Suchergebnisse

This post is co-authored with Robert Gampfer. *** International climate negotiations have become almost unimaginable without the participation of civil society organizations (CSOs). In 2011, 1490 organizations were accredited as observers; most of which were environmental groups, research institutions, and … Continue reading →

This post first appeared on the International Budget Partnership's blog here Governments around the world are at a critical juncture. Democracy is continuing to erode in countries across the globe, with increasing threats to citizens' freedoms and restrictions on civic organizations. At the same time inequality is high and rising. Frustration with governments (democratic or…

Corruption is both a major cause and a result of poverty around the world. It occurs at all levels of society, from local and national governments, civil society, judiciary functions, large and small businesses, military and other services and so on.
Some countries are seeing increasing protests at large scale corruption. In India, a largely non-violent movement has sprung up, which has also inspired anti-corruption campaigners in Nepal. In Brazil, inspired by the way protesters in Spain have used social networks, technology has been used to increasingly campaign against corruption there.
The global financial crisis has made conditions worse in many places for many people. Increasing food prices and other policy decisions governments are pushing through is leading to many volatile conditions, and it may be that this is giving a much needed push for large-scale grassroots and civil society movements against debilitating corruption.
This update to the corruption section includes an overview of some of the protests mentioned above.
Read full article: Corruption

Health epidemics have a multilayered, long-standing impact on society as a whole, and an inordinate impact on women. Particularly in a country like Iraq where progress on women's rights and issues has been slowly gaining more traction in recent years, the coronavirus threatens to halt progress on these key issues and give lower priorities to women's concerns that are still vital during such a time of crisis. While more men than women seem to get infected with the new coronavirus globally--there is no gender-disaggregated data for Iraq--, the social impact of the virus in countries that already have been through the worst of the pandemic can serve as important indicators for Iraq.

The social impact of the coronavirus has had an uneven impact on women more than men in the first countries hit by the coronavirus in East Asia. Notably, in South Korea, women have taken on a larger burden than men in taking care of children forced to stay at home due to school closures, as societal norms more often place the burden for childcare on women. Not only does this put greater pressure on women who are in many cases already the primary caretakers at home, but it makes them more likely to lose their jobs as they are forced to divert more time to childcare. These societal norms also mean women are more likely to be exposed by the virus, as they are stuck in a caretaker role for sick family members and makeup over 70% of the healthcare sector according to a World Health Organization Report.

Women forced to stay home and work less in order to dedicate more time to caretaking also means that women are more likely to suffer from the economic impact of the virus, whether that means job loss or wage reductions. This means that even after the virus has effectively contained, women are more likely to suffer from the economic fallout than men long after the virus is gone.

In addition, in China, rights activists reported an increase in domestic violence cases, as lockdowns and economic pressure have increased tensions in many households. Particularly at the epicenter of the virus in Wuhan, China, activists reported a threefold increase in domestic abuse cases. The quarantine measures in place, while cases were at their height in China, made it difficult for activists to provide aid, and diverted police attention away from assisting women who suffered from domestic abuse. This disruption of support networks makes it more difficult for women to report domestic abuse cases and to get away from their abusers.

Social, cultural, and political barriers to women's participation in Iraq might lead to disproportionate effects based on gender. First, there have already been voices raising concerns that some families might not allow women who had tested positive for the virus to be quarantined, as more traditional culture is against women to remain unaccompanied. Not only would this present a serious threat to the health of individual women, but such refusals by conservative families to follow the recommendations of medical personnel may contribute to undermining the government measures to contain the virus. Second, women's representation in government is already limited in Iraq, and with a limited voice in the decision-making chambers of government, their gender-sensitive concerns will likely be less of a priority to Iraq's policy makers. And finally, Iraq's economic situation that was in decline even before the outbreak might further impact the poor economic opportunities already facing women in Iraq.

Beyond the loss of life and social and economic impacts on men and women in Iraq, the crisis is also an opportunity for the government and civil society to increase engagement with the most vulnerable groups, including women, and bring them in as a major element of preventing the spread of the virus. Societal norms placing women into the primary caretaker role in homes means they will have a greater awareness of how the virus is spreading, so they can report more accurate information. In addition, polling conducted in several countries suggests that women are more concerned with the spread of the virus than men. The government could take advantage of this trend by bringing women into the process of raising awareness and concern about the virus among Iraq's population.

Given the unequal impact, the social impact of coronavirus will have on women, the Iraqi government and civil society partners should prioritize making sure issues that impact women are not sidelined during the crisis. Support networks should strengthen their outreach efforts and make resources for women's health and domestic abuse support more accessible, ideally with government backing. It is especially important that the government prioritize getting out accurate information on the coronavirus and work with the support of tribal and religious leaders to encourage families to follow quarantine procedures for women who test positive for the virus.


Women participating in NDI's National Reconciliation Program prepare food baskets in Kirkuk to help their community cope with movement restrictions taken in response to COVID-19

Gender, Women and Democracy, Countries: Iraq

Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, talks with David Axelrod about the prospects for the Middle East peace process in the Trump era, the rapid changes transforming society which he chronicles in his latest book, and why he disagrees with President Obama's decision to not pursue more direct American intervention in the Syrian civil war.
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NDI's Chris Fomunyoh is once again joined by Ambassador Johnnie Carson as they discuss the steps that can be taken to strengthen democracy. They continue their conversation with their thoughts on the key challenges and opportunities facing Africa this year.
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Johnnie Carson: When female voices are not heard, the conversation is crippled, the policy is crippled, the institutions are crippled and the results are crippled.
Chris Fomunyoh: I'm Chris Fomunyoh, senior associate and regional director for Central and West Africa at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, NDI. Welcome to this edition of DemWorks.

Again we're joined by Ambassador Johnnie Carson, a proud member of the board of directors of The National Democratic Institute, NDI with a 37 year career in the U.S. Foreign Service focus on Africa. In our previous episode, you spoke about the risk of back sliding. So for this episode, we will focus on the steps that can be taken to strengthen democracy in Africa.

I'd like us to pivot a little bit to the Sahel because in Tanzania we see the back sliding that's coming from political actors themselves, but there's something happening in the Sahel, which is a region in which we see a lot of political commitment to democratic governance, whether it's from the leaders and activists in Niger Republic, in Burkina Faso and in Mali, but at the same time these countries are coming under tremendous pressure from violent extremists who are coming across the desert and destabilizing what would be an emerging democracy and what concerns do you have and how do you think organizations like NDI, like USIP and others that have the self-power expertise, so to speak can contribute to the efforts to counter violent extremism like Sahel and also the whole of Africa?

JC: Chris you're absolutely right and we should all be concerned about outside forces that can come in and destabilize a country, its politics, its economy and its society and across the Sahel we in fact see this happening. The challenges to stability, to democracy to holding free and transparent and creditable elections and having democratic systems that work, are not only challenged by sometimes authoritarian leaders seeking to maintain power and control, we also can see this emerging as a result of exogenous forces coming in from outside, and here we see non-state actors undermining stability across the Sahel, which is creating tension for democracies and tensions for states.

I think one of the things that is absolutely critical in addressing the problems with the Sahel is for government to reconnect with their citizens, to put in place the kinds of services that citizens are looking for and are demanding and expecting. They need to be responsive to the needs that they, citizens believe are not there and they have to have these connections in order to build up resilience, to build up strength against the ideologies and to the negative forces that are brought in by extremist groups.

It is extremists groups across the Sahel are taking advantage of the absence of good services and good connectivity between government and citizens and one of the things that must accompany the security response is in fact a development and government response. Security alone cannot end the problems in the Sahel. It's an important ingredient but the most important ingredient is government going in and establishing responsible connections, providing services, education, healthcare, sanitation, water cattle feeding stations and services that citizens require and are being deprived of.

So one of the things that must be hand in hand and be out front is not the military response and the security response but the governance response, the social service response and if that is absent, the security response will be deficient and will not work.

CF: In fact, I'm so thankful you say that, because I know that you and other members of our board, Secretary Albright, in particular the chair of our board, you've been emphasizing reinforcing this message about democracy and development component as part of the toolkit in conquering violent extremism and in fact, that's the approach that NDI is taking to its work in the Sahel because we currently have ongoing programs in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, and our focus, the main focus of that piece of work is on people, processes and the politics and trying to create platforms where governments can reconnect with citizens at a grassroots level.

So in a number of cases we've set up platforms where civil society with legislatures and members of the executive branch, including representatives of the security services get together regularly to figure out what the challenges are in various communities and how to foster inter-communal dialogue and better relationships between the security services and the populations that they seek to serve, because you may remember there was a UN study that said that in many of the cases where violent extremism persist, that 70% of the people who join extremist organizations, are reacting to poor performance by security services and you have paid a lot of attention to Nigerian and the whole Boko Haram phenomenon.

I don't know how this would fit into our conversation with regards to the Sahel as well.


JC: I think it also very pertinent for Nigeria, and I too have seen studies of some very distinguished organizations, Mercy Corps and others that talk about why people are recruited and indeed, the authoritarian sometimes brutal nature of security forces towards communities that they should be protecting drives individuals away from the government and into the hands of Boko Haram.

Even the origin of the current violence in Northern Nigeria has its origins in the brutal extrajudicial killing of Boko Haram's first leader in 2009. His apprehension, his questioning, his interrogation, torture and mistreatment were all recorded on someone's cellphone and became widely seen throughout the country and throughout the north. Two years later, after that event in 2009 we saw and upsurge in 2011 and the activities of Boko Haram and indeed people continued to say that the brutal nature in which the security forces sought to root out Boko Haram, in fact generated more recruits for Boko Haram than it did for support for the government's efforts.

It is absolutely critical, it's absolutely critical that security forces recognize that they have a responsibility to protect the civil liberties and the human rights of the citizens of the state that they are protecting and that the way they treat the individuals in areas that they go into, may have an impact on their ability to ultimately win the conflict, but one thinks of Nigeria and particularly of the North East and there again weak institutions of corruption of lack of social services are all playing a major part in why the conflict in that region continues.

In the north east of Nigeria particularly and the three most affected states, Borno, Yobe and Adamawa. Those three states have the lowest social indicators of any of Nigeria's 36 states, less access to education, to healthcare, to water resources and to jobs and access and this all plays out as well. Governments needs to be responsive to their citizens and while a security response is important, governance and providing social services and the needs to citizens to build resilience is critical as well.

CF: This seems like a good place to take a short break. For well over 35 years NDI has been honored to work side by side with courageous and committed pro-democracy activists and leaders around the world to help contribute to develop the institutions practices and skills necessary for democracy's success.

I realize it's many countries to cover but in the few minutes that are left, I just see if you have any parting words for four countries that we haven't really focused that much on and those are Ethiopia, Kenya, The Democratic Republic of Congo and we'll exit with Cameroon. What are your thoughts?

JC: My thoughts on Ethiopia. It is absolutely essential that those of us who support a democracy and democratic progress lend all of our efforts to those of the Ethiopian government to ensure that the democratic experiment that is underway is successful. Prime Minister Abiy won the Nobel Prize for bringing about peace with Eritrea but the more important thing is that we, outside step up our effort to help him ensure that his legislative elections, this year, are successful and that we do what we can to strengthen his country's democratic progress.

He has appointed and outstanding leader, Birtukan, former opposition leader, spent many years in jail as his country's election commissioner. We need on the outside to provide the kind of technical and financial and advocacy support that she might need to put in place the architecture for running the country's elections. It will in fact be the first real serious elections in that country since the collapse of the Derg in the early 1990s. So it's important that we help do this.

Ethiopia is Africa's second most populous country behind Nigeria and it's important that we help democracy there. It's also a key and strategic state in the region bordering a number of other countries that will look to the success of what happens here. So we need to support.

Kenya, will have elections next year. It is important that there be a continuation in the improvement of the country's electoral agencies. The shadow of the flawed and failed and controversial and violent elections of 2007 and 2008 continue to be a shadow. The controversies associated with the last elections and court decisions there continue to hang over. It is important to continue to support civil society, support the electoral commission and work with the Kenyan government to ensure an outcome.

It appears very clearly that President Kenyatta wants to leave a positive legacy of progress, economically, politically and electorally. This will be a challenge but we should support the process moving forward. The features are still there.

CF: In fact, I should say before end up with the last two countries that for listeners, Ethiopia has got a parliamentary system of government. That's why the parliamentary elections are extremely important, the national elections for Ethiopia and also with regards to Kenya, as you say, President Uhuru Kenyatta would like to leave a good legacy. He's coming to the end of his second term and NDI working with partners on the continent has been very strong on the issue constitutionalism, respect for rule of law. In fact, we had a continent wide conference in Niamey, Niger Republic last October on the whole question of presidential term limits and we'll be having a second conference in Botswana in June to discuss term limits with former African heads of states and various other partners on the continent.

Just to say that, as leaders relinquish power when their terms come to an end, they help consolidate and strengthen democratic practices and institutions. So, with the two remaining countries-

JC: I applaud President Kenyatta for saying very early on that he would adhere to the constitution, he would serve two terms and step down. This is an important message for the most important country in East Africa, especially looking at the neighboring states, particularly Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda where leaders there have found ways to extend themselves in office. He recognizes the importance of transition at the top and allowing the citizens of the country to select new leadership on a constitutional basis rather than trying to alter the constitution to eliminate term limits, age limits and perpetuate themselves in power.

