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On January 13, the Republic of China (ROC, Taiwan) held presidential and legislative elections, keeping the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in the presidency with 40.05% of the vote going to incumbent vice-president William Lai. Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) …

Aileen Moreton-Robinson in her book The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty presents a collection of essays on race, dispossession and sovereignty. She argues that 'the thread that weaves the chapter(s) together is the intersubstantive relations between white possession and Aboriginal sovereignty'. Moreton-Robinson's position aligning with the aim of the book as written by a critical Indigenous scholar is clear and well-defined through a wide range of issues that are addressed in each of these essays. Thus, there are a number of avenues that a commentary on this book can take – I choose to focus on two main broader themes in relation to solidarity and power.
The aim of this book is to reveal how racialization is the process by which whiteness operates possessively to define and construct itself as the pinnacle of its own racial hierarchy.
There is no doubt that this is a powerful aim. However, as a migrant to Australia I was questioning the core of this book: are possessive logics only limited to whiteness? According to Aileen Moreton-Robinson, based on the arguments in the book, the answer to this question is undoubtedly 'no' as she limits the boundaries of indigeneity to the US, Canada and New Zealand. This book would have been more impactful had it addressed issues with indigeneity and dispossession beyond the so-called global north context and beyond whiteness.
I would like to acknowledge that I am writing this commentary as a migrant coming into Australia with existing sets of ontological attachments to land. Although Moreton-Robinson does refer to non-white migrants as those that 'can belong, but they cannot possess', she also states:
Nonwhite migrants' sense of belonging is tied to the fiction of terra nullius and the logic of capital because their legal right to belong is sanctioned by the law that enabled dispossession.
There is a lot of emotion attached to the above statement and depending on the ontological positions, various non-white migrant groups will read this accordingly. This is a different take to critical colonial history as compared with Priyamvada Gopal's views in her recent book Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. Through a comprehensive historical analysis of anticolonial resistance, Gopal illustrates the significant role of solidarity among various groups (white and non-white) to create meaningful revolutions. Solidarity is a key aspect and potentially a way forward towards decolonization, which is missing from The White Possessive.
The above observations and reflections on the book are based on who I am and my relation to Country (as a migrant). The following few paragraphs will focus on specific reflections on the content with reference to the use of Michel Foucault and the post-structural approach framing The Whie Possessive. First, there are some discrepancies in Moreton-Robinson's position as a post-structuralist especially in relation to the issue of power. In the last, third section of the book, Moreton-Robinson uses 'Foucault's sovereignty, race and biopower thesis to propose a new research agenda for Critical Indigenous studies.' In my view, Foucault's concept of power is relational. In Foucault on Power, [...]
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By Olivia C. Harrison. This article is a review of Olivia Harrison's new book "Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France". She examines the intersection of antiracist and pro-Palestinian activism in France from the 1970s to the present. Against the ubiquitous association of pro-Palestinianism with Islamism and anti-Semitism, she shows that the Palestinian question has served as a "rallying cry" for anti-colonial and antiracist activists for the past fifty years.

In my latest article (open access) for Review of International Studies I examine Indigenous resistance to neo-extractive development in Latin America and ask what this means for International Relations (IR). I contend that Indigenous resistance can disrupt traditional thinking in IR via an 'insurrection of subjugated knowledge'.
The post Challenging the Coloniality of Space in International Relations appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

In einer Welt, die sich zunehmend der Wichtigkeit des Umweltschutzes bewusst wird, ist es an der Zeit, über ein Thema zu sprechen, das nicht nur unsere Ökosysteme betrifft, sondern auch tiefergreifende soziale Ungerechtigkeiten aufdeckt. Wir sind alle Zeugen und Verursacher des Klimawandels und seiner verheerenden Auswirkungen. Nun wollen wir genauer hinsehen und verstehen, wie dieser Wandel bestimmte Gemeinschaften in unverhältnismäßigem Maß betrifft. Die Rede ist von Umweltrassismus.Im Folgenden soll gezeigt werden, dass Umweltprobleme nicht gleichmäßig auf alle Bevölkerungsgruppen verteilt sind, sondern oft die treffen, die bereits benachteiligt sind. Dafür wird zuerst der Begriff Umweltrassismus aus verschiedenen Perspektiven betrachtet. Anschließend wird an Beispielen genauer aufgezeigt, was für Arten es gibt, bevor es um Lösungsvorschläge gehen wird.In dem Beitrag wird von BIPoC gesprochen. BIPoC steht für "Black, Indigenous and People of Colour". Das Akronym setzt sich also aus politischen Selbstbezeichnungen von Menschen zusammen, die von rassistischer Unterdrückung betroffen sind.Ursprung des Begriffs "Umweltrassismus"?Dass die Folgen des Klimawandels immer verheerender werden, ist nichts Neues. Und dass dies enorme Gesundheitsfolgen mit sich bringt, ist auch bekannt. Dabei wird zwischen direkten (primären) Folgen und indirekten (sekundären und tertiären) Folgen unterschieden. Zu den direkten Folgen zählen eine erhöhte Sterbe- und Erkrankungsrate durch Ereignisse wie Hitzewellen, Überschwemmungen oder Waldbränden. Zu den indirekten Folgen gehören Auswirkungen wie Nahrungsmittelknappheit, Zunahme von Infektionskrankheiten und Allergien. Außerdem gibt es sozial bedingte Folgen, beispielsweise Hungersnöte, Entwicklungsstagnation oder Kriege (Kuehni, Egger 2012, S. 190). Doch was ist, wenn Teile der Erde oder bestimmte Gruppen schlimmer unter den Folgen des Klimawandels leiden als andere? In diesem Zusammenhang wird mittlerweile immer häufiger von "Umweltrassismus" gesprochen.Der Begriff kam Anfang der 1980er Jahre auf. Damals suchte der Bundesstaat North Carolina einen Ort, an dem man mit Polychlorierte Biphenylen (PCB) verseuchte Erde entsorgen kann. Zuerst war eine Entsorgungsdeponie in einem Bezirk mit hauptsächlich weißen Menschen geplant. Eine Bürgerinitiative verhinderte dies. Daraufhin war schnell klar, dass die Deponie in einem der Bezirke mit hauptsächlich schwarzen, armen oder anderweitig benachteiligten Nachbarschaften errichtet werden sollte.1982 wurde beschlossen, die verseuchte Erde in einer kleinen Gemeinde namens Afton zu entsorgen. Diese Stadt liegt in Warren County, dem damals ärmsten Landkreis in North Carolina mit einem schwarzen Bevölkerungsanteil von 65 %. Die Bevölkerung versuchte dagegen anzugehen. Zuerst gerichtlich, doch als das nichts half, gab es über sechs Wochen Sitzblockaden, Straßensperren und Demonstrationen. Dabei wurden mehr als 500 Demonstrierende verhaftet. Doch alle Bemühungen halfen nichts. Die Mülldeponie wurde dennoch gebaut. (Ituen/Tatu Hey 2021, S. 4-5). Kurz darauf wurde PCB weltweit verboten, da es sich als hochgiftig, krebserregend und erbgutschädigend herausstellte (Warda 2020).Trotz der Niederlage bei dem Bau der Deponie waren diese Proteste von großer Bedeutung und wurden von vielen anderen als Vorbild genommen. Aus Kämpfen gegen diese Art von Umweltrassismus