist market
economy.







If you ask me what is today's great transformation, I
would prefer to treat the last 200 years as a single event, that is, a period
in which the world population increased from one billion to seven billion, when
the proportion of people living in cities grew from under 3% to around half,
and where energy production increased on average 3% a year. The Great Transformation
is this leap of mankind from reliance on the land into living in cities. It has
been organized by a variety of institutions, including cities, capitalist
markets, nation-states, empires, regional federations, machine industry, telecommunications
networks, financial structures, and so on. I'm prepared to say that in the
twentieth century national capitalism was the dominant economic form, but by no
means all you need to know about if you want to make a better world.







I prefer to look at the economy as being organized by
a plural set of institutions, including various political forms. The Great Transformation
in Polanyi's sense was not really the same Great Transformation that Marx and
Engels observed in Victorian England—the idea that a new economic system was
growing up there that would transform the world. And it did! Polanyi and Marx
had different views (as well as some common ideas), but both missed what
actually happened, which is the kind of capitalism whose collapse is constitutes
the Great Transformation for us today. The last thirty years of financial
imperialism are similar to the three decades before the First World War. After
that phase collapsed, thirty years of world war and economic depression were
the result. I believe the same will happen to us! Maybe we can do something
about it, but only if our awareness is historically informed in a
contemporarily relevant way.











The distinction between
states and markets really underpins much of what we understand about the workings
of world economy and politics. Even when we just say "oh, that's not economic"
or "that's not rational", we invoke a separation. How can we deal with this
separation?







This state-market division comes back to the bourgeois
revolution, which was an attempt to win freedom from political interference for
private economic actors. I've been arguing that states and markets were always
in bed together right from the beginning thousands of years ago, and they still
are! The revolution of the mid 19th century involved a shift from
capitalists representing workers against the landed aristocracy to a new
alliance between them and the traditional enforcers to control the industrial
and criminal classes flocking into the cities. A series of linked revolutions
in all the main industrial countries during the 1860s and early 70s—from the
American civil war to the French Third Republic via the Meiji Restoration and
German unification—brought this alliance to power.







Modernity was thus a compromise between traditional
enforcers and industrial capitalists and this dualism is reflected in the
principal social form, the nation-state. This uneasy partnership has marked the
relationship between governments and corporations ever since. I think that we
are now witnessing a bid of the corporations for independence, for home rule,
if you like. Perhaps, having won control of the political process, they feel
than can go ahead to the next stage without relying on governments.  The whole discourse of 'corporate social responsibility'
implies that they could take on legal and administrative functions that had
been previously 'insourced' to states. It is part of a trend whereby the
corporations seek to make a world society in which they are the only citizens
and they no longer depend on national governments except for local police
functions. I think that it is a big deal—and this is happening under our noses!







Both politicians and economic theorists (OliverWilliamson got a Nobel prize for
developing Coase's theory of the form along these lines)
are proposing that we need to think again about what functions should be
internal to the firm and what should be outside. Perhaps it was a mistake to
outsource political control to states and war could be carried out by private
security firms. The ground for all of this was laid in the late 19th
century when the distinction in law between real and artificial persons was
collapsed for business enterprises so that the US Supreme Court can protect
corporate political spending in the name of preserving their human rights!
Corporations have greater wealth, power and longevity than individual citizens.
Until we can restore their legal separateness from the rest of humanity and
find the political means of restricting their inexorable rise, resistance will
be futile. There is a lot of intellectual and political work still to be done
and, as I have said, a lot of pain to come before more people confront the
reality of their situation.











What role do
technological innovations play in your understanding and promoting of shifts in
the way that we organize societies? Is it a passive thing or a driver of
change?







I wrote a book, the
Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World
(read it here, with the introduction
here), which centered on a
very basic question: what would future generations consider is interesting
about us? In the late '90s, the dot com boom was the main game in town. It
seemed obvious that the rise of the internet was the most important thing and
that our responses to it would have significant consequences for future
generations.







When I started writing it, I was interested in the
democratic potential of the new media; but most of my friends saw them as a new
source of inequality – digital exclusion, dominance of the big players and so
on. I was accused of being optimistic, but I had absorbed from CLR James a
response to such claims. It is not a question of being optimistic or
pessimistic, but of identifying what the sides are in the struggle to define
society's trajectory. In this case the sides are bureaucracy and the people. Of
course the former wish to confine our lives within narrow limits that they
control in a process that culminates as totalitarianism. But the rest of us
want to increase the scope for self-expression in our daily lives; we want
democracy and the force of the peoples of world is growing, not least in Africa
which for so long has been excluded from the benefits of modern civilization.
Of course there are those who wish to control the potential of the internet
from the top; but everywhere people are making space for themselves in this
revolution. When I see how Africans have moved in the mobile phone phase of
this revolution, I am convinced that there is much to play for in this
struggle. What matters is to do your best for your side, not to predict which
side will win. Speaking personally, Web 2.0 has been an
unmitigated boon for me in networking and dissemination, although I am aware
that some think that corporate capital is killing off the internet. A lot depends
on your perspective. I grew up learning Latin and Greek grammar. The
developments of the last 2-3 decades seem like a miracle to me. I guess that
gives me some buoyancy if not optimism as such.







It's obvious enough to me that any democratic response
to the dilemmas we face must harness the potential of the new universal media.
That's the biggest challenge. But equally, it's not clear which side is going
to win. I'm not saying that our side, the democratic side, is going to beat the
bureaucratic side. I just know which side I'm on! And I'm going to do my best
for our side. Our side is the side that would harness the democratic potential
of the new media. In the decade or more since I wrote my book on money and the
internet, I have become more focused on the threat posed by the corporations
and more accepting of the role of governments. But that could change too. And I
am mindful of the role the positive role that some capitalists played in the
classical liberal revolutions of the United States, France and Italy.











Final Question. I would
like to ask you about the distinction between formal and informal economy which
you are famous for having coined. How did you arrive at the distinction? Does the
term, the dichotomy, still with have the same analytical value for you today?








Around 1970, there was a universal consensus that only states could organize economies for development. You were either a Marxist or a Keynesian, but there were no liberal economists with any influence at that time. In my first publication on the topic (Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana, read it here, pdf)—which got picked up by academics and the International Labor Organization—I was reacting against that; the idea promoted by a highly formal economics and bureaucratic practice that the state as an idea as the only actor. In fact, people in Third World cities engaged in all kinds of economic activities, which just weren't recognized as such. So my impulse was really empiricist—to use my ethnographic observations to show that people were doing a lot more than they were supposed to be doing, as recorded in official statistics or discussed by politicians and economists.






Essentially, I made a distinction between those things
which were defined by formal regulation and those that lay outside it. I posed
the question how does it affect our understanding in the development process to
know more what people are doing outside the formal framework of the economy.
And remember, this came up in West Africa, which did not have as strong a colonial
tradition as in many other parts of Africa. African cities there were built and
provisioned by Africans. There were not enough white people there to build
these cities or to provide food and transport, housing, clothing and the rest
of it.







In my book on African agriculture, I went further and
argued that the cities were not the kind of engines of change that many people
imagined that they were, but were in fact an extension of rural civilizations
that had effectively not been displaced by colonialism, at least in that
region. Now if you ask me how useful I think it is today, what happened since
then of course is neoliberal globalization, for want of a better term, which of
course hinges on deregulation. So, as a result of neoliberal deregulation, vast
areas of the economy are no longer shaped by law, and these include many of the
activities of finance, including offshore banking, hedge funds, shadow banking,
tax havens, and so on. It also includes the criminal activities of the
corporations themselves. I've written a paper on my blog called "How the
informal economy took over the world" which argues that we are witnessing the
collapse of the post-war Keynesian consensus that sought to manage the economy in
the public interest through law and in other ways that have been dismantled; so,
it's a free-for-all. In some sense, the whole world is now an informal economy,
which means, of course, that the term is not as valuable analytically as it
once was. If it's everything, then we need some new words.







The mistake I made with other people who followed me was
to identify the informal economy with poor slum dwellers. I argued that even
for them, they were not only in the informal economy, which was not a separate
place, but that all of them combined the formal and informal in some way. But
what I didn't pay much attention to was the fact that the so-called formal
economy was also the commanding heights of the informal economy—that the
politicians and the civil servants were in fact the largest informal operators.
I realize that any economy must be informal to some degree, but it is also
impossible for an economy to be entirely informal. There always have to be
rules, even if they take a form that we don't acknowledge as being
bureaucratically normal like, for example, kinship or religion or criminal
gangs. So that's another reason why it seems to me that the distinction has
lost its power.