So I hope others in the region are in fact looking at Kenya's model. One jumps across to West Africa and looks at President Paul Biya who's been in power for three decades, plus shows no desire whatsoever to leave office. Here is a man who has lost touch with his citizens and the communities of his country and because he has lost touch with his citizens, because there have been structural deficiencies and weaknesses and the institutions that he is responsible for, we now see a country that is suffering from three or four major political crisis, crisis with the English speaking portion of this country in the south west, the emergence of Boko Haram and radicalism across the border from Nigeria in the north west and problems of herders and farmers driven by drought and climate conditions.

President Biya has lost touch with the needs of his citizens and his government has not been responsive to anyone but himself and a small political elite. I think it is important for the international community to point out the failures and the flaws of his governance, the corruption that underpins it and to support those internally who are pushing for a constitution and political policies that fundamentally change the nature and structure of society, political architecture in society.

CF: You're so right, because that's one country that it's got tremendous potential but that it's not pulling its weight at all and because of its strategic location, invariably weakens other countries in the central Africa sub region, as well as in West Africa too and it's now taking full advantage of what could be real opportunities to improve the wellbeing of its citizens.

We'll be right back after this quick message.

And let's end with the country right in the heart of the continent, The Democratic Republic of Congo. I was in Kinshasa in October and met with political leaders and opinion leaders across the board, civil society, religious leaders who are very powerful in the Congo, very influential and I came away, I should say, a little more optimistic than I was going in. I was quite apprehensive given what has transpired in the 2018 presidential elections but after talking to the Congolese, I got a sense that a genuine attachment to reform.

Everybody wants some reforms of the political process or the electoral process and the key question is whether they are going to be able to set aside their personal agendas and actually get together to help this country, which has got tremendous resources and tremendous potential get back on its feet. I was very impressed by the fact that most of the leaders in Congo are pretty young. I know that you and I have talked about Congo for many, many times and when you were still in the administration you had to deal with some of their crisis.

I don't know what you take is on the present leadership and the present challenges but also the opportunities that present themselves in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

JC: Let me say that The Democratic Republic of the Congo has more unrealized potential than any other large state in Africa and that potential has continued to be in held in check and not realized because of the poor nature of the politics that have occurred there since the 1960s.

The 2018 elections were deeply flawed and irregular and not representative, I think, of the vote of the people. The one thing that one can say about the process that it did lead to President Kabila stepping down and a new younger president, Tshisekedi coming into power. There was immediately after the election a strong feeling that Tshisekedi was going to be instrument of Kabila going forward in that his leadership and his authority and his ability to do things would be substantially constrained. Tshisekedi has shown some degree of independence.

It is again important to recognize that there is little we can do to rerun that election or to reverse it but there is something that all of us can do going forward, and that to put pressure on President Tshisekedi to ensure that the electoral commission is strengthened, it has more independence, more technical capacity and more of an ability to deliver a more responsible, fair and transparent election going forward.

It is also important that he continue the fight against corruption, that he begin to put in place the kind of economic reforms that are going to unleash the potential of the Congo and to provide the people, The Democratic Republic of the Congo an opportunity to realize so many of the opportunities that they have been denied in the past. He has shown more independence than I thought but it is important that he not stop, that he continue to move forward, that he open up political space and continue to open it up for civil society, for the opposition, for the media, that he not constrain but unleash the country's potential and that he continue to show both in reality and fact his independence away from Kabila and those who were around him in the past.

He will be judged on the next four years very keenly, but it's important that the institutions of democracy to the extent that we can help civil society strengthen them, that they be nurtured and pushed forward. Elections and democracy...Democracy doesn't depend essentially, solely on elections. It is institutions that must be strengthened and we can help the DRC and civil society move those forward.

Again, working effectively with religions groups, Catholic Church, a very powerful instrument, working with women's groups, with working youth groups across the DRC and working with an emerging entrepreneurial class of young Congolese as well. We have to nurture and strengthen and push them forward. These next elections will be able to tell us whether there's been progress. President Tshisekedi needs to continue to move forward.

CF: Thank you very much Ambassador Johnnie Carson. It's really been an honor to have you do this tutor for us on the entire continent. Of course there still would always be ground to cover. As you were speaking, I thought about what late President John F Kennedy said about democracy as a never ending endeavor, and so NDI and similar organizations will continue to work side by side with our African partners to make sure that we can support them, give them the support and share experiences that they need so that we can all collectively, continue to work to strengthen and support democracy in countries like the DRC, Ethiopia, Sudan and across the entire continent.

Thank you also for being a member of our board of directors. We are extremely proud of that and extremely proud of the partnership that NDI has with USIP and hope that our two organizations would continue to work together to support the growth of democracy across Africa and to our listeners, can I just say thank you for sharing in this edition of DemWorks, to follow our next podcast. Please check us out on our website www.NDI.org.

Thank you for listening.


Ambassador Johnnie Carson





Peace, Security and Democratic Resilience,

In fragile states, democracy needs, even more, strengthening in times of pandemics as citizens and institutions are exposed to increased vulnerabilities. In some cases incipient dialogue and reconciliation networks may break down as social groups turn inward as a self-protection reflex, cultural barriers might exclude women and other marginalized groups from receiving healthcare, and armed groups might exploit the situation to increase their influence. In addition to the extraordinary effort of medical personnel providing life-saving health services, governments, civil society, and citizens alike need to do their part.
Trust in institutions is key to citizens' compliance with measures that restrict individual liberties. Extraordinary measures, such as declaring a state of emergency, restricting movement, and mobilizing emergency funds, come with an increased need for government leadership and responsibility. The government's response needs to be measured and expenses appropriate, though. More than ever, the executive branch of the government should allow parliamentary control over policy implementation, because lack of proper and functional oversight mechanisms may lead authorities to abuse—or be seen as abusing—their powers.
As multiple priorities will compete for limited resources in the coming weeks and months, political parties should build political consensus not only on ways to manage the current health crisis but also on a path to socio-economic recovery over the coming months.
Strengthen social solidarity. The distribution of resources to treat medical cases—and to protect communities at large—should be and viewed as being fair; a sense of inequity can lead to deteriorating social cohesion due to perceptions that some regions or ethno-sectarian groups are getting more than their fair share. Encourage cross-group networks of solidarity that complement government efforts.
Demonstrate effective leadership and communication. Political leaders have a duty to make tough decisions, but also reassure citizens and inspire those in the frontlines of the fight against the coronavirus. Leaders should explain the strategy, and show empathy, letting experts tackle medical and legal details. The government should communicate often, with "one voice," and with clarity. Always tell the truth—misleading information or manipulated statistics tend to avenge quickly, especially in an age when everyone can easily share information using smart devices. Also, keep in mind that preexisting socio-economic and political issues will not disappear during this time; constituents still need access to services, jobs, safety, etc.
Media and citizens need to exercise good judgment and critical thinking to avoid creating panic and inflicting unnecessary suffering on the already stressed population. Deliberate disinformation is meant to sow confusion, distrust between social groups, between citizens and their government, and lead eventually to doubt that democracy can delivery in times of crisis.
Have a positive outlook—acknowledge the effort and give hope. People need inspiring models, and strong characters are forged in difficult times. Moreover, fragile countries need positive stories of challenges to overcome together to spawn a sense of resilience and pride. All should praise the hard work and commitment of first responders and try to instill the same values of self-sacrifice, discipline, and resilience across the public sector and the society at large. Last but not least, decision-makers should project hope and explain how the country and the society will be transformed and made stronger, how it will be more cohesive, through a rediscovered sense of common purpose.


Credit: Ibrahim Naji

Democracy (General), Countries: Iraq

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

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

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


World map of Coronavirus (Covid-19)



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

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

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





Democracy (General), Elections Podcasts Listen democracy

Mary Elizabeth King on Civil Action for Social Change,
the Transnational Women's Movement, and the Arab Awakening







Nonviolent resistance remains by and large a marginal
topic to IR. Yet it constitutes an influential idea among idealist social
movements and non-Western populations alike, one that has moved to the center
stage in recent events in the Middle East. In this Talk, Mary King—who has spent over 40 years promoting nonviolence—elaborates
on, amongst others, the women's movement, nonviolence, and civil action more
broadly.






Print version of this Talk (pdf)






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



The field of International Relations is different from
Peace and Conflict Studies; it has essentially to do with relationships between
states and developed after World War I. In the 1920s, the big debates concerned
whether international cooperation was possible, and the diplomatic elite were
very different from diplomats today. The roots of Peace and Conflict Studies go
back much further. By the late 1800s peace studies already existed in the
Scandinavian countries. Studies of industrial strikes in the United States were
added by the 1930s, and the field had spread to Europe by the 1940s. Peace and
Conflict Studies had firmly cohered by the 1980s, and soon encircled the globe.
Broad in spectrum and inherently multi-disciplinary, it is not possible to walk
through one portal to enter the field.



To me it is also important that Peace and Conflict
studies is not wary of asking the bigger hypothetical questions such as 'Can we
built a better world?' 'How do we do a better job at resolving conflicts before
they become destructive?' 'How do we create more peaceable societies?' If we do
not pose these questions, we are unlikely to find the answers. Some political scientists say that they do not wish to
privilege either violence or nonviolent action. I am not in that category,
trying not to privilege violence or
nonviolent action. The field of peace and conflict studies is value-laden in
its pursuit of more peaceable societies. We need more knowledge and study of
how conflicts can be addressed without
violence, including to the eventual benefit of all the parties and the larger
society. When in 1964 Martin Luther King Jr received
the Nobel Peace Prize, his remarks in Oslo that December tied the nonviolent
struggle in the United States to the whole planet's need for disarmament. He said
that the most exceptional characteristic of the civil rights movement was the
direct participation of masses of people in it. King's remarks in Oslo were also
his toughest call for the use of nonviolent resistance on issues other than
racial injustice. International nonviolent action, he said, could be utilized
to let global leaders know that beyond racial and economic justice, individuals
across the world were concerned about world peace:



I venture to suggest [above all] . . . that . . . nonviolence become
immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field
of human conflict, by no means excluding relations between nations . . . which
[ultimately] make war. . . .



In the half century since King made his address in
Oslo, nonviolent civil resistance has not been allocated even a tiny fraction
of the resources for study that have been dedicated to the fields of
democratization, development, the environment, human rights, and aspects of
national security. Many, many questions beg for research, including intensive
interrogation of failures. Among the new global developments with which to be
reckoned is the enlarging role of non-state, non-governmental organizations as
intermediaries, leading dialogue groups comprised of adversaries discussing
disputatious issues and working 'hands-on' to intervene directly in local
disputes. The role of the churches and laity in ending Mozambique's civil war
comes to mind. One challenge within IR is how to become more flexible in
viewing the world, in which the nation state cannot control social change, and
with the widening of civil space.





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



I
came from a family that was deeply engaged with social issues. My father was the
eighth Methodist minister in six generations from North Carolina and Virginia.
The Methodist church in both Britain and the United States has a history of
concern for social responsibility ― a topic of constant discussion in my home
as a child and young adult. When four African American students began the
southern student sit-in movement in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1,
1960, by sitting-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter, I was still in college.
Although I am white, I began to think about how to join the young black people
who were intentionally violating the laws of racial segregation by conducting
sit-ins at lunch counters across the South. Soon more white people, very like
me, were joining them, and the sweep of student sit-ins had become truly
inter-racial. The sit-in movement is what provided the regional base for what
would become a mass U.S. civil rights movement, with tens of thousands of
participants, defined by the necessity for fierce nonviolent discipline. So,
coming from a home where social issues were regularly discussed it was almost
natural for me to become engaged in the civil rights movement. And I have
remained engaged with such issues for the rest of my life, while widening my
aperture. Today I work on a host of questions related to conflict, building
peace, gender, the combined field of gender and peace-building, and nonviolent
or civil resistance. At a very young age, I had started thinking as a citizen
of the world and watching what was happening worldwide, rather than merely in
the United States.



Martin Luther King (to whom I am
not related) would become one of history's most
influential agents for propagating knowledge of the potential for constructive
social change without resorting to violence. He was the most significant exemplar
for what we simply called The Movement. Yet the movement had two southern
organizations: in 1957 after the success of the Montgomery bus boycott of
1955-56, he created, along with others, the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC). The other organization was the one for which I worked for
four years: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pron. snick), which initially came into being literally to coordinate
among the leaders of the student sit-in campaigns. As the sit-ins spread across
the South, 70,000 black, and, increasingly, white, students participated. By
the end of 1960, 3,600 would have been jailed.



SCLC and SNCC worked together but
had different emphases: one of our emphases in SNCC was on eliciting leadership
representing the voices of those who had been ignored in the past. We
identified many women with remarkable leadership skills and sought to
strengthen them. We wanted to build institutions that would make it easier for
poor black southern communities to become independent and move out of the
'serfdom' in which they lived. Thus we put less prominence on large
demonstrations, which SCLC often emphasized. Rather, we stressed the building
of alternative (or parallel) institutions, including voter registration,
alternative political parties, cooperatives, and credit unions.