ist schließlich die Bewegung für Klimagerechtigkeit hervorgegangen, welche erstmals Fragen sozialer Gerechtigkeit im Zusammenhang mit umweltpolitischen Aspekten betrachtete (FARN, o.J.). Geprägt wurde der Begriff Umweltrassismus von dem Bürgerrechtler Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., der an den Demonstrationen in Afton beteiligt war. Er definiert Umweltrassismus als"the intentional siting of polluting and waste facilities in communities primarily populated by African Americans, Latines, Indigenous People, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, migrant farmworkers, and low-income workers" (Ihejirika 2023)Chavis veröffentlichte im Jahr 1987 gemeinsam mit der United Church of Christ (UCC) Kommission eine Studie zum Thema "Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States". Aus der Studie ging hervor, dass drei von fünf BIPoC nahe einer Giftmülldeponie wohnen. In einem Dokumentarfilm sagte Davis:"The issue of environmental racism is an issue of life and death. It is just not an issue of some form of prejudice where someone doesn't like you because of the color of your skin. This is an issue that will take your life away, if you don't get involved." (United Church of Christ 2023 / o.J.).Die Protestaktion und der Film löste eine nationale Debatte über Umweltrassismus aus (United Church of Christ 2023). Die Studie von 1987 wurde bis 2007 fortgesetzt und zeigte, dass nach wie vor eine Ungleichheit herrscht und Menschen aufgrund ihrer Hautfarbe einem höheren Risiko von umweltschädlichen Stoffen ausgesetzt sind. Noch immer werden Mülldeponien eher an Standorten mit einem hohen Anteil an BIPoC erbaut, als dort, wo weiße Menschen leben (Bullard et. al. 2007, S. 155).Seither gibt es immer mehr Studien zu Umweltrassismus. Diese bestätigen, dass PoC viel stärker Umweltrisiken ausgesetzt sind als weiße Personen. Die Ursache liegt vor allem darin, dass die Industrie sich meistens dort ansiedelt, wo hauptsächlich BIPoC leben. Deshalb sind schwarze Menschen 1.5 Mal, Hispanics 1.2 Mal und einkommensschwache Menschen 1.3 Mal so viel Feinstaub ausgesetzt wie weiße Menschen bzw. einkommensstarke (Warda 2020). Durch die Studien und Veröffentlichungen zum Thema Umweltrassismus hat sich der Begriff weiterentwickelt. Der amerikanische Soziologe Robert Bullard definiert ihn als"any policy, practice or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (where intended oder unintended) individuals, groups or communities based on race or color" (Batiste 2022, S. 1).Das Projekt "ENRICH" (Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities, and Community Health) unterscheidet zwei Bestandteile des Umweltrassismus. Zum einen gibt es die räumliche Verteilungsungerechtigkeit, die sich auf die Standortwahl industrieller Umweltverschmutzer und anderer umweltgefährdender Projekte bezieht. Zum anderen handelt es sich um die Verfahrensungerechtigkeit. Dabei stehen die institutionellen Mechanismen und Richtlinien im Mittelpunkt, welche die Ungerechtigkeit aufrechterhalten (ENRICH o.J.).Umweltrassismus, Klimawandel und Kolonialismus Durch den Klimawandel werden weitere, ganz neue Seiten von Umweltrassismus aufgezeigt. Die Ursachen und Folgen des Klimawandels sind ungleich über den Planeten verteilt. Länder im globalen Süden sind meist viel stärker von den Auswirkungen des Klimawandels betroffen. Und das, obwohl sie deutlich weniger CO2-Emissionen erzeugen als der globale Norden (Warda 2020). Das zeigt, dass die Klimakrise die (globale) soziale Krise und somit den Umweltrassismus in großen Dimensionen enorm beeinflusst. Um dieses Ungleichgewicht von Nord- und Südkugel, welches mit dem Klimawandel einhergeht, zu erfassen, muss der Kolonialismus berücksichtigt werden.Im Zuge der Kolonialisierung kam es zu neuartigen globalen Handels- und Machtbeziehungen, welche bis heute anhalten. Dadurch blühte der globale Norden auf und erreichte Reichtum und Wohlstand (Bendix 2015, S. 273). Die Länder des globalen Südens galten als "Ressourcen- und Absatzmärkte" und halfen den Ländern auf der Nordhalbkugel, ihren Reichtum zu vermehren (Öztürk 2012, S. 2).Viele westliche Firmen wollen günstig in ärmeren Ländern produzieren. Meist haben die ärmeren Länder zudem eine fragile staatliche Struktur. Westliche Länder und Firmen nutzen dies aus und verschmutzen dadurch dort vor Ort die Natur und achten wenig auf Einheimische (Warda 2020). Der globale Süden wird ausgebeutet und leidet unter den massiven Eingriffen in deren Ökosysteme von außerhalb (Ziai 2012, S. 23).Aktuell zeigt sich eine erhebliche Diskrepanz im durchschnittlichen Pro-Kopf-Ausstoß von Emissionen zwischen den ärmsten Ländern, zu welchen Niger, Somalia und die Zentralafrikanische Republik gehören. Dieser Ausstoß ist in den ärmsten Ländern mehr als 140 Mal niedriger als beispielsweise in Deutschland. Dazu kommt die historische Verantwortung des Globalen Nordens hinsichtlich des Klimawandels. Der größte Teil der Emissionen, der sich seit Beginn der Industrialisierung in der Atmosphäre gesammelt hat, geht auf den Globalen Norden zurück (Kurwan 2023).Eine interessante Abbildung zu den Pro-Kopf-CO2-Emissionen im Jahr 2021 findet ihr hier. Dort wird der durchschnittliche Verbrauch von fast jedem Land dargestellt. Durch Klicken auf das Land kann man sehen, dass zum Beispiel Deutschland einen durchschnittlichen Pro-Kopf-Verbrauch an Emissionen von 8.09 hatte. Eine klare Nord-Süd Trennung der Welt ist erkennbar.Damals wie auch heute sind die Länder im globalen Süden zudem stark von der Landwirtschaft abhängig. Ihre Existenz steht babei auf dem Spiel. Um sich vor den Auswirkungen zu schützen, fehlt den Menschen, aber auch den Ländern, oftmals das Geld. Von außerhalb kommt wenig Hilfe und das, obwohl der Klimawandel ein globales Problem ist. Dennoch gibt es auf politischer Ebene einen einseitigen Fokus, welcher nur auf den vergleichsweise geringen Auswirkungen auf den globalen Norden liegt. Die Länder des globalen Südens werden mit den schlimmen gesellschaftlichen und ökologischen Folgeschäden nahezu allein gelassen.Das bedeutet nicht, dass einzelne Personen, welche die Entscheidungen treffen, eine konkrete diskriminierende Absicht haben (Bellina 2022, S. 64), aber dass viele die globalen Konsequenzen außen vor lassen und nicht bedenken. Die Folge? Sie müssen fliehen. Menschen können aufgrund der Probleme, die durch den Klimawandel ausgelöst werden, nicht in ihrer Heimat bleiben (Warda 2020).Laut einem Bericht des Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (iDMC) aus dem Jahr 2015 verlassen seit 2008 jedes Jahr durchschnittlich 26.4 Mio. Menschen, ihre Heimat aufgrund von Naturkatastrophen. Das ist eine Person pro Sekunde. Die Zahl der geflohenen Personen sollen sich in den nächsten Jahren vervielfachen. Hauptursachen hierbei sind wetterbedingte Katastrophen wie Stürme, Überschwemmungen und Sturmfluten. Zu eher schleichenden Umweltproblemen wie Dürren oder dem ansteigenden Meeresspiegel gibt es (noch) keine konkreten Zahlen. Das sind deutlich mehr Personen, die aufgrund von Naturkatastrophen fliehen müssen, als aufgrund von Krieg. Oft stehen Umweltkatastrophen mit anderen Konflikten im Zusammenhang, beispielsweise Wasserknappheit (Yonetani 2015, S. 8). Umweltrassismus beeinflusst also das reale Überleben dieser Menschen.Doch nicht nur zwischen Süd und Nord gibt es Unterschiede. Auch die Einkommensunterschiede innerhalb eines Landes tragen dazu bei. So treffen die Folgen des Klimawandels die Menschen mit weniger Einkommen oft härter. Zum einen, weil sie weniger Wohnraum und somit weniger Rückzugsorte haben, zum anderen haben Einkommensschwache meist auch kein Auto oder eine andere Möglichkeit, am Straßenverkehr teilzunehmen und vor der Katastrophe zu fliehen (Adick 2022).Es kann auch Diskriminierung zwischen Geschlechtern und Generationen geben. Besonders Frauen und Kinder sind von den Folgen der Klimakrise betroffen (Kurwan 2023). Und das, obwohl Männer durchschnittlich