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Latin America and the Caribbean (LCR) will be center stage in the global development debate as leaders from around the world convene in Lima, Peru for the annual meetings of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund. Critical progress in poverty reduction has been made in the region over the last decade. The region's bottom 40 percent of the population saw growth eclipsing that seen by the group in every other region in the world. However, a global slowdown in economic growth and activity challenges these positive strides. The stories in this report embody concrete successes of countries working together with the World Bank. Innovative development approaches were designed and implemented. Individuals, communities, countries, and even regions benefited from better health, education, governance, disaster risk management, and more.

Timothy Mitchell on
Infra-Theory, the State Effect, and the Technopolitics of Oil










This is the first in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich 







The unrest in the Arab
world put the region firmly in the spotlights of IR. Where many scholars focus
on the conflicts in relation to democratization as a local or regional dynamic,
political events there do not stand in isolation from broader international
relations or other—for instance economic—concerns. Among the scholars who has
insisted on such broader linkages and associations that co-constitute political
dynamics in the region, Timothy Mitchell stands out. The work of Mitchell has
largely focused on highly specific aspects of politics and development in Egypt
and the broader Middle East, such as the relations between the building of the
Aswan Dam and redistribution of expertise, and the way in which the differences
between coal and oil condition democratic politics. His consistently nuanced
and enticing analyses have gained him a wide readership, and Mitchell's
analyses powerfully resonate across qualitative politically oriented social
sciences.  In this Talk, Timothy Mitchell discusses, amongst others, the birth of 'the
economy' as a powerful modern political phenomenon, how we can understand the
state as an effect rather than an actor, and the importance of taking
technicalities seriously to understand the politics of oil.







Print version of this Talk (pdf)



What is, according to you,
the biggest challenge / principal debate in current globally oriented studies?
What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?



I'm not myself interested in, or good at, big debates,
the kinds of debates that define and drive forward an academic field. The
reason for that is partly that once a topic has become a debate, it has tended
to have sort of hardened into a field, in which there are two or three
positions, and as a scholar you have to take one of those positions. In the
days when I was first trained in Political Science and studied International
Relations, that was so much my sense of the field and indeed of the whole
discipline of political science. This is part of one's initially training in
any field: it is laid out as a
serious debate. I found this something I just could not deal with; I did not
find it intellectually interesting which I think sort of stayed with me all the
way through to where I am now. So although big debates are important for a
certain defining and sustaining of academic fields and training new generations
of students, it is not the kind of way in which I myself have tended to work. I
have tended to work by moving away from what the big debates have been in a
particular moment. My academic interests always started when I found something
curious that interests me and that I try to begin to see in a different way.



However, I suppose with my most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011), in a sense there was a big debate going on, which was the debate about the resource
curse and oil democracy. That was an old debate going back to the 70's, but had
been reinvigorated by the Iraq war in 2003. But that to me is an example of the
problem with big debates, because the terms in which that debate was argued
back and forth—and is still argued—did not seem to make sense as a way to
understand the role of energy in 20th century democratic politics.
Was oil good for democracy or bad for democracy? The existing debate began with
those as two different things—as a dependent or independent variable—so you
would already determine things in advance that I would have wanted to open up.
In general I'm not a good person for figuring out what the big debates are.



But I think, moving from International Relations as a
field to 'globally oriented studies', to
use your phrase, one of the biggest
challenges—just on an academic level, leaving aside challenges that we face as
a global community—is to learn to develop ways of seeing even what seem like
the most global and most international issues, as things that are very local.
Part of the problem with fields such as 'global studies', the term
'globalization', and other terms of that sort, is that they tend to define
their objects of study in opposition to the local, in opposition to even
national-level modes of analysis. By consequence, they assume that the actors
or the forces that they're going to study must themselves be in some sense
global, because that is the premise of the field. So whether it is nation
states acting as world powers; whether it is capitalism understood as a global
system—they have to exist on this plane of the global, on some sort of
universal level, to be topics of IR and global studies. And yet, on close
inspection, most of the concerns or actors central to those modes of inquiry
tend to operate on quite local levels; they tend to be made up of very small
agents, very particular arrangements that somehow have managed to put
themselves together in ways that allow them take on this appearance and
sometimes this effectiveness of things that are global. I'm very interested in
taking things apart that are local, on a particular level, to understand what
it is that enables such small things, such local and particular agents, to act
in a way that creates the appearance of the global or the international world.



Now this relates back to the second part of your
question, about substantive concerns that we face as a global community. When I
was writing Carbon Democracy there
was all this attention on the problem of 'creating a more democratic Middle
East', as it was understood at the time of the Iraq war. It struck me that when
debating this problem—of oil and democracy, of energy and democracy—we saw it
as somehow specific to these countries and to the part of the world where many
countries were very large-scale energy producers. We were not thinking about
the fact that we are all in a sense caught up in this problem that I call
carbon democracy, and that there are issues—whether it is in terms of the
increasing difficulty of extracting energy from the earth, or the consequences
of having extracted the carbon and put it up in the atmosphere—that we, as
democracies, are very, very challenged by. Those issues—and I think in
particular the concerns around climate change—when you look at them from the
perspective of U.S. politics, and the inability of the U.S. even to take the
relatively minor steps that other industrialized democracies have taken: this
inaction suggests a larger problem of oil and democracy that needs explaining
and understanding and working on and organizing about. I also think there is a
whole range of contemporary issues related to energy production and consumption
that revolve around the building of more egalitarian and more socially just
worlds. And, again, those issues present themselves very powerfully as concerns
in American politics, but are experienced in other ways in other parts of the
world. I would not single out any one of them as more urgent or important than
another, and I do think we still have a long struggle ahead of us here. 





How did
you arrive at where you currently are in your approach to issues?



Well,
I had a strange training as a scholar because I kept shifting fields. I
actually began as a student of law and then moved into history while I was
still an undergraduate, but then became interested in political theory; decided
that I liked it better than political science. But by the time I arrived in
political science to study for a PhD, I had become interested in politics of
the Middle East. This was partly from just travelling there when I was a
student growing up in England, but I also suppose in some ways the events of
the seventies had really drawn attention to the region. So the first important
thing that shaped me was this constant shifting of fields and disciplines,
which was not to me a problem—it was rather that there was a kind of
intellectual curiosity that drove me from academic field to field. And so if
there was one thing that helped me arrive at where I am, it was this constant
moving outside of the boundaries of one discipline and trespassing on the next
one—trying to do it for long enough that they started to accept me as someone
who they could debate with. And I think all along that has been important to
the kind of scholarship I do; yet therefore I would say where I currently am in
my thinking about my field is difficult in itself to define. But I think it is
probably defined by the sense that there are many, many fields—and it is moving
across them and trying to do justice to the scholarship in them, but at the
same time trying to connect insights from one field with what one can do in
another field. I have always tried to draw things together in that sense, a
sense that one can call an interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary sensitivity.



I
think the other part of what has shaped me intellectually was that, in ways I
explained before, I was always drawn into the local and the particular and the
specific and I was never very good at thinking at that certain level of
large-scale grand theory. So having found myself in the field of Middle Eastern
politics in a PhD-program, and being told that it involves studying Arabic which
I was very glad to do, I then went off to spend summers in the Arab world, and
later over more extended periods of time for field research. But to me, Egypt
and other places I've worked—but principally Egypt—became not just a field
site, but a place where I have now been going for more than 30 years and where
I have developed very close ties and intellectual relationships, friendships,
that I think have constantly shaped and reshaped my thinking. And even when I
am reading about things that are not specifically related to Egypt—the work I
do on the history of economics, or the work I have done on oil politics that
are not directly connected with my research on Egypt—I am often thinking in
relation to places and people and communities there that have profoundly shaped
me as a scholar. 



So
traveling across different contexts I'd say I have not developed a kind of set
of theoretical lenses I take with me. Rather, I would say I have developed a way of seeing—I would not
necessarily call it 'meta', I see it as much more as sort of 'infra': much more
mundane and everyday. While I have this sort of intellectual history of moving
across disciplines and social sciences in an academic way, there is another
sort of moving across fields, another sensibility, and that sensibility
provides me with a sense of rootedness or grounding. And that is a more
traditional way of moving across fields, because whether when one is writing
about contemporary politics or more historically about politics, one is dealing
constantly with areas of technical concern of one sort or another, with
specialist knowledge. Engaging with that expert knowledge has always provided
both a political grounding in specific concerns and with a kind of concern with
local, real-world, struggles on the ground. So that might have been things like
the transformation of irrigation in nineteenth-century Egypt, or the remaking
of the system of law; or it might be the history of malaria epidemics in the
twentieth century, or the relationship between those epidemics and
transformations taking place in the crops that were grown; or, more
recently—and more obviously—of oil and the history of energy, and the way
different forms of energy are brought out of the ground. And I should mention
beside those areas of technical expertise already listed, economics as well: a
discipline I was never trained in, but that I realized I had to understand if I
was to make sense of contemporary Egyptian politics—just as much as I had to
understand agricultural hydraulics or something of the petroleum geology as a
form of technical expertise that is shaping the common world.



In
sum, what keeps me grounded is the idea that to really make sense of the
politics of any of those fields, one has got to do one's best to sort of enter
and explore the more technical level—with the closest attention that one can
muster to the technical and the material dimensions of what is involved—whether
it is in agricultural irrigation, building dams or combating disease. And
entering this level of issues does not only mean interviewing experts but
arriving at the level of understanding the disease, the parasite, the modes of
its movement, the hydraulics of the river, the properties of different kinds of
oil... So as you can see it is not really 'meta', it really is 'infra' in the
anthropological way of staying close to the ground, staying close to processes
and things and materials.





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



A
couple of things. I think one is precisely the thing I just mentioned in answer
to your last question: that is, the kind of interest in going inside technical
processes, learning about material objects, not being afraid of taking up an
investigation of something that is a body of knowledge totally outside one's
area of training and expertise. So, if I was advising someone or looking for a
student, I would not say there is a particular skill or expertise, but rather a
willingness to really get one's hands dirty with the messy technical details of
an area—and that can be an area of specialist knowledge such as economics, but
also technical and physical processes of, for instance, mineral extraction. I
think to me this is—for the kind of work I am interested in doing—enormously
important.