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



One requirement is a subject that
has virtually disappeared from the schools in the United States: the field of
geography. It used to be taught on every level starting in kindergarten, but
has now been melded into a mélange called 'social sciences'. You would be
surprised at how much ignorance exists and how it affects effectiveness. I
served for years on the board of directors of an esteemed international
non-profit private voluntary organization and recall a secretary who thought
that Africa was a country. This is not simplistic — if you don't know the names
of continents, countries, regions, and the basic political and economic
history, it's much harder to think critically about the world. Secondly,
students need to possess an attitude of reciprocity and mutuality. No perfect
country exists; there is no nirvana without intractable problems in our world.
No society, for example, has solved the serious problems of gender inequity
that impede all spheres of life. Every society has predicaments and problems
that need to be addressed, necessitating a constant process. So we each need to
stand on a platform in which every nation can improve the preservation of the
natural environment, the way it monitors and protects human rights, transitions
to democratic systems, the priority it places on the empowerment of women, and
so on. On this platform, concepts of inferior and superior are of little value.



You also co-authored an article in 1965 about the role of women and how working in a political movement for equality
(the civil rights movement) has affected your perceptions of the relationship
between men and women. Do you believe that the involvement of women in the
Civil Rights Movement brought more gender equality in the USA and do you think
involvement in Nonviolent Resistance movements in other places in the world
could start such a process?



From within the heart of the civil
rights movement I wrote an article with Casey Hayden, with whom I worked in
Atlanta in the main office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and in the
Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. Casey
(Sandra Cason) and I were deeply engaged in a series of conversations involving
other women in SNCC about what we had been learning, the lessons from our work aiding
poor black people to organize, and asking ourselves whether our insights from
being part of SNCC could be applied to other forms of injustice, such as inequality
for women. The document reflected our growth and enlarging understanding of how
to mobilize communities, how to strategize, how to achieve lasting change, and
was a manifestation of this expanding awareness. The title was Sex and Caste – A Kind of Memo. Caste is an ancient Hindu demarcation
that not only determines an individual's social standing on the basis of
the group into which one is born, but also differentiates and assigns
occupational and economic roles. It cannot be
changed. Casey and I thought of caste as comparable to the sex of one's birth.
Women endure many forms of prejudice, bias, discrimination, and cruelty merely
because they are female. For these reasons we chose the term caste. We sent our
memorandum to forty women working in local peace and civil rights movements of
the United States. The anecdotal evidence is strong that it inspired other
women, who started coming together collectively to work on their own
self-emancipation in 'consciousness raising groups.' It had appeared in Liberation magazine of the War Resisters
League in April 1966 and was a catalyst in spurring the U.S. women's movement; indeed, the consciousness-raising
groups fuelled the women's movement in the United States during the 1970s. Historians
reflect that the article provided tinder for what is now called 'second-wave
feminism', and the 1965 original is anthologized as one of the
generative documents of twentieth-century gender studies.



We
have to remember that women's organizations are nothing new, but have been
poorly documented in history and that much information has been lost. Women
have been prime actors for nonviolent social change in many parts of the world
for a long time. New Zealand was the first country to grant women the vote, in
1893, after decades of organizing. Other countries followed: China, Iran, later
the United States and the United Kingdom. Women in Japan would not vote until
1946. IR expert
Fred Halliday contends that one of the most remarkable transnational movements
of the modern age was the women's suffrage movement. The movement to enfranchise women may have been the biggest
transnational nonviolent movement of human history. It was a significant
historical phenomenon that throws light on how it is sometimes easier to bring
about social and political change now than in the past.





Nonviolent movements seem to be growing
around the world, and not only in dictatorships but also in democracies in
Europe and the USA. How do you explain this?



I think that the sharing of
knowledge is the answer to this question. Study in the field of nonviolent
action has accelerated since the 1970s, often done by people who are both
practitioners and scholars, as am I. Organizing nonviolently for social justice
is not new, but the knowledge that has consolidated during the last 40 years
has been major. The works of Gene Sharp
have been significant, widely translated, and are accessible through the Albert EinsteinInstitution. His first major work, The Politics of Nonviolent
Action, in three volumes, came out in 1973 (Boston: Porter Sargent
Publishers). It marked the development of a new understanding of how this form
of cooperative action works, the conditions under which it can be optimized,
and the ways in which one can improve effectiveness. Sharp's works have since been
translated into more than 40 languages. Also valuable are the works and
translations of dozens of other scholars, who often stand on his shoulders.
Today there may be 200 scholar-activists in this field worldwide, with a great
deal of work now underway in related fields. Knowledge is being shared not only
through translated works, but also through organizations and their training
programs, such as the War Resisters League International and the International
Fellowship of Reconciliation, each of which came into existence in Britain around
World War I. Both are still running seminars, training programs, and
distributing books. George Lakey's Training for Change and a new database at Swarthmore College that
he has developed are sharing knowledge. So is the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, which has built
a dramatic record in a short time, having run more than 400 seminars and
workshops in more than 139 countries. The three major films that ICNC has
produced (for example, 'Bringing Down a Dictator'), have
been translated into 20 languages and been publicly broadcast to more than 20
million viewers.



After its
success, leaders from the Serbian
youth movement Otpor! (Resistance) that in 2000 disintegrated the Slobodan Milošević dictatorship formed a network
of activists, including experienced veterans from civil-resistance struggles in
South Africa, the Philippines, Lebanon, Georgia, and Ukraine to share their
experiences with other movements. People can now more
easily find knowledge on the World Wide Web, often in their original language
or a second language, and they can find networks that share information about
their experiences, including their successes and failures.



I reject the Twitter explanation for
the increased use of nonviolent action or civil resistance, because all
nonviolent movements appropriate the most advanced technologies available. This
pattern is related to the importance of communications for their basic success.
Nonviolent mobilizations must be very shrewd in putting across their purpose,
their goals and objectives, preparing slogans, and conveying information on how
people can become involved. In order for people to join—bearing in mind that
numbers are important for success—it is critically important to make clear
what goal(s) you are seeking and why you have elected to work with civil
resistance. This decision is sometimes hard to understand for people who have
suffered great cruelty from their opponent, and who maintain 'but we are the
victims', making the sharing of the logic of the technique of civil resistance vital.





What would you say is the importance of
Nonviolent Resistance Studies in the field of International Relations and
Political Science? And how do you counter those who argue that some forms of
structural domination are only ended through violence?



In
this case we can look at the evidence and stay away from arguing beliefs or
ideology. Thanks to political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan,
who have produced a discerning work, Why Civil Resistance Works (2011), we now have
empirical evidence that removes this question from mystery. They studied 323
violent and nonviolent movements that occurred between 1900 and 2006 and found
that the nonviolent campaigns were twice as effective as violent struggles in
achieving their goals, while incurring fewer costly fatalities and producing
much greater prospects for democratic outcomes after the end of the campaign.
They found only one area in which violent movements have been more successful,
and that is in secessions. So, we don't need to dwell in the realm of opinion,
but can read their findings. Other scholars have written about the same issues
using qualitative data ― by doing interviews, developing case studies, and analytical
descriptions ― but the work of Chenoweth and Stephan is quantitative, putting
it in a different category due to its research methods.





Reading 'Why Civil Resistance Works' it
caught my eye that nonviolent campaigns seem less successful in the Middle East
and Asia than in other regions. Did you see that also in your own work? And if
so, do you have an explanation for it? In addition, do you believe that the
'Arab Awakening' is a significant turn in history, or did the name arise too
quickly and will it remain a temporary popular phrase?



What
I encountered in working in the Middle East was an expectation, notion, or hope
among people that a great leader would save them and bring them out of darkness.
This belief seems often to have kept the populace in a state of passivity.
Sometimes such pervasive theories of leadership are deeply elitist: one must be
well educated to be a leader, one must be born into that role, one must be
male, or the first son, etc. Such concepts of leadership discourage the taking
of independent civil action.



I think that the Arab Awakening has
been significant for a number of reasons. As one example, there had been a
widespread (and patronizing) assumption in the United States and the West that
the Arabs were not interested in democracy. We have heard from various sources
including Israel for decades that Arabs are not attracted to democracy. As a
matter of fact, I think that all people want a voice. All human beings
wish to be listened to and to be able to express their hopes and aspirations.
This is a fundamental basis of democracy and widely applicable, although
democracy may take different forms. The Arab Awakening rebutted this arrogant
assumption. This does not mean that the course will be easy. One of my Egyptian
colleagues said to me, 'We have had dictatorship since 1952, but after Tahir
Square you expect us to build a perfect democracy in 52 weeks! It cannot
happen!'



Among the first concessions
sought by the 2011 Arab revolts was rejection of the right of a dictator's sons
to succeed him. The passing of power from father to son has been a
characteristic of patriarchal societies, in the Arab world and elsewhere. Anthropologist John Borneman notes, 'The public renunciation of the son's claim to inherit the
father's power definitively ends the specific Arab model of succession that has
been incorporated into state dictatorships among tribal authorities'. In Tunisia to Egypt, Libya,
Syria, and Yemen (not all of which are successes), such movements have sought
to end the presumption of father-son inheritance of rule.



I believe that we are seeing the start of a broad democratization process
in the Middle East, not its end. The learning and preparation that had been occurring
in Egypt prior to Tahrir Square was extensive. Workshops had been underway for
10 to 15 years before people filled Tahrir Square. Women bloggers had for years
been monitoring torture and sharing news from outside. One woman blogger
translated a comic book into Arabic about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr, from the 1960s, and had it distributed all over Cairo. Labor unions had
been very active. According
to historian Joel Beinin, from 1998 to 2010 some 3 million laborers took part
in 3,500 to 4,000 strikes, sit-ins, demonstrations, and other actions,
realizing more than 600 collective labor actions per year in 2007 and 2008. In the years immediately before the revolution, these
actions became more coherent. Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old Google executive, set
up a Facebook page and used Google technologies to share ideas and knowledge
about what ordinary people can do. The April 6 Youth Movement, set up in 2008, three years before Tahrir, sent one of
its members to Belgrade in 2009, to learn how Otpor! had galvanized the
bringing down of Milošević. He returned to Cairo with materials and films,
lessons from other nonviolent movements, and workshop materials. This all goes
back to the sharing of knowledge. Yet the Egyptians have now come to the point
where they must assume responsibility and accountability for the whole and make
difficult decisions for their society. It will be a long and difficult process.
And it raises the question of what kind of help from outside is essential.





Why do you raise this point; do you think
outside help is essential?



I know from having
studied a large number of nonviolent movements in different parts of the globe
that the sharing of lessons laterally among mobilizations and nonviolent
struggles is highly effective. African American leaders were traveling by
steamer ship from 1919 until the outbreak of World War II to the Indian
subcontinent, to learn from Gandhi and the Indian independence struggles. This
great interchange between black leaders in the United States and the Gandhian
activists, as the historian Sudarshan Kapur shows in Raising
Up A Prophet (1992), was critically significant in the
solidification of consensus in the U.S. black community on nonviolent means. I have written about how the knowledge moved from East
to West in my book Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Scholarly exchanges and interchanges among activists
from other struggles are both potentiating and illuminating. Most
observers fail to see that nonviolent mobilizations often have very deep roots
involving the lateral sharing of experience and know-how.





You have written a book about the first
uprising, or 'intifada', in the Occupied Palestinian Territories between 1987
and 1993. The second Palestinian uprising did not contain much nonviolent
tactics though. Do you foresee another uprising soon? If not, why? If yes, do
you think that Nonviolent Actions will play again an important role in that
uprising, or is it more likely to turn violent?



Intifada is linguistically a
nonviolent word: It means shaking off and has no violent implication
whatsoever. (This word is utterly inappropriate for what happened in the
so-called Second Intifada, although it started out as a nonviolent endeavor.)
In the 1987 intifada, virtually the entire Palestinian society living under
Israel's military occupation unified itself with remarkable cohesion on the use
of nonviolent tools. The first intifada (1987-1993, especially 1987-1990)
benefited from several forces at work in the 1970s and 1980s, about which I
write in A Quiet Revolution (2007), one of which came from Palestinian activist
intellectuals working with Israeli groups, who wanted to end occupation for
their own reasons. These Israeli peace activists thought the occupation
degraded them, made them less than
human, in addition to oppressing Palestinians. The second so-called intifada
was not a 'shaking off'. For the first time, it bade attacks against the
Israeli settlements, which had not occurred before.