mehr zur Klimaerwärmung beitragen als Frauen. Ein Grund dafür ist, dass Warnungen bei Naturkatastrophen größtenteils im öffentlichen Raum stattfinden, Frauen sich allerdings eher zuhause aufhalten und sich dort um Kinder und Haushalt kümmern und darum erst später davon erfahren. Sie sind auch bei der Flucht für Kinder und die Pflege der älteren Angehörigen zuständig (DGVN 2016). Ein weiterer Grund ist gerade bei Flutereignissen, dass Frauen seltener schwimmen können und schlechteren Zugang zu Verkehrsmitteln haben (Kurwan 2023).Eine Folge von Umweltkatastrophen, die nichts direkt mit Umweltrassismus zu tun hat, möchte ich dennoch nicht unerwähnt lassen. Laut Studien steigt die Anzahl der gewaltsamen Übergriffe auf Frauen nach Umweltkatastrophen enorm. Oftmals verdoppeln sich die Zahl der Gewalttaten von Männern gegenüber Frauen. Warum das konkret nach Katastrophen häufiger auftritt, hängt wahrscheinlich mit den fehlenden Strukturen im Chaos zusammen. Frauen sind dadurch weniger geschützt (DGVN 2016).Umweltrassismus kann also gegen einzelne Personen, Gruppen oder auch Länder auftreten. Aus den Kämpfen gegen Umweltrassismus erfolgten verschiedene Bewegungen für Klimagerechtigkeit. Einige sind uns allen bekannt, wie "Fridays for Future". Sie setzen sich nicht nur für Klimapolitik und Klimaschutz ein, sondern auch für Klimagerechtigkeit, wodurch dem Umweltrassismus entgegengewirkt werden soll (Fridays for Future 2020). Es handelt sich dabei also nicht nur um eine Klimabewegung, sondern um eine Klimagerechtigkeitsbewegung.FallbeispieleUm noch deutlicher zu zeigen, was für Arten von Umweltrassismus es auf der Erde gibt und wie oft diese auftreten, werden im Folgenden einige Beispiele aufgeführt.Das erste Beispiel handelt von den USA, genauer gesagt von den Gemeinden eines über 130 km langen Landstrichs entlang des Mississippi von Baton Rounge bis New Orleans in Louisiana. Hier haben sich insgesamt über 150 Ölraffinerien, Kunststofffabriken und andere chemische Anlagen angesiedelt, die viele Emissionen ausstoßen. Und das direkt an den zuvor bestehenden Siedlungen. Gleichzeitig weist der Abschnitt eine sehr hohe Inzidenz- und Sterblichkeitsrate im Vergleich zum Rest der USA auf. Auch die Krebsrate ist viel höher als im Rest des Landes. Aufgrund dessen wird dieser Abschnitt auch "Cancer Alley", die Allee der Krebskranken, genannt. In kaum einem anderen Bundesstaat ist die Luft so schlecht wie in Louisiana (Batiste 2022, S. 1).Doch nicht alle Menschen am Mississippi sind gleichermaßen betroffen. Vor allem die hier lebenden schwarzen Menschen auf der einen Seite des Flusses kämpfen gegen den Krebs. Verantwortlich dafür wird die Industrie gemacht. Auf der anderen Seite des Flusses leben hauptsächlich weiße Menschen, oftmals derselben Gemeinde. Aufgrund von Protesten wurden dort keine Industrieanlagen erbaut. Diese sehen die Industrie mittlerweile als Chance für neue Arbeitsplätze und Steuereinnahmen. Aber nur, wenn sie in einem bestimmten Abstand erbaut werden. Studien haben gezeigt: Je näher die Menschen an den Industrieanlagen wohnen, desto höher das Gesundheitsrisiko. Und da sich die Industrie hier auffällig nahe in Nachbarschaften mit hauptsächlich BIPoC oder Armen angesiedelt haben, gehen diese von einem rassistischen Motiv aus. Sie haben das Gefühl, geopfert zu werden, an zweiter Wahl zu stehen (Schmidt 2023).Eine Studie aus den USA zeigt, dass es eine besonders hohe Sterberate bei BIPoC gibt im Zusammenhang mit Hitzewellen. Vor allem in Großstädten sterben doppelt so viele wie weiße Menschen. Das liegt an den Temperaturdifferenzen innerhalb der schwarzen und weißen Nachbarschaft, welche bei bis zu 1.7° Celsius liegen kann (Ituen/Tatu Hey 2021, S. 12/13).Doch Umweltrassismus gibt es auch in Deutschland. So wurde durch verschiedene Studien festgestellt, dass es beispielsweise in Kassel eine erhöhte Luftverschmutzung in den Bezirken gibt, in welchen Menschen mit niedrigen sozioökonomischen Status und Migrationshintergrund wohnen (Ituen/Tatu Hey 2021, S. 9). Auch andere marginalisierte Gruppen, wie Sinti*zza und Rom*nja erleben dies immer wieder. Meistens werden sie in Gegenden mit einer hohen Umweltbelastung geschoben und von Umweltgütern wie sauberem Trinkwasser ausgeschlossen (Ituen/Tatu Hey 2021, S. 8).Eine neue Studie aus Chicago verdeutlicht, dass Schwarze während der Pandemie für 50 % der Corona-Infektionen und sogar 70 % der Todesfälle verantwortlich waren. Und das, obwohl sie lediglich 30 % der Bevölkerung von Chicago ausmachen. Und auch in Großbritannien zeigt sich, dass schwarze Menschen fast doppelt so häufig wie weiße Menschen einem erhöhten Risiko ausgesetzt sind, an Covid-19 zu sterben (Ituen/Tatu Hey 2021, S. 13).Ebenso können ganze Länder von Umweltrassismus betroffen sein, wie beispielsweise Senegal. Der globale Süden ist durch Kolonialisierung und jahrhundertelange Ausbeutung viel später in die Industrialisierung eingestiegen. Bis dahin haben die Länder des Nordens schon viel, viel mehr CO2 ausgestoßen, welches über 100 Jahre in der Atmosphäre bleibt. Trotzdem sollen die Länder des globalen Südens genau so viel CO2 einsparen wie die Länder auf der Nordhalbkugel. Gleichzeitig sollen sie die Schulden gegenüber dem globalen Norden abbauen. Das führt dazu, dass Länder im Süden (z.B. Senegal) ihre fossilen Energieträger von Industrienationen ausbeuten lassen, um nicht noch tiefer in die Schulden zu stürzen (Adick 2022).Umweltrassismus bekämpfenDie Bekämpfung von Umweltrassismus wird von Land zu Land unterschiedlich gehandhabt. Der gemeinsame Kern ist jedoch, dass das Leid der betroffenen Personen gemindert werden soll. Diese wollen auf sich aufmerksam machen und gegen das Unrecht ankämpfen. So war es auch bei Cancer Alley. Gemeinsam mit Anwälten wurden Klagen gegen staatliche Einrichtungen oder chemische Fabriken angestrengt (Schmidt 2023). Robert Taylor, der Gründer der Initiative gegen die Chemiefabriken, kämpft für eine bessere Zukunft. Vor allem für die BIPoC-Kinder der Gemeinden. Weitere Forderungen sind Verschärfungen von Vorschriften der EPA (Envioronmental Protection Agency), welche eine unabhängige Behörde der USA ist und sich für den Umweltschutz und den Schutz der menschlichen Gesundheit einsetzt, und eine Wiedergutmachung für die betroffenen und hinterbliebenen Personen (Batiste 2022, S. 29).Mittlerweile hat auch Präsident Joe Biden davon gehört und Taylor ins Weiße Haus eingeladen. Hier soll er verdeutlichen, dass Umweltschutz oberste Priorität hat und somit auch dem Umweltrassismus entgegengewirkt werden kann. Es gibt den Anwohner*innen und Umweltgruppen Hoffnung. Außerdem verlangen sie mehr Forschung zu dem Thema, um besser ihr Leid belegen zu können. Sie glauben, dass die Politik ihnen dann mehr Glauben schenkt (Schmidt 2023). Die daraus resultierende nationale Aufmerksamkeit soll der Wendepunkt von Cancer Alley sein (Batiste 2022, S. 29).Ein weiteres einzigartiges und innovatives Projekt wurde 2012 von Dr. Ingrid Waldron in Kanada ins Leben gerufen. Dabei handelt es sich um das sogenannte ENRICH-Projekt (Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities, and Community Health), welches sich auf die sozialen, ökologischen, politischen und gesundheitlichen Auswirkungen von Umweltrassismus in Mi´kmaq-Gemeinden (Ureinwohner*innen) und Nova Scotia, einer kleinen Provinz in Kanada, spezialisieret (ENRICH o.J.). Die hauptsächlich dort lebenden BIPoC berichten von Krankheiten wie Krebs oder Diabetes, welche aufgrund von Mülldeponien, die 1974 und 2006 eröffnet wurden, hervorgerufen wurden. Außerdem hatten sie kaum Zugang zu sauberem Trinkwasser, da das Wasser viele Giftstoffe enthielt. Der Müll zog zudem Bären, Waschbären und Insekten an (Klingbeil 2016).Das Projekt will Wege finden, um räumliche wie verteilungstechnische Arten des Umweltrassismus in diesen Gemeinden anzugehen und mithilfe der Bürger*innen die Politik bzw. Politiker*innen zum Handeln zu zwingen. Des Weiteren wollen sie national über die Ansiedlung und Regulierung von Industrieanlagen im Zusammenhang mit Umweltrassismus informieren. Das machen sie mithilfe von Interessenvertretungen, gemeinschaftlichem Engagement, Mobilisierung und Kapazitätsaufbau in betroffenen Gemeinden, öffentlicher Bildung, Studierendenausbildung, sektorübergreifenden Partnerschaften, Workshops und Kommunikation (ENRICH o.J.). Auch ihnen ist es in erster Linie wichtig, auf diese Umstände aufmerksam zu machen. Die Beteiligten schafften es, dass im Jahr 2015 zum ersten mal in Kanada ein Gesetzesentwurf zum Thema Umweltrassismus eingebracht und bis zur zweiten Lesung durchgebracht wurde. Allerdings wurde das Gesetz nicht verabschiedet (Klingbeil 2016).Das Projekt sorgte weltweit für Aufsehen. Im April 2018 veröffentlichte Waldron das Buch "There´s something in the water" und verwendete Nova Scotia als Fallbeispiel, um die Auswirkungen von Umweltrassismus und dessen gesundheitliche Folgen auf indigene und schwarze Gemeinschaften in Kanada zu untersuchen. Das Buch erhielt zwei Preise. 