The
other thing that I would stress in the area of globally-oriented studies, is
that one could think of two ways of approaching a field of study. One is to
move around the world and gather together information, often with a notion of
improving things, such as development work, human rights work, international
security work. This entails gathering from one's own research and from other
experts in the field, with a certain notion of best practices and the state of
field, and of what works, and therefore what can then be moved from one place
to another as a form of expert knowledge. Some people really want that mobile
knowledge, which I suppose is often associated with the ability to generalize
from a particular case and to establish more universal principles about
whatever the topic is. And in this case one's own expertise becomes the
carrying or transmission of that expert knowledge. One saw a lot of that around
the whole issue of democratization that I mentioned before in the Middle East,
around the Iraq war when experts were brought in. They had done democracy
elsewhere in the world and then they turned up to do it in Iraq, and again
following the Arab Spring.



Against
that, to me, there is another mode of learning, which is not to learn about what is happening but to learn from. So to give the example, if there
is an uprising and a struggle for democracy going on in the streets of Cairo,
one could try and learn about that and then make it fit one's models and
classify it within a broader range of series of democratizations across the
world, or one could try and learn from it, and say 'how do we rethink what the
possibilities of democracy might be on the basis of what is happening?' To me
those are two distinct modes of work. They are not completely mutually
exclusive, but I think people are more disposed towards one or the other. I
have never been disposed, or good at, the first kind and do like the second, so
I would mention that as the second skill or attitude that is useful for doing
this sort of work.





In which discipline or field would you situate
yourself, or would we have to invent a discipline to match your work?



I
like disciplines, but I do not always feel that I entirely belong to any of
them. That said, I read with enormous profit the works of historians, political
theorist, anthropologists, of people in the field of science and technology
studies, geographers, political economists and scholars in environmental
studies. There are so many different disciplines that are well organized and
have their practitioners from which there is a lot to learn! But conversely, I
also think, in ways I have described already, there is something to be learnt
for some people from working in a much more deliberately post-disciplinary
fashion. The Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department to which I
have been attached here in Columbia for about five years, represents a
deliberate attempt by myself and my colleagues to produce some kind of
post-disciplinary space. Not in order to do away with the disciplines, but to
have another place for doing theoretical work, one that is able to take
advantage of not being bound by disciplinary fields, as even broad
disciplines—say history—tend to restrict you with a kind of positive liberty of
creating a place where you can do anything you want—as long as you do it in an
archive. I quite deliberately situate myself outside of any one discipline,
while continuing to learn from and trespass into the fields of many individual
disciplines. They range from all of those and others, because I am here among a
community of people who are also philologists; people interested in Arabic
literature and the history of Islamic science; and all kinds of fields, which I
also find fascinating. The first article I ever published was in the field of
Arabic grammar! So I have interests that fit in a very sort of
trans-disciplinary, post-disciplinary environment and I thrive on that.



Yet
doing this kind of post-disciplinary work is in a practical sense actually
absolutely impossible. If only for the simple fact that if it is already hardly
possible to keep up with 'the literature' if one is firmly situated within one
field, then one can never keep up with important developments in all the
disciplines one is interested in. There are some people that manage to do this
and do it justice. My information about contemporary debates in every
imaginable field is so limited; I do not manage to do justice to any field. In
the particular piece of research I might be engaged in, I try to get quickly up
to pace on what's going on, and I often come back again and again to similar
areas of research. I am currently interested in questions around the early
history of international development in the 1940's and 1950's, and that is
something I have worked on before, but I have come back to it and I found that
the World Bank archives are now open and there is a whole new set of
literatures. I had not been keeping up with all of that work. It is hard and
that is why I am very bad at answering emails and doing many of the other
everyday things that one is ought to do; because it always seems to me, in the
evening at the computer when one ought to be catching up with emails, there is
something you have come across in an article or footnotes and before you know
it you are miles away and it has got nothing to do with what you were working
on at the moment, but it really connects with a set of issues you have been
interested in and has taken you off into contemporary work going on in law or
the history of architecture… The internet has made that possible in a
completely new way and some of these post-disciplinary research interests are
actually a reflection of where we are with the internet and with the
accessibility of scholarship in any field only just a few clicks away. Which on
the one hand is fascinating, but mostly it is just a complete curse. It is the
enemy of writing dissertations and finishing books and articles and everything
else!





What role does expertise, which is kind of a central
term in underpinning much of the diverse work or topics you do, play in the
historical unfolding of modern government?



That
is a big question, so let me suggest only a couple of thoughts here. One is
that modern government has unfolded—especially if one thinks of government itself
as a wider process than just a state—through the development of new forms of
expertise, which among other things define problems and issues upon which
government can operate. This can concern many things, whether it is problems of
public health in the 19th or 20th century; or problems of
economic development in the 20th century; or problems of energy,
climate change and the environment today. Again and again government itself
operates—as Foucault has taught us—simultaneously as fields of knowledge and fields
of power. And the objects brought into being in this way—defined in important
ways through the development of expert knowledge—become in themselves modes
through which political power operates. Thanks to Foucault and many others,
that is a way of thinking or field of research that has been widely developed,
even though there are vast amounts of work still to do.



But
I think there is another relationship between modes of government and
expertise, and this goes back to things I have been thinking about ever since I
wrote an article about the theory of the state (The Limits of the State, pdf here) that was published in American
Political Science Review a long time ago (1991). The point I made then, is that
it is interesting to observe how one of the central aspects of modern modes of
power is the way that the distinction between what is the state and what is not
the state; between what is public and what is private, is constantly elaborated
and redefined. So politics itself is happening not so much by some agency
called 'state' or 'government' imposing its will on some other preformed
object—the social, the population, the people—but rather that it concerns a
series of techniques that create what I have called the effect of a state: the very distinction between what appears as a
sort of structure or apparatus of power, and the objects on which that power
works.



More
recently one of the ways I have thought about this, is in terms of the history
of the idea of the economy. Most people think of 'the economy' either as
something that has always existed (and people may or may not have realized its
existence) or as something that came into being with the rise of political
economy and commercial society in the European 18th and 19th
century. One of the things I discovered when I was doing research on the
history of development, is that no economist talked routinely about an object
called 'the economy' before the 1940's! I think that is a good example of the
history of a mode of expertise that exists not within the operations of an
apparatus of government but precisely outside of government.



If
you look in detail at how the term 'the economy' was first regularly used, you
find that it was in the context of governing the U.S. in the 1940's immediately
after the Second World War. In the aftermath of the war there was enormous
political pressure for quite a radical restructuring of American society: there
were waves of strikes, demands for worker control of industries, or at least a
share of management. And of course in Europe, similar demands led to new forms
of economy altogether, in the building of postwar Germany and in the forms of
democratic socialism that were experimented with in various parts of Western
Europe. As we know, the U.S. did not follow that path. And I think part of the
way in which it was steered away from that path, was by constructing the
economy as the central object of government, coupled with precisely this
American cultural fear of things where government did not belong. So this was
radically opposed to how the Europeans related government to economy: European
governments had become involved in all kinds of ways, deciding how the relation
between management and labor should operate in thinking about prices and wages;
instituting forms of national health insurance and health care; and the whole
state management of health care itself... Now this was threatening to emerge in
the U.S., and was emerging in many ways in the wartime with state control of
prices and production. In order to prevent the U.S. from following the European
path after the war, this object outside of
government with its own experts was
created: the economy. And the economists were precisely people who are not in government, but who knew the laws and
regularities of economic life and could explain them to people. It is
interesting to think about expertise both as something that develops within the
state, but also as something that happens as a creation of objects that
precisely represent what is not the
state, or the sphere of government.





Your most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011) focuses on the political structures
afforded, or engendered, by modes of extraction of minerals and investigates
how oil was constitutes a dominant source of energy on which we depend.
Can you give an example of how that works?



Let
me take an example from the book even though I might have to give it in very a
simplified form in order to make it work. I was interested in what appeared to
be the way in which the rise of coal—the dominant source of energy in the 19th
century and in the emergence of modern industrialized states—seemed to be very
strongly associated with the emergence of mass democracy, whereas the rise of
oil in the 20th century seemed to have if anything the opposite set
of consequences for states that were highly dependent on the production of oil.
I wanted to examine these relations between forms of energy and democratic
politics in a way that was not simply some kind of technical- or energy
determinism, because it is very easy to point to many cases that simply do not
fit that pattern—and, besides, it simply would not be very interesting to begin
with. But it did seem to me, that at a particular moment in the history of the
emergence of industrialized countries—particularly in the late 19th
century—it became possible for the first time in history and really only for a
brief period, to take advantage of certain kinds of vulnerabilities and
possibilities offered by the dependence on coal to organize a new kind of
political agency and forms of mass politics, which successfully struggled for
much more representative and egalitarian forms of democracy, roughly between
the 1880's and the mid 20th century. In general terms, that story is
known; but it had been told without thinking in particular about the energy
itself. The energy was just present in these stories as that which made
possible industrialization; industrialization made possible urbanization;
therefore you had lots of workers and their consciousness must somehow have
changed and made them democratic or something.



That
story did not make sense to me, and that prompted me to research in detail, and
drawing on the work of others who had looked even more in detail at, the
history of struggles for a whole set of democratic rights. The accounts of
people at the time were clear: what was distinctive was this peculiar ability
to shut down an economy because of a specific vulnerability to the supply of
energy. Very briefly, when I switched to telling the story in the middle of the
20th with oil, it is different: partly just because oil was a
supplementary source of energy—countries and people now had a choice between
different energy sources—but also because oil did not create the same points of
vulnerability. There are fewer workers involved, it is a liquid, so it can be
routed along different channels more easily; there is a whole set of technical
properties of oil and its production that are different. That does not mean to
say that the energy is determining the outcome of history or of political
struggles, and I am careful to introduce examples that do not work easily one
way or the other in the history of oil industry in Baku,
which is much more similar to the history of coal or the oil industry in
California for that matter. But you can pay attention to the technical
dimensions in a certain way, and the to the sheer possibilities that arise with
this enormous concentration of sources of energy—which reflects both an
exponential increase in the amount of energy but also an unprecedented
concentration of the sites at which energy is available and through which it
flows—that you can tell a new story about democratic politics and about that
moment in the history of industrialized countries, but also the subsequent
history in oil-producing countries in a different way. That would be an example
of how attention for technical expertise translates into a different
understanding of the politics of oil.





This leads to my next question, which is how do you
speak about materials or technologies without falling into the trap of either
radical social reductionism or a kind of Marxist technological determinism? Do
you get these accusations sometimes?