Let me put it this way: in virtually every situation, there is some
potential for human beings to take upon themselves their own liberation through
nonviolent action. We may expect that such potential is dormant and waiting for
enactment. Disciplined nonviolent action is underway in a number of
village-based struggles against the separation barrier in the West Bank right
now, in which Israeli allies are among the action takers. As another example,
the Freedom Theatre in Jenin is using Freedom Rides, a concept
adopted from the U.S. southern Civil Rights Movement, riding buses to the South
Hebron Hills villages and along the way using drama, music, and giant puppets
as a way of stimulating debate about Israeli occupation. Bloggers and writers
share their experiences (see e.g. this post by Nathan Schneider). For
the first time, as we speak, the Freedom Bus will travel from the West Bank to
make two performances in historic pre-1948 Palestine (Israel), in Haifa and the
Golan, in June 2013. A Palestinian 'Empty Stomach' campaign, led by Palestinian
political prisoners in Israel, has had some success in using hunger strikes to
press Israeli officials for certain demands. With the purpose of prevailing
upon Israel to conform to international resolutions pertaining to the
Palestinians and to end its military occupation, Palestinian civic
organizations in 2005 launched a Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign,
drawing upon the notable example of third-party sanctions applied in the
anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. The Palestinian Authority has called
for non-state observer status at the United Nations and supports the boycotting
of products from Israeli settlements resistance.



More and more Palestinians are now
saying, 'We must fight for our rights with nonviolent resistance'. Many
Israelis are also deeply concerned about the future of their country. I
recently got an email from an Israeli who was deeply affected by reading Quiet
Revolution and has started to reach out to
Palestinians and take actions to bring to light the injustices that he
perceives. Tremendous debate is underway about new techniques, novel processes,
and how to shift gears to more effective mutual action. The United States
government and its people continue to pay for Israel's occupation and
militarization, which has abetted the continuation of conflict, although it is
often done in the name of peace! The United States has not incentivized the
building of peace. It has done almost nothing to help the construction of
institutions that could assist coexistence.



Also,
it is very important for the entire world, including Israelis, to recognize
intentional nonviolent action when they see it. The Israeli government
persisted in denying that the 1987 Intifada was nonviolent, when the Palestinian
populace had been maintaining extraordinary nonviolent discipline for nearly
three years, despite harsh reprisals. Israeli officials continued to call it
'unending war' and 'the seventh war'. Indeed, it was not perfect nonviolent discipline,
but enough that was indicative of a change in political thinking among the
people in the Palestinian areas that could have been built upon. Although some
Israeli social scientists accurately perceived the sea change in Palestinian
political thought about what methods to use in seeking statehood and the
lifting of the military occupation, the government of Israel generally did not
seize upon such popularly enacted nonviolent discipline to push for progress.
My sources for Quiet Revolution
include interviews with Israelis, such as the former Chief Psychologist of the
Israel Defense Force and IDF spokesperson.





Your latest book is about the transitions
of the Eastern European countries from being under Soviet rule to independent
democracies. You chose to illustrate these transitions with New York Times
articles. Why did you chose this approach; do you think the NY Times was
important as a media agency in any way or is there another reason?



There
is another reason: The New York Times
and CQ Press approached me and asked if I would write a reference book on the
nonviolent revolutions of the Eastern bloc, using articles from the Times that I would choose upon which to
hang the garments of the story. The point of the work is to help particularly
young people learn that they can study history by studying newspapers. The book
gives life to the old adage that newspaper reporters write the first draft of
history. In the book's treatment of these nonviolent revolutions, I chose ten Times articles for
each of the major ten struggles that are addressed, adding my historical
analysis to complete the saga for each country. It had been difficult for Times reporters to get into Poland, for
example, in the late 1970s and the crucial year of 1980; they sometimes risked
their lives. Yet it's in the nature of journalism that their on-the-spot
reportage needed additional analysis; furthermore newspaper accounts often
stress description.



After
the 1968 Prague Spring, when the Soviet Union sent 750,000 troops and tanks
from five Warsaw Pact countries into Czechoslovakia, crushing that revolt,
across Eastern Europe a tremendous amount of fervent work got underway by small
non-official committees, often below the radar of the communist party states.
This included samizdat (Russian for
'self published'), works not published by the state publishing machinery,
underground publications that were promoting new ways of thinking about how to
address their dilemma. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania were the most
active in the Eastern bloc with their major but covert samizdat. As it was
illegal in Czechoslovakia for a citizen to own a photocopy machine, 'books'
were published by using ten pieces of onion-skin paper interspersed with carbon
sheets, 'publishing' each page by typing it and its copies on a manual
typewriter.



The
entire phenomenon of micro-committees, flying universities, samizdat boutiques,
seminars, drama with hidden meanings, underground journals, and rock groups
transmitting messages eluded outside observers, who were not thinking about
what the people could do for themselves. The economists and Kremlinologists who
were observing the Eastern bloc did not discern what the playwrights, small
committees of activist intellectuals, local movements, labor unions,
academicians, and church groups were undertaking. They did not imagine the
scope or scale of what the people were doing for themselves with utmost
self-reliance. In essence, no one saw these nonviolent revolutions coming, with
the exception of the rare onlooker, such as the historian Timothy Garton Ash. Even today the
peaceful transitions to democracy of the Eastern bloc are sometimes explained
by saying 'Gorby did it', when Gorbachev did not come to power until 1985. Or by
attributing the alterations to Reagan's going to Berlin and telling Gorbachov
to tear down the Wall. 



By
December 1981, Poland was under martial law, which unleashed a high degree of
underground organizing, countless organizations of self-help, reimagining of
the society, and the publishing of samizdat. Still, even so, some people
believe that this sweeping political change was top-down.  It is indisputably true that nonviolent
action usually interacts with other forces and forms of power, but I would say
that we need this book for its accessible substantiation of historically
significant independent nonviolent citizen action as a critical element in the
collapse of the Soviet Union.





You also mention Al Jazeera as an
important media agency in your most recent blog post at 'Waging Nonviolence'.
You wrote that Al Jazeera has an important role in influencing global affairs.
Could you explain why? And more generally, how important is diversification of
media for international politics?



Al
Jazeera generally has not been taking the point of view of the official organs
of governments of Arab countries and has usually not reported news from
ministries of information. Additionally, it often carries reports from local
correspondents in the country at issue. If you are following a report from
Gaza, it is likely to be a Gazan journalist who is transmitting to Al Jazeera.
If it is a report from Egypt, it may well be an Egyptian correspondent. Al
Jazeera also has made a point of reporting news from Israel, and utilizing
reporters in Tel Aviv, which may be a significant development. Certainly in the
2010-2011 Arab Awakening, it made a huge difference that reports were coming
directly from the action takers rather than the official news outlets of Arab
governments.



President
George W. Bush did not want Al Jazeera to come to the United States, because he
considered it too anti-American. I remember reading at the time that the first
thing that Gen. Colin Powell said to Al Jazeera was 'can you tone it down a
little?' when asking why Al Jazeera couldn't be less anti-American in its news.
To me, either you support free speech or you do not; it's free or it's not: You
can't have a little bit of control and a little bit of freedom.



Until
recently, Al Jazeera was not easily available in the United States, except in
Brattleboro, Vermont; Washington, DC; and a few other places. It was difficult
to get it straight in the United States. I mounted a special satellite so that
I could get Al Jazeera more freely. This does not speak well for freedom of the
press in the United States. This may change with the advent of Al Jazeera
America, although we still do not know to what degree it will represent an
editorially free press.



News
agencies are important for civil-resistance movements for major reasons.
Popular mobilizations need good communications internally and externally!  People need to understand clearly what is the
purpose and strategy and to be part of the making of decisions. Learning also crucially
needs to take place inside the movement: activist intellectuals often act as
interpreters, framing issues anew, suggesting that an old grievance is now
actionable. No one expects the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker,
and everyone else in the movement to read history and theory.



When
news media are interested and following a popular movement of civil resistance,
they can enhance the spread of knowledge. In the U.S. civil rights movement,
the Southern white-owned newspapers considered the deaths of black persons or
atrocities against African Americans as not being newsworthy. There was
basically a 'black-out', if you want to call it that, with no pun. Yet dreadful
things were happening while we were trying to mobilize, organize, and get out the
word. So SNCC created its own media, and Julian Bond
and others and I set up nationwide alternative outlets. Eventually we had 12
photographers across the South. This is very much like what the people of the
Eastern bloc did with samizdat — sharing and disseminating papers, articles,
chapters, even whole books. The media can offer a tremendous boost, but
sometimes you have to create your own.





Last question. You combine scholarship
with activism. How do you reconcile the academic claim for 'neutrality' with
the emancipatory goals of activism?



To
be frank, I am not searching for neutrality in my research. Rather, I strive
for accuracy, careful transcription, and scrupulous gathering of evidence. I
believe that this is how we can become more effective in working for justice,
environmental protection, sustainable development, pursuing human rights, or
seeking gender equity as critical tools to build more peaceable societies.
Where possible I search for empirical data. So much has been ignored, for
example, with regards to the effects of gendered injustice. I do not seek
neutrality on this matter, but strong evidence. For example, since the 1970s, experts
have known that the education of women has profoundly beneficial and measurable
effects across entire societies, benefiting men, children, and women. Data from
Kerala, India; Sri Lanka; and elsewhere has shown that when you educate women
the entire society is uplifted and that all indicators shift positively. The
problem is that the data have for decades been ignored or trivialized. We need
much more than neutrality. We need to interpret evidence and data clearly to
make them compelling and harder to ignore. I think that we can do this with
methodologies that are uncompromisingly scrupulous.





Mary Elizabeth King is professor of peace and conflict studies at the
UN-affiliated University for Peace and and is Scholar-in-Residence in the
School of International Service, at the American University in Washington, D.C.
She is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the
University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. Her most recent book is The
New York Times on Emerging Democracies in Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C.:
Times Reference and CQ Press/Sage, 2009), chronicling the nonviolent
transitions that took place in Poland,  Hungary, East Germany,
Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine in the late
1980s and early 1990s. She is the author of the highly acclaimed A
Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance (New
York: Nation Books, 2007; London: Perseus Books, 2008), which examines crucial
aspects of the 1987 uprising overlooked or misunderstood by the media,
government officials, and academicians. 





Related links





King's personal page 
Read the book edited by
King on Peace Research for Africa
(UNU, 2007) here (pdf) 
Read the book by King Teaching Model: Nonviolent Transformation of
Conflict (UNU, 2006) here (pdf)










Print version of this Talk (pdf)