2019 wurde der gleichnamige Dokumentarfilm veröffentlicht.Das sind einzelne Projekte, die wichtig sind und von denen Betroffene profitieren können. Jedoch können sie nicht dem globalen Umweltrassismus entgegenwirken, welcher heute enorme Dimensionen angenommen hat. Nicht nur Bevölkerungsgruppen, sondern auch Länder sind unterschiedlich von den Folgen des Klimawandels betroffen. Die Politik kann und muss dagegen ankämpfen. Es gibt schon Lösungsideen, wie dem Umweltrassismus entgegengewirkt werden kann.Ein Prinzip, das dabei beachtet werden sollte, ist das Verursacherprinzip. Dabei sollen nicht nur die aktuellen Emissionen berücksichtigt werden, sondern auch die historische Verantwortung. Das bedeutet, dass beachtet werden muss, welches Land wie viel CO2 in der Vergangenheit ausgestoßen hat. Dadurch verändert sich das CO2-Budget der Länder im Norden. Teilweise wäre das Budget schon komplett aufgebraucht. Außerdem sollen die Nationen des globalen Nordens die Verantwortung als hauptsächliche Verursacher des Klimawandels auf sich nehmen und für die Kosten von Anpassungsstrategien und klimabedingten Schäden in Ländern des globalen Südens aufkommen müssen (Kurwan 2023).Eine weitere Lösung, die das Problem beheben könnte, ist ein Schuldenerlass. Das führt dazu, dass fossile Energieträger des globalen Südes im Boden bleiben können und die Länder das Geld anders investieren können. Beispielsweise in eine Veränderung, die sozial und ökologisch gerecht wäre. Des Weiteren könnten sie mit dem Geld die Klimaanpassung (mit-)finanzieren. Viele Wissenschaftler*innen oder auch der Internationale Währungsfonds (IWF) haben sich positiv zu dieser Lösung geäußert. Somit könnte den ärmeren Ländern mehr finanzieller Spielraum gegeben werden. Das kann ein Hilfsmittel gegen die Ungerechtigkeit sein. Jedoch kann es diese nicht komplett lindern. Der Norden muss definitiv noch mehr investieren. Denn wie schon weiter oben gesagt, hängt die Klimakrise eng mit der sozialen Gerechtigkeit und somit dem Umweltrassismus zusammen.FazitDer Beitrag beleuchtete das komplexe Thema des Umweltrassismus. Der Begriff wurde Anfang der 1980er Jahre geprägt und bekommt immer mehr Bedeutung. Umweltrassismus hat viele Facetten. Es tritt auf, wenn Umweltprobleme und Umweltverschmutzung unverhältnismäßig stark bestimmte Gemeinschaften betreffen. Meist betrifft es die Menschen, die bereits benachteiligt sind.Umweltrassismus ist also nicht nur eine Frage der Umwelt, sondern auch eine der sozialen Gerechtigkeit, wenn nicht sogar eine Frage von Leben und Tod. Neben BIPoC können auch Geschlechter und Generationen sowie ganze Länder direkt oder indirekt betroffen sein. Häufig trifft es Frauen, Kinder und Einkommensschwache am stärksten.Der globale Norden, der historisch für einen Großteil der CO2-Emissionen verantwortlich ist, leidet weniger unter den Folgen des Klimawandels als der globale Süden. Und das, obwohl der Süden deutlich weniger Emissionen verursacht.Um dem Umweltrassismus entgegenzuwirken, gibt es verschiedene Lösungsansätze. Diese reichen von gemeindebasierten Initiativen und internationaler Zusammenarbeit bis hin zu Gerichtsverfahren und politischen Maßnahmen. Ein wichtiger Schritt dabei ist es, die historische Verantwortung anzuerkennen und den globalen Norden zur Verantwortung zu ziehen. Ein Schuldenerlass für die Länder des globalen Südens könnte ihnen zudem finanzielle Ressourcen verschaffen, die sie in umweltfreundliche Technologie stecken können.Mit diesem Beitrag soll ein Bewusstsein für Umweltrassismus geschaffen werden. Das Ziel ist es, dass weniger CO2 freigesetzt wird, um eine nachhaltige Welt zu schaffen, in der Umweltressourcen und Chancen fair verteilt werden und niemand aufgrund seiner Hautfarbe oder seines sozialen Status benachteiligt wird. Es erfordert Engagement auf individueller und globaler Ebene, um die notwendigen Veränderungen herbeizuführen.LiteraturverzeichnisAdick, Katharina (2022): SPEZIAL: Klimagerechtigkeit – So wird Klimaschutz sozialer (Audio-Podcast). In: Quarks Daily. < https://open.spotify.com/episode/7g3b3BPJO9FHbJS9cHyeiB > (30.09.23).Batiste, Joheneisha (2022): Being Black Causes Cancer: Cancer Alley and Environmental Racism. < https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4092077 > (28.09.23).Bellina, Leonie (2022): Environmental Justice. In: Gottschlich, Daniela/Hackfort, Sarah/Schmitt, Tobias/Von Winterfeld, Uta (Hrsg.): Handbuch Politische Ökologie. Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH: Wetzlar. S. 63-78.Bendix, Daniel (2015): Entwicklung. In: Arndt, Susan/Ofuatey-Alazard, Nadja (Hrsg.): Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht. (K)Erben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv deutscher Sprache. Unrast: Münster, S. 272-278.D. Bullard, Robert/Mohai, Paul/Saha, Robin/Wright, Beverly (2007): Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty. 1987-2007. A Report Prepared for the United Chruch of Christ Justice & Witness Ministeries. < http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/unitedchurchofchrist/legacy_url/7987/toxic-wastes-and-race-at-twenty-1987-2007.pdf?1418432785 > (27.09.2023).Deutsche Gesellschaft für die Vereinten Nationen (DGVN) (2016): Klimagerechtigkeit und Geschlecht: Warum Frauen besonders anfällig für Klimawandel & Naturkatastrophen sind. < https://dgvn.de/meldung/klimagerechtigkeit-und-geschlecht-warum-frauen-besonders-anfaellig-fuer-klimawandel-naturkatastroph > (30.09.23).Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities, and Community Health (ENRICH): Welcome to the ENRICH Project < https://www.enrichproject.org/ > (28.09.23).Fachstelle Radikalisierungsprävention und Engagement im Naturschutz (FARN) (o.J.): Von Umweltrassismus zu Klimagerechtigkeit? Koloniale Kontinuitäten in der Klimakrise. < https://www.nf-farn.de/umweltrassismus-klimagerechtigkeit-koloniale-kontinuitaeten-klimakrise > (28.09.23). Fridays for Future (2020): ZEIT FÜR KLIMAGERECHTIGKEIT #KEINGRADWEITER – TEIL II: KLIMAGERECHTIGKEIT IM GLOBALEN KONTEXT. < https://fridaysforfuture.de/zeit-fuer-klimagerechtigkeit-keingradweiter-teil-ii-klimagerechtigkeit-im-globalen-kontext/ > (29.09.23).Ihejirika, Maudlyne (2023): Was ist Umweltrassismus? < https://www.nrdc.org/stories/what-environmental-racism > (27.09.23).Ituen, Imeh/Tatu Hey, Lisa (2021): Kurzstudie. Der Elefant im Raum – Umweltrassismus in Deutschland. Studien, Leerstellen für Umwelt- und Klimagerechtigkeit. < https://www.boell.de/de/2021/11/26/der-elefant-im-raum-umweltrassismus-deutschland > (28.09.2023).Klingbeil, Cailynn (2016): Forschungen über Umweltrassismus. < https://www.goethe.de/ins/nz/de/kul/sup/fut/20843144.html > (30.09.23).Kuehni, Claudia/Egger, Robert (2012): Klima. In: Egger, Matthias/Razum, Oliver (Hrsg.): Public Health: Sozial- und Präventivmedizin kompakt. De Gruyter: Berlin. S. 187-194.Kurwan, Jenny (2023): Klimagerechtigkeit. < https://www.bpb.de/themen/klimawandel/dossier-klimawandel/515255/klimagerechtigkeit/ >Öztürk, Asiye (2012): Editorial. In: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Kolonialismus. (44-45). S. 2Schmidt, Sarah (2023): Krebskrank am Öl-Delta. < https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/amerika/krebs-diskriminierung-usa-100.html > (30.09.23).United Church of Christ (2023): A Movement Is Born: Environmental Justice and the UCC. < https://www.ucc.org/what-we-do/justice-local-church-ministries/justice/faithful-action-ministries/environmental-justice/a_movement_is_born_environmental_justice_and_the_ucc/ > (27.09.2023).Warda, Johanna (2020): Ist der Klimawandel rassistisch? Die einen produzieren die Klimakatastrophe, die anderen baden sie aus – diese Annahme beschreibt der Begriff "Klimarassismus". Woher kommt er und was ist dran? < https://www.fluter.de/klimawandel-ist-ungerecht-verteilt > (27.09.2023).Yonetani, Michelle (2015): Global Estimates 2015. People displaced by disasters. < https://www.internal-displacement.