At the time, it was a valuable service to point to the
fact that many people were doing things that were escaping notice. But once
what they were doing had been noticed, then the usefulness of the distinction
really came into question. I suppose in retrospect that the idea of an informal
economy was a gesture towards realism, to respect what people really do in the
spirit of ethnography. I have taken that idea to another level recently in mywork on the human economy at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Here, in addition to
privileging the actors' point of view and their everyday lives, we wish to
address the human predicament at more inclusive levels than the local or even
the national. Accordingly, our interdisciplinary research program (involving a
dozen postdocs from around the world, including Africa, and 8 African doctoral
students) seeks ways of extending our conceptual and empirical reach to take in
world society and humanity as a whole. This is easier said than done, of
course.







Keith
Hart is Extraordinary Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of
Scholarship and Co-Director of the Human Economy Program at the University of
Pretoria, South Africa. He is also centennial professor of Economic Anthropology at the LSE.











Related links










Faculty Profile at U-London


Personal webpage


Read Hart's Notes towards an Anthropology of the Internet (2004, Horizontes Antropológicos) here (pdf)


Read Hart's Marcel Mauss: In Pursuit of a Whole (2007, Comparative Studies in Society and History) here (pdf)


Read Hart's Between Democracy and the People: A Political History of Informality (2008 DIIS working paper) here (pdf)


Read Hart's Why the Eurocrisis Matters to Us All (Scapegoat Journal) here (pdf)









Print version of this Talk (pdf)

As much as COVID-19 is a health and economic crisis, at its core, it is also a governance crisis.

NDI President Derek Mitchell and new Director of Democratic Governance Kristen Sample delve into ways governments and the international community have risen (or not) to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Find us on: SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | Google Play