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

Rainbow Rights Paralegal Training



A Conversation With LGBTI Activists on Community-Building

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

To celebrate International Youth Day 2020 Rachel Mims, Senior Program Officer for Youth Political Participation at NDI, is joined by three young leaders from Zambia, Lebanon, and Moldova. They discuss competitive youth debate as an opportunity to build political skills, actively contribute to solving social problems, and create greater space for youth inclusion in public life. For more information please go to https://www.ndi.org/youth-leading-debate
Find us on: SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | Google Play
Given Kapolyo: I don't believe in the saying young people are the future leaders. Because the truth is they tell us this for years and years and years, when I was 15 they told me you're a future leader, then I turned 20 and they said I'm a future leader, then they turned 25, and they said I'm a future leader, so then I'm now just waiting, I'm saying okay, when does the future come?
Now I think just this is time that we turn it around, and say young people should be the leaders of today, as well.
Rachel Mims: Today's young people deserve real opportunities to participate in political processes, and contribute to practical solutions that advance development. When given an opportunity to organize, voice their opinions, and play a meaningful role in political decision making, they consistently demonstrate their willingness and ability to foster positive lasting change. They also become more likely to demand and defend democracy, and gain a greater sense of belonging.
Recent global movements such as movements for climate justice and racial justice demonstrate that young people are demanding a shift in who has power, and in how that power is used, yet young people still find themselves marginalized from mainstream politics, and are limited in their ability to exercise the same influence over decision making processes. This is particularly true for young people who have experienced intersecting forms of marginalization and exclusion. At a time when global inequality is increasing, young people remain disproportionately impacted, and are expressing frustration with leaders and institutions that they perceive to be inaccessible, incapable, unresponsive, corrupt, and often repressive.
NDI works globally to support the political participation of young people through a variety of approaches that increase young people's agency, and create a more supportive environment. One approach involves helping young people develop competitive debating skills, including an issue analysis and framing, reasoning, public speaking, and active listening. NDI has supported [inaudible 00:02:05] programs in several countries, including longstanding programs in Jordan and Moldova, and more recent programs in Guatemala and Libya. We've seen the debate skills not only enhance political participation, but also contribute to holistic youth development. Debate builds practical skills that pave the way for young people to successfully engage in civil discourse and peaceful problem solving, both with their peers and with adult power holders.
I'm Rachel Mims, Senior Program Officer for Youth Political Participation at the National Democratic Institute, and today we are joined by three young leaders from Lebanon, Moldova, and Zambia, each working in different ways to apply their debate skills and actively contribute to solving social problems. As a result, they're creating greater space for youth inclusion in public life. First we'll hear from [Gibbon Carpolio 00:02:58]. Next up, Rachbenda Fou, and then Selena Decuzar. Welcome to Dem Works.
In Zambia, NDI partner with a chapter of the Center for Young Leaders of Africa, and Youth for Parliament, to gather young people from across political parties, media, and civil society organizations to debate solutions for increasing the number of young people in parliament. This debate program created an opportunity for youth from parties and civil society to change ideas, develop their public speaking and research skills, and to generate discussion around critical issues facing youth in Zambia.
We spoke with Given Kapolyo to learn more. Given, thank you for joining us today.
GK: Thank you so much for having me. It's a great pleasure to feature. First of all, I'm a young African female, my name is Given Kapolyo, I'm a young politician, I'm a student, I'm an activist, I'm an advocate, and a public speaker now. I can proudly call myself a public speaker, after I took part in the NDI public speaking that was called the Youth Debate Zambia.
I live in the northern part of Zambia. That's Kasama, northern province, Kasama, rural part of Zambia, so it was great that I was moved from the northern part of Zambia to the capital city, just to participate in the Youth Debate Zambia.
RM: Thank you, and thank you for telling us about all the different hats you wear. I hope to hear more about your activism, and other things that you're doing in politics.
Can you tell me more about your experience in the debate program? What was it like? What were some of the topics that you all discussed?
GK: We began with a training session. We covered the history of public speaking, we covered the tricks that we need for public speaking, how you draw the attention of a crowd, how you keep them engaged, and ordered. It was different young people from different parts of the country, and we were all brought together and were taught together, and then were given a topic. We were discussing how we can increase the number of young people in parliament, the number of youths in parliament, and it was a very profound experience, in the sense that we didn't just learn, then they'd give us a chance to actually show what we had learned from the training, and it was that interesting.
By the time we were leaving the training, there were people that were so confident to go back to their communities, and just speak change into their communities, into the crowds, and that was just how interesting, and just how meaningful it was to me and other participants that were there.
RM: I really love the point about public speaking, and this immediate sense of agency that young people feel, that they can go back and use their voice, and they have skills that they can start to put into use right away. Can you talk about the connection between some of the skills that you learned and your future political aspirations? I know that you're interested in running for public office.
GK: One of the things that we learned at the Youth Debate Zambia was that communication, public speaking and communication have a lot to do with politics, and with the youth standing out as a public figure, because it's they also mentioned how many great orators were [inaudible 00:06:34] were to get into public office because of how they spoke, how good they were at it, and the impacts that it just had in changing society.
For me as a young politician, first of all I must mention that the country that I'm from it's very difficult for a young female. First of all, it's very difficult for a female to make it into public office. It's even worse for a young female to make it. That, it also prepared me for how I could use my words to show people that not only will I be a voice for them, I could actually speak my heart out to them, tell them what my plans are, but then do it skillfully in a way that they buy into it, and are able to elect me, and even how because we dealt with topics on how you could make your speech relatable such that as you're telling your story somebody that is listening instantly feels like you're telling their story, and when they're able to relate with you it will be very easy for them to actually elect you as their leader, because they feel like you're a mirror of them, and then you can represent them better.
The training for me was actually a point that I think began a lot of things for me, because I knew I could speak, but then I didn't know I could use it to further my political ambition. When I went back home, in Kasana, I was able to speak to various groups. Just by me sharing my story with them, they were able to buy into the vision that I have for my ward, because I have aspirations of standing as a ward counselor next year, in our general elections, and it's been very helpful.
I've been able to know another important thing we learned is how you should be able to read your audience, so depending on who I'm talking to, I'm able to know which skills I should employ.
RM: Thank you. I know you can't see me, but I'm nodding vigorously over here, because you just shared, I think, so many important lessons with our listeners, just about how you can use these skills to further your political ambition, how things are different for young women, and how they face different barriers and challenges into getting into elected office, and how these skills help create an opening.
I want to talk about NDI's work in changing the face of politics, and it relates directly to what you mentioned about being a young woman in politics. NDI is launching a decade-long campaign to accelerate the pace of change on all aspects of women's empowerment, and that includes their participation in leadership and politics, and I wanted to hear from you what you think young people's role is in not only changing the face of politics, but ensuring that young women have a role to play, and can participate in politics.
GK: We need to become alive to the reality that our parents will not be here 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now, it is us that will be here. Every time I'm speaking to young people about young people involvement in politics and leadership and decision making and getting involved in civic spaces, I'm always telling them if we don't get involved now, then we are simply selling our future off ... Not even selling it off, we're simply giving it off for free. Because whatever our ... Those that we leave leadership to today, whatever decisions they make, or whatever they choose to do with the resources that we have, whatever they choose to do with our nation, they will not be here to face the repercussions, we will be here.
Most of our parliament, the Zambian parliament has over 158 seats, and only 2 people are below the age of 35, only two people are youth, but if we do get young people involved, then we do get young people into parliament, we will know to say this decision that I'm making today, I'm only 27, so the decision that I'm making today, 30 years from now the chances that I still will be here to answer for it and to face the repercussions of if I make a bad decision will linger in my mind, for even as I make a decision I'm thinking I'm not thinking five years from now, I'm thinking 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 years from now, because I'm assured I will still obviously be here. I feel the time is now that young people actually take over and provide solutions to many of these challenges, and many of the problems that our country, our continent, and even the world is facing today.
RM: So many of the points that you just talked about really point to the need for this culture shift, and a culture change within politics. I think a lot of what you are advocating for, particularly about greater youth inclusion, can help contribute to that shift, and politics being more inclusive and representative of young people.
I just really want to thank you for taking time to talk with us today, and to share your thoughts, and I really want to wish you all the best in your run for office. I think you would make an amazing political leader, and I'm really excited to see what your future holds, and where you'll go after your participation as a young person in politics.
GK: Thank you so much. I look forward to where I go to, so I keep working towards it. And this I'm guaranteed that I will get there. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure having this conversation with you. I look forward to further interactions.
RM: Us as well. Thank you again.
For more than 35 years, NDI has been honored to work with thousands of courageous and committed democratic activists around the world, to help countries develop the institutions, practices, and skills necessary for democracy's success. For more information, please visit our website, at www.NDI.org.
In Lebanon, NDI is collaborating with the television station MTV Lebanon, for its weekly program, It's About Time, which features political leaders responding to questions from the host and from young people who have been trained in policy analysis and debate skills by NDI. MTV Lebanon hopes that by expanding debate culture in the country and by proving that young people can debate, they will pave the way for hosting Lebanon's first debates between national political leaders before the next elections in 2022. The show has achieved broad viewership, and resulted in viral moments on social media, with some political leaders saying that they tune in specifically to watch the youth debate segment. I would like to introduce everyone to Rafka Noufal, a junior Lebanese lawyer, and active participant on the debate show. Rafka, thank you for joining us for the podcast today.
Rafka Noufal: Thank you for having me with you today.
RM: I'd like to start with you giving us a brief introduction about your work, and your background, and what brought you to the debate show.
RN: I'm a 24-years-old Lebanese junior lawyer. I studied law in the Holy Spirit University, a Catholic University in Lebanon, and I just graduated from my masters to a degree. I also have a certificate of completion of the [inaudible 00:14:06] university program on international criminal law and procedures, and am a very social person who's interested in politics and in all the topics that are rising inside our country. When I knew about the TV political show It's About Time, through my university, I was very excited and more willing to join this show because I saw it as a platform to raise our voice as the young people in Lebanon, and to give our opinion and our thoughts on all the political and social and economic topics that are arising inside our society.
I work as a lawyer now, [inaudible 00:14:42] bar association, and I work in an office that takes private law cases and more specifically criminal law cases. Throughout my work, I got familiar with the gaps and insecurities inside the Lebanese legal system.
RM: I see so much connection between your ability to do this work as a lawyer and having the opportunity to dig into these pressing political issues on the debate show. Can you tell me a little bit more about your experience on the show, and talk about some of what you gained, whether it's skills that you gained, or kind of how the show maybe changed your perspective about politics?
RN: In fact, the different trainings we did with NDI were very useful on many levels. First of all, it developed our skills in public speaking, which is very important in the life of politics, and to my work also of the lawyer. Also, these trainings triggered the reason and the logic inside every mind of the young people who participate in the show, and it let us discuss and have conversations people from all over the country, so this debate program let us know how to discuss, how to debate topics without hurting other people's feelings, or other people's opinions.
RM: Can you tell me a little bit more about some of the topics that you debated on the TV show, and maybe topics that came up that were a bit more controversial, or there was more, there were maybe more emotions, or opinions that people really wanted to share?
RN: First off, my last debate at the show was about the early elections in Lebanon. I was supporting that we should have an early election in Lebanon, to change the members of the parliament, because the government in Lebanon now, even the parliament, they are not doing enough work in order to take us, or to help Lebanon go through this economic situation, this economic crisis we're going through right now in Lebanon. I was supporting the fact that we should be doing an early election, to change the leaders, to change the member of the parliament. We need young people to get inside the parliament. We need new, free minds, that are not attached to the past, they are not divided by sectarianism. We need a civil country, not a country that is divided by sectarianism.
RM: Can you talk a little bit more about your thoughts on the protest, and what you see as a way forward not only for young people in Lebanon, but the entire so many people across the country have been engaged in the protests, kind of what do you see as a vision, or a way forward?
RN: I would like to start by giving, talking about the problem between this disconnection, between young people nowadays in Lebanon, and the political parties, before talking about the protests. In fact, political parties in Lebanon are still attached to the past, and they divide young people by sectarianism. You should follow this party because you are from the sect that this party supports, or also I think that political parties inside Lebanon lack any vision for the future beyond their personal interests, and the most important point is that they deny the youth right to participate in decision making process, because they are political parties that are doomed with ... How to say it? Political inheritance, and the cultural hierarchy that says that elders know better than young people, but in fact when that's not the case when it's faced with reality, because every generation faces new challenges, different from the challenges that the other generation faced, so all of this adding to the corruption that grows like a tumor inside [inaudible 00:18:54] infecting all the aspects after [inaudible 00:18:58] for about like the environment, infrastructure, and economic crisis led to the birth of this protest and this revolution that emerged inside the streets of Lebanon.
RN: I think that young people, and I'm one of them, we saw this revolution as a window of hope to change the current corrupted situation in the country, and maybe to take part of the decision making process, to give our opinion, our thoughts.
RM: Do you see some of the topics that have come up in debates, and young people's desire to protest and take part in the revolution, do you see that as a meaningful pathway to change?
RN: I think so. I think young people believe in these social movements because these social movements are based on the free minds, and are detached from sectarianism, and from inequality between the Lebanese people, and maybe these social movements can create in the future political parties that can govern Lebanon and help it to develop like other countries in the world.
RM: This year, under the banner of of Changing the Face of Politics, NDI is launching a decade-long campaign to accelerate the pace of change on all aspects of women's empowerment, and that includes their participation in leadership and politics. I wanted to ask you what you see as young people's role in changing the face of politics, and ensuring that young women specifically can participate and have a meaningful role in politics, and particularly in the context of Lebanon, this new politics that you all are attempting to usher in.
RN: I think that [inaudible 00:20:44] young people are making a step to bridge this gap between politics and youth people, because they are taking on important issues, such as climate change, mass immigration, and even women empowerment, however, I think that we still have a bit of problem inside the third-world countries, but as for women empowerment, I think Lebanon and and outside in other countries young people believe in gender equality between man and woman, and they don't consider gender as an indication for holding a political position.
In fact, we support us young people that competence, performances and efficiency are the only conditions for judging a person in a position of power, and not being a woman or a man. Thus, if we take charge in Lebanon, I think you will see more women engaged in the politics. For example, right now in Lebanon we are demanding the vote of the law for women's quota in all Lebanese election as a step to engage more women in the political life of the country.
RM: Do you think that this culture of youth debate, and young people sharing their voices on these important political topics, do you think that this trend will continue, in that it's important that young people continue to use debate to speak out about politics?
RN: The debating concept is important because first, it lets you build constructive arguments in a persuasive way, and you don't only talk just to talk, you have to talk with a logic and reason. Young people can express their opinion with public speaking skills, and to accept the opinion of other people without deciding them, or offending them, as I mentioned before.
RM: I really want to thank you for taking time out to share more with us about your political experience, and to talk about the political trends that we're witnessing in Lebanon. I think that a lot of what you shared can be really relevant for young people, and for others that are participating in politics, to really understand how this development skills and development of knowledge around debate can be useful for a political career.
RN: I would like also to thank NDI for all the training they did with us, and it was really a lifetime experience with them, and with It's About Time show.
RM: Great. Thank you.
RN: Thank you so much.
RM: NDI has worked with thousands of young people on the art of competitive policy debate, and has ongoing debate programs in three regions. To learn more about NDI youth debate programs, or access program resources, visit the Youth Leading Debate Initiative, on NDI.org.
In Moldova, NDI is facilitating the seventh iteration of the Challenger Program, which aims to help create the next generation of political leaders, policymakers, and civil servants. Challenger equips young people with the knowledge and skills to develop realistic public policies that respond to the needs and priorities of the people in Moldova. The youth debates take place in the second phase of the program, the policy debate school. During the program, the participants acquire research and analytical skills, and they also take part in developing a youth manifesto, which addresses important national problems faced by young people in the country.
I would now like to introduce you to Silena, who is a member of the Challenger Program, and is going to join us to talk a little bit about her experience. Hey, Silena, thanks for joining us today.
Selina Dicusar: Hello. Thank you for having me.
RM: I'd like to just start with you giving us a brief introduction about yourself, and telling us about your experience in the program.
SD: Okay. My name is Selena Dicusar. I am 20-years-old. I was born in the Republic of Moldova. Currently, I'm studying Moldova, at the international relations.
SD: I am a member of the Communication PR Department of the Erasmus Student Network Chisinau, but elections are currently underway, and I will run for Vice President. I am also participant of Challenger, and a double winner of the Best Speaker Award.
RM: Selena, thank you for that introduction. Can you tell me about your experience in the Challenger Program, why did you decide to join in the first place, and what do you think you gained from your participation in the program?
SD: It's certainly the most complex intense and in depth project that I've ever been involved in. I've had a unique experience participating in a project which changed my attitude towards politics, and taught me new skills. Firstly, I learned to value my knowledge in terms of languages and to apply them correctly in research. Secondly, I have learned to think critically, and always question any information I receive or process. And last but not least, I learned how to develop solutions.
About opportunities, yes, what I gained in Challenger helped me to properly recommend myself to the mayor of my native village, and prove that my ideas will help improve the situation in the village.
RM: Thank you. I think you brought up some really excellent points, particularly about this need to challenge information that we receive from different sources, and to really kind of understand what's being proposed for our different communities. Can you talk a little bit more about some of the debate skills? You mentioned that they connect to your political participation outside the program. What about the debate component helps prepare you for political engagement outside the program?
SD: First of all, the debate helped me understand how to make a manifesto, because we are writing manifestos in the program, and I think this is one of the most important skills that I have learned, and that have certainly helped me to engage more in politics out of the program.
RM: Great. Thank you. I want to talk a little bit about I know that you do quite a bit of work on the local level, and that you've been doing some work with the local mayor, so I want to talk about this trend that we're seeing, which is a bit of a disconnect between young people and formal political institutions, and we're really seeing young people kind of disengage from formal politics. I'm wondering based on your work in the community and on the local level what you think about this trend in young people moving away from formal politics, and also if you think that working on a local level is part of a solution or a viable pathway for young people to participate in politics.
SD: First of all, it is mandatory that parties and politicians stop underestimating youth. They shouldn't only change their attitudes, but also encourage young people to join parties, giving them the opportunity to work on the issues that interest them, and unfortunately one of the biggest issues between young people, political institutions, and parties in Moldova that they don't hear each other. Young people are often not appreciated fairly, they are not heard, and these of course discourages them from further action.
Local political participation is certainly a viable path that many Moldovans are unaware of, specifically my case about three or four young people and one curator from another city work on projects in our city [inaudible 00:28:24], those are the critical shortage of young people work is proceeding slowly. Most likely this is due to the fact that such work requires time and dedication. Is almost not rewarded financially, and among our youth experience is not in the first place for all. The situation is improving, the new generation is more politically active.
RM: Thank you, Selena, and I think a lot of the points that you made about how parties need to change their strategy about the way that they engage young people is really important, and also this need to work at multiple levels, that we're working at the lower level, but we're also creating opportunities at the national level, too, and I think your work experience speaks to that as well.
I want to talk a bit about young women's participation. This year, under the banner of changing the face of politics, NDI is launching a decade-long campaign to accelerate the pace of change on all aspects of women's empowerment, and this includes women's participation in politics. I want to ask you what you feel like young people's role is in ensuring that the face of politics changes, and that young women have more opportunities to participate.
SD: First of all, it seems to me that the new generation which is now growing up is more aware of the problems that humanity faces. This is a generation that can embrace changes slowly, and their role in ensuring that participation of women in politics is first of all to learning how to accept the leadership of a woman, and question the abilities of women and men working in the same area on the wages of equal criteria, and to better involve young women in politics we must first of all educate them because an educated woman is a strong woman who can defend her interests.
RM: Thank you. I think you know the point about it being a generational change, I think that's echoed in the other, the conversations with other young people, as well, is it seems like this generation is more willing to ensure that participation is inclusive, and then that includes young women as part of the conversation.
I really want to thank you for joining us today, and for sharing some insights about your participation in the program, and how you see your participation in Challenger really helping create political space for young people. Is there anything you want to add, in closing?
SD: I would like very much to thank the people coming here that created this program. It's a big challenge for Moldova to teach a generation of people that is aware of politics, that can change the political situation in the country, and the political culture, as well. I think if we get to teach more people how politics works, probably there will be a positive change in my country.
RM: Again, I just want to thank you for joining us, and answering the questions. I really wish you the best of luck in everything that you pursue, moving forward.
SD: Thank you very much.
RM: Thank you to our listeners. To learn more about NDI, or to listen to other Dem Works podcasts, please visit us at NDI.org.