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/20150713-global-estimates-2015-en-v1.pdf > (27.09.2023).Ziai, Aran (2012): Neokoloniale Weltordnung? In: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Kolonialismus. (44–45). S. 23-30.

The revolutionary violence that swept Kyiv's Maidan Square on the night of February 21, 2014 unleashed the forces of Ukrainian nationalism and, ultimately, Russian revanchism, and resulted in, among other things, the first full-scale land war in Europe since 1945.President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the Maidan the "first victory" in Ukraine's fight for independence from Russia. Yet too often lost in the tributes to Ukraine's 'Revolution of Dignity' are two simple, though ramifying, questions: What was the Maidan really about? And did things have to turn out this way?Revisiting the events of that time may help us more fully understand how we arrived at this fateful moment in world affairs.So, what precipitated the Maidan Revolution?In November 2013, Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych rejected the terms of the European Union Association Agreement in favor of a $15 billion credit agreement offered by the Russian Federation. Many in the western part of Ukraine had supported the EU deal, as it would have, in their view, secured Ukraine's future within Europe.But, as the Europeans, Americans, Ukrainians and Russians knew full well, the association agreement with Brussels wasn't merely a trade deal. Section 2.3 of the EU-Ukraine association agenda would have required the signatories to:"...take measures to foster military cooperation and cooperation of technical character between the EU and Ukraine [and] encourage and facilitate direct cooperation on concrete activities, jointly identified by both sides, between relevant Ukrainian institutions and CFSP/CSDP agencies and bodies such as the European Defence Agency, the European Union Institute for Security Studies, the European Union Satellite Centre and the European Security and Defence College."In other words, the trade deal also included the encouragement of military interoperability with forces viewed, rightly or wrongly, by the Russian government as a threat to Russian national security.In addition, the EU association agenda required Ukraine to put up barriers to trade with Russia. An alternative proposal put forward by Romano Prodi (former Italian Prime Minister and EU Commission president) would have allowed Ukraine to trade with both Russia and the EU but was rejected by Brussels.Yanukovych's rejection of the EU agreement brought thousands of protesters to Kyiv's Independence (Maidan) Square. Yet policy disagreements over issues of trade and national security can and are routinely adjudicated via democratic procedures, as they are in the U.S. and Europe. And such an adjudication was eminently possible, even as late as the morning of February 21, 2014, when a deal brokered by Russia and the EU was struck between Yanukovych and the Ukrainian opposition that included a revision of Ukraine's constitution, the creation of a unity government, and an early presidential election to be held 10 months later in December 2014.But on the night of February 21, Yanukovych fled, and a new government was installed by voluntarist rather than democratic means. The immediate post-Maidan government included the far-right Svoboda Party, whose members, according to a contemporaneous Reuters report, held "five senior roles in Ukraine's new government including the post of deputy prime minister."Edmund Wilson once wrote that "it is all too easy to idealize a social upheaval which takes place in some other country than one's own." And that was a trap into which the Obama administration — along with almost the entirety of the American media, intelligentsia and think tank world — fell in the immediate aftermath of the Maidan.It would be fair of critics of this view (and there are many) to ask: What were their alternatives to the Obama administration's support for the Maidan and Kyiv's post-revolutionary government?Mr. Obama might have said "A deal was struck. Stick to it." This would have required a degree of statesmanship unusual to any American president. But, as Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer observed only a month later, "...there was a deal that was cut with the European foreign ministers. That deal was abrogated and the Americans were very happy to jump on that immediately in ways that would have been completely unacceptable to anyone in the U.S. administration if we had been on the other side."And so, the U.S. lent its support to the post-Maidan government (and the Anti-Terrorist Operation, or ATO, launched in April 2014) against the largely, but of course far from entirely, indigenous uprising in the Donbas. Thus began the first phase of the war, which lasted until the evening of February 24, 2022 and cost 14,000 dead and 1.5 million refugees.In addition to the ATO, Kyiv also pursued a policy of decommunization in the east (later cited by Putin as among his many grievances with post-Maidan Kyiv) and repeatedly refused to implement the Minsk Accords. As a former U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, Jack F. Matlock, noted in Responsible Statecraft, "The war might have been prevented — probably would have been prevented — if Ukraine had been willing to abide by the Minsk agreement, recognize the Donbas as an autonomous entity within Ukraine, avoid NATO military advisors, and pledge not to enter NATO."The second phase of the war opened on the evening of February 24, 2022, as some 190,000 Russian troops invaded Ukraine. The costs to Ukraine have been staggering.The World Economic Forum recently estimated that the cost of Ukrainian reconstruction will reach $1 trillion. Still more, "Approximately 20% of the country's farmland has been wrecked and 30% of land either littered with landmines or unexploded ordnance." Casualty estimates are known to be among the most closely held state secrets during wartime, but some, like former Ukraine prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko, have estimated Ukraine suffered a combined 500,000 dead and wounded in its war with Russia. Meanwhile, the population of Ukraine has plummeted from 45.5 million in 2013 to an estimated 37 million today.Looking back, the warnings issued by a small minority in the winter of 2014, including, but not limited to: the present authors; Professor Stephen F. Cohen; The Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven; Ambassador Jack Matlock; Professor John J. Mearsheimer; and others were dismissed by the Obama administration, policymakers, the media and the most influential think tanks in Washington. Yet the effort to wrest Ukraine into the West's orbit via revolutionary violence, despite the objections of fully a third of that country, has been nothing short of catastrophic.