Yes,
I think so, but more so from people who have not read my work and who just hear
some talks about it or some secondary accounts. To me, so much of the
literature that already existed on these questions around oil and democracy, or
even earlier research on coal, industrialization and democracy, suffered from a
kind of technical determinism because they actually did not go into the
technical. They said: 'look, you've got all this oil' or 'look, you had all that
coal and steam power' and out of that, in a very determinist fashion, emerged
social movements or emerged political repression. This was determinist because
such accounts had actually jumped over the technical side much too fast:
talking about oil in the case of the resource curse literature, it was only
interested in the oil once it had already
become money. And once it was money, then it of course corrupts, or you buy
people off, or you do not have to seek their votes. The whole question of how
oil becomes money and how you put
together that technical system that turns oil into forms of political power or
turns coal into forms of political power, does not get opened up. And that to
me makes those arguments—even though there is not much of the technical in
them—technically very determinist. Because as soon as you start opening up the
technical side of it, you realize there are so many ways things can go and so
many different ways things can get built. Energy networks can be built in
different ways and there can be different mixes of energy. Of course most of
the differences are technical differences, but they are also human differences.
It is precisely by being very attentive to the technical aspects of
politics—like energy or anything else, it could be in agriculture, it could be
in disease, it could be in any area of collective socio-technical life—that one
finds the only way to get away from a certain kind of technical determinism
that otherwise sort of rules us. In the economics of growth, for instance,
there is this great externality of technological change that drives every sort
of grand historical explanation. Technology is just something that is kept
external to the explanatory model and accounts for everything else that the
model cannot explain. That ends up being a terrible kind of technical
determinism.



The
other half of the question is how this might differ from Marxist approaches to
some of these problems. I like to think that if Marx was studying oil, his
approach would be very little different. Because if you read Marx himself,
there is an extraordinary level of interest in the technical; that is, whether
in the technical aspects of political economy as a field of knowledge in the 19th
century, or in the factory as a technical space. So, conventional political
economy to him was not just an ideological mask that had to be torn away so
that you could reveal the true workings of capitalism. Political economy has
produced a set of concepts—notions of value, notions of exchange, notions of
labor—that actually formed part of the technical workings of capitalism. The
factory was organized at a technical level that had very specific consequences.
The trouble with a significant part of Marx's theories is that he stopped doing
that kind of technical work and Marxism froze itself with a set of categories
that may or may not have been relevant to a moment of 19th century
capitalism. There is still a lot of interesting Marxist theory going on, and
some of the contemporary Italian Marxist theory I find really interesting and
profitable to read, for example. Some of the work in Marxist geography
continues to be very productive. But at the same time there are aspects of my
work that are different from that—such as my drawing on Foucault in
understanding expertise and modes of power.





How come so many of the social sciences seem to stick
so rigidly to the human or social side of the Cartesian divide? It seems to be
constitutive of social science disciplines but on the other hand also radically
reduces the scope of what it can actually 'see' and talk about. 



I
think you are right and it has never made much sense to me. I suppose I have
approached it in two kinds of ways in my work. First, this kind of dualism was
much more clearly an object of concern in some of the early work I published on
the colonial era, including my first
book, Colonising Egypt (1988), where
I was trying to understand the process by which Europeans had, as it were, come
to be Cartesians; had come to see the world as very neatly defined it into mind
on the one hand and matter or on the other—or, as they tended to think of it,
representations on the one hand and reality on the other. And I actually looked
in some detail, at the technical level, at this—beginning with world
exhibitions, but moving on to department stores and school systems and modern
legal orders—to understand the processes by which our incredibly complicated
world was engineered so as to produce the effect of this world divided into the
two—of mind or representation or culture on the one hand, and reality, nature,
material on the other.



Second,
what were the effects, what were the repetitive practices, that made that kind
of simple dualism seem so self-evident and taken for granted? All that early
work still informs my current work, although I do not necessarily explore this
as directly as I did. One of the things I try to do is avoid all the vocabulary
that draws you into that kind of dualism. So, nowhere when I write, do I use a
term like 'culture', because you are just heading straight down that Cartesian
road as soon as you assume that there is some hermetic world of shared meanings—as opposed to what? As opposed to
machines that do not involve instructions and all kinds of other things that we
would think of as meaningful? So I just work more by avoiding some of the
dualistic language; the other kind would be the entire set of debates—in almost
every discipline of the social sciences—around the question of 'structure
versus agency' which just doesn't seems to me particularly productive. And I
have been very lucky, recently, in coming across work in the fields of science
and technology studies, because it is a field of people studying machines,
studying laboratories and studying people, a field that took nature itself as
something to be opened-up and investigated. In taking apart these things, they
realized that those kinds of dualisms made absolutely no sense. And they have
done away with them in their modes of explanation quite a long time ago. So
there was already a lot in my own work before I encountered Science and
Technology Studies (STS) that was working in that direction; but the STS people
have been at it for a long time and figured out a lot of things that I had only
just discovered.





Can you explain why it seems that perhaps implicitly
decolonization, or the postcolonial moment—which is understood within political
science and in development literature as a radical moment of rupture in which a
complete transfer of responsibility has taken place, instituted in sovereignty—is
an important theme in your work?



I
have actually been coming back to this in recent work, because I am currently
looking again at that moment of decolonization in Egypt. The period after World
War II, around the 1952 revolution and the debacle around the building and the financing of the Aswan Dam,
constitutes a wonderful way to explore questions on how much change
decolonization really engendered and to see how remarkably short-lived that
sort of optimism about decolonization, meaning a transfer of responsibility and
sovereignty, actually was. Of course decolonization did transfer responsibility
and sovereignty in all kinds of ways, but then that was exactly the problem for
the former colonial regimes: because, from their perspective, then, how were
all the people who had profited before from things like colonialism to continue
to make profits? The plan to build the High Dam at Aswan—although there has
always been Egyptians interested in it—initially got going because of some
German engineering firms… For them, there was no opportunity in doing any kind
of this large-scale work in Europe at
the time because of the dire economic situation there. But they knew that Egypt
had rapidly growing revenues from the Suez Canal and so they got together with
the British and the French, and said: let's put forward this scheme for a dam
so that we can recycle those revenues—particularly the income from the Suez
Canal, which was about to revert to Egyptian ownership—back into the pockets of
the engineering firms, or of the banks that will make the loans and charge the
fees. And that is where the scheme came from. Then the World Bank got involved,
because it too had found it had got nothing to do in Europe in the way of
development and reconstruction, so it invented this new field of development.
And it became a conduit to get the Wall Street banks involved as well. And the
whole thing became politicized and led to a rupture, which provided then the
excuse for another group, the militarists, the MI6 people, to invade and try to
overthrow Nasser. So just in the space of barely four years from that moment of
decolonization, Egypt had been reinvaded by the French, the British, working
with the Israelis, and had to deal with the consequences and the costs of
destroyed cities and military spending. That is an example of how quickly
things went wrong; but also of how part of their going wrong was in this
desperate attempt by a series of
European banks and engineering firms trying to recover the opportunities for a
certain profit-making and business that they had enjoyed in the colonial period
and now they suddenly were being deprived of. 






Last question. Has your work helped you make sense of
what is currently going on in Egypt and would you shine your enlightened light
on that a bit? Not on the whole general situation but perhaps on parts which
are overlooked or which you find particularly relevant. 



May
be in a couple of aspects. One of them is this kind of very uneasy and
disjunctive assemblage relationship between the West and forms of political Islam.
It sometimes seemed shocking and disturbing and destabilizing that the
political process in Egypt led to the rise and consolidation of power of the
Muslim Brotherhood. But of course the U.S. and other Western powers have had a
very long relationship going back at least to the 1950's—if not before—with
exactly these kinds of political forces or people who were locally in alliance
with them, in places like Saudi Arabia. I have a chapter in Carbon Democracy that explores that
relationship and its disjunctions. And I think it is important to get away from
the notion that is just a sort of electoral politics and uneasy alliances, but
it is actually the outcome of a longer problem. Both domestically within the
politics in the Arab states, of how to found a form of legitimacy that does not
seem to be based on close ideological ties with the West, but at the same time
operates in such in a way, that in practical terms, that kind of alliance can
work. So that would be one aspect of it, to have a slightly longer-term
perspective on those kinds of relationships and how disjunctively they
function.



The
other thing, drawing it a little more directly on some of the work on democracy
in Carbon Democracy, is that so much of the scholarship on democracy is about
equipping people with the right mental tools to be democrats; the right levels
of trust or interpersonal relations or whatever. There is a very different view
in my book, that the opportunities for effective democratic politics require
very different sets of skills and kinds of actions—actions that are much more
as it were obstructionist, and forms of sabotage, quite literally, in the usage
of the term as it comes into being in the early 20th century to
describe the role of strikes and stoppages. These are, I attempt to show, the
effective tools to leverage demands for representation in more egalitarian
democratic politics. I have been very interested in the case of Egypt, in the
particular places and points of vulnerability, that gave rise to the
possibility of sabotage. For instance, one of the less noted aspects of the
Egyptian revolution in general, was the very important role played by the labor
movement; this was not just a Twitter or Facebook revolution, but that was
important as well. Although the labor movement was very heavily concentrated in
industries—in the textile industry—the first group of workers who actually
successfully formed an independent union were the property tax collectors. And
there is a reason for that: there was a certain kind of fiscal crisis of the
state—which had to do with declining oil revenues and other things—and there
was the attempt to completely revise the tax system and to revise it not around
income tax—because there were too few people making a significant income to
raise tax revenues—but around property taxes.
And that was a point of vulnerability and contestation that produced not just
some of the first large-scale strikes but strikes that were effective enough
that the government was forced to recognize a newly independent labor movement.
This case is an instance of how the kind of work I did in the book might be
useful for thinking about how the revolutionary situation emerged in
Egypt. 



Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian. His areas of research
include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and
technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other
forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Much of his
current work is concerned with ways of thinking about politics that allow
material and technical things more weight than they are given in conventional
political theory.  Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he
received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D.
in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined
Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York
University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern
Studies. At Columbia he teaches courses on the history and politics of the
Middle East, colonialism, and the politics of technical things.