Podcast Participants; Given Kapolyo, Rafka Noufal, Selina Dicusar.



24. Increasing Youth Political Inclusion through Debate

Democracy (General), #NDI #National Democratic Institute #Women #Citizen Participation #Youth

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














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














Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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







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







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











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







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







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







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







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







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











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







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







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











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







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







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







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







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







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











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







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







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







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







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











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







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







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







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







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







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











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







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







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







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











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







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







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







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











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








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






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







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







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







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







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











Related links










Faculty Profile at U-London


Personal webpage


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


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


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


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









Print version of this Talk (pdf)

John Dewey on the Horror of Making
his Poetry Public



This April's Fools interview is a preview for 'The Return of the Theorists: Dialogues with Great Thinkers in International Relations' (ed. Ned Lebow, Peer Schouten & Hidemi Suganami), now available at Palgrave.









After
various rounds of experimentation, two youthful IR scholars (the editor-in chief of this venture and Christian Bueger) bend space-time and
access an alternate reality with the ambition to conduct an interview for Theory
Talks with John Dewey. Dewey (1859-1952) was an American thinker often associated
with a school of thought that has become known as American pragmatism. He is today
largely known for his contributions to education studies, philosophy of science,
and the theory of democracy. In this Talk, the young scholars sound out Dewey
on what thinking tools his original worldview would provide for IR—after
resolving a small embarrassment.







TT Dear Mr. Dewey. Thank you so much for your
willingness to participate in this Talk. Theory
Talks is an open-access journal that contributes to International Relations
debates by publishing interviews with cutting-edge theorists. It is not often
that Theory Talks is able to overcome
space-time limitations and conduct a Talk with a departed theorist.



I am sorry—I think I have to interrupt you there…



TT Well, all right?



Yes, yes, the fact of the matter is that I am not a
theorist and refuse to be associated with that label! To purify theory out of
experience as some distinct realm, sirs, is to contribute to a fallacy that I
have dedicated my life to combat! I am afraid that this venture of yours, of
involving me in this Theory Talks, is
stillborn.



TT Dear Professor Dewey—with all due respect, we are
running ahead of matters here a little. The reason why we invited you is exactly
for you to expound your ideas—and reservations—regarding theory, practice, and
international relations. Would you be willing to bracket your concern for a
minute? We promise to get back to it.



Well my dear sirs—it is that you insist on a
dialogue—that restless, participative and dramatic form of inquiry that leads
to so much more insight than books—and that you have travelled from far by
means that utterly fascinate me, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.



TT Thank you. And let us from the outset emphasize
that by interviewing you for Theory Talks, we don't necessarily want to reduce
your contribution to thought to the practice of theorizing. Isn't it also
correct you have written poetry?



Now I am baffled a second time! I have never publicly
attempted my hand at the noble art of the poetic!



TT It has to be said, Mr. Dewey, that the problem of
what is and isn't public has perhaps shifted a bit since your passing away. That's
something we'd like to discuss, too, but the fact of the matter is that what
you have consistently consigned to the trashcan of your office at Columbia
University has been just as meticulously recovered by 'a janitor with a long
view'.



Oh heavens! You tell me I have been uncovered as a
versifier? What of my terrible scribbling has been uncovered you say?



TT Well, perhaps you recognize the one that starts
like:



I hardly
think I heard you call

Since
betwixt us was the wall

Of sounds
within, buzzings i' the ear

Roarings
i' the vein so closely near…



… 'That I was captured in illusion/Of outward things
said clear…' I well remember—a piece particularly deserving of oblivion. I
wrote that in the privacy of lonely office hours, thinking the world would have
the mercy not to allow a soul to lay its eyes on it!



TT We are sorry to say that besides this one, a total
of 101 poems has been recovered, and published in print—and you know, given
some advances in technology, circulation of text is highly accelerated, meaning
that one could very well say your poetry is part of the public domain.



So there I am, well half a decade after my death,
subject to the indirect effects of advances in technology interacting with the
associations I myself carelessly established between roses, summer days, and
all too promiscuous waste bins! Sirs, in the little time we have conversed, I
see the afterlife hasn't brought me any good. Hades takes on a bleaker shade…



TT Well, in reality, the future has been good to you:
you are firmly canonised as one an authentic American intellectual, and stand firmly
on a pedestal in the galleries occupied by the notables of modern international
social thought. So why don't we explore a little bit why that is, within the
specific domain of political theory? Theory
Talks actually poses the same first three questions to every interviewee,
followed by a number of questions specific to your thought. The first question
we always pose is: What, according to you, is the biggest challenge or central
debate in International Relations and what is your position vis-à-vis that
challenge/debate?



I think that while it must have been noted by other
interviewees that in fact this question is two separate questions—one about
real-world challenges and another about theoretical debates—I would be the last
to do so, and I am happy you mix concerns of theory and practice. I have always
fought against establishing such a fictional separation between seemingly distinct
domains of thought and practice. It is a dangerous fiction on top of it. The
same goes for International Relations—while I have not dedicated myself to the
study of the international as a discrete field of action, I do think that this domain
does not escape some of the general observations I have made regarding society
and its politics.



I hold that "modern society is many societies more or
less loosely connected" by all kinds of associations. As I explain in The Public and its Problems, a
fundamental challenge of modern times is that the largely technically mediated associations
that constitute societies have outstretched the social mechanisms that we had
historically developed on the human scale of the village to mitigate their
indirect effects on others. During my life, I witnessed the proliferation of
railway, telegraph, radio, steam-driven shipping, and car and weapon
industries—thoroughly extending the web of association and affectedness within
and across borders. This means action constantly reaches further. People close
by and in far-off places are suddenly confronted with situations that they have
to relate to but which are out of their control. This automatically makes them
part of interested publics, with a stake in the way these mechanisations work. Now
this perhaps seems abstract but consider: the spread of a new technology—I see
you both looking on some small device with a black mirrored screen nervously
every 5 minutes—automatically involves users as a 'stakeholder'. Your actions
are mediated by them. You become affected by their design and
configuration—over which you have little control. In that regard, you are part
of a concerned public, but you have no way to influence the politics
constitutive of these technologies.



I would say the largest challenge is to amplify
participation and to institutionalize these fleeting publics. The proliferation
of technologies and institutions as conduits for international associations has
rendered publics around the globe more inchoate, while seemingly making it
easier than ever before to influence—for good or ill—large groups through the
manipulation of these global infrastructures of the public. We sowed
infrastructures, we reap fragilities and more diffusely affected publics: each
new technological expansion of the possibility to form associations leads to
concomitant insecurities.



TT How did you arrive where you currently are in your
thinking?



I have had the sheer luck or fortune to be engaged in
the occupation of thinking; and while I am quite regular at my meals, I think
that I may say that I would rather work, and perhaps even more, play, with
ideas and with thinking than eat. I was born in the wake of the Civil War, and
in times of a profound acceleration of technology as a vehicle of social,
economic, and political development. Perhaps, as in your own times, upheaval
and change was the status quo, stability a rare exception. My studies at Johns
Hopkins with people such as Peirce had tickled an intellectual curiosity as of
yet unsatisfied. I subsequently went to the University of Chicago for a decade
in which my commitment to pragmatist philosophy consolidated. Afterwards at
Columbia, and at the New School which I founded with people such as Charles A. Beard
and Thorsten Veblen, this approach translated into a number of books. In these I
applied my pragmatist convictions to such disparate issues as education, art,
faith, logic and indeed politics, the topic of your question. For me, these are
all interdependent aspects of society. This interdependence and inseparability
of the social fabric means that skewed economic or political interests will
reverberate throughout. But I am an optimist in that I also believe in the
fundamental possibility and promise of science and democracy to curb radical
change and reroute it into desirable directions for those affected. Good things
are also woven through the social and we should amplify those to lessen the
effects of negative associations.



TT What would a student require to become a specialist
in International Relations or to see the world in a global way?



A question dear to my heart. You might know that
throughout my entire life I have striven for transforming our understanding and
practice of education. Human progress is dependent on education, and as I have
learned during my travels to Russia, reform is not to be had by revolution but
by gradual education. Education is training in reflective thinking. The quality
of democracy depends on education.



Towards the end of my life I witnessed the creation of
the United Nations. This was a clear signal to me that "the relations between
nations are taking on the properties that constitute a public, and hence call
for some measure of political organization". Having this forum implied that we
saw the end of the complete denial of political responsibility of how the
policies in one national unit affect another as we find in the doctrine of
sovereignty. That the end of this doctrine is within reach means that we
require global education which will ensure the rise of informed global publics
which can develop the tools required to respond to global challenges.