This year, CEGA was recognized by the American Economic Association (AEA) for our efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in the field of economics and within our center. In this post, Maya Ranganath, Associate Director of Global Networks and Inclusion, reflects on CEGA's inclusion strategy, pointing to unequal power dynamics in global development research and discussing how CEGA ensures that our work — externally and internally — is consistently aligned with our core values.CEGA Fellows, from left to right: Jaah Mkupete, Fola Aina, Hellen Namawejje, Caroline Sitienei Koech, Arnold Musungu, Ojiri Enahoro Innocent, and Muthoni Ng'ang'a, alongside Maya Ranganath at PacDev 2024 | Credit: CEGAAt CEGA, we regularly reflect on what it means to produce evidence for decision-makers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) from our position at an elite academic institution in the United States. In recent years, we have increasingly focused on how scientific narratives are "owned" by privileged groups and have updated our diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) strategy to address this dynamic. While inclusion has always been core to CEGA, we have consistently updated our strategies to match evolutions in the development research ecosystem.CEGA's theory of change centers our DEIJ goals: our third pillar is to "make the evidence ecosystem more inclusive." We pursue three interlocking objectives in support of this:To center the voices of underrepresented groups — including researchers, decision-makers, and study participants in LMICs — in social science research and policy debates.To ensure that rigorous evidence exists to help decision-makers in LMICs address injustices in society.To create a diverse and welcoming community at CEGA, respect and reflect the communities in which we live and work, and encourage the broader evidence-informed policy ecosystem to seek the same.We pursue these objectives by investing in LMIC scholars and institutions, supporting inclusive and equitable research, promoting ethics in research, diversifying our networks and team, and creating an environment where our staff and researchers feel a sense of belonging. Below we highlight some of the most important aspects of our DEIJ strategy.Investing in LMIC Scholars and InstitutionsSince 2008, CEGA's Global Networks initiative has bolstered the leadership of scholars from Africa, South Asia, and other low-income regions by equipping them with the tools, skills, networks, and funding they need to thrive. We organize short-course workshops, host semester-long fellowships, and provide extensive follow-on support. To date, CEGA has hosted 85 scholars at UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, and virtually. The fellowships provide the opportunity to audit relevant courses, present work in seminars, apply to competitive funding calls, receive mentorship, and network with faculty members and students. These scholars have received nearly $2 million in grant funding to promote their independent research activities and mainstream of development research globally. Program alumni started the Network of Impact Evaluation Researchers in Africa (NIERA) in 2018, an independent organization of former fellows that works to advance decision-focused evaluations in sub-Saharan Africa.Importantly, the capacity-strengthening support we provide to LMIC scholars is designed to meet the demand for training and mentorship in the short- and medium-term. Longer term, we are eager to support the transfer of ownership of these types of programs to LMIC institutions, to leverage their growing capacity and resources to train and mentor the next generation of African scholars.As a learning organization, CEGA is committed to pursuing open inquiry and debate about the barriers to — and opportunities for — inclusion across the evidence-informed policy ecosystem. Through our Collaboration for Inclusive Development Research (CIDR), we are working with NIERA to develop an evidence-based theory of change for inclusion that delineates which stakeholders are best placed to add value at various stages of the research-to-policy pipeline.Supporting Inclusive and Equitable ResearchMany research approaches in development economics reinforce Western notions of "epistemic superiority" over indigenous ways of knowing. CEGA has long encouraged an inclusive approach and a plurality of methods and disciplines that, together, make our research more accessible and more relevant to a broader range of stakeholders. While we continue to prioritize the use of impact evaluations where feasible and appropriate, we also support studies that leverage quasi-experimental methods, qualitative methods, data science, and mixed-methods approaches.As a re-granting institution, we recognize our power to fund research equitably and inclusively and support research that challenges unequal power structures. Our research granting policy formalizes how and when research teams should consider DEIJ criteria when awarding new grants. Typically, when evaluating research proposals, we include criteria that assess the diversity of the research team and of the larger portfolio. We have also developed a "co-authorship statement" with our grant awards outlining how researchers should be credited for their contributions, encouraging greater equity within research teams.CEGA prioritizes research activities that address persistent inequities and injustices in society. This means moving beyond sub-group analysis and conducting research with transformational potential for traditionally disadvantaged groups. For example, CEGA recently established a "Gender & Agency" theme to support gender transformative research aimed at dismantling harmful power structures and promoting gender equity. Additionally, our domestic-facing portfolio, the Opportunity Lab, hosts an initiative on "Racial Equity in the Labor Market," which examines the role of state and federal wage and employment policy in reducing racial disparities and promoting greater equity of economic opportunity in the United States.CEGA's Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) works to democratize the way social science is produced, scrutinized, and shared by realigning incentives for knowledge generation and use. For example, the BITSS catalyst program invests in scholars from LMICs to encourage transparent and reproducible research. Tools and standards that foster open access to data, code, and published research make it easier for LMIC researchers to access and advance new research. Additionally, the Social Science Prediction Platform (SSPP) provides a tool for sourcing input from community members, amplifying local knowledge, and helping to inform better research.Diversifying our Network and TeamCEGA continues to pursue a more diverse staff and network of affiliates. We have audited and refined our hiring processes, writing more inclusive job descriptions, disseminating them to diverse institutions, and developing a more equitable interview process. While the work of diversifying our organization will never be "finished," our efforts have yielded some progress: currently, 27% of our staff come from underrepresented backgrounds (as defined by UC Berkeley), up from 9% only three years ago. To track our progress, we conduct annual demographic surveys with staff, measure staff perceptions of the Center's equity and inclusivity, and enable anonymous feedback mechanisms. Meanwhile, we recently revamped our compensation framework to ensure that staff of different backgrounds are compensated equitably and transparently. We also audited and adapted our affiliate nomination process to ensure it is equitable and conducive to a diverse network. Importantly, we maintain a variety of staff forums to discuss our positionality in development research and reflect on current events in our communities.CEGA's DEIJ work is managed by a dedicated working group that I lead as the Associate Director of Global Networks and Inclusion, and guided by an internal DEIJ strategy and set of key performance indicators. We are energized by the AEA's recognition of our efforts over the years, while acknowledging that we have a long way to go to achieve our DEIJ goals. In this spirit, we welcome your comments and feedback on our approach. We further commit to sharing our learnings, including our challenges and failures, openly and transparently. Please stay tuned for more updates on DEIJ in the near future.CEGA's Award-Winning Approach to Promoting Diversity and Inclusion was originally published in CEGA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Theory Talk #75: Tarak Barkawi on IR after the West, and why the best work in IR is often found at its marginsIn this Talk, Tarak Barkawi discusses the importance of the archive and real-world experiences, at a time of growing institutional constraints. He reflects on the growing rationalization and "schoolification" of the academy, a disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized within a university audit culture, and the future of IR in a post-COVID world. He also discusses IR's contorted relationship to the archive, and explore future sites of critical innovation and inquiry, including the value of knowledge production outside of the academy. PDF version of this TalkSo what is, or should be, according to you, the biggest challenge, or principal debate in critical social sciences and history?Right now, despite thinking about it, I don't have an answer to that question. Had you asked me five years ago, I would have said, without hesitation, Eurocentrism. There's a line in Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe where he remarks that Europe has already been provincialized by history, but we still needed to provincialize it intellectually in the social sciences. Both sides of this equation have intensified in recent years. Amid a pandemic, in the wreckage of