Related links:





Faculty Profile at Colombia University
Read
Mitchell's Rethinking Economy (Geoforum
2008) here (pdf)
Read
Mitchell's The Limits of the State:
Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics (The American Political Science
Review 1991) here (pdf) 
Read
Mitchell's McJihad: Islam and the U.S.
Global Order (Social Text 2002) here (pdf) 
Read
Mitchell's The Stage of Modernity (Chapter
from book 'Questions of Modernity', 2000) here (pdf) 
Read
Mitchell's The World as Exhibition
(Chapter from book 'Colonising Egypt' 1991) here (pdf) 



Print version of this Talk (pdf)



  

The Indonesia economic quarterly reports on and synthesizes the past three months' key developments in Indonesia's economy. It places them in a longer-term and global context, and assesses the implications of these developments and other changes in policy for the outlook for Indonesia's economic and social welfare. Indonesia's economic growth has so far remained resilient to the weakness in the global economy. Amidst a still uncertain outlook, Indonesia will need to prepare itself for the potential consequences of China's slowdown and additional falls in commodity prices, and for the possibility of renewed turbulence in financial and commodity markets. Continuing to strengthen the policy framework to deal with shocks and building economic resilience through improvements in the quality of spending and in the regulatory environment will be key to maintaining, and improving further, Indonesia's strong recent growth performance. Progress towards these goals could be tested as the 2014 election year approaches. Indonesia's economy maintained its robust pace of growth in the second quarter of 2012, expanding by 6.4 percent year-on-year, up slightly from 6.3 percent in the first quarter. Buoyant private consumption continued to lift domestic demand, and investment spending also increased strongly. Despite the rapid pace of economic activity, consumer price inflation has remained moderate to date. Headline CPI inflation fell back to 4.3 percent year-on-year in September after edging up to 4.6 percent in August, when it was pulled higher temporarily by the Idul Fitri holidays. Core inflation has remained stable, just above 4 percent. Indonesia's current account moved further into deficit in the second quarter of 2012. Structurally, the trend towards current account deficits reflects consistently strong domestic investment relative to the level of domestic savings. The slowdown in exports over 2012, alongside generally strong import demand, has seen the large goods trade balance surpluses of recent years narrow and this, coupled with consistent net outflows in the income and services sub-accounts, moved the overall current account into a deficit of 3.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the second quarter of 2012.

The focus of the paper is on five key financial stability issues in Emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs), which have been selected on the basis of their degree of materiality for a reasonably broad range of EMDEs; their implications for regulatory, supervisory or other financial sector policies; and the extent to which these issues are not already being addressed by other international work streams. The paper does not cover other financial stability issues that may also be relevant for EMDEs but are addressed in other G20/Financial Stability Board (FSB) work streams. Such issues include the management of sizeable and volatile capital flows; the design of policy measures to address the risks arising from systemically important financial institutions; the development of macro-prudential policy frameworks; the creation of effective resolution tools and regimes for financial institutions; strengthening the oversight and regulation of the shadow banking system; and reforming the functioning of over-the-counter derivatives and commodities markets. This paper focuses on five key financial stability issues in EMDEs: 1) application of international financial standards; 2) promoting cross-border supervisory cooperation; 3) expanding the regulatory and supervisory perimeter; 4) management of foreign exchange risks; and 5) developing domestic capital markets.

This synthesis paper is based on a review of three countries in West Africa-Burkina Faso, Mali, and Mauritania where state owned enterprises (SOEs) continue to play an important role and Governments have embarked on a number of public sector reforms are intended to have a positive impact on SOEs. SOE governance practices and problems are having strong similarities in all of the countries reviewed. These commonalities can be ascribed to the fact that all of the countries are transitioning from centrally controlled economic and political traditions to more liberal economies and to a more democratic government. All are facing challenges with implementing the legal structures left behind from colonial times. The data that is available shows that wholly-owned and state controlled SOEs under perform. Many are technically insolvent and survive only through government support. Their performance is not only poor in the financial area but also in the provision of needed social services. The country studies link the poor performance of SOEs, in particular wholly-owned SOEs, to their governance practices. Long-lasting reforms are not simply a matter of plugging holes in the legislative or institutional framework. Corporate governance is the result of a complex interplay of law, practice, institutions and culture. Action plans need to take into account incentives and the political, social and cultural context of corporate governance in the country in addition to the legal framework. Indeed, SOE governance is a system and making it work better requires a systems approach. Most reform plans in the past have focused on one or another element of SOE governance, which might explain why many have fallen short of hopes and expectations. Systems approaches, on the other hand, are important in complex organizations (such as SOEs) whose success depends upon the interaction and cooperation of other organizations and institutions. This synthesis paper presents the objectives and the methodology used in carrying out the reviews followed by a discussion of the features and importance of SOEs in each of the countries studied. It then segues into a discussion on the performance of SOEs which is supplemented by case studies of both successful and unsuccessful SOEs and key lessons learned the paper then presents the current Government initiatives for reform and the remaining challenges and recommendations. The paper concludes with suggestions on how to implement the recommendations based on examples from other countries that have embarked on comprehensive governance reforms for the SOE sector.

As part of its Global Policy Initiative, Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) partnered with the Superintendence of Banks, Insurance and AFPs of Peru in late 2008, with the purpose of enhancing the understanding of the issues and trends in consumer relations when financial services are delivered through branchless banking, particularly through agents, which are used in ever increasing scale in Peru. The product was this joint report. Three other countries with relevant experience in branchless banking (Kenya, Brazil and India) participated in a similar exercise at approximately the same time. As in the case of Peru, the exercise gave an opportunity for regulators of each jurisdiction to look at their regulatory and institutional framework for protecting branchless banking users, evaluate their regulatory and supervisory actions, and identify areas for improvements. A forthcoming CGAP focus note complements the effort, by making an overall evaluation of the lessons learned in these countries and drawing on the knowledge from other pioneer countries such as South Africa, Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines. The focus note will point out and address priority areas of concern and possible regulatory and policy options to address them. The first part of the report outlines the financial inclusion efforts currently being undertaken by the Superintendence. The following section summarizes the most important points of the legal and regulatory framework for financial consumer protection, pointing out any specificity of branchless banking. The third part describes the branchless banking business in Peru and describes the issues and problems identified in the relationship between branchless banking clients and providers, and the supervisory and enforcement implications. The last section draws conclusions and makes recommendations for achieving a balance between openness to innovation and protection in a branchless banking environment.

Nigeria's long-run growth performance has been extremely poor. Between 1960 and 2000, real income per capita grew at only 0.43 percent per year. The situation improved between 2001 and 2006 when real per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at an average annual rate of 4.2 percent. This paper demonstrates that the superior growth performance during 2001-06 is largely attributable to the impact of better leadership and economic policy making. The improved performance of the economy after 2003 arose from implementing a comprehensive economic reform program focusing on four main areas: macroeconomic reform; structural reform; governance and institutional reform; and public sector reform. The reforms, backstopped by improved oil revenue management, monetary policy implementation, and debt management, improved overall macroeconomic policy making. This resulted in real GDP growth averaging 7.1 percent per year between 2003 and 2006, an inflation rate of 10 percent in 2006, foreign exchange reserves of US$45 billion in 2006, and total external debt of only US$5 billion in 2006. Clearly, between 1960 and 2000, Nigeria's policy choices were poor, and the reforms that sought to correct them were plagued by inconsistencies, policy reversals, and lack of coherence. In contrast, due to good leadership, the reforms adopted in 2003 were consistent and have been implemented in a coherent manner.

Louisiana was at this same spot 16 years ago. We
don't need to return to it a third time.

There was much optimism then as Republican Rep. Bobby
Jindal prepared to take the oath of office as governor. He had said a lot of
great things in his campaign and swamped the field, with the promise that he
could make a definitive break from the state's dying corpse of a liberal
populist political culture, unlike the outcome of the only previous
semi-serious attempt, the governorship of Republican Buddy Roemer.

In retrospect, it was too much to expect. Jindal
had won as much for his agenda as he had as a reaction to botched
administration, as well as inferior policy-making, by Democrat Kathleen Blanco.
And he did do as he said, making government smarter, as well as deliver on
ethics and education (and to a lesser degree civil service) reform and on
income tax cuts.

Yet Jindal didn't do much to restrain the growth
of government, and as GOP former state Sen. Conrad Appel (and who this week
will join the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education) who was an insider to
Capitol machinations in this era hinted
recently, likely because he couldn't. Keep in mind that the GOP finally
acquired legislative chamber majorities just before he won a second term, and even
in his second term with some breathing space enough Republicans-In-Name-Only made
efforts to trim government in any permanent way difficult.

Of course, Jindal didn't help himself before his
term was half up by switching into a more populist conservative direction which
didn't match the previous worldview underpinning his agenda that didn't suit
his style, and he then started to play safe on policy in the hopes of electoral
advancement. If you're shooting for national electoral prominence at the
highest level, it's distracting to try to continue laying the groundwork to
change the culture back home.

As a result, the foundation laid was unstable and
unable to resist a determined counterattack by liberal populism and its special
interest remora. Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards did
his best to bring back every bad policy that has caused Louisiana to blow
opportunity after opportunity to fall even further behind the rest of the
country than when Jindal had faced taking office, leaving a legacy
of failure specializing in depopulation, economic malaise, and a declining
quality of life – and then some, for Edwards went where no other governor had
gone before in stumping for faddish intellectually and morally bankrupt social and
environmental policies.

Now, Republican Jeff Landry stands at the same
juncture as did Roemer and Jindal, but with distinct advantages. Perhaps the
best way to analogize this moment is to consider the state's preparedness, within
government and among the electorate which can be called the level of maturity
of its political culture, and potential to embrace a change in course akin to
trying to grow productive viticulture.

Understand that significant political change,
unless violently from below, generally operates in an indirect fashion where the
mass public first articulates this desire at the top of the system, and with
sustained desire it cascades down the system until the sufficient amount of
change is achieved. One could argue that Republican Dave Treen narrowly winning
the governorship in 1979 may have been a first sign of this, although more
likely the stagnant American economy and particularly energy crisis and its
impact that harmed Louisiana more than it helped until deregulation of oil and
gas came around the time of Treen's election, had much to do with damaging the
Democrat brand, as well as other idiosyncratic factors (i.e., outgoing Democrat
Gov. Edwin Edwards playing cards to maximize his chances of a successful
challenge in 1983 rather than to elect a Democrat in 1979), that eclipsed any
real desire among the majority of the Louisiana public to change the liberal populist
course of the state's political culture.

Yet if that desire had not been the driving factor
in the 1979 contest, it had become so in 1987 where a battered energy sector
and animus against Edwards mobilized at least a plurality of voters to support
Roemer, who explicitly ran against Edwards specifically but more generally liberal
populism. The problem for Roemer was he was like a vine transplanted into entirely
unsuitable rocky, if not desert, soil. With few friends in the Legislature or
elsewhere, he couldn't accomplish much, and he blundered by reversing himself
on some fiscal issues.

Outflanked by two populists for reelection in a
contest that brought Edwards back, change stagnated while liberal populism
retrenched. Still, the desire in the electorate for change continued to grow
and even if it hadn't reached critical mass enough to force its will in legislative
elections, it did force out Edwards. But his successor Republican Mike Foster (like
Roemer a converted Democrat) did little to challenge the orthodoxy, with an
exception being education policy.

Backsliding resumed with the ascension of Democrat
Kathleen Blanco to succeed Foster, but the electorate nearly prevented that when
Jindal almost defeated her. The critical mass further grew closer as
Republicans (although some being RINOs) began to make headway in legislative elections
as the cascading effect grew in strength.