Derek Mitchell: As we all continue to shelter in place and respond to the colossal health and economic crisis that is COVID-19, we must not forget that at its core, pandemics are as much a result of governance failure as any failure of healthcare or health system.
Since working to support democratic processes, institutions and governance around the world is what NDI does for a living, we thought it useful to delve into the role governance has played in the COVID-19 pandemic with NDI's experience in more than 50 countries around the world serving as a guide. Welcome to DemWorks. My name is Derek Mitchell, president of the National Democratic Institute.
To discuss all this with me in this podcast, I'm joined by NDI's new director of democratic governance, Kristen Sample.
Kristen Sample: Thank you so much Derek.
DM: Kristen just joined us on March 1. She brings more than 20 years of democratic governance experience with her to NBI having advised and evaluated programs at UN Women, UN Democracy Fund, the Open Society Foundation, Global Partners, Governance and International IDEA. Kristen is an expert on countering corruption, legislative strengthening in the nexus of gender and politics and she has led projects focused on the impact of democratic reform on economic development and citizen security. At a moment when the global crisis in governance is at the center of international conversation, at least before the pandemic push pause, we are thrilled to have Kristen aboard to look at that issue with fresh creativity here at NBI. So welcome Kristen to your very first DemWorks podcast.
KS: I'm really pleased to have the opportunity to speak with you today on such important issues.
DM: So we'll speak about the crisis of governance but also the pandemic factor as well. But I do want to start with this global governance crisis that has sort of preceded this. This is a broader overhang. We've seen all over the world popular demonstrations over the past year and more and everywhere from Moscow to Managua, to Hong Kong, to Khartoum, to Algeria, to Istanbul, to Paris. You can go on and on. And what it represents is a frustration with the quality of governance. Democracy somehow is not delivering for people. And I want to hear your thoughts on that. It's a moment of turmoil certainly. People will look at this and say, "Well, democracy is failing," but it's more than democracy that this is happening. It's a general quality of governance question that I think actually provides an opportunity. So let me just ask your thoughts on that first off, Kristen.
KS: Yeah. Thanks so much for that question, Derek. I think that NDI, since we have officers or programs spanning every region of the world basically in more than 50 countries, we're in a very good position to be able to take the pulse of what's happening in the different countries. In fact, we have been conducting surveys every two weeks of our country programs to get a sense of what's happening on the ground and we've received some very interesting signals that I'm really happy to be able to share with you today.
On the one side, we are saying that in many countries governments are responding very seriously, in very concerted ways to the health crisis. I mean in more than two thirds of the countries. The governments in the countries where we work are closing nonessential businesses in over 60%, they are communicating in ways, having very intensive communication campaigns that really are reaching all citizens. But when it comes to the democracy side, when it comes to implementing that response and pursuing a response that's consistent with democratic principles and norms and values and institutions, we are seeing some troubling developments at the same time.
For instance, the number of governments by our account, over 40% of the governments in the countries where we work are declaring emergency powers and it's clear that this is an extraordinary situation that requires extraordinary measures, but in many cases these emergency powers are inconsistent with democratic principles. They are not linked to the crisis. There is no provision for legislative oversight or in many cases, these have no sunset class, so there's no time limit and these are simply open-ended.
And link to that and linked in many cases to these emergency powers, emergency decrees, we're seeing an uptick also in threats to fundamental freedoms. For instance, nearly half of our countries are reporting that there are measures in place where governments are repressing non-state media who are critical of the government's response to the pandemic and that in some cases, again, almost 50% of our countries, there are measures in place where governments are limiting space for civil society to engage in political actions.
Another factor that I'd like to highlight too is while we're all distracted by the pandemic and while people are at home and perhaps with less access to information and less direct contact with government, there are also signals that many governments are using this as an opportunity to diminish anti-corruption controls. So that means that in some cases economic response packages or healthcare delivery is taking place with less transparency and less openness, which as you can imagine is a risk in terms of making sure that those resources are actually getting where they need to be.
And all of this, all of the stresses, the frustration and these concerns of course also have impacts when it comes to citizen trust, interpersonal trust citizen trust of the government and also we're seeing greater potential for civic unrest and a deteriorating security environment.
So all together, I hate to start with such a pessimistic view, but I think it is important again, through the networks that we have, the relationships that we have with political and civic actors on the ground, to convey the seriousness of the situation and to make sure that we're always communicating that well, this response requires really drastic measures. These measures need to be consonant of course, with the principles of democratic governance.
DM: Right. It fits into this broader competition of narratives that occurred even before the pandemic began, where China or Russia saying, "Look, authoritarian governments are more efficient in providing services. We do this stuff better. Democracy is messy." And they're able, as you say, to take advantage of this moment when people are looking for strong central control to make that case and to both do that rhetorically but also through provision of services.
And then it's not just those major countries. You'll have folks whether it's Hungary or Poland or you just go around the world, they're postponing elections. They are shutting down civil society, they're settling scores with adversaries. They're constraining public debate, saying that those things are luxuries during a time of crisis and that gives them an opportunity then as you said, for not just power grabs, but resource grabs and money grabs and they say, "Look, these are extraordinary times. They require extraordinary measures." And the concern is that these extraordinary measures will be permanent, that they'll say you need us to be surveilling people.
So this is a challenge for certainly those who do democracy work and for folks inside these countries. But I think the broader question of security, we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later, but it's interesting what we're seeing on the ground as you say.
You do a lot of work in the legislative sphere, you have a lot of background on that. How legislatures are particularly important. Civil society is too, but just focusing on legislature's role as a check and balance against executive overreach, can you talk about from the NDI experience or your other observation, how legislatures are being challenged, how they're dealing with this moment, how they're adapting to deal with the COVID-19 moment.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm so glad you brought this point up. The first challenge that I'd highlight is this risk that the legislative branch is getting sidelined. In a crisis like this, the executive branch is generally front and center. Their role is clearly understood by citizens. Head of state might be the one out there doing daily press briefings or a health minister communicating medical reports. And there's this sense of emergency that as I sort of alluding to before, it seems to empower the executive branch. And unfortunately that seems to be, in many cases, at the expense of the legislative power.
And additionally, another challenge and another reason that legislatures are perhaps getting crowded out or sidelined is simply that, the coronavirus, by it's dynamic, it's not socially compatible. And since parliaments are these multi-member bodies that have more diffuse operations, more diffuse leadership and that involve hundreds of different people, it's simply just a challenge to assemble a large group of people together, bring them together and keep them front and center in this crisis.
So if that first challenge is making sure that people just keep in mind that legislatures matter and the legislatures are able to exert their rights and their authority, I'd say that the second challenge of course is just how do parliaments, legislatures operate in a virtual world. Politicians are by nature, they like to shake hands, they like to get out on the street, they need to be in touch with their constituents. And there are so many challenge involved in this current world that we have where we should all be social distancing.
So looking across the world where we work, their parliaments are adopting different measures. Some of them are using social distancing restrictions like reducing the number of MPs in sessions. Others are moving to remote voting, remote deliberations. And then others are not meeting at all, which of course is quite terrible. And in those cases where legislatures have been dissolved or have been suspended for long periods of time.
We are working too, as you were saying, as NDI closely with parliaments in a number of countries to try to do those adaptations to the rules of procedures so that they're able to continue meeting in session and continue deliberating and continuing exercising oversight. For instance, we have connected parliamentarians in Colombia with parliamentarians in Ecuador. We have virtual sessions to learn from Ecuador's experience in adopting a regulation for the implementation of virtual session and teleworking.
So we are trying to connect parliamentarians across countries to understand how some parliaments have been moving forward in terms of remote procedures and how that's going for them. And two more challenges. One I'd highlight is that oversight role that we've been talking about. And from the same survey that we conducted with our country programs, we found that in 59% of the countries, checks and balances have been weakened, have deteriorated under the pandemic.
And this is happening at such an unfortunate time when there's so many policy measures that need to be approved and put in place. If we just take the issue of debt policy for instance, I saw a statistic from the Westminster Foundation that more than 80 countries have already requested emergency aid from the IMF. I mean these countries are struggling of course to meet different types of fiscal obligations and they are desperate for cash in order to ramp up health services and put in place economic measures.
And so these governments are taking on debt obligations, debt burns that are going to have far reaching impacts and long lasting impacts that should really be approved by the legislative branch and include monitoring and reporting. And that's not always the case in most of these instances.
DM: So you just say it's a very dangerous time and folks are adapting procedurally, but there are really implications to this longterm, including for security. And I think we'll get to that after the break.
For more than 35 years, NDI has been honored to work with courageous and committed pro-democracy activists and leaders around the world to help countries develop the institutions, practices and skills necessary for democracy's success.
KS: Welcome back. Derek, I've heard you speak to the issue of authoritarian systems and how they're operating in this crisis and that the authoritarian nature in itself makes health crises more likely. And you've also said in some of your speeches and some of the conversations we've had that it's not a coincidence that the pandemic started in China and I'd really like to hear from your expertise, your deep background on China specifically. Can you explain to listeners why that is? Why there is that connection?
DM: Well, as I said at the top, this is not just a health crisis, it's a governance crisis. It's a factor of governance both in the prevention of the pandemic and the response to it. We talked so far mostly about the response, how we're responding to the pandemic, but the core of the pandemic is a failure of governance. The difference between a local health crisis that is contained and a pandemic lies in the ability of a political system to respond to that early challenge quickly and effectively. And that requires both government and civic action. And if you're going to deal with this crisis early, it requires both. To do that, you have to act swiftly. You have to have widespread testing and contact tracing. You need critical support from citizens. In order to do all that and to ensure that that happens, you have to have basic civic trust.
Closed societies routinely fail that test of having that civic trust and that rapid action for some very practical reasons. When a government suppresses a free flow of information, when it fails to empower independent civic institutions, when it's too insecure to convey bad news candidly, doesn't feel that it has a political legitimacy, therefore, it's insecure to convey bad news. When its data can't be trusted because it's opaque, when its officials are afraid to speak truth to power or communicate inconvenient truths to their superiors or act decisively, absent waiting for some strict orders from the very center and they can't move quickly, the result can be deadly.
It turns what is a local health issue into a pandemic so it crosses borders. It becomes not just a problem for one country but for all others. So democratic governance is very, very practical and once again in this regard, transparent, accountable, inclusive, responsive, open governments is essential to crisis response but it's also essential to prevent the crisis from emerging to begin with.
And it is a matter of national security. This highlights frankly what many of us have known all along, that this is not just nice but has very practical national security effects. And as we just talked earlier, the irony is that just as the world needs more open democratic societies to prevent future crises and deal with the current one, there are opportunistic politicians who are closing political and civic space. That I think is a very practical reason why that closed societies cause these pandemics.
KS: I think that all of those points that you've been raising in terms of the threats and the vulnerabilities are so important for us to keep front and center. At the same time, here in NDI, as you know, is we're very keen to make sure that there are also opportunities to elevate the many examples around the world where governments are acting democratically and effectively in response to the crisis and they're framing and working with citizens in ways that are absolutely consistent with democratic values and principles. And so I do want to showcase some of those.
I think it's received a lot of press around the world how New Zealand, for instance has reacted, and I read this week that New Zealand is perhaps one of the very first countries to have been able to successfully eliminate COVID. They have no new COVID cases. And it's a case that really stands out for the way that the prime minister has been able to deliver information in a very clear, compassionate, inclusive way, a way that's very grounded in science of course, and transparent.
And at the same time where the legislature has had an important role developing a parliamentary select committee that's providing scrutiny of the government's response. The government has also been very affirmative there I think, in terms of issues of freedom of information and media freedom and has said that they would not slow down, for instance, their commitment to responding to requests for information during the crisis. So there's certainly the case of New Zealand, which is so interesting and it's shown such early success, but there are other places around the world too where specific measures taken by the government I think have been so positive and far reaching.
Uruguay comes to mind for instance. We see so many cases where authoritarian leaders are using this crisis to be able to settle scores as you were saying, or to act in a very partisan fashion. But in Uruguay, the president convened all of the former presidential candidates to give a joint press conference to send a powerful message of unity and to show that across the party divide, they were working together to develop responses.
Taiwan also really stands out for its cross party coordination, the transparent communications they've had, the very creative efforts that the government has put in place there, I think they've called it humor, not rumor. A campaign to share facts in real time to counter disinformation, to manage fear. So there aren't many cases out there as I was saying, of governments that are responding effectively and in ways that are building that citizen trust that you were mentioning.
DM: Yes. And then a further one, another democracy that's a leading democracy, probably the first out of the gate is South Korea. They did exactly what was necessary. People are looking at that example, a democratic example. They didn't sacrifice rights at all. They obviously had very strong controls at times of the society, but it took very swift action. They did widespread testing, contact tracing and they worked with civil society and is shown over and over that civil society is probably one of the most important factors. It's not simply a government driven thing that makes a response success. Civil society serves as a very efficient force multiplier for government. We saw that in Katrina, hurricane Katrina. We see it's proved over and over that it really is effective in getting the word out and messaging.
Ensuring is like in Taiwan through their civic tech community, they're sort of hackers. They're young citizens, who themselves in a voluntary fashion, formed a community. They were viewed as allies and partners not alienated from the government. And that partnership has been a success in Taiwan, has been a success in South Korea and is essential for a success. And that means that governments need to be open, need to be transparent, they need to see society as partners. So this is absolutely critical.
KS: Yeah. And I just want to add on the South Korea example. I'm so glad you brought that up because South Korea held elections during the pandemic on April 15, they had national assembly lessons and they were actually able to organize those elections in a way that was seen as very transparent, that was very consistent with electoral integrity and they had higher levels of turnout than in previous elections, which is pretty amazing. And there's so many countries around the world that are facing elections in 2020. I think the way that South Korea was able to do it with a very intensive communication campaign as you were speaking again to their transparency of communication, they had expanded early voting measures in place. They had home voting, they had very comprehensive safeguards for people to be able to vote in person. So even organizing an election in a time that seems so difficult and so challenging, I think that as you were saying, democracies like South Korea are showing that there is a way forward.
DM: Right. And I think we can learn some lessons from that as well. There are groups, including NDI has been at the center of this, of putting together documents that say here are the election integrity guidelines for this moment, that democracy should not be sacrificed at the alter of crisis response, that elections need to move forward if they can be done in the right way and if they need to be postponed, it's postponed within a certain timeframe and only during a period of high crisis. So there are principles here where democracy can continue to move forward. It makes the society stronger, it builds that civic trust that's important for crisis response. But we need to... You can walk and chew gum at the same time at this moment. So I'm glad we were able to talk about some of these democratic examples.
KS: Absolutely. And I will be right back after this quick message.
You can hear more from other democracy heroes by listening to our DemWorks podcast available on iTunes and SoundCloud.
DM: Welcome back with Kristen Sample. Of course you're new to NDI, but you know NDI very well and it's a fundamental principle everywhere that nations will only succeed when societies are fully inclusive, where they don't leave anybody behind. They enable all to contribute equally. That means women, that means young people, that means traditionally marginalized groups, LGBT communities, et cetera. It's just plain logic that if you leave anybody behind, that you're not going to get the most out of your citizen when you're going to hold your country back, and yet we are witnessing negative impacts toward these populations during this COVID-19 moment. Kristen, can you speak to this, explain what's going on here and why it matters?
KS: Sure, absolutely. I mean obviously this crisis isn't occurring in a vacuum. It's occurring in a context where across the world, across all countries, there are already this array of existing intersecting inequalities where some people were coming into this crisis already in a disadvantaged place. And then the pandemic itself has differentiated impacts that affect women and other marginalized groups disproportionately. I'll just give a few examples.
I mean lockdown for women who are living in relationships of power imbalance and of abuse perhaps, lockdown for them means locked in, with an abusive partner. And for instance our survey of country offices that I was referring to previously, in 66% of our countries, there seems to be an increase in sexual and gender based violence since the pandemic. In 15% of those countries, it's a significant increase. Of course these women might be locked in in vulnerable situations and then at the same time have less access to government resources, government support. So that's one example.
Others, people with disabilities for instance, who have always struggled to access health services, transportation in an equitable fashion, you can imagine that that lack of access and the differentiated impact of the pandemic on them is life threatening in some cases.
There are digital divide concerns, people in rural areas or women, other marginalized groups who may have less access to information, to resources. There are real concerns also and cases around the world where this pandemic is being exploited by anti migrant hate groups for instance, who try to link movement and migration to the origin of the virus. Or in some cases, for instance in Africa and some of the countries where we work, media outlets are perpetuating stereotypes against people with albinism for instance, and placing the blame for the virus on them.
So there are so many challenges around making sure that people have access to resources, people are safe and that we are able to convey and support a message of social cohesion and solidarity instead of the divisions that we're seeing pop up around the world. I think that in our case, for instance in Indiana, what we're trying to do is reinforce the need for inclusive decision-making, making sure for instance, that women are involved in decision making and other marginalized groups are involved in decision making and representation and in these deliberation bodies, making sure that the policymaking is taking into account these vulnerabilities and these different differentiated needs. And also the government messaging is inclusive, getting to everybody and it's supporting the social cohesion messaging and solidarity messages.
DM: And again, this is critical for the crisis response, pandemic response. I mean COVID-19 doesn't discriminate. Whoever has it, whoever is vulnerable or subject will get it and it will spread to the society writ large. So if you're not inclusive, if you're excluding folks, if politicians then see that there is an opportunity here as some politicians will to divide and conquer, to play on fear. Or spoilers from the outside may see that there are opportunities if they're divided societies, to create tensions that then require or enable them to negotiate the deal that you want to make or promote corruption within the society.
There are all kinds of ways this makes societies less stable, less secure, and affects the development and certainly the response to crises. So this is not just a nice thing, it's not just a human rights thing. This is fundamentally important to national security, international security and to everything that we're seeking to achieve through democracy.
KS: Absolutely. And I think along the things I'd really like to hear from you too, Derek, in terms of how you see along the lines of this being an international crisis that includes the whole world, that joins us all although we are in very different places. How you see role NDI's role in supporting that cross border cooperation and solidarity and having the international community come together?
DM: Given that authoritarians are claiming their model is unique for this moment, we have to be out there making our case. But in terms of our specific adaptations that we are doing, we are working in places like Ethiopia to ensure that the public opinion surveys are necessary invents of their postponed elections or continue forward, but can be done virtually. That we can adapt legislative rules of procedure in places that need it to allow for remote voting and continue the legislative process to ensure that election integrity is maintained.
As I mentioned earlier, there are certain principles and established accepted international principles for when and how to postpone elections, how to hold them during moments of crisis. And we put together crisis response kits that can be used. It's called the practical toolkit for politicians during a pandemic that can help political parties figure out how to do crisis management or help the government put together crisis communication.
So a lot of things that can be done internally and done across different countries that ensure the solidarity is still there, the momentum for democracy is still there. The expectation that democratic norms are sustained in this moment so that the headlines are not simply roll back authoritarian opportunism, that massive surveillance, all the things that people may succumb to because of fear during crisis, that there is an alternative voice and it says it doesn't have to be like that. Or if it does have to be like that now, it doesn't have to continue to be like that indefinitely and that there are some standards by which these things are being imposed.
So that international norm setting at this moment, it's probably more important than ever to do and we are trying to do at national level. We're trying to do it across different countries to ensure that there is not a vacuum to which the authoritarian voice moves and has free open season for its own values. It goes across, I think, a lot of different countries. And Kristen, I'd be interested in your thoughts from your perspective of governance, how that's working.
KS: I think that there's a real role for the international community to play. And I wanted to highlight that too in what you're saying because these challenges are so vast that clearly we have to work together on people to people exchanges and supporting lesson sharing. And so I do think that there's an absolute role for the international community playing in terms of getting out the messages of that democracy is not a luxury, it's not something that could be put into a coma or put on hold while we're all sheltering, that it's something that has to be reaffirmed on a daily basis.
And so I do think that countries also have to, in addition to standing firm, standing on their own ground on democratic principles, they also have to be willing to promote and expand those democratic principles across borders, especially to counter those liberal influences that you were referring to earlier, that in some cases are, really transmitted and increased through disinformation campaigns or phony PR campaigns that need to be called out of course by all actors.
DM: Thanks again, Kristen for joining me in conversation about how democracies can best meet the challenges of COVID and how NDI with its global partners are meeting the moment.
KS: Thank you, Derek.
DM: I'd also like to say thank you to our listeners. To learn more about NDI or to listen to other DemWorks podcasts, please visit our website at www.ndi.org. Thanks very much.