neoliberalism, in the wake of financial crisis, the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the events of the Trump Presidency, and the return of the far right, the West feels fundamentally reduced in stature. The academy, meanwhile, has moved on from the postcolonial to the decolonial with its focus on alternative epistemologies, about which I am more ambivalent intellectually and politically. Western states and societies are powerful and rich, their freedoms attractive, and most of them will rebound. But what does it mean for the social sciences and other Western intellectual traditions which trace their heritage to the European Enlightenments that the West may no longer be 'the West', no longer the metropole of a global order more or less controlled by its leading states? What kind of implications does the disassembling of the West in world history have for social and political inquiry? I don't have an answer to that. Speaking more specifically about IR, we are dealing now with conservative appropriations of Eurocentrism, with the rise of other civilizational IRs (Chinese, European, Indian). These kinds of moves, like the decolonial one, foreground ultimately incommensurable systems of knowing and valuing, at best, and at worst are Eurocentrism with the signs reversed, usually to China. I do not think what we should be doing right now in the academy is having Chinese social sciences, Islamic social sciences, Indian social sciences, and so on. But that's definitely one way in which the collapse of the West is playing out intellectually. How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?By the time you get to my age you have a lot of debt, mostly to students, to old teachers and supervisors, and to colleagues and friends. University scholars tend not to have very exciting lives, so I don't have much to offer in the way of events. But I can give you an experience that I do keep revisiting when I reflect on the directions I've taken and the things I've been interested in. When I was in high school, I took a university course taught by Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers. As many will know, before he became involved in the Vietnam War, and later in opposing it, he worked on game theory and nuclear strategy. I grew up in Southern California, in Orange County, and there was a program that let you take courses at the University of California, Irvine. I took one on the history of the Roman Empire and then a pair of courses on nuclear weapons that culminated with one taught by Ellsberg himself. I actually had no idea who he was but the topic interested me. Nuclear war was in the air in the early 1980s. Activist graduate students taught the preparatory course. They were good teachers and I learned all about the history and politics of nuclear weapons. But I also came to realize that these teachers were trying to shape (what I would now call) my political subjectivity. Sometimes they were ham handed, like the old ball bearings in the tin can trick: turn the lights out in the room, and put one ball bearing in the can for each nuclear warhead in the world, in 1945 this many; in 1955 this many; and so on. In retrospect, that's where I got hooked on the idea of graduate school. I was aware that Ellsberg was regarded as an important personage. He taught in a large lecture hall. At every session, a kind of loyal corps of new and old activists turned out, many in some version of '60s attire. The father of a high school friend was desperate to get Ellsberg's autograph, and sent his son along with me to the lecture one night to get it. It was political instruction of the first order to figure out that this suburban dad had been a physics PhD at Berkley in the late '60s and early '70s, demonstrating against the Vietnam War. But now he worked for a major aerospace defense contractor. He had a hot tub in his backyard. Meanwhile, Ellsberg cancelled class one week because he'd been arrested demonstrating at a major arms fair in Los Angeles. "We stopped the arms race for a few hours," he told the class after. I schooled myself on who Ellsberg was and Vietnam, the Cold War, and much else came into view. Meanwhile, he gave a master class in nuclear weapons and foreign policy, cheekily naming his course after Kissinger's book, I later came to appreciate. I learned about RAND, the utility of madness for making nuclear threats, and how close we'd come to nuclear war since 1945. My high school had actually been built to double as a fallout shelter, at a time when civil defense was taken seriously as an aspect of a credible threat of second strike. It was low slung, stoutly built, with high iron fences that could be closed to create a cantonment. We were not far from Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station and a range of other likely targets. All of this sank in as I progressed in these courses. Then one day at a strip mall bookstore, I discovered Noam Chomsky's US foreign policy books and never looked back. At Cambridge, I caught the tail end of the old Centre of International Studies, originally started by an intelligence historian and explicitly multi-disciplinary. It had, in my time, historians, lawyers, area studies, development studies, political theory and history of thought, and IR scholars and political scientists. Boundaries certainly existed out there in the disciplines. But there weren't substantial institutional obstacles to thinking across them, while interdisciplinary environments gave you lots of local resources (i.e. colleagues and students) for thinking and reading creatively. What would a student need to become a kind of specialist in your kind of area or field or to understand the world in a global way? Lots of history, especially other peoples' histories; to experience what it's like to see the world from a different place than where you grew up, so that the foreign is not an abstraction to you. I think another route that can create very interesting scholars is to have a practitioner career first, in development, the military, a diplomatic corps, NGOs, whatever. Even only five years doing something like that not only teaches people how the world works, it is intellectually fecund, creative. People just out of operational posts are often full of ideas, and can access interesting resources for research, like professional networks. How, in your view, should IR responding to the shifting geopolitical landscape?  The fate I think we want to avoid is carrying on with what Stanley Hoffmann called the "American social science": the IR invented out of imperial crisis and world war by Anglo-American officials, foundations and thinkers. Very broadly speaking, and with variations, this was a new world combination of realism and positivism. This discipline was intended as the intellectual counterpart to the American-centered world order, designed, among other things, to disappear the question of race in the century of the global color line. The way it conceived the national/international world obscured how US world power worked in practice. That power operated in and through formally sovereign, independent states—an empire by invitation, in the somewhat rosy view of Geir Lundestad—trialed in Latin America and well suited to a decolonizing world. It was an anti-colonial imperium. Political science divided up this world between IR and comparative politics. This kind of IR is cortically connected to the American-centered world fading away before our eyes. It is a kind of zombie discipline where we teach students about world politics as if we were still sitting with the great power peacemakers of 1919 and 1944-45. It is still studying how to make states cooperate under a hegemon or how to make credible deterrence threats in various circumstances. Interestingly, I think one of the ways the collapse of US power is shaping the discipline was identified by Walt and Mearsheimer in their 2013 article on the decline of theory in IR. In the US especially but not only, IR is increasingly indistinguishable from political science as a universal positivist enterprise mostly interested in applying highly evolved, quantitative or experimental approaches to more or less minor questions. Go too far down this road and IR disappears as a distinct disciplinary space, it becomes just a subject matter, a site of empiricist inquiry. Instead, the best work in IR mostly occurs on the edges of the discipline. IR often serves as cover for diverse and interdisciplinary work on transboundary relations. Those relations fall outside the core objects of analysis of the main social science and humanities disciplines but are IR's distinctive focus. The mainstream, inter-paradigm discipline, for me, has never been a convincing social science of the international and is not something I teach or think much about these days. But the classical inheritances of the discipline help IR retain significant historical, philosophical and normative dimensions. Add in a pluralist disposition towards methodology, and IR can be a unique intellectual space capable of producing scholars and scholarship that operate across disciplines. The new materialism, or political ecology, is one area in which this is really happening right now. IR is also a receptive home for debating the questions thrown up by the decolonial turn. These are two big themes in contemporary intellectual life, in and beyond the academy. IR potentially offers distinct perspectives on them which can push debates forward in unexpected ways, in part because we retain a focus on the political and the state, which too easily drop out of sight in global turns in other disciplines. In exchange, topics like the new materialism and the decolonial offer IR the chance to connect with world politics in these new times, after the American century. In my view, and it is not one that I think is widely shared, IR should become the "studies" discipline that centers on the