When Jindal took over, his transplanted vine found
much better soil – not excellent, as liberal populist Democrats still had legislative
majorities and dominated most of local government – that with care and effort
could have become very productive. And he largely pursued that course in his
first term, but after the first 18 months of his second term he mostly
neglected that, and, as a result, to easily the vine was pulled by John Bel Edwards
with the momentum lost and revanchist forces regrouped.

The liberal populism extension perpetrated by
Edwards only fueled the public's desire to condemn it to the ash heap. In the
final analysis, the failures of liberal populism – which became more visible
once Democrat Pres. Joe Biden replaced Republican former Pres. Donald Trump – simply
became too apparent to enough Louisianans not only to sweep Landry into office
but also to reinvigorate the Legislature into its first truly conservative majority,
full spectrum in scope that rejects the idea that government is there to redistribute
and to cater to special interests that create winners and losers. It had taken
decades, but sufficient majorities for change had built in the public to complete
the cascade down from the state's chief executive to legislative offices, as
well as to other elected executive branch officials.

Which means now the soil is extremely fertile for
the kinds of policy changes Landry promises to pursue, and very likely to stick
if the effort is put in. The death rattle of liberal populism in state
government is at hand with a little fidelity and determination by its opponents,
unlike in 1988 and 2008 when the fleeting promise was there but conditions not
right that demanded more that could be brought to bear. Now the time is right, and
four to eight years of inspired leadership hewing to genuine conservatism will
complete a historic transformation of Louisiana's political culture that
cements into state government complementary conservative policy.

But it won't happen without commitment, perhaps
inspired by the fact that at this third inflection point Louisiana simply can't
afford to allow resurrection of liberal populism and re-empowerment of its special
interest hangers-on that have held back the state for a century.

United States policy toward Israel's war in Gaza was neatly summarized by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on November 30: "Israel has one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world. It is capable of neutralizing the threat posed by Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent civilians. And it has an obligation to do so." This posture — destroy Hamas but do so in observance of the laws of war — is not that of the administration alone. It has been widely embraced by official Washington. A key defense of what would emerge as the hallmark of the Biden administration's Gaza outlook came from Jo-Ann Mort and Michael Walzer in the New Republic on October 18. "A just war requires the defeat of Hamas," they wrote. "It is a maxim of just war theory that the rules of war cannot make it impossible to fight a just war. There has to be a way to fight."In their view, the best way was "to fight with restraint, to reject indiscriminate bombing and shelling, to respect enemy civilians (many, many Gazans are opposed to Hamas), and take necessary risks to reduce their risks, and finally to maintain a clear goal: defeat for Hamas. Nothing more."Walzer is the author of Just and Unjust Wars, a hugely influential treatise on morality in war that has gone through successive editions since its publication in 1977. Walzer's meditation on the just war was especially impressive for taking on a wide range of historical examples, but it was written under the shadow of the war in Vietnam. Walzer condemned that war not only as an unjustified intervention but also as one that was "carried on in so brutal a manner that even had it initially been defensible, it would have to be condemned, not in this or that aspect but generally." In his treatise, Walzer closely considered both jus ad bellum (the right of going to war) and jus in bello (the law governing its conduct). As Walzer noted, "considerations of jus ad bellum and jus in bello are logically independent, and the judgments we make in terms of one and the other are not necessarily the same." But in the case of Vietnam, he argued, they came together. "The war cannot be won, and it should not be won. It cannot be won, because the only available strategy involves a war against civilians; and it should not be won, because the degree of civilian support that rules out alternative strategies also makes the guerillas the legitimate rulers of the country." Do not these strictures apply to Israel's war in Gaza? Hamas hides behind civilians, or is rather closely intermingled with them, as the Viet Cong once were. It has enjoyed an equal or greater amount of support from the local population. Its acts of assassination and terrorism fall far short, numerically, of those committed by the VC. Walzer was rightly shocked by the civilian toll in Vietnam, which saw a civilian-combatant fatality ratio of approximately two to one. In Gaza, the proportion of civilian-to-combatant deaths is at least five to one and probably much greater. Israeli leaders have made clear that their war is on the whole population. Their criteria for when to bomb, aided by AI, has blown past previous restraints. Another case taken up by Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars was America's atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The decision was justified at the time as the only way to avert the far larger casualties likely to ensue were the United States to have attempted an invasion of Japan. Walzer rejected this argument. "It does not have the form: if we don't do x (bomb cities), they will do y (win the war, establish tyrannical rule, slaughter their opponents)." Instead, the U.S. government in effect argued that "if we don't do x, we will do y." The real problem, Walzer argued, was the policy of unconditional surrender — that is, it had to do with U.S. war aims. Walzer approved the policy of unconditional surrender when applied to Germany — Hitler's regime represented a "supreme emergency" — but not when applied to Japan. "Japan's rulers were engaged in a more ordinary sort of military expansion, and all that was morally required was that they be defeated, not that they be conquered and totally overthrown," he wrote. Walzer's treatment of Vietnam and Hiroshima suggests that there are imperative reasons to stop short of total victory as a war aim, if the result of pursuing it is a moral enormity. If you have to commit wickedness on a titanic scale in order to achieve total victory, you should accept limited war and seek the containment of the enemy, not his obliteration. This is especially so, one might add, if the enemy one aims to annihilate elicits widespread sympathies elsewhere, making probable some kind of over-the-top retribution in the future. There are 2.2 million Gazans. There are 1.8 billion Muslims. Germany and Japan were friendless in 1945. It is obvious that Israel's war in Gaza bears no relationship to the war that Mort and Walzer recommended on October 18. Israel has not fought with restraint, has not rejected indiscriminate bombing and shelling, has not respected enemy civilians. Operation Swords of Iron has been instead the most elaborate and twisted application yet of the Dahiya Doctrine, Israel's longstanding war plan that makes a virtue out of wildly disproportionate retributions. That Israel intended to do this was apparent from the outset — 6,000 bombs were dropped in the war's first six days — but went strangely unnoticed by Mort and Walzer when their piece appeared. The authors stressed the need to get humanitarian aid into Gaza but didn't mention the Israeli blockade on all things requisite to life, a radical policy totally opposed to laws of war and imposed by Israel on the war's first day. In a subsequent interview on October 30, Walzer conceded that there was no justification for Israel's blockades of Gaza's electricity, water, and food supply, but also questioned the idea that a humanitarian pause would be justified before Hamas was defeated. "Acts that shock the moral conscience of mankind" was one of Walzer's most resonant phrases in Just and Unjust Wars. He meant by that "old-fashioned phrase" not the solipsistic prevarications of political leaders, but "the moral convictions of ordinary men and women, acquired in the course of their everyday activities." Clearly, Israel's war in Gaza has entailed a profound shock to these sensibilities. It is this revulsion, not sympathy for Hamas, that explains world-wide public opposition to what Israel is doing. From the beginning of the crisis, the Biden administration's approach to the war ran closely in parallel with the course recommended by Mort and Walzer. Eliminate Hamas. Do so while sparing civilians as much as possible. Then be sweet to the Palestinians and give them an independent state. Israel was happy to take the first part of this formula and to contemptuously reject the rest. Meanwhile, alongside these homilies to humane war, the United States has undertaken a vast effort to resupply Israel's stock of bombs. Confronting the escalating death toll, U.S. policymakers are dazed and confused. They're still on autopilot in support of Israel's war aim, while ineffectually shrieking in horror at the cost to Gaza's civilians. The truth is that there is no way to destroy Hamas without destroying Gaza. Contrary to Secretary Blinken's words (and Walzer's advice), Israel does not know how to destroy Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent civilians. Monumental harm to civilians follows from Israel's war aim of destroying Hamas, which the Biden administration and Walzer continue to endorse. That war aim stands in urgent need of reconsideration.Dear RS readers: It has been an extraordinary year and our editing team has been working overtime to make sure that we are covering the current conflicts with quality, fresh analysis that doesn't cleave to the mainstream orthodoxy or take official Washington and the commentariat at face value. Our staff reporters, experts, and outside writers offer top-notch, independent work, daily. Please consider making a tax-exempt, year-end contribution to Responsible Statecraft so that we can continue this quality coverage — which you will find nowhere else — into 2024. Happy Holidays!