World map of Coronavirus (Covid-19)



19. Governance is Key During COVID-19? (w/ Kristen Sample) Posted 6 days ago

Democracy (General), COVID-19 Podcast NDI Listen democracy

Jordan Branch on Google
Maps, State Formation, and the International Politics of Cartography







The territorial
underpinnings of international politics are as familiar as they are contested
within the discipline of International Relations. While the presumed 'territorial
trap' of the discipline has been attacked from many sides (see, for instance, Theory Talk #4),
Jordan Branch is more interested in turning the question around. 

His work has
carefully addressed the historical constitutive effects of mapping practices
and technologies on the subsequent transformation of practices of, and ideas about,
rule and the international system. In this fascinating Talk, Branch,
amongst others, discusses the significance of cartography for international
politics, explores the effects that contemporary digital mapping might have on political
spaces, and illustrates how innovations in mapping impacted on rule with the historical
example of France.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)





What is according to your view the most
important challenge facing global politics and what is/should be the central
debate in the discipline of International Relations (IR)?



While
there are many different debates going on at the same time within the discipline,
the one that has interested me most is the relationship between ideas and
practical or material factors. There is a very simplistic version of this
dichotomy that has been debated to death in the constructivist versus
rationalists debates, particularly in the American field of IR—an over-drawn
distinction, as many have pointed out. I am more interested in actual
explanations for the process, outcome, or phenomenon we're looking at. Rather
than separating them out, I am interested in how the ideational and material
relate to one another, how they fit together.



This
relationship poses questions for my specific interest in technological change. We
are experiencing fast-paced technological changes—for example, the information
technology revolution—which can yield a natural yet incorrect assumption, namely,
that this change will inevitably have some kind of major effect on, or
interaction with, politics and, specifically, with international relations.
This may be true, but it is too often assumed. Indeed, this raises another
problem. Even if there is such an effect, is it something we'll be able to
observe, let alone predict or explain, as it is happening? From my historical
work on the role of maps in state formation, for example, it is quite evident that
for people at the time, there was no way to see the impact maps had on the
political/spatial/ideational constitution of the state.



The information
technology (IT) revolution is the most obvious current example of dramatic technological
change. Although it has been playing out for the last 20 or 30 years, it only
continues to accelerate. Over the past couple of years, a lot of discussion has
focused on 'big data' and what it implies for business, financial analysis, and
the like. Of course, it also presents possibilities as a new tool for social
science. But there is a danger here. There is a tendency of seeing new
technological phenomena only in their material contexts, specifically focusing
on possibilities for measurement, for example, thereby neglecting to think
about the ideational. How do ideas about collecting and using data actually
play into the collection and analysis itself? So while they are in practice
always entangled, analytically, I find the distinction between the ideational
and the material a very fruitful one, not so much as a debate between opposing
fields, but as way to think about technological change.





How
did you arrive where you currently are in your thinking about these issues?



It is
funny—people often ask this sort of question, and I did not necessarily see a
natural trajectory for my thinking or work until I began to look and think
back. This interest in connecting technological and political change goes as
far back as my undergraduate time at Stanford University, where I initially
majored in mechanical engineering, and later switched to International
Relations. While technology remained an important preoccupation, I became more
interested in politics, history, and theory. So the interest formed into
questions about the political implications of phenomena like technology. But
this didn't happen instantly. Just before beginning my PhD at the University of
California, Berkeley, I was planning to do comparative work on regime change
and democratization. Then my older brother (Adam Branch), who is also a
political scientist, gave me a copy of Hendrik Spruyt's The Sovereign State and its Competitors (1994), and he said: 'Hey
you might like this!' So, I literally read that on a beach the summer before
starting grad school—which may sound funny, but I sat down, read it, and found
it fascinating. Yet I didn't immediately start thinking about these questions
then. It took a year or two, when I started really thinking about what I wanted
to work on. I came back to this work and realised these were the kind of
questions I was interested in: the origins of the territorial state and its
characteristics.



The
interest in the state as a concept had been with me for slightly longer. As an
undergrad my first introductory course to IR was taught by Stephen Krasner (Theory Talk #21).
Krasner has strong views, and the class was very rigorous. A lot of his work
focuses on the state and I think his framings influenced me early on. I don't entirely
agree with some of Krasner's arguments about sovereignty, but these
disagreements are more about the specifics of salient time periods or cases.
Other work which influenced me early on was that of John Ruggie on
territoriality. Indeed his approach became central as I was developing these
questions myself. I also discovered a host of literature in political geography
that turned out to be very interesting and useful. 