transboundary. How do we re-imagine IR as the interdisciplinary site for the study of transboundary relations as a distinct social and political space? That's a question of general interest in a global world, but one which few traditions of thought are as well-equipped to reflect on and push forward as we are.That's an interesting and forceful critique which also brings us back to a common thread throughout your work: questions of power and knowledge and specifically the relation between power and knowledge in IR and social science. I'm interested in exploring this point further, because so much of your critique has been centered on how profoundly Eurocentric IR is and as a product of Western power. Well, IR's development as a discipline has been closely tied to Western state power. It would seem that it has to change, given the shifts underway in the world. It's like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons - he's run off the cliff. His legs are still moving, but he hasn't dropped, yet. That said, there's no singularly determinate relation between power and the historical development of intellectual traditions. Who knows what kind of new ideas and re-imagining of IR's concepts we might see? As I say, I think one reflection of these changes is that we're already seeing North American IR start to fade into universal quantitative social science. As Hoffmann observed, part of IR's appeal was that the Americans were running the world, that's why you started a social science concerned with things like bipolarity and deterrence, and with analyzing the foreign policy of a great power and its interests and conflicts around the world. Nowadays the Americans are at a late Roman stage of imperial decline. Thinking from the command posts of US foreign policy doesn't look so attractive or convincing when Emperor Nero is running the show, or something altogether darker is waiting in the wings. IR is supposed to be in command of world politics, analyzing them from on high. But what I've seen over the course of my education and career is the way world politics commands IR. The end of the Cold War torpedoed many careers and projects; the 1990s created corps of scholars concerned with development, civil war and humanitarian intervention; in the 2000s, we produced terrorism experts (and critical terrorism studies) and counterinsurgency specialists and critics, along with many scholars concerned in one way or another with Islam. What I have always found fascinating, and deeply indicative, about IR is the relative absence until relatively recently of serious inquiry into power/knowledge relations or the sociology of knowledge. In 1998 when Ole Waever goes to look at some of these questions, he notes how little there was to work from then, before Oren, Vitalis, Guilhot and others published. It's an astounding observation. In area studies, in anthropology, in the history of science, in development studies, in all of these areas of inquiry so closely entangled with imperial and state power, there are long-running, well developed traditions of inquiry into power/knowledge relations. It's a well-recognized area of inquiry, not some fringe activity, and it's heavily empirical, primary sourced based, as well as interesting conceptually. In recent decades you've seen really significant work come out about the role of the Second World War in the development of game theory, and its continuing entwinement with the nuclear contest of the Cold War. I'm thinking here of S.M. Amadae, Paul Erickson, and Philip Mirowski among others. The knowledge forms the American social science used to study world politics were part and parcel of world politics, they were internal to histories of geopolitics rather than in command of them. Of course, for a social science that models itself on natural science, with methodologies that produce so-called objective knowledge, the idea that scientific knowledge itself is historical and power-ridden, well, you can't really make sense of that. You'd be put in the incoherent position of studying it objectively, as it were, with the same tools. IR arises from the terminal crisis of the British Empire; its political presuppositions and much else were fundamentally shaped by the worldwide anti-communist project of the US Cold War state; and it removed race as a term of inquiry into world politics during the century of the global color line. All this, and but for Hoffmann's essay, IR has no tradition of power/knowledge inquiry into its own house until recently? It's not credible intellectually. Anthropologists should be brought in to teach us how to do this kind of thing. You've been at the forefront of the notion of historical IR, and in investigating the relationship between history and theory – why is history important for IR?Well, I think I'd start with the question of what do we mean when we say history? For mainstream social science, it means facts in the past against which to test theories and explanations. For critical IR scholars, it usually means historicism, as that term is understood in social theory: social phenomena are historical, shaped by time and place. Class, state, race, nation, empire, war, these are all different in different contexts. While I think this is a very significant insight and one that I agree with, on its own it tends to imply that historical knowledge is available, that it can be found by reading historians. In fact, for both empiricism and historicism there is a presumption that you can pretty reliably find out what happened in the past. For me, this ignores a second kind of historicism, the historicism of history writing itself, the historiographical. The questions historians ask, how they inquire into them, the particular archives they use, the ways in which they construct meaning and significance in their narratives, the questions they don't ask, that about which they are silent, all of these, shape history writing, the history that we know about. The upshot is that the past is not stable; it keeps changing as these two meanings of historicism intertwine. We understand the Haitian revolution now, or the indigenous peoples of the Americas, entirely differently than we did just a few decades ago.That raises another twist to this problem. Many IR scholars access history through reading historians or through synthetic accounts; they encounter history by and large through secondary sources. One consequence is that they are often a generation or more behind university historians. Think of how Gaddis, for instance, remains a go to authority on the history of the Cold War in IR. In other disciplines, from the 1980s on, there was a historical turn that took scholars into the archives. Anthropologists and literary scholars used historians' tools to answers their own questions. The result was not just a bunch of history books, but entirely new readings of core questions. The classic example is the historical Shakespeare that Stephen Greenblatt found in the archives, rather than the one whose texts had been read by generations of students in English departments. My point here is that working in archives was conceptually, theoretically significant for these disciplines and the subjects they studied. For example, historical anthropology has given us new perspectives on imperialism. While there is some archival work in IR of course, especially in disciplinary history, it is not central to disciplinary debates and the purpose is usually theory testing in which the past appears as merely a bag of facts. In sum, when I say history and theory, I don't just mean thinking historically. I mean actually doing history, being an historian—which means archives—and in so doing becoming a better theorist. Could you expand on these points by telling us about your recent work on military history? I think that military history is particularly interesting because it is a site where war is reproduced and shaped. Military history participates in that which it purports only to study. Popular military histories shape the identities of publics. Staff college versions are about learning lessons and fighting war better the next time. People who grow up wanting to be soldiers often read about them in history books. So our historical knowledge of war, and war as a social and historical process, are wrapped up together. I hope some sense of the promise of power/knowledge studies for larger questions comes through here. I'm saying that part of what war is as a social phenomenon is history writing about it. It's in this kind of context that the fact that a great deal of military history is actually written by veterans, often of the very campaigns of which they write, becomes interesting. Battle produces its own historians. This is a tradition that goes back to European antiquity, soldiers and commanders returning to write histories, the histories, of the wars they fought in. So this question of veterans' history writing is in constitutive relations with warfare, and with the West and its nations and armies. My shorthand for the particular area of this I want to look into is what I call "White men's military histories". That is, Western military history in the modern era is racialized, not just about enemies but about the White identities constructed in and through it. And I want to look at the way this is done in campaigns against racialized others, particularly situations where defeats and reverses were inflicted on the Westerners. How were such events and experiences made sense of historically? How were they mediated in and through military history? I think defeats are particularly productive, incitements to discourse and sense making. To think about these questions, I want to look at the place of veterans in the production of military histories, as authors, sources, communities of interpretation. My sandbox is the tumultuous first year of the Korean War, where US forces suffered publically-evident reverses