Systems forest of shelter belts are the efficient, durable and effective tools of stabilizing agricultural landscapes, which are predominant in the structure of the land fund of Ukraine. They create ecological agricultural landscapes frame, but their number, state, forestry and haphazard placement do not meet current requirements. To improve the situation, the order of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine from September 18, 2013 p. № 725-p adopted the Concept of agroforestry in Ukraine. The Concept is identifying areas of institutional change and improvement of legislation, which will provide special optimization of protective forest plantations of linear type on zonal basis, effective management and they will become a prerequisite for ecological by sustainable development of agricultural landscapes. Among the many causes of deterioration in the effectiveness of protection of arable land protective forest plantations linear type are: low efficiency targeted system of government measures to protective forest plantations linear type, and the lack of legal norms, which provides for liability for inefficient land use, and low level of financial security measures to protect soil from erosion. The purpose of this article is to propose the changes in legislative documents regulating forest management in protective forest plantations of linear type. During the years of independence Ukraine has not made clarity as to which governmental authority in current conditions have to deal with protective afforestation, the creation, protection and farming in windbreaks. After the beginning of land privatization in 1992 in the fate of shelterbelts it was a stuck for many years of uncertainty. They are not subject to sharing under the Land Code of Ukraine (Ed. 1992). Therefore, units of land sharing or land reserves the identified and in respect of windbreaks question remained open. In connection with the reorganization in 2000 the collective farms in agricultural market-type formation (private enterprises, farms, limited liability company, etc.) that were subjects of collective ownership of land, windbreaks were divested respective to local councils. One of the most effective solutions to the problem of protective afforestation is amending the regulations on the use of protective forest plantations of linear type. The policy amendments made to the regulations, consideration of national target programs in forestry, environmental protection and the optimization of land area of protective forest plantations of linear type on zonal basis. This will direct the state budget for the protection of the most vulnerable agricultural land - arable lands. The next step was the adoption of the Action Plan to implement the Concept. The primary objective of the Action Plan determined the preparation of proposals for amendments and additions to laws and other legal acts of reproduction, use and maintenance of protective forest plantations of linear type. Addressing protective afforestation problems require coordinated interaction and cooperation between scientists of different fields for a clear definition of the legal regime and preserve these unique plants. To eliminate uncertainty the status of the land occupied by windbreaks, the Land Code of Ukraine need to remove the windbreaks of the list of non-agricultural land for the purpose of classification of these and other agroforestry plantations to the land for forestry purposes. The legislate should developed to empower rural, town and city councils to regulate land relations in monitoring the use and protection of lands of communal property, land and environmental compliance legislation with mandatory environmental certification of land-based assessment of their compliance with the current requirements of soil protection by application of complex agronomic, hydraulic, organizational, economic and agroforestry measures. Corrections in Land Code required that land for windbreaks and other protective plantings may be available for use by land owners and other land users who use adjacent land for commercial agricultural production and have subordinate specialized units for forest management. For effective implementation of key provisions of the Concept of development of agroforestry in Ukraine is proposed amendments to the Laws of Ukraine, which regulate the protective afforestation realization. The necessity of providing windbreaks conservation status, securing them with entities providing economic incentives for the provision of tax and credit benefits to persons who take care of forest protective stands existing and create new plantations. Listed as proposals for state control over land use and protection, exemption from compensation for loss of agricultural and forestry production, drafting land inventory with analysis of agroforestry providing for land protection and to scope the area of protective plantations by category in the near future. ; Системы полезащитных лесных полос – действенный, долговечный и эффективный способ стабилизации агроландшафтов, которые являются преобладающими в структуре земельного фонда Украины. Они создают экологический каркас агроландшафтов, но их количество, состояние и бессистемное размещение не отвечают современным требованиям. Для исправления ситуации распоряжением КМ Украины от 18 сентября 2013 № 725-р одобрена Концепция развития агролесомелиорации в Украине. Целью Концепции является определение направлений институциональных изменений и совершенствования законодательства, что обеспечит оптимизацию площадей защитных лесных насаждений линейного типа по зональному принципу, эффективное хозяйствование в них и станет экологической предпосылкой для устойчивого развития агроландшафтов. Среди многих причин ухудшения эффективности защиты пахотных земель полезащитными насаждениями линейного типа выделяются: низкая эффективность целенаправленных системных государственных мер полезащитных лесных полос, а также отсутствие юридических норм, которыми предусмотрена ответственность за неэффективное землепользование, и низкий уровень финансового обеспечения мероприятий по защите почв от эрозии. Поэтому целью данного исследования является внесение изменений в законодательные документы, регламентирующие ведение хозяйства в защитных лесных насаждениях линейного типа. Одним из действенных путей решения проблемы полезащитного лесоразведения является внесение изменений в нормативно-правовые акты по использованию защитных лесных насаждений линейного типа. Концепцией предусмотрено внесение соответствующих изменений в законодательные акты, участие в государственных целевых программах в сфере лесного хозяйства, охраны и защиты земель вопросы оптимизации площадей защитных лесных насаждений линейного типа по зональному принципу. Это позволит направить средства государственного бюджета на охрану уязвимой части сельскохозяйственных угодий – пахотных земель. Следующим шагом стало утверждение Плана мероприятий по реализации Концепции. Первоочередной задачей Плана мероприятий определено подготовку предложений по внесению изменений и дополнений в законодательные и другие нормативно-правовые акты в части воспроизводства, использования и содержания защитных лесных насаждений линейного типа. Решение проблемы полезащитных лесоразведения требует слаженного взаимодействия и сотрудничества ученых разных отраслей наук для четкого определения правового режима и сохранения этих уникальных насаждений. Для устранения неопределенности статуса земель, занятых под полезащитными лесными полосами, в Земельном кодексе Украины необходимо изъять полезащитные лесные полосы из перечня несельскохозяйственных угодий с целью отнесения этих и других лесомелиоративных насаждений к землям лесного фонда. Законодательно предоставить полномочия сельским, поселковым, городским советам в области земельных отношений для осуществления контроля за использованием и охраной земель коммунальной собственности, соблюдением земельного и экологического законодательства с обязательным экологической сертификацией земельных участков на основе оценки соответствия их современным требованиям по охране почв путем применение комплекса агротехнических, гидротехнических, организационно-хозяйственных и агролесомелиоративных мероприятий. Для эффективной реализации основных положений Концепции развития агролесомелиорации в Украине предложено внесение изменений в Законы Украины, которые регламентируют ведение полезащитных лесоразведения. Обоснована необходимость предоставления полезащитных лесных полос природоохранного статуса, закрепление их за субъектами хозяйствования, обеспечение экономического стимулирования с предоставлением налоговых и кредитных льгот лицам, осуществляющим уход за существующими агролесомелиоративными насаждениями и создают новые. Внесены также предложения по Государственному контролю использования и охраны земель, освобождение от возмещения потерь сельскохозяйственного и лесохозяйственного производства, составление проектов землеустройства по анализу агролесомелиоративного обеспечения охраны земель и объемов необходимых площадей защитных насаждений по категориям на ближайшую перспективу ; Для ефективної реалізації основних положень Концепції розвитку агролісомеліорації в Україні запропоновано внесення змін у Закони України і підзаконні акти, які регламентують ведення полезахисного лісорозведення. Обґрунтовано необхідність надання полезахисним лісовим смугам природоохоронного статусу, закріплення їх за суб'єктами господарювання, забезпечення економічного стимулювання з наданням податкових та кредитних пільг особам, які здійснюють догляд за існуючими агролісомеліоративними насадженнями та створюють нові. Внесено також пропозиції щодо Державного контролю за використанням та охороною земель, звільнення від відшкодування втрат сільськогосподарського та лісогосподарського виробництва, складання проектів землеустрою з аналізом агролісомеліоративного забезпечення щодо охорони земель і обсягів необхідних площ захисних насаджень за категоріями на найближчу перспективу.

The struggle to belong Dealing with diversity in 21st century urban settings. Amsterdam, 7-9 July 2011 Eye contact, clientele alignment & laissez-faire: the production of public space and neighbourhood in Phnom Penh, Cambodia Thomas Kolnberger(*) Paper presented at the International RC21 conference 2011 Session: Nr. 12 – Belonging, exclusion, public and quasi-public space (*) Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Research Unit IPSE (Identité, Politiques, Sociètes, Espace) Universität Passau, BR Deutschland Southeast Asian Studies thomas.kolnberger@uni.lu Overview Private, public or quasi-public spaces are terms that seem particularly difficult to apply to non-Western societies: as in the 'West', their boundaries are fluid and routinely transgressed, but in ways that are distinctive to the local situation and history. This paper is arguing that these concepts retain practical descriptive power, particularly for the city of Phnom Penh, a case study of demographic extremes, as nearly all her inhabitants could be classified as immigrants. In deed, the Khmer Rouge had forcefully evicted the ca. two million people-strong population of the capital in 1975, virtually erasing all 'bourgeois urbanity' during Pol Pot's Cambodian 'auto-genocide'. After the fall of the regime, the new socialist government slowly repopulated the deserted metropolis with new urban dwellers. Their social and spatial belonging needed to be set up from scratch. "Who belongs to whom" (in terms of political clientelism and patronage), "who is doing what" (regarding face-to-face control and eye contact investigation), and "who owns what" (concerning redistribution and also new original accumulation of capital) were the essential questions in this 'struggle to belong'. In this urban setting, people have been employing a mixed set of strategies for implementing 'belonging' ever since. Based on empirical surveys (mapping & interviews) and research in Cambodian and French colonial archives, this paper presents the constant negotiations of private and public space in a changing economic environment from three angles: - streets, squares, and parks as spaces of interaction: the spatial inheritance of the French colonialism in a new context - the emergence of different types of gated communities since 1975: at first by spatial inclusion strategies generating patronage networks, then by urban planning separating rich from poor - the economy of espionage and imitation of Phnom Penh's retail trade: the neighbours' curious gaze Methodology - The city of Phnom Penh in Cambodia is a case study for a `rush economic evolution´ - This paper aims in one part to highlight the role and influence of place and space for a specific process: the spatial location of business sites in a unique window of opportunity as a self-organizing process `from below´. By applying spatial analysis (GPS mapping), a specific pattern of retail agglomeration and dispersion of this `atomistic´ metropolis could be identified. The analysis is based on fieldwork investigating the use of the city's space for economic ends. 1,000 kilometres of built frontage (`streetscapes´) with 14,647 cases of land use features (e.g. shops, `pavement economy´ etc.) have been surveyed and mapped. Subsequent to this quantitative part, 100 semi-structured interviews and numerous ad hoc conversations were conducted including a dozen of expert interviews (city administration, NGO, city planners). Results and Thesis - The city of Phnom Penh in Cambodia is a case study for a `subsistence urbanization´ - Much economic geography research has focused on the importance of the social context for various transactions. 'Face-to-face contact remains central to coordination of the economy, despite the remarkable reductions in transport costs and the astonishing rise in the complexity and variety of information – verbal, visual and symbolic – which can be communicated near instantly' (Storper and Venables, 2003, p. 43 ). Visual proximity and eye-contact are particularly important in environments of imperfect information, like in Cambodia after Pol Pot. Information was scarce at this time and communication hardware rare. Thus, in Phnom Penh's initial retail business formation, an 'economy of espionage and imitation' provided the necessary information for deal-making, decisions concerning the assortments of goods, prize, and trends. The first merchants and producers were heavily dependent on visual contact 'around the corner' and close contact also proved to be beneficial to customers. This specific knowledge and information externality (an externality or transaction spillover is a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices) could only be reaped by spatial agglomerations. While screening and socialization of network members and potential partners were essential for the build-up of Cambodia's original clientele-system during the gradual resettlement, visual contact became the decisive steering mechanism for the original distribution of business agglomeration or its dispersion. For a `subsistence urbanization´, the public and quasi-public space are the most important `common-pool resource´. The influx of the population into the city produced a `non-rivalrous´ and `non-excludable´ economic good by the neighbours' curious gaze. - The city of Phnom Penh in Cambodia is a case study for a `spatial club´ - From a New Institutionalism's point of view 'City's neighbourhoods – residential, industrial and commercial clusters – are like firms, nexuses of agreements and understandings about entitlements to share and pooled resources. They differ from firms in that they are spatial clusterings and in that they cluster around resources that remain to varying extents in the public domain. They are like spatial clubs. Members co-operate by various forms of informal and formal rules and agreements in order to ensure the continued supply and enhancement of shared public domain goods. Municipal government is itself a type of club, delivering collectively consumed infrastructure and regulations from a tax on its citizens, firms and visitors. Communities, in the social sense, are also clubs – delivering collectively consumed benefits such as a sense of belonging, security and culture' (Webster and Lai 2003, p. 58). This spontaneous `neighbouring´ as 'rational herding' (Banerjee 1992; Hung and Plott 2001) helped to reduce transaction costs during the initial resettlement process (and beyond). It can be described as a continuous act of self agglomeration of business, creating bazaar-type streets over the whole of the city, which specialise in specific goods and services forming thus, from a bird's view perspective, a `mental retail map´ for the inhabitants. This is one side of building neighbourhoods in Phnom Penh. The base for this laissez-faire et laissez passer behaviorism of the government in (micro)economy was the redistribution of Phnom Penh's real estate amongst trustworthy followers. A `New property Deal´ of first in, first served allocated the built environment piecemeal. In this political economy, two steps are discernable. First, a community-building process regarding the public administration. Each ministry was assigned to a certain area of the city and in a top-down process, starting from the top echelons to the simple civil servants and officials, distributed land and housing. Initially, each responsible could pick `his´ followers and could reward him/her with the allocation of living space, a social structure, which represents a spatially bond replica of the traditional clientelism and patronage-network in Cambodia. These 'strings' (ksae) formed the first neighbourhoods as a kind of `original´ gated community because each administrative unit was planned to be self-sufficient. Each 'cité' (Carrier 2007) was thus clearly demarcated. Its decisions were autonomous, too. In certain areas of Phnom Penh, remnants of this socio-politically gathered community can be found. In a second step, and with increasing immigration, secondary ksae (the mother's cousin, the friend of a friend) proliferated and the city was being `filled up´. Today, the pattern of co-residence in technically secluded areas of Phnom Penh resembles the typical economical founded example of gated communities as neighbourhoods around the world: the rich and the better off separate from the rest. The once moral economy of the civil war and initial post-conflict years is dissolving. Regulation, commodification and the government's efforts to demarcate public and private space is replacing/reducing the common good 'public space'.