So,
one could say that my trajectory was really more focused on understanding the
historical outcome of the territorial state than on what role technology,
specifically maps, played in this process. The focus on technology, while
existent from my engineering days, really began to materialize as a link missing
from existing explanations of state formation. I was thinking about how we might
be able to find some additional traction on these questions by including
technology more prominently. It has certainly been part of some scholarship on
state formation, as in Charles Tilly's work or William McNeill's on
technological change and warfare. Surely, technology has always been in there,
but the discussion has been centered on war fighting technology and maybe on
transport, and only to a lesser degree on communication technology in the
broader sense.



Another
piece of work which triggered my focus on the relationship between the
ideational and the material was Ron Deibert's book Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia (1997, read the 1995 PhD thesis
that became the book here, pdf). He talks about internet
communication technology but also about the printing press and the impact it
has on the global distribution of power. Yet, only when I read this book for
the second or third time just as I was finishing up my dissertation did I realize
how much his framing had shaped how I formulated my thesis. He does touch on
the role of mapping, but it is his elaboration on the way in which media
informs how people think about the world which was spot on for me. For me, maps
as a medium very importantly framed how people thought about and imagined the
world in the past—but of course these questions about technology and its role
in constituting the international political system, states, territorial
boundaries, and so on are still relevant today.





What would a student need to become a
specialist in global studies or understand the world in a global way?



I
think it is important to be really excited and interested in your topic and
what you want to do. The key thing is to enter a grad program that fits you in
terms of your interests and to be willing to do whatever methodological training
ends up being needed for your research project.



I
think there's a tendency to look for a 'one size fits all' graduate training
model, which does make sense at the initial level. Everyone should get a
certain amount of background in a variety of methods, whether they'll end up
using those or not. For example, I have not used quantitative methods in my own
research, but I'm glad that I had to take classes on those methods in grad school.
They give you the ability to understand work which may connect to your own but
comes at it from a different angle. And you should always be open to a variety
of methods. The key is to be able to understand a broad array of approaches, otherwise
you won't be able to engage in broad conversations.



I
also feel I gained a lot from exploring, and reading widely, from other
disciplines such as history and sociology. I already mentioned political
geography, which is really not too distant but, nonetheless, in the U.S. it
sits in a different department. You might think that some work is 'on the other
side of the fence' but it is important to be able to bring that work into your
thinking.



The
final thing is to be open and ready to change your mind, whether it is about
the answer you're expecting to get to your question, or even changing the
question itself. Obviously there is a certain point when you're almost done
with a project where that might not be a good idea…. but if it is early on and
it works and you can do it logistically, I think it is important to be willing
to do that. Five years later you're going to be a lot better off.





So far, your work has been mainly
historical. Can you explain the importance of 'looking back' for understanding
contemporary international relations?



I
think it is extraordinarily important and useful. A lot of us in this and other
fields do see strong connections between today's politics and past events,
institutions, and ideas. There is an important notion that we cannot engage
meaningfully with the present if we do not understand its genealogy. That is
certainly a driver for me in thinking about the origins of the state and
territorial boundaries. It may help us to observe patterns we might see
replicated or appear in some kind of altered yet recognizable form today.
Indeed, it can help us think about where were might be headed.



Although
I also hesitate here slightly: always looking to the past for the answers can
be problematic. History can help us to observe patterns, dynamics, and maybe
relationships that might tell us something about other periods or about contemporary
international relations. But we should never do so thinking that the patterns
are definitely going to be the same or are deterministic. I think one can look
for patterns or relationships without automatically assuming that they have to
apply everywhere.



Historical
analysis can be problematic in its own right, because there is no way to
discover or absorb the past 'as it really was.' All history is some kind of
construction, whether it is based on contemporary or historical sources. Additionally,
in the social sciences we often have to rely on secondary sources. That is not
inherently a problem; this fact just introduces more variables to think about.
Pure narrative purporting to capture 'what really happened' can be very
problematic.



Given these disclaimers, it is useful to consider
the past. I think what should be emphasized is that, specifically at the grad
school level, students should be encouraged to dig a little deeper
historically. They shouldn't hesitate to do that excavation work.





IR, it has been argued, rests firmly on
a spatial or territorial understanding of politics. What constitutive role does
territorial space play in IR and is that role based on historical fact or is it
myth?



I
like that question. I think it is actually both—sort of a myth and sort of a
fact.  In one sense, territory informs at
least the state ideal (i.e., states as we think of them): it informs what the
state is, the interests of states, and of course how we distinguish one state
from another. And yet, while this is all inherently territorial, we also know
that this is far from an accurate description of a lot of regions and places in
the world. There are many different spatial ideas, practices, and organizations
with political agency that are non-state or non-territorial.



But
regarding the myth of state territoriality: I think it is important to point
out there is a lot of detail in the 'conventional narrative' of the state, such
as timing of when territoriality came about as pinpointed in Westphalia, that
has been quite effectively debunked by a number of scholars in the last 10 or
20 years (scholars like Andreas Osiander or Benno Teschke, from different
theoretical perspectives). This is a strongly supported finding. But it really
hasn't penetrated the mainstream narrative very well. While we can gradually see
a little more nuanced discussion in IR textbooks in the U.S., they more often
than not will still start with 1648 and Westphalia.



We
can now confidently say that states—states as we think of them now—did not
appear in 1648, let alone earlier. This is especially true if we look at the
specifically territorial or spatial aspects of statehood, which again are so
central to how we think about the state internationally. The focus on defending
cleanly demarcated linear boundaries and the idea of asserting absolute
sovereign authority within those lines; this is really not consolidated until at
least the 19th century. So, part of the myth is the timing and the
how and why we have states.



But
there still is a factual quality to territoriality in this story we tell
ourselves about the foundation of the international system and the supposed
creation of sovereign states. In a certain setting and for a certain period I
think this describes the ideas and practices of international politics quite
well. The most obvious example of this is 19th century Europe. While
there are still ways in which it diverges from the ideals of the typical state system,
in a lot of ways it actually did fit that. This happened at the same time as
the development of modern Western historiography, and it was the setting for some
of the traditional foundation of political science and IR. So we can see how
one shaped the other: history-making and state-making. The singular territorial
ideal of statehood from the 19th century has subsequently been
applied to other issues, actors, and areas. Even if it does not fit exactly, it
is applied today still and it is made to fit retrospectively much earlier
periods, where it applied less well.



Ultimately,
it is a powerful myth which has informed how we think about international
relations to such a degree that we shouldn't just throw it out. Instead, we
should think about exactly how it actually informs the way that international
relations is understood and practiced.
Practitioners and officials don't exactly read IR journals and base their
decision-making on our knowledge production, but the basic ideas of states, boundaries,
and territory which inform the practice of international relations—as well as
the study of it—should be our concern.





You have looked specifically at how
mapping has contributed to imagining and formation of the modern state system. Could
you elaborate more on how something as technical as cartography matters for
international politics?



I've
argued in my recent work that early modern mapping technologies were really
essential to the consolidation of the territorial state, particularly the
specific territorial features of states today. Maps, which have been a popular
medium over the past few centuries, really do shape how people understand the
world and their place in it. This gets us back to the connection between the
material and the ideational.



In early
modern Europe a revolution took place, first in mapmaking technologies and,
slightly later, in the ideas and practices of political rule, especially as it
relates to territory. I argue this was really not a coincidence. How rulers and
subjects conceived of rule and how rulers conceived of their realms was really
altered as they increasingly used maps that depicted the world in this one
particular way. The key characteristics of modern statehood – at least of the
ideal of modern statehood – such as linear boundaries between homogenous territorial
claims, really appeared first in maps and only subsequently in political practices
on the ground. Of course, there were existing authority structures, but these were
not particularly spatial or were not spatial in this linear demarcated way. Subsequently,
however, these authority structures were ignored or sometimes even actively
renounced in favor of the kind of authority which could be literally shown and
drawn on a map.



It is
interesting because initially, maps were not predominantly produced by rulers, states,
or officials. They were certainly involved in sponsoring some mapping projects,
buying maps, and using them, but mapmaking was more of a commercial private
scientific enterprise, if we can apply the label 'scientific' in the 16th
and 17th centuries. These map-makers certainly didn't have any articulated
goal of changing politics, at least not on this broad level. They were really
concerned with making money, maybe creating art, and advancing what they
thought was a growing science of cartography.



We
can however see that the map, as a technological artifact—maps as actual things—had
an impact on the practices of rule both between rulers and between rulers and
their subjects. I argue that this process occurred quite broadly across the
European development of the international system at that time. And you can see
this sequence really clearly in a case like France.



Let
me illustrate that. Here are three maps of 'France' ranging from the 1400s to
the 1700s—the quotation marks are necessary because the notion of there being
one entity called France across this whole period is more a matter of us labeling
it as such rather than it being one recognizable entity.