In a more substantive fashion, I would insist that
students hold on to the essential impossibility to separate out experience as
it unfolds over time. The divisions and preferences that have come to dominate
academic knowledge in its 20th century 'maturing' are for me a loss
of rooting of knowledge in experience.



TT We're sorry, but isn't the task of social sciences
to offer universal or at least objective analytical categories to make sense of
the muddle of real-world experience? What you seem to be proposing is the
opposite!



I align with Weber in lamenting the acceleration of
the differentiation of understanding in society. This has made it difficult for
your generations to address social, political and economic challenges head on
while avoiding getting lost in one of its details or facets. Isn't the economic
and the political, constantly encroaching on everyday life? In the end, this
perhaps explains my insistence on democracy and schooling as the pivots of good
society: democracy to reconstruct and defend publics, and schooling to defend
individuals against (mis)understanding the world in ways that cannot be reduced
to their own lived experience. If students could only hold on to this holistic
perspective and eschew isolating subject matters from their social contexts.



TT Throughout your 70 years of active scholarship you
have written over a thousand articles and books. One commentator of your work
suggested that your body of writing is an "elaborate spider's web, the
junctions and lineaments of which its engineer knows well and in and on which
he is able to move about with great facility. But for the outsider who seeks to
traverse or map that territory there is the constant danger of getting stuck."
Many find your work difficult to navigate—what advice would you give the
reader?



Sirs why would anyone want to engage in a quest of
mapping all of my writings? You have to understand that thought always proceeds
in relations. A web, perhaps, yes. A spider's web certainly not. A spider that
spins a web out of himself, produces a web that is orderly and elaborate, but
it is only a trap. That is the goal of pure reasoning, not mine. The scientific
method of inquiry is rather comparable to the operations of the bee who
collects material within and from the world, but attacks and modifies the
collected stuff in order to make it yield its hidden treasure. "Drop the
conception that knowledge is knowledge only when it is a disclosure and
definition of the properties of fixed and antecedent reality; interpret the aim
and test of knowing by what happens in the actual procedures of scientific
inquiry". The occasion of thinking and writing is the experience of problems
and the need to clarify and resolve them. Everything depends on the problem,
the situations and the tools available. Inquiry does not rely on a priori
elements or fixed rules. I always attempted to start my work by understanding in
which problematic situations I aimed at intervening. Philosophy and academic,
but also public life, in my time was heading in wrong directions that called
upon me to initiate inquiry to resolve issues—in media res, as it were. When I
wrote Logic, I tried to rebut
dogmatic understandings. Now it appears that I am on the verge of becoming a
dogma myself. In a sense, the most tragic scenario would be if people develop a
"Deweyan" perspective or theory. Now I am curious, what problem brought you
actually to converse with me? 



TT Well, we are here today because we have been asked
to contribute to an effort to collect the views of a number of different
theorists, who, like you, live in different space-time. Now that we are here,
could we ask you to tell us how you use the term 'inquiry'? It is one of your core
concepts and in our conversation you already frequently referred to it. It is
often difficult to understand what you mean by this term and how it provides
direction and purpose for science…



It's a simple one, provided you have not been
indoctrinated by logical positivists. You, me, all of us, frequently engage in
inquiry. There is little distinction between solving problems of everyday life
and the reasoning of the scientist or philosopher. Most often habit and routine
will give you satisfaction. Yet when these fail or give you unpleasant
experience, then reasoning begins. Without inquiry, sirs, most likely you
wouldn't have been able to speak to me today! You will have to explain later
how you bended time and space and which technology allowed you to travel through
a black hole. But Albert was right, time travel is possible! Could we converse
today without Einstein's fabulous inquiry that led him to the realization of
space-time? Until the promulgation of Einstein's restricted theory of
relativity, mass, time and motion were regarded as intrinsic properties of
ultimate fixed and independent substances. Einstein questioned this on the
basis of experimentation and an investigation of the problem of simultaneity,
that is, that from different reference frames there can never be agreement on
the simultaneity of events.



Reflection implies that something is believed in (or
disbelieved in), not on its own direct account, but through something else
which stands as witness, evidence, proof, voucher, warrant; that is, as ground
of belief. At one time, rain is actually felt or directly experienced without
any intermediary fact; at another time, we infer that it has rained from the
looks of the grass and trees, or that it is going to rain because of the
condition of the air or the state of the barometer. The fact that inquiry intervenes
in ever-shifting contexts demands us to restrain from eternal truths or absolutistic
logic. Someone believing in a truth such as "individualism", has his program
determined for him in advance. It is then not a matter of finding out the
particular thing which needs to be done and the best way, and the
circumstances, of doing it. He knows in advance the sort of thing which must be
done, just as in ancient physical philosophy the thinker knew in advance what
must happen, so that all he had to do was to supply a logical framework of
definitions and classifications.



When I say that thinking and beliefs should be
experimental, not absolutistic, I have in mind a certain logic of method. Such
a logic firstly implies that the concepts, general principles, theories and
dialectical developments which are indispensable to any systematic knowledge are
shaped and tested as tools of inquiry. Secondly, policies and proposals for
social action have to be treated as working hypotheses. They have to be subject
to constant and well-equipped observations of the consequences they entail when
acted upon and subject to flexible revision. The social sciences are primarily
an apparatus for conducting such investigations.



TT Doesn't such a form of reasoning mean we'll just
muddle through without ever reaching certainty?



Absolutely correct! Arriving at one point is the
starting point of another. Life flowers and should be understood as such; experimental
reasoning is never complete. I can imagine the surprise you must feel at sudden
unforeseen events in international political relationships when you hold on to
fixed frames of how these relationships do and ought to look. That we will never
reach certainty does not imply to give up the quest of certainty, however. We
have to continuously improve on our tools of scientific inquiry…



TT Sorry to interrupt you here. Now it sounds as if
you have a sort of methods fetish. Do you imply that everything can be solved
by the right method and all that we have to do is to refine our methods? That's
something that our colleagues running statistics and thinking that the problems
of international can be solved by algorithms argue as well.



It might be that mathematical reasoning has well
advanced since my departure, and that the importance granted to the economy and
economic thinking as the sole conditioning factor of political organisation has
only increased, but you haven't fully grasped what I mean by 'tools'. Tell your
stubbornly calculating colleagues that inquiry is embedded in a situation,
hence there cannot be a single method which would fix all kinds of problems.
Second, while I admire the skill of mathematicians, what I mean by tools goes
well beyond that. A tool can be a concept, a term, a theory, a proposal, a
course of action, anything that might matter to settle a particular situation.
A tool is however not a solution per se. It is a proposal. It must be tested
against the problematic material. It matters only in so far as it is part of a
practical activity aimed at resolving a problematic situation.  



TT You emphasize that language is instrumental and reject
the idea of a private language. You also spent quite some energy to demolish
the "picture theory" of language. These arguments form the basis of
what we call today "constructivism", yet they are mainly subscribed to the Philosophical
Investigations of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein.



Earhh, I am aware of this fellow. He is an analytical
philosopher, so develops his argument from a different background. I started to
work on the social and cultural aspects of language use from around 1916. I
don't know whether Wittgenstein actually read my work when he set out to write
Philosophical Investigations, but you are quite right, there are obvious
parallels. I think my own term of "conjoint activity" expresses pretty much the
same, perhaps less eloquently, what Wittgenstein termed language games. I am
pleased to hear, however, that the instrumental view on language, that objects
get their meanings within a language in and by conjoint community of functional
use, has become firmly established in academia. I'd have reservations about the
term, 'constructivism'. It might be useful since it reminds us of all the
construction work that the organization of politics and society entails. Indeed
I have frequently stressed that instrumentalist theory implies construction. If
constructivism doesn't mean post-mortem studies of how something has been
constructed, but is directed towards production of better futures, I might be
fine with the term. But perhaps I would prefer 'productivism'.



TT That is a plausible term, but we are afraid, the
history of science has settled on constructivism. And you are right, the tendencies
you warn us of are significantly present in our discipline.



Sirs, if you permit. I have to attend to other
obligations. I
wish you safe travels back. Make sure you pick up something from the gift shop
before you leave.

NDI President Derek Mitchell and NDI Board Chairman Secretary Madeleine Albright talk about her new book Hell and Other Destinations, and her experiences as Secretary of State. She reflects on U.S. foreign policy, democratic trends, and her hopes for the future.

This podcast was recorded May 27, 2020, prior to demonstrations in support of racial equality across the United States.