The main reason for blaming the EU for not watching the regional reforms more often is based on the idea that the EU has a chance to stimulate and positively influence developments in Central Asia and Kazakhstan and to provide a democratic social model. Many analysts think the EU could use economic relations and business ties in the region for the sake of social development and vice versa arguing that social instability affects the EU business relations forcing Kazakhstani government to finally solve problems and execute necessary democratic reforms. For instance, Sebastien Peyrouse sees the following behavior: "In theory, Europe could make use of its business potential to help spread the social model it incarnates. The EU could thus choose to privilege business relations that commit the participants to ensuring certain legal standards in economic activity and to strengthening the rule of law. This could be done, for instance, by giving preference to Central Asian companies that are committed to respecting the rights of local workers, to fighting corruption, promoting fair competition and good corporate governance, and recognizing the importance of contracts. The long-term objective would be to increase the social responsibility of Central Asian companies – something that has indirect repercussions on the societies" (PEYROUSE 2009, P. 11). Nevertheless, he also doubts that it can be easily done because of possible accusations by using "its own doorstep to tax heavens – particularly in Luxembourg - where Central Asian heads of state, their families and the oligarchs close to them deposit money siphoned off from national wealth" (PEYROUSE 2009, P. 11). However, the history of the EU as a welfare union of states is more powerful than the use of accusations. Therefore, European politicians may successfully use economic ties, contacts, and obligations in long-term trade relations to influence the government to provide better social reforms to secure stability, as well as strengthen the power of the EU as an external player in the region. In this case, the economic topic should serve as a basis for the European strategy in the region. "The EU therefore has every reason to implement forms of development assistance which, by helping European companies to establish themselves in the market, will play a key role in reducing Central Asia's social vulnerability and will contribute to the fight against poverty, which is currently the main issue that needs to be addressed by the international community and by regional governments" (PEYROUSE 2009, P. 11). Continuation of this strategy that will enforce Kazakhstani government to provide the society with necessary reforms will gain a positive image for the union both within the region and globally. This also may help the EU, as an external player, to further obtain influence on governmental decision-making processes. It is obvious that social stability is the key to decrease economical risk factors and to improve the investment climate to benefit the whole development of a country or union. In this case, the EU strategy will profit the EU itself. Chances for a successful realization of such a plan are relatively high. Kazakhstan has been conduction fruitful business with EU Member States. According to the statistics, provided by the German Auswaertiges Amt, Germany takes place number eight in the list of Kazakhstan trading partners with a commodity turnover of EUR 5.7 billion in 2008, and it continues to grow (AUSWAERTIGES AMT 2009). "In this area, Kazakhstan does not hide its ambitions; its "Path to Europe" program clearly states its intention to become one of the main communications hubs between Asia and Europe" (PEYROUSE 2009, P. 9), according to Sebastien Peyrouse, who specialized on Central Asian trade and economic relations. The program called "Path to Europe" was signed by the President in August 2008 and supposed to be implemented during 2009-2011. According to evaluations made by the EU and Kazakhstani political analysts, the program will help to intensify and deepen the political collaboration between Kazakhstan and the EU. The introduction of the program has 3 stages and the basis for implementation of the program was prepared carefully. First of all, the president addressed his hopes for future profitable relations with the EU beforehand, in his annual message to the people of Kazakhstan. This message was used by Kazakhstani officials during political meetings to announce the future document. Finally, the document was signed and came into force in August 2008. The program seemed to be very promising. For instance, in March 2008, during the conference in the Netherlands, organized with the help of the Kazakhstan embassy, the ambassador of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Mainura Murzamadiyeva, familiarized more than 70 representatives of political, informational, and business layers of the Netherlands with the President´s message to the people of Kazakhstan, where he had announced the future program. Many of Dutch political scientists stated that the proposals the president made in his message will definitely intensify political cooperation between Kazakhstan and the EU, attract foreign investments, bring new technologies, and help to bring people of different regions close to each other. Analyzing the program "Path to Europe" that is celebrating its first anniversary this August, since it was signed in 2008, the following objectives are performed by the government of the Republic of Kazakhstan: - Cooperation with the EU countries; - Creation of required conditions for technological cooperation; - Energy cooperation development; - Transport cooperation development; - Technical regulation and metrology cooperation; - Trade-economic relation strengthening and broadening; - Small and medium-sized enterprises development; - Living conditions improvement cooperation; - Humanitarian cooperation; - Kazakhstani legal base improvement and European experience application. Kazakhstan clearly stated that it expects the level of a strategic partnership with leading European countries in political, economic, and humanitarian spheres and a trade commodity turnover increase by 10% per year as well as a high level of exchange visits. The country also expects the EU to help to promote Kazakhstan internationally which will improve the investment climate and, therefore, the economic situation. However, priorities of the country remain unclear showing the country's reluctance to answer the questions on how to establish democracy and solve the following problems "continuation of efforts on creation of conditions for democracy institutions development on the OSCE territory; transport and transit potential development; Eurasian transcontinental transport corridors development; ecological problems solutions; trust measures and regional security strengthening; non-military aspects of safety development under the OSCE activities including terror, extremism, drug trafficking, organized crime, weapons' and people's sale fighting and Afghanistan reconstruction". To reach the declared goals and priorities, Kazakhstan needs the support of the EU and cooperation. Many political and business analysts provide recommendations suggesting to establish trade chambers and delegation sections related to trade and business that will monitor the activities, provide more legal support and consultations for small and medium-sized business in the region. Further, they suggest establishing more exchange programs for Kazakhstani businessmen to bring more business culture and experience. To monitor and evaluate the progress, the EU can establish clear and visible rating systems with distinct conditions and deadlines. In this case, evaluation committees and reports with full transparency are crucial. However, the first step, the EU should fulfill, is to admit that the time of 'soft power' has ended and finally declare a clear political dimension. Without a distinctive view and goal, the EU will not succeed in representing a strong power and will not improve the policy that has been executing in Kazakhstan since signing the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement in 1992.

In 2012, the Mexican Presidency of the G20 introduced inclusive green growth as a cross-cutting priority on the G20 development agenda. The second meeting of the G20 Development Working Group (DWG), hosted by the Government of the Republic of Korea, took place in Seoul the 19th and 20th of March 2012. As agreed during the first DWG meeting, this second meeting focused on the priorities for their presidency in the first half of 2012: infrastructure, food security and inclusive green growth (IGG). At its Seoul meeting, the DWG also agreed that IGG co-facilitators and relevant international organizations (IOs) should work together in 2012 to develop a nonprescriptive good practices guide/toolkit on enabling national policy frameworks for inclusive green growth to support countries who voluntarily wish to design and implement affordable and inclusive green growth policies, with the aim of achieving sustainable development and poverty alleviation. The toolkit is organized as follows. First, the necessity of applying the different tools in the context of a broad inclusive green growth strategy is stressed, and a harmonized framework combining approaches and tools identified by all four IOs is set forth. Second, the document offers an overview of key tools that can be mobilized to implement an inclusive green growth strategy. Quick technical descriptions of these tools are offered along with suggested sources for further details. Finally, capacity building and knowledge sharing initiatives are presented, with the Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP) highlighted as a powerful collaborative tool to advance policies for inclusive green economies.

This report discusses selected issues regarding accountability in public services. The introduction discusses the accountability framework that will be used for the report. Chapter 1 assesses South Africa's progress on service access and quality, and summarizes recent policy initiatives. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 describe the international and South African experience with mechanisms that seek to improve accountability - public sector reform, citizen report cards, and others - and posits hypotheses to be explored in the following chapters. Chapter 5 applies the World Bank's accountability framework to a participatory assessment of services in six municipalities in South Africa. Chapters 6 and 7 apply the framework to the education and water and sanitation sectors. Chapter 8 explains why community-driven development does not factor in any main South African development programs. Chapter 9 explains the continuing learning practices pioneered in the manufacturing sector and addresses how these practices might be used by the South African government to effect change. Chapter 10 summarizes the conclusions, translates these into main hypotheses to be tested in future work, and formulates a number of policy recommendations for public debate.