The
first map is from a 15th century manuscript about royal and noble
genealogy in France. The image is purported to represent 'all the realm of
France' and shows the country as a collection of what I would call places
rather than a single linearly demarcated space. You do have the notion of spatial
boundaries here, in terms of rivers as means for demarcation. Yet, very
clearly, the visual language of this map focuses on towns. And this is how rule
was practiced and operationalized as well: negotiations would be over places, or
maybe collections of people based on identity, jurisdiction, or where they were
allowed to reside, but not in term of linear demarcations between claims.









Now
look at the second map, which is just from about 150 years later, from the
1590s. It is from an atlas by a follower of Mercator, and its label Gallia is
the Roman designation for France. From our modern perspective we can recognize
something that looks a lot like a modern map of France. Maybe even a state, although
the boundaries are not exactly like we would expect them to be. But this is the
visual language of mapping that we are familiar with: longitude, latitude,
spatial expanses colored in, homogenous territorial claims—there is something
about the space depicted that argues that it is all the same, that is all
France.



And
despite this familiarity, it was actually far from an accurate depiction of
French rule. Not just in the actual placement of the boundaries, which are
contestable, but in the discrete nature of the boundaries themselves. Along
these frontiers, so clearly demarcated on this image, the claims of the French
king were often unclear and overlapped with those of other rulers. This was
even true for the interior of France during this period.









The
third map is another 150 years later, from the 1740s. This is from a map
showing the triangulation of the realm, undertaken by a group of geographers, known
as the Cassini survey, as several generations of the Cassini family headed up
this effort. The realm is being mapped explicitly using geometric tools with
the important emphasis that the image is actually meant to represent reality.
It is understood that way: it's supposed to measure reality, in order to enable
the French king to better understand what he rules. Moreover, this mapping took
place at the same time that rule was being implemented in practice on the
ground in terms of spatial expanses as we think of them, in the form of
demarcating boundaries with neighbors which had previously been unclear,
overlapping jurisdictions.



Although
maps of the second generation (i.e., the map from the 1590s) were 'inaccurate,'
they were extremely influential. They were widely distributed and purchased by
the elite, both inside and outside of government. Using these maps provided
rulers with this particularly new territorial meaning to their centralizing and
bureaucratizing efforts. As a consequence, the use of these maps as material
tools of governing and negotiation really changed the language of rule. Rule becomes
cartographic, at least in part. When two opposing sides come to the negotiation
table, for example, they at the very least have already agreed, implicitly, that
the division should be a linear boundary—it is just a question of where.



By
the time the third map is produced, the government is much more directly
involved in map production using accurate geometrical measurement. Yet the very
desire for this mapping was shaped by the earlier use of those commercial maps
that built up the visual grammar of geometric space. The French case is useful
because it is very well documented, but we do see the same sort of process
repeated either simultaneously or later throughout Europe and also elsewhere. In
fact, there is a lot of interesting scholarship on the introduction of mapping
and modern geographic thinking into regions outside the West. Siam Mapped (1994), a book by Thongchai Winichakul,
is a fantastic study that I found really useful for my thinking about Europe,
even though it deals with Siam (Thailand) in the late 19th and early
20th centuries.



This
is my story about mapping and territory, but I think there is a broader frame
to your question: do we want to bring in these sort of technical factors into explanations
in International Relations? And while we don't want to be technologically
determinist, there is some useful thinking around technology and its effects we
should consider. The impact of maps has been so strong, and yet they are such
common artifacts that they are largely conceived of as 'unremarkable' outside
of geographic-oriented disciplines.





So can we juxtapose this insight that mapping practices precede the
practice of rule and state formation to the anthropological present, that is,
what do the contemporary, some say radical, shifts in mapping techniques entail
for international politics?



Absolutely.
When I initially present my work, there is often an assumption that I use GIS
in my study. Instead, my work focuses on analyzing mapping itself—maps as
historical artifacts, their effects and their interaction with political
identities, interests, and organizations. But I think the ways in which methodology
and the subject of study overlap on subjects like technology could potentially
contribute to stretching the boundaries of IR. The big data question is both a
question of studying what big data means for politics but also how we can use
big data to study politics. The way in which new technologies can simultaneously
play into our methods and into our answers or questions is a pressing and
fascinating issue.



For
instance, there has been a lot of back and forth on the question of whether
more open-access mapping techniques entail some sort of democratization. While
I think we have seen that more participatory forms of mapping are possible, we
shouldn't think that this type of mapping is completely open, as no
technological system is completely open to anyone and everyone at all times.
But, indeed, there is a democratization of mapping under way. Authorship in a
whole host of domains, including mapping, is opening up where there used to be
a single authoritative voice or at least a single type of authoritative voice. So
maps are an example of this opening up and collective authorship. At the same
time, accommodating more voices also means that a lot of information is being
shared without authority or attribution or what we think of as a legitimate
source… When you open a map from Rand McNally or National Geographic, you know
that specific cartographers thought this was accurate and you can blame or
praise them. But when you open up a layer of Google Earth that has been
crowd-sourced you don't know who put that pin there, and you don't know why.



It's
really interesting to explore a bit further how this is different from the
recent past. In the 19th and first half of the 20th
century, mapmaking was essentially state-led. The U.S. geological survey, the
Ordnance Survey in Britain, or large mapmaking geographical institutions such
as National Geographic represented the owners and producers. Mapping was so
technical, so obviously technical that the everyday person would not be able to
make a map to Rand McNally's standards. This has changed, and quite importantly
so. Not only do we have the technology to do this, people are aware that they
can use it as easily as opening a smartphone app, thereby incorporating more
points of view. This is not necessarily good or bad. Politically, it does open
up new possibilities. Maps have always been political, both implicitly and
explicitly. It certainly opens up the possibility of some kind of broader shift
in ideas about territory. Let me illustrate with an example. I haven't
necessarily come across specific maps that present some completely novel visual
grammar potentially reshaping the way we think about the world. But, an
interesting example I like to bring to my students: there was a September 2011blog post on Google's Lat-Long blog (which is the company's blog about Google Maps and Google Earth). Its headline
read: 'South Sudan is now official on Google Maps,' and it displayed a
screenshot of the new boundary. 







They changed their base layer by adding a boundary between South Sudan and
Sudan. This of course followed the referendum and the UN's recognition, and all
the traditional precursors to official statehood. South
Sudan became a recognizable entity on that blog. Google Earth, a
non-governmental actor, indeed a huge corporate actor—and thus not necessarily
democratizing—becomes part of the discourse of declaring South Sudan's official
existence.



This
is an example of how things might be going. Interestingly, the whole enterprise
of mapping today actually resembles more closely that of the 16th
and early 17th centuries then that of the 19th or early
20th century, not technologically but organizationally. The
state-centric view of the world was enforced by the state-authored mappings of
the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, by contrast, there is a
kind of shared or unclear authorship, there is crowdsourcing, there are multiple
sources of conflicting and quite openly unreliable or uncertain information.
This environment of rapidly increasing distribution and use also describes the
creation of the early atlases in the late 16th century and early 17th
centuries, which involved the collation of all kinds of information from multiple
sources.



And
of course it was in the 16th and 17th century when this
sort of non-state-controlled mapping presented innovative images of the world—those
images that ended up shaping and consolidating the state form of territory. And
so it was these new tools for understanding and acting on the world which gave
the state its territorial shape. As key information-producing activities are
being opened up, some forms of power are being redistributed. This certainly
means that we need to widen our scope in terms of whom we consider to be a
stakeholder or what sort of actors we want to study. We know that the dichotomy
of state versus non-state is not sufficient. We need to be subtler in our
inquiries. In IR, of course, the stereotypical over-emphasis on states is being
questioned, and this is really just one more sign that a piece of the power of
the state, in this case map-production and distribution, is shifting elsewhere.




I
recently had a conversation with students in my undergrad seminar on technology
and international politics. I went into it saying: 'Hey, all this mobile
mapping and GPS and Google Earth is totally revolutionary. This may change how
we think about the world.' And they were all completely unconvinced, since they
use these technologies all the time—to a bunch of twenty-year-olds these tools seem
unremarkable. And maybe that is actually a more accurate analysis. But it is
interesting how it is such a different analysis from that of my generation and anyone
older, all of us who have spent a lot of time, for example, driving around
without GPS. It is partly this perception and the 'unthinking usage' which make
the relationship between technologies and social and political outcomes so difficult
to observe. Our ideas may be changed, and especially the ideas of younger
generations may be changed, without anyone particularly noticing how dramatic
the changes might be. This also means that the connections, because they are
'unthinking,' can be quite foundational to people's ideas of social identities
or political practices. They are tacit and embodied. That makes it both hard to
observe but also an interesting puzzle. But it is worthwhile mentioning that
the images presented by Google Maps and other digital mapping tools,
particularly satellite imagery, might carry a greater legitimacy in terms of
depicting 'the truth'. It looks like a picture of the world and therefore
whatever is on it, even layered on data (like a new international boundary),
must be true. It represents another apex of the scientific trajectory of
mapping.