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Derek Mitchell: Hello. Welcome to DemWorks. My name is Derek Mitchell, president of the National Democratic Institute.
We indeed are honored to once again to have Secretary Albright join us. Madam Secretary first, thank you again very much for doing this. Do you want to share some opening thoughts? I want to turn it over to you. Perhaps some things that have happened since we last got together about a month back.
Secretary Albright: Terrific. Thank you very much, Derek. Two important meetings I've participated in the past weeks. What was very interesting, it was the ... First was a virtual hearing convened by the house foreign affairs committee. They couldn't have testimony, so this was a briefing, and I did it alongside Derek and Dan Twining from IRI, and the subject was authoritarianism, disinformation and good governance during COVID-19. And this was the first time that the committee had done this kind of a hearing, And I think it's a very important signal that they chose to focus on the subject of democracy. And I think that it's a great tribute to NDI that we were the first organization asked to debrief the committee.
What is very, I think, positive is that leaders in Congress, both Republicans and Democrats recognize that good governance is critical to responding to the pandemic. And they know that NDI therefore has a key role to play in helping the world overcome the challenge and others like it.
DM: We discussed it at that last town hall, featuring our chairman about how she was on the cusp of releasing a new memoir about her life. This one being about her very eventful life after leaving her job as the first woman vice secretary of state. Hell and Other Destinations was released in mid April. During my time in doors last month, I read her book and it really is funny, a funny and fascinating read. So my intention today is to open up another conversation with our chairman and do so first by asking some questions based on themes from her life that she discusses in her book.
You said in your book that everyone should write a memoir. Why do you say that? And do you, or did you, have you kept a journal yourself?
SA: Well let me say this. I have thought, because basically I come from an academic background that when one looks at what happened in a certain period of history, it's very important to read people's memoirs. Now what I have found as I've analyzed memoirs, and I have, is that people write it from a different perspective. And so it's important because often we disagree on the context or what we did or what our role was. But I think it is interesting to kind of have the memoirs and it's really worth the doing. And I think especially people that have been in public positions, but everybody, I think in terms of ...
So let me just say, I have tried over the years to keep a journal. And I haven't really, because at a certain stage I was made much ... Obviously when I was young and had met a lot of people, I thought, "Isn't this great. I have to write about it." And then it always kind of stops after one month. Then, I did actually not keep a journal when I was in the government, because as we know ... I don't know if you remember, everything was being subpoenaed. But I had a lot of scratchy notes. And then what happened as I was writing Madam Secretary initially, was that when I found the schedule it was like the Rosetta Stone, because I could identify what the scratchy notes actually has something to do with. But embarrassingly, my mind would wander, and all of a sudden in the middle of my scratchy notes it was say, "Buy yogurt." And so I was multitasking even then, but I didn't keep a journal. And in many ways I wish I did, but there are so many records of the kinds of things that we all did together that I think my memoirs have been fairly complete.
DM: I felt one of the most poignant chapters in the book was the story about how you discovered your maternal grandmother's journal. It was about five or six years ago while you're going through your father's artifacts. And it turned out your grandmother had been killed in the Holocaust in 1942, and the journal, you have excerpts with the journal in the back of the book and it was written as a kind of dialogue she had ... She wanted to have with your mother and maybe with you while you're all in England. It also reads like kind of a lonely mother who wanted to connect with an absent family alone and isolated and Czechoslovakia, as things happened around her. Dangerous world was swirling in 1942 ... Well, really it started in 42 for her in that journal.
Can you talk a bit about the experience of discovering this journal, and through it your grandmother, so late and what it meant to you? Because we're also being isolated with things swirling out our doors, but also just what it meant to you to discover this and discover your grandmother so late.
SA: Well, thank you for asking that. And I ... Just for people that don't know my story, I was raised a Catholic, married and Episcopalian, and found out I was Jewish. So I can have my religious discussions sitting in a corner. But basically, I did not know about my Jewish background until 1996. And I had gotten a letter from somebody that had the names of the villages and my grandparents' names and dates right, and that was just as I was being vetted to be secretary of state, and the White House lawyer asked all the questions about taxes and nannies and stuff, but then he said, "We always ask this question of everybody. Is there anything you'd like to tell us that we didn't ask you?" And I said, "Well, it's perfectly possible I'm of Jewish background." And they said, "So what? The president is not antisemitic."
And it was only later when I was already an office that I was visited by some reporters who started giving me this disgusting index cards. These Nazis were very good record keepers and they had names of my relatives that have been sent to concentration camps. So to get to the journal part of it is my parents, we left Czechoslovakia in March, 1939, or escaped frankly. My father was in the Czechoslovak diplomatic service, and we escaped to England. And they ... When I think about all the things that happened, I find it harder and harder to get my head around it.
My parents were in their 30s, they left their families behind and went to England, where they were isolated in many different ways. We came back and I won't go through the whole story, but my father died in 1997 and he had lots of papers, and then my mother moved to Washington and she brought all his stuff with her. And when she died, all of a sudden all of it got transferred to me. And I had some hesitation in looking at anything, frankly, because of how the memories, but then what happened is when I became a public official diplomatic security moved into in my garage and were around all the time and there were all these boxes. And they said, "You've got to put these in storage." So I put all these boxes into storage and I didn't look at them, and it wasn't until 2015 that I had to find something and I went to the storage and I start poking through the boxes. And all of a sudden, there's this old envelope, and inside it is a diary. A journal. And it kind of blows my mind.
I look at it, obviously it's a ... And it's from my grandmother, and it is something that she wrote to ... They were letters to my mother describing what was going on. And it was kind of an interesting mixture of just day to day kind of things. "I did this, I washed my hair and I went shopping." And then all of a sudden it began to say things like, "They're talking about Aryans and non Aryans. I've never heard that distinction," she says. And goes through the kinds of things that the Jews in the town we're not able to shop in a variety of places. Oh, they had to give up all their warm clothes to the Nazi soldiers, and ... Just stunning. And in the middle it would say things, "How was it [Mudlanka 00:08:45]?" Which was me. "She's so cute." And it just was unbelievable.
And it was really like a message in a bottle where all of a sudden it's hearing from a previous generation in terms of their hopes and their wishes. And obviously in the most incredibly complex time. And the other thing I try to figure out, how my mother even got this and I've tried to put together what the path of it was and how stunned she must've been when it showed up. And so I have translated it, and it is in the book. But it's really very meaningful and it has hope in it, which I think is such an important part. And one of my messages just generally is that we can't control everything around us. We can only control our behavior. And I think that that's something that also came through in my grandmother's journal.
DM: It also is you talked about the various identities you have in a way as a Catholic Episcopalian Jew, in terms of heritage. And that issue of identity is a big one that we work with at NDI. And there's a big question for nations nowadays, given your past and your family, that of your family, how has the question of identity shaped you?
SA: Well, I have definitely been a lot of different things. As a child, we spent the war in England then went back to Czechoslovakia briefly, and then my father was made ambassador to Yugoslavia. I think some of you've heard me tell this. The little girl in the national costume that gave flowers at the airport, that's what I did for a living. My father didn't want me going to school with communists, so I had a governess. And then I got ahead of myself, and as people know in Europe, you have to be a certain age to get into the next level. So my parents sent me to school in Switzerland, where I was finally told how I should spell my name, because my mother used to pronounce it [Mudlan 00:00:10:44]. And so anyway, I have the French spelling and I learned to speak French. And then we come to the United States.
And so I was recently asked to describe myself in six words, and it is, worried optimist, problem-solver, and grateful American. And I think those are my identities and I'm grateful to be an American, but I'm also grateful for the background that I've had in terms of trying to understand how other people see themselves. I do think identity is important. I think we all want to know who we are. We may get surprised, but it's worth it knowing. What I don't like, and this is what troubles me and I wrote about this in my previous book on fascism is when my identity hates your identity, because that then is obviously very divisive. And it's one thing to be proud of your identity, it's another, hyper nationalism, which we're seeing that is undercutting everything. And we know that the virus knows no borders. So there are an awful lot of paradoxes that are going on now in terms of wanting to know who you are, but not thinking that you're better than everybody else.
And my, as I describe, authoritarian leaders and fascists, I begin with Mussolini. It's a matter of the leader identifying himself. And by the way, they're all his, with one group at the expense of another and makes them scapegoats. And that's why I'm very troubled by the divisions that are being exacerbated now.
DM: There's individual identity and there's national identity. And the national identity, as you say, that's most pernicious is an exclusive identity, rather than an inclusive identity, which is what we're all about. We're all about an inclusive identity. We're all treated equally. And these authoritarians are about identifying those exclusive identities, us and them, that tear countries apart and create the instability and insecurity that results. So this is a key part of what we do, I think absolutely.
During the writing process, we you able to identify the moment in your life when you knew what your life purpose was? At what point did you know what Mark you wanted to leave in this world?
SA: And it's a hard question to answer, because I do think that one of the things that was a motivating factor for me growing up was that I was, and am, a grateful American, and wanted to give back in some form. I also ... My father had, obviously, a great influence on me. So did my mother, and my father kept saying that Americans are taking democracy for granted. We had just left the country of our birth twice. Once because of the Nazis and then because of the communists. And the fragility of democracy. And so I looked at trying to figure out, in looking back, what were the different methods that I thought I could use to give back to America?
By the way, it never occurred to me that I would be secretary of state. There's some people who think I planned that. Never. But I do think that I wanted to have some kind of a role where I was able to talk about the necessity of supporting democracy. And I got fascinated by the UN because that's what brought us to America. And so kind of looking at institutional structures, but it never, never occurred to me. Nor did it occur to me, frankly, that I would be able to have a post secretary of state life, where I was able to put together the various things that I was interested in.
What I tried to do always is to make whatever I was doing next more interesting than what I'd done before. Not easy if you've been secretary of state, but the reason I wanted to write this book was to show how the various things that I got involved in related to each other and how I learned from one thing to another. My greatest talent, frankly, is dot connection, of trying to figure out how one thing relates to another.
I do want to talk about one specific moment that's so stands out. My favorite thing to do is to give naturalization certificates at the ceremonies. And so the first time I did it was July 4th, 2000 at Monticello, and I'm handing out a certificate and I hear this man. He goes away and he says, "Can you believe I'm a refugee, and I just got my naturalization certificate from the secretary of state?" And I go up to him and I say, "Can you believe that a refugee is secretary of state?" And I so believe in what America stands for and what we can do to be helpful to others, which is why I say that at this moment, the statue of Liberty is weeping.
DM: Our research in Ukraine has uncovered historical memory as a significant target of Russian information attacks. Ukrainians appear to be vulnerable to attacks that speak to evoke nostalgia for the economic stability of the Soviet period. These attacks exploit an actual democratic challenge for Ukraine, which is an economy that is not working for all citizens. In the US, what vulnerabilities do you worry similar information attacks could seek to exploit.
SA: I do think that I have been ... I love history. When I teach at Georgetown, I always try to put everything into historical context. And I have to say what I was just doing before we started this discussion was watching a program about a project in the United States about slavery. And there's ... The New York Times was doing something called 16 19, and there were some very strong arguments on Morning Joe this morning about this, between those who recollect history differently, or are trying to use it in particular ways for political movement, which we do. And I think people do that in terms of understanding what their history means.
And then one of the people there said, "History is to be argued about," which I find interesting because you kind of think, "Okay, well, we know what history is." But it goes back to your first question, Derek, about writing memoirs. Because people have different ideas of their history. I think the question is, do you have a society where you can dispute the history? And the Ukrainian one is clearly unbelievably complicated, in terms of that a modern Russia comes out of Ukraine, and that that relationship and Ukraine itself is a complicated country in terms of East and West and religion, and the aspect of communism that gave people a certain sense of understanding what the system was. They might not have gotten the kinds of things ...
Not everybody just wants the freedom to talk. Some of them want to be able to what their history is about. Are they going to have retirement? What group do they belong to? Can they send their kids to school? And I found this in a lot of research that I did about central and Eastern Europe at the time, right after the fall of the wall. What is it that the people thought that they ... What was communism and what were the possibilities of democracy? And I do think that Ukraine is one of the more complex countries, and the fact that it has been invaded, and the fact that the economic situation is something that is being pushed by the Russian hacking and the way that they operate, and their way of trying to divide us and divide Ukrainians from each other.
DM: Rebuilding a United Europe was one of the success stories of the second part of the 20th century. The last few years have seen the foundations of Europe shake with Brexit and the rise of authoritarian populace. How do we ensure that the European project continues as a liberal democratic one?
SA: I think that it is something that I ... I keep going back, trying to figure out what went wrong. Why did this happen? And I think partially we didn't appreciate enough the problems of societies that had been under communism for 50 years, and that it was much ... We spent a lot of time, I think, with a lot of the wonderful dissidents and intellectuals, and didn't think enough about how it affected the people that had had jobs. I mentioned that a little bit. And I think that also there are the issues now of this identity and the hyper nationalism, and that has been created to some extent in Europe, by the differences in the economic lives of, initially, Northern and Southern Europe, and trying to figure out why some were doing better than others, which then did lead to the fact that there were some leaders like Orban and the Poles that started blaming the other. And that was the most evident in many ways in why Brexit happened.
So these are big trends. I happen to believe in a European Union, but I think that as a structure, it also needs some fixing in terms of how it works with the different economic situations in the central and eastern European countries.
DM: In your book, you speak about how you dealt with misogyny as you progressed in your career. Can you share what helped to keep you steadfast in fighting this prejudice?
SA: I think that what is interesting ... And I often say that I went to college sometime between the invention of the iPad and the discovery of fire, but here it was a women's college. And basically we were told by our commencement speaker to get married and raise children. And I think that what I've been trying to do is to understand why women, why we're so hard on ... Tough on each other in terms of being very judgmental or finding our own inadequacies and other women. And so I have been very much for having ... Creating groups of women that can support each other.
And that is why I think it is so important, the kind of things that NDI is doing, in terms of working with women, to make sure that they are participants in society, run for office, and are respected. And I'd love talking about the fact now that the countries that are doing best on dealing with the coronavirus are ones that are run by women. New Zealand, Taiwan, Finland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Iceland. And I think trying to make clear what the characteristics are of women that make that possible in terms of multitasking, of caring, not setting their children against each other, but you have to keep ... I do think that what is important is for women to support each other, and so that you're not the only woman in the room.
DM: Sometimes moments of crisis and trial like this pandemic lead to better things. What are your hopes in that regard? And also what is the significance of today's pin?
SA: My hope, this is where my optimism comes from, our young people. I love learning from my students, and students that are particularly interested in foreign policy and diplomacy. Many of whom have traveled and they speak different languages and they certainly are tech literate. And I think that they question ... I think the important part for all of us as a democracy organization is to make sure that they participate, that they do vote, that they are interested in the institutional structures in the countries where they are. But that is definitely what gives me hope. And not ...
And I think it's very important, and I say this wherever I can, that democracy is not a spectator sport. It is something that the people need to be involved in. They need to be informed. They need to be respected. And I think the other part that I often talk about, and this is so true of NDI activities, is to spend time with people with whom you disagree and try to figure out where they're coming from, and understand what their needs are, and have a dialogue with civil society, and then understand the various institutions that are important. But definitely what makes me hopeful, our young people.
DM: On this issue of hopes of how moments of crisis and trial can lead to better things, I do think that's a very important question. I really hope that moments of trial by fire are sometimes very important, to set priorities to remember what's important, and to tell you how precarious things always are. I think we can get kind of complacent about things, as we are as a country, or we as individuals, that everything is going to be simply easy. I'm sure it's not easy for any of us. I'm sure many people have gone through lots of trials in their lives, as we all have. But crises can be moments where we focus on how ... Okay, we take stock of where our priorities are, and what kind of choices we want to make, which is what Madame Secretary said. Not just ... Crisis don't just happen to you, you also have a choice in how you respond to that crisis, both individually and as a collective, as a country, as a unit.
So I do think it's an opportunity and I'm certainly seeing that NDI of having better communication and doing more to force change, even potentially in culture because of this moment that's quite different than we've ever experienced. So we should be thinking in those terms. What are the things that we can do to take advantage of this moment, even when there's a lot of stress and anxiety? To take advantage of the opportunity as well. And that's my hope for all of us at NDI, again, as an organization and individually, that we can do that. And I think we can come out better on the back end if we go through it together on those terms.
SA: One of my heroes was Harry Truman. He was my first American president. We came to the United States, November 11th, 1948. He is the one that understood, to a great extent, America's role in the world, a democracy. And understand linking domestic to foreign policy. But I think there's so many other people that I have admired. I admire the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Masaryk, who married an American. And the first Czechoslovak constitution was modeled on the American one with one difference. It had a women's rights in it in 1918.
And so I think that one can have more than one hero, and I think it's important to point them out and to understand that people have gone through very difficult periods before. And I do think that what is important is to really be proud of things that we can do, and the thing that I personally am proudest of, because it put things together and how I used representing the United States was what we were able to do to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. And going there with President Clinton made a big difference cause they kept saying, "We were just there. We are so grateful to the United States."
DM: Well Madam Secretary, let me just close the book conversation with a quote from the book that I saw that I just want to share with everybody that you say at the end. I think it's in the acknowledgements at the end. The central theme of this book is about how people of all descriptions can work together for common goals against the background of accelerating history. It is about trying to make sense of the world we have while attempting to contribute to something better. Madam Secretary and everybody out there, stay safe, be well. Thank you all. Have a good day, and we'll talk again soon.
SA: Thank you so much for everything that you do. Thank you.
DM: Please visit our website at www.ndi.org. Thanks very much.

NDI Board Chairman Secretary Madeleine Albright



Derek Mitchell & Secretary Madeleine Albright on her past and democracy's future

Democracy (General), Podcast Listen Secretary Albright Madeleine AlbrightCountries: All Regions