Climate action, economic competition and geopolitical shifts are more intertwined than ever. In the wake of the skyrocketing inflation and deteriorating China relations, United States President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law on 16 August 2022. Conceived as the foundation of the new US industrial policy, the IRA aims to rebuild the country's industrial capacity, including 500 billion US dollars in new spending and tax breaks, among which almost 400 billion aimed at boosting clean energy.[1] Across the Atlantic, the European Union expressed concerns about the potential loss of industrial competitiveness resulting from the IRA. In response, the EU unveiled its own Green Deal Industrial Plan (GDIP) in February 2023.[2] The objective of this plan is to promote the enhancement of net-zero manufacturing capacities in order to meet the EU's climate targets.
Both the IRA and the GDIP have a common goal of reducing dependence on China, especially in clean technology, although through different approaches. The US focuses on bringing high-value production back to its shores, while the EU aims to develop and diversify supply chains.[3] This divergence is also reflected in the debate between "decoupling" and "derisking", with the latter recently gaining prominence as policymakers recognise the challenges of completely reshoring supply chains domestically.[4]
The US and the EU share industrial and geoeconomic objectives, but will also encounter similar challenges, in particular concerning the first stages of green supply chains. Despite their heterogeneous approaches, Western policymakers will in fact have to secure critical raw materials for clean technology manufacturing, with the aim of resourcing the energy transition.The green transition and its critical materials
Critical raw materials (CRMs) encompass various minerals and metals, such as lithium, cobalt, magnesium and rare earths, that are indispensable for numerous applications. Within the framework of the European Green Deal, the EU has identified and listed its CRMs in the dedicated Critical Raw Materials Act, setting clear targets in terms of domestic extraction, processing, recycling and import diversification. Particular attention is paid to the materials employed to produce permanent magnets used in wind turbines and energy storage systems. In a similar vein, the IRA provides subsidies for electric vehicles (EVs) manufactured using at least 40 per cent of domestically sourced CRMs. These measures highlight the US' and the EU's efforts to secure a stable supply of CRMs as part of their respective industrial plans. Sourcing these materials, however, entails significant challenges in the current international landscape.China's dominance in CRMs supply chains
Indeed, the People's Republic of China (PRC) stands as the principal player in the extraction, processing and export of CRMs. Its leading position derives from a state capitalist model combining economic, security and strategic interests.[5] This prominence is striking in the rare earths (REs) market. Indeed, China controls 65 per cent of global RE production and 90 per cent of processing operations.[6] From a European perspective, the EU imports up to 98 per cent of its REs from the PRC (depending on the specific mineral).[7]
Apart from rare earths, China has also enhanced its position in the supply chains of other CRMs by investing abroad. Notably, Beijing has made significant investments in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which possesses 70 per cent of the world's reserves of cobalt, thereby gaining control over mining operations. This is particularly concerning considering that China also holds 72 per cent of the global cobalt refining capacity.[8] A similar picture emerges regarding lithium. The Chinese company Tianqi Lithium has the second-largest stake in Sociedad Química y Minera (SQM) and owns 51 per cent of the world's largest lithium mine located in Greenbushes, Western Australia Downstream.[9] Moreover, the PRC dominates roughly 60 per cent of the global lithium refining capacity[10] and is the primary global producer and exporter of lithium-ion batteries and RE permanent magnets, which are high-value-added products.[11]
Considering the role of China and the projected increase in CRM demand of over 450 per cent by 2050 in order to meet the Paris Climate Agreement goals,[12] this situation is far from rosy. There is a real risk that Western countries, while promoting clean energy deployment, might see an increasing reliance on CRM-exporting countries, with China at the forefront. Supply shortages may emerge as a potential threat, especially given China's growing domestic demand for CRMs, which has consistently surpassed its domestic supply over the past five years, resulting in a surge in imports.[13]The risk of political weaponisation…
In parallel, Western-decision makers must consider the potential political weaponisation of the PRC's control over CRMs. Already in 2010, Beijing unofficially restricted the export of REs to Japan as a retaliatory measure following a dispute over territorial waters in the East China Sea.[14] Two years later, the EU, Japan and the US brought a case to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), seeking its intervention regarding the export quotas imposed by China on REs. The WTO only reached a decision in 2014, compelling China to remove its export restrictions.[15]
Between 2009 and 2020, according to the OECD, export restrictions on CRMs have increased fivefold, with China implementing the highest number in 2020.[16] These restrictions mainly take the form of export taxes, which are not prohibited under WTO rules, unlike quantitative export restrictions. More recently, however, China decided to impose stringent export controls on two critical rare earth materials – gallium and germanium – from August 2023, in what may arguably be a retaliation against the US's 2022 restrictions on chip exports.…and how to address it
To reduce dependence on CRMs imports, Western policymakers may focus on three different kinds of measures: improving their circular economy, expanding their domestic production and diversifying their import sources. Improving the circular economy of CRMs is crucial: by promoting the recovery and recycling of these materials, policymakers can sustain the domestic demand while reducing reliance on imports. However, there are significant challenges, particularly in the case of RE recovery from permanent magnets. In the EU, for example, the recycling of permanent magnets is not yet well developed due to a combination of regulatory, financial, supply chain and technological obstacles.[17]
Expanding the domestic production of CRMs is another avenue to reduce dependence on imports. However, this approach faces socio-economic and ecological barriers. The establishment of new mining activities often encounters resistance from local populations, and resource exploitation can lead to pollution and have profound impacts on the environment of mining areas.[18] Additionally, the process of making a new mine operational and productive typically takes more than ten years.[19]
In the short to mid-term, supply chain diversification is likely to be the key factor in reducing risks. This aspect is explicitly addressed by the European Critical Raw Materials Act,[20] which envisages the establishment of new trade agreements to secure and diversify the supply of CRMs. Diversification assumes a significant role as it provides an external and diplomatic dimension to the new EU green industrial policy, given the necessity of enlarging the network of CRMs suppliers, especially in Africa and South America. However, supply chain diversification must deal with China's international action vis-à-vis developing countries rich in CRMs through its Belt and Road Initiative.
Strategic and collaborative endeavour between the EU, the US and their closest allies is therefore key. Notably, the US and the EU have recently initiated negotiations aimed at enabling CRMs extracted or processed within the EU to be considered for subsidies granted for electric vehicles by the IRA.[21] Moreover, a cooperative approach emerges as the paradigm for enhanced security and resilience within supply chains against the Chinese centralisation of CRMs. In this regard, the US-led Minerals Security Partnership, aimed at investing in secure CRM supply chains and cooperating on recycling technology development, appears to be a promising step forward.[22]
To conclude, the transition towards a "green" industrial structure entails numerous challenges that extend beyond purely economic and environmental considerations. Critical raw materials, one of the pillars of this transformation, are currently entangled in critical geopolitical issues, primarily related to China's dominance over their supply chains. Amidst mounting tensions between China and the US, the geoeconomic leverage wielded by the PRC poses a number of tangible risks – above all, the potential slowdown of the decarbonisation process, jeopardising the efforts against climate change.Salvatore Finizio is a final year master's student in Resource Economics & Sustainable Development at the University of Bologna.
This is a winning article (1st place) submitted to the 2023 edition of the IAI Prize contest.[1] Justin Badlam et al., "The Inflation Reduction Act: Here's What's in It", in McKinsey Public Sector Insights, 24 October 2022, https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/the-inflation-reduction-act-heres-whats-in-it.[2] European Commission, A Green Deal Industrial Plan for the Net-Zero Age (COM/2023/62), 1 February 2023, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=celex:52023DC0062.[3] Loyle Campbell and Alexandra Gritz, "Europe's Green Industrial Policy and the United States' IRA. Reducing Dependence on China", in DGAP Memos, 21 March 2023, https://dgap.org/en/node/38543.[4] Henry Sanderson, "What Counts as De-Risking? The Geopolitics of Energy and China", in Oxford Energy Forum, No. 137 (August 2023), p. 14-16, https://www.oxfordenergy.org/?p=46438.[5] Sophia Kalantzakos, "The Race for Critical Minerals in an Era of Geopolitical Realignments", in The International Spectator, Vol. 55, No. 3 (September 2020), p. 1-16, DOI 10.1080/03932729.2020.1786926.[6] Philip Andrews-Speed and Anders Hove, "China's Rare Earths Dominance and Policy Responses", in OIES Papers, No. CE7 (June 2023), https://www.oxfordenergy.org/?p=46247.[7] Kjeld van Wieringen with Marcos Fernández Álvarez, "Securing the EU's Supply of Critical Raw Materials", in EPRS At a Glance, July 2022, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_ATA(2022)733586.[8] Jane Nakano, "The Geopolitics of Critical Minerals Supply Chains", in CSIS Reports, March 2021, p. 4, https://www.csis.org/analysis/geopolitics-critical-minerals-supply-chains.[9] Sophia Kalantzakos, "The Race for Critical Minerals", cit.[10] Jane Nakano, "The Geopolitics of Critical Minerals Supply Chains", cit., p. 4.[11] Suleyman Orhun Altiparmak, "China and Lithium Geopolitics in a Changing Global Market", in Chinese Political Science Review, Vol. 8, No. 3 (September 2023), p. 487-506, https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-022-00227-3.[12] Kirsten Hund et al., Minerals for Climate Action: The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition, Washington, World Bank, July 2020, p. 11, https://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/961711588875536384/Minerals-for-Climate-Action-The-Mineral-Intensity-of-the-Clean-Energy-Transition.[13] Dolf Gielen and Martina Lyons, "Critical Materials for the Energy Transition: Rare Earth Elements", in IRENA Technical Papers, No. 2/2022 (May 2022), p. 24, https://www.irena.org/Technical-Papers/Critical-Materials-For-The-Energy-Transition-Rare-Earth-elements.[14] Rajive Ganguli and Douglas R. Cook, "Rare Earths: A Review of the Landscape", in MRS Energy & Sustainability, Vol. 5, No. 1 (December 2018), Article 6, DOI 10.1557/mre.2018.7.[15] WTO website: Dispute Settlement: DS431: China — Measures Related to the Exportation of Rare Earths, Tungsten and Molybdenum, https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds431_e.htm.[16] Przemyslaw Kowalski and Clarisse Legendre, "Raw Materials Critical for the Green Transition. Production, International Trade and Export Restrictions", in OECD Trade Policy Papers, No. 269 (April 2023), p. 37 and 41, https://doi.org/10.1787/c6bb598b-en.[17] Vasileios Rizos, Edoardo Righetti and Amin Kassab, "Developing a Supply Chain for Recycled Rare Earth Permanent Magnets in the EU", in CEPS In-Depth-Analysis, No. 2022-07 (December 2022), https://www.ceps.eu/?p=38613.[18] Jingjing Bai et al., "Evaluation of Resource and Environmental Carrying Capacity in Rare Earth Mining Areas in China", in Scientific Reports, Vol. 12 (2022), Article 6105, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-10105-2.[19] Arthur Sullivan, "Rare Earths Find in Sweden: A Game Changer?", in Deutsche Welle, 1 December 2023, https://www.dw.com/en/a-64375644.[20] European Commission, Proposal for a Regulation Establishing a Framework for Ensuring a Secure and Sustainable Supply of Critical Raw Materials (COM/2023/160), 16 March 2023, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=celex:52023PC0160.[21] European Commission, Joint Statement by President Biden and President von der Leyen, Washington, 10 March 2023, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement_23_1613.[22] Website of the US Department of State: Minerals Security Partnership, https://www.state.gov/minerals-security-partnership.