If it is just about adding a data layer on a base map that remains the
same, does that then mean that ontologically this kind of mapping technology
actually doesn't challenge territoriality?



That
gets to an interesting point, which entangles with a lot of the more careful
discussions of globalization and the state. One version of that is that the
state is not dying, is not being destroyed. It is just that other things are
being layered on top of it, and the state and its boundaries still remain and
still matter for certain things. In this case, maps are perfectly capable of
showing state boundaries—they look very fixed, very strong—but one can layer on
top other types of information, maybe transactional flows or particular places
that are connected in different ways.



I
think that could be an interesting argument: these new mapping tools can really
show so much, and it is matter of selecting what you want to show and
unselecting things you don't want to show. Thus they don't do anything to
undermine one particular view of the world. Now that is not necessarily a good
or bad thing. If we look at the history of mapping and the origins of state
territoriality, a key part of that was that it was really hard to depict
medieval jurisdictional and personal notions of rule on early modern maps. Printing
technology and mapping tools prescribed depiction in a certain way—drawing
lines and coloring in spaces. Maps made it harder to show and thus think about
the other forms of rule. If digital maps are still perfectly capable of showing
states and their boundaries, they may do very little to undermine that notion
of territory.





Finally, if we are interested in the politics of maps, to what extent do
we need to study not only the maps as political artifacts but the mapmakers as
political actors as well?



I
think it is extremely useful to do both, and obviously if we study mapping
today, we can do both. In terms of
historical work, we can only rely on very limited sources, such as what mapmakers
themselves wrote about what they were doing. We don't know a lot about their
goals or ideas about politics. I would have loved to have been able to read
exhaustive memoirs by mapmakers such as Ortelius and Mercator. Of course, they might
not have said anything about the questions we are interested in. On the other
hand, a lot of map-makers today are involved in mapping for explicit political
reasons: for example, Ushahidi-type collaborative mapping (www.ushahidi.com), or humanitarian and
relief mapping. Here we can dig into the question of how the maps produced relate
to specific objectives. That is a great way to get more analytical leverage on
a lot of these questions.



Jordan Branch joined the Political Science
department at Brown as an Assistant Professor in summer 2012. He received his
PhD in Political Science at UC-Berkeley in 2011, and spent 2011-2012 as the
Hayward R. Alker Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Studies at
the University of Southern California. His interests include international
relations theory, the history of the sovereign state system, contemporary
challenges to statehood, and the intersection of technological and political
change. In 2014, Cambridge University Press published his book, The
Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty. His
research has also appeared in International Organization and
the European Journal of International Relations.







Related links





Faculty profile at Brown University
Read
Branch's Mapping the Sovereign State:
Technology, Authority, and Systemic Change (International Organization 2011) here (pdf) 
Read
Branch's Colonial Reflection' and
Territoriality: The Peripheral Origins of Sovereign Statehood (European Journal of International Relations,
2012) here (pdf) 








Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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Many countries with scheduled elections this year face a difficult choice in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic: how to balance public health considerations with holding a free and fair election. Learn more from NDI Senior Associate and Director of Electoral Programs Pat Merloe and Program Director Julia Brothers as they talk about democratic back-sliding during this crisis, electoral integrity, and ways civil society organizations can still make a difference.
Find us on: SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | Google Play
Pat Merlow: In the public health crisis, especially where governments are weak or people are suspicious of governments, trusted voices are really important to get out accurate information.
Julia Brothers: Hello, this is Julia Brothers. I'm the Program Director for Elections at the National Democratic Institute. Welcome to Dem Works.
JB: Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic is sewing insecurity among the public, which can be exploited by authoritarians to consolidate power in sideline democratic institutions. It also poses severe technical, political, and social threats to elections themselves.
In many countries, the effects of the virus may strain citizen relationships with government and elected [inaudible] officials, intensify political tensions and the potentials for violence, disenfranchise voters and increase conditions for democratic backsliding.
Today I'm joined by Pat Merlow, senior associate and director of electoral programs at NDI. Welcome to the podcast, Pat. Thank you for being here.
Pat Merlow: Hi, Julia.
JB: So the COVID-19 crisis is causing enormous challenges for every country, including those with scheduled elections this year. What are the biggest concerns deciding whether to hold or postpone elections?
PM: Elections must be held in ways that safeguard public health and in ways that ensure genuine opportunities for the electorate to vote. Universal and equal suffrage, which is in every modern constitution, means inclusion, not exclusion. So we have to also hold elections in ways where the political parties and the candidates have a fair chance to compete for votes without a playing field that's being manipulated or intentionally or unintentionally tilted in one party's favor.
So striking a proper democratic balance of public safety and credible election processes is different and really difficult in every country. Depends a lot on the level of economic and technological development in the country on the nature of social cohesion versus divisions in the country and political polarization.
So in many countries where NDI works, the concern is whether authoritarians will rush through elections with undue public health risks in order to gain an electoral advantage or to postpone elections under conditions that advantage their attempts to gain and maintain more power.
A second troubling circumstance in countries that are unstable or prone to various kinds of violence, where constrains of the public health crisis can be used by malign actors to flood the population with this information... I mean we're hearing this term infodemic; also hate speech and other means to scapegoat religious or ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people or women in order to gain political advantage.
That's not all the countries where NDI works, but even those are neither authoritarian nor fragile states, the COVID-19 crisis is still posing gigantic challenges both on the public health and to electoral integrity.
JB: Right. I mean these factors present themselves as challenges to electoral integrity, not just where there might be bad faith actors that are trying to utilize this crisis to consolidate power, but also just in addressing basic issues related to how to make sure that you're maximizing participation during a public health crisis.
What are some of the factors that these countries would need to think about in terms of actually implementing elections either during a public health crisis or immediately after.
PM: There really are a number of factors that have to be considered. So the first thing that comes to everybody's mind of course is what do you do? Can people actually go to polling places or should they be under some sort of the shelter in place lockdown-like circumstances.
That doesn't just affect whether to vote. That really has to do with whether you can register to vote safely or not. In countries where there are not a high level of electronic engagement where the digital divide falls really widely across broad swipes of the population, gathering those people into places to register to vote or to vote is really the only means of doing it. So the question of a postponement becomes really an operative question.
Then we're concerned with what are the conditions for the postponement and how does that interrelate with the declarations of states of emergency, whether they're being done properly with the kinds of constraints on limitations on powers or whether they're being done in ways that usurp power.
JB: Yeah. I think one of the major concerns, especially thinking about citizens being able to participate in the process, is that during a pandemic, if voters are concerned about going out to vote, chances are that that's not going to be an equal distribution among the population, where there are a vulnerable populations that will be more impacted.
You'll see disproportionate levels of low turnout among certain communities like senior citizens or persons with disabilities or women who disproportionately have the burden of childcare and are in a situation where you don't have options for even temporary childcare because of social distancing regulations.
Well, this seems like a good place to take a short break.
For more than 35 years, NDI has been honored to work with courageous and committed pro-democracy activists and leaders around the world to help countries develop the institution's practices and skills necessary for democracy success. Welcome back.
JB: So we talked a bit about the postponements that we're seeing around the world in terms of electoral timelines. Are election observers relevant during electoral delays, especially if there's restrictions on movement in the population if they're under some form of shelter in place or lockdown.
PM: Yeah. So Julie, you mentioned that NDI works in more than 70 countries and in fact, working with nonpartisan citizen groups and coalitions and various organizations is one of the hallmarks of NDI's work over more than 35 years now and certainly the 25 years where I've been involved.
There's a network of citizen election observers, there are nine of them in various regions of the world and they're amalgamated in more than 250 organizations from 90 countries. Those organizations have been sharing best practices and ideas about what can be done.
So let me just quickly mention a couple of them. There are four areas where they have been able to focus. One are ways to assist; that is, to assist public health agencies and the electoral authorities to bring about safe elections and fair elections.
The second is ways to address authoritarian opportunism and how states of emergency and various conditions are being used by those who would usurp the citizens of power.
The third are ways to address disinformation, hate speech and attempts at hyperpolarization that influence and create unfair conditions for elections.
The fourth way is to address, as you mentioned earlier, examples of where a health crisis can lead to disenfranchisement or further tilt the playing field so that it's an unfair circumstance.
JB: Yeah, I mean you mentioned especially tracking the authoritarian leaders who are potentially taking advantage of the health crisis to grab power and subvert democracy and in some unstable countries, this can threaten heightened instability.
What can election servers be doing to address that or what are they currently doing to address that?
PM: The most important thing is citizen election observers in all kinds of countries have been time tested and over the series of elections cycles two, three, even four in many countries, they've built national networks and they've established themselves as trusted voices.
In a public health crisis, especially where governments are weak or people are suspicious of government, trusted voices are really important to get out accurate information from the health authorities, accurate information from the electoral authorities about what to do, where to do things and so on.
Also, they have networks that can collect information; even during lockdowns. You and I were in a conversation with one of the partner organizations with whom we work in Sri Lanka just last week. The head of that organization is working on a civil society task force.
That task force is considering how to gain access to women's shelters, to older people's homes, to places where there's foster children's care, drug treatment centers, and so on because these are vulnerable populations that are being hit hard by the crisis.
One of the things that he pointed out in our conversation is that the government is taking advantage of the postponement of the election for electoral advantage by handing out dry goods to citizens and even medical supplies through the political party rather than as an impartial governmental service to the people.
So the question that he posed was, even during lockdown, is there a way that our network of over 1,000 people could begin to document this and report it so that we can lift up to the public the nature of this problem that's coming about and see if we can't get some accountability and get them to cut back.
So even during a lockdown, it's possible for the citizen observer groups to do things that are extraordinarily relevant.
JB: Yeah, I mean it seems like there are certainly opportunities for electoral observers to be monitoring the kinds of things that they would normally be looking at in a pre-election period when their elections are delayed... Issues related to is the government still helping to create conditions for a credible and competitive process in the midst of a public health emergency. Are conditions being put in place to ensure that marginalized populations are not sidelined from the process.
But it also kind of expands it a little bit too in that there are these potentially other issues that that groups may consider looking at. Like you mentioned, how health resources are being distributed and what kinds of policy changes are being made and how were those being made?
What's the decision-making process around things like delaying the elections, around emergency voting procedures? Are they inclusive? Are all the parties being brought in to them? Is civil society be brought into these discussions and taking a look at some of these new conditions that observers may otherwise not necessarily be monitoring in a pre-election period.
I think the other issue here is there are constraints here in terms of potentially being able to deploy a bunch observers out into the field to collect information if you're in a lockdown situation.
So it's been interesting talking with groups to see how they're thinking creatively about how they can collect some of this information remotely. What kind of data exists that you can collect whether it's open data sources from the government looking at budgets, looking at how budgets are changing and how resources are moving.
You mentioned looking at disinformation, being able to monitor social media and seeing what data could be collected from that.
It's been interesting to see how citizen election observers around the world are getting creative and still doing their jobs while being sometimes trapped at home.
PM: Absolutely. You mentioned the disinformation... One of the things that we've been seeing is that in Russia for example, they have been making use of the COVID crisis to begin to track people even more carefully to introduce facial recognition technologies and cameras.
The term that's been throwing around is cybergulags being created there. With China's facial recognition technologies and the way that's been used to suppress the weaker minorities, China has been introducing that working with governments and other places in the world to try to get that into voter registration so that you have biometric voter registration data that includes facial recognition technology.
So in this era, getting access to government decision making, getting access even to the health data and disaggregated by gender, by vulnerable groups and so on is part of the work that election observers normally do. Demanding open electoral data can lead easily to the same kinds of advocacy around open health data.
One of the other things I thought that you've touched on that's interesting is the states of emergencies and the relationships between that and postponement. There's more than 45 countries at this point that have postponed elections at the national and sub-national level.
Not all of them are problematic by any means, but in a lot of countries, there have been extended states of emergency without any end date. The postponements have no end date on them.
One of the things that election observers can do is to join with... And many of them are human rights organizations and bringing about the rules that have been established in the international arena for limiting the duration of states of emergencies, that the measures that are taken have to be proportionate to the nature of the threat to the nation to bring those issues up and do advocacy around them and to help those of us in the international arena be aware of where these problems are in various countries.
JB: With that, I think we'll take a quick break. We'll be back after this quick message.
One of the things that Secretary Albright has said is that it's absolutely essential for young people to understand that they must participate and that they are the energy behind democracy.
You can hear more from other democracy heroes by listening to our Dem Works podcast. It is available on iTunes and SoundCloud.
So before the break, we were talking about the role that citizen election monitors are playing in the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on electoral integrity. Are there other considerations that citizen election groups should be thinking about in the need for electoral integrity in their countries?
I'm thinking especially related to how groups can make sure that their observers are safe while also being able to collect information and an advocate for critical processes and good governance.
PM: That's really a critical question, Julia. A good example that comes to mind is in Mali, which has had very few reported cases of COVID-19, there was a parliamentary election just two weeks ago. The government, for national security reasons, has had to postpone those elections for almost two years and they were really in a phase of saying we need to push it ahead. In fact, there had not been a reported COVID-19 death until just a few hours before the election date.
So it went forward and the citizen observers with which NDI has been working in that country in the weeks leading up to that advocated that the polling stations had to have masks for the staff; had to have gloves; had to have hand sanitizers or hand washing stations because hand sanitizer is hard to get in a lot of places in Mali.
They made sure that their observers had those materials themselves. I think 1,500 observers went out to polling stations across the country. In their own headquarters and gathering data, there was social distancing that took place and they did a lot of checking in with their observers about how they were doing, how they were feeling over the course of the day.
So one thing that the citizen observers can do is to join with organizations that are health advocates for those places where either voter registration is about to take place or voting is about to take place to ensure that the conditions minimize the risk.
We just saw this over this past weekend in the elections that were held in South Korea. Whether or not you might think that the election should go forward, there was a country where there's a lot of public confidence in what the government has been doing and in the integrity of the election authorities and voter turnout was not terribly affected by this.
So there is something that can be done immediately and as you have mentioned, there are numerous things that can be looked at by citizen observers without ever really leaving their homes or their headquarters. One of those, as you mentioned, is disinformation. Our partners in Georgia, for example, have uncovered a link between Russian propaganda, which has gone up around disinformation around COVID-19 and linking it to destabilizing public trust in Georgia's government.
There's a really interesting report that they came out with just last week on that front. So how does COVID-19 and elections interface is something that can be explored in a number of dimensions.
JB: We've talked mostly about the work of nonpartisan civil society organizations and their own countries that are confronting this challenge. Is there a role for international election observers on terms of electoral oversight during a public crisis, especially knowing that they will have some of the same if not even more constraints than citizen election monitors?
PM: It's a very difficult role at the moment for international election observers. We've been in touch with our colleagues at the African Union and the European Union, at the United Nations and Organization of American States and so on. Many of them have been bringing teams home from countries. Some of them have been postponing or canceling sending teams out.
At the same time, there are a number of things that international observers can do. As you mentioned, you can look at things from a distance. You can review the legal framework, which is part of what every international election observation and citizen observers do.
You can compare what has been done over the past few cycles of elections, where recommendations have been made, whether those recommendations were acted upon or whether you find the same problem repeating in the next report and prioritize the issues that you might look to and even be able to inform diplomats and others about things that they should be raising with government.
You can look at disinformation and other information disorder, hate speech and so on, from afar. Certainly you can tune in with what the critical people inside a country who are working on these issues have been doing. You can conduct some long distance interviews with key people in the citizen groups and in the election authorities and the political leaders to learn their opinions about what the state of play is in the country and their concerns going forward.
But when it comes time to put people on the ground, we have to look at travel restrictions. We have to look at countries where foreigners have been seen as people who bring in COVID-19 and there's been violence against them; so security of observers is important. And the numbers of people who may go or where they may be deployed depending upon hotspots in the country and so on.
So this is something that over the course of this year will be a challenge. And the next thing will be a challenge for international election observers is that as so many elections are being postponed, they're being postponed probably towards the end of this year or the beginning of next year, which already has many scheduled elections. So there may be an overwhelming demand for which the supply of financial and human resources runs short.
JB: It does seem like at this point, especially knowing that international election observers in a lot of the places just can't deploy right now, one of the roles to play here is really trying to raise the voices of the citizen groups on the ground that are able to actually do some on the ground observation.
Also keeping in mind, especially for the places we're concerned about authoritarian overreach, thinking about how we can use some of these international mechanisms to push back on democratic backsliding and mitigate tensions in places where it could potentially be a bit more unstable with the current situation.
PM: You're right. That's the contribution that the international community can do, too... To really amplify the voices of the citizenry and to augment their efforts to bring about respect for civil and political rights.
When you have a network of thousands of citizens who have taken the time and the effort to go out of their homes, into the street, to look at what the nature of the threats of violence or vote buying or intimidation to document how these things of disproportionally driven women or restricted women's political and electoral participation, would they have taken the time to go into polling stations, sometimes under threat or coercion?
These people have become a solid core of citizen empowerment in so many countries around the world, and each of those citizens, of course, is using WhatsApp and other ways of talking and they're influencers within a country.
They can gather information, they can give accurate information out, but as they report up through their networks, if there's good collaboration between the reputable citizen groups and the credible international election observers and the international community more broadly, we can use that cooperation that we've been working on over the years to try to bring attention, even when it's hard to shine a light directly on problems in countries that are being affected by this crisis and facing political challenges and stress.
JB: Well, thank you again, Pat, for joining us. I think this has been a particularly relevant discussion. I'd also like to say thank you to our listeners.
To learn more about NDI or to listen to other Dem Works podcasts, please visit our website@www.ndi.org
PM: Thank you, Julia and thank you to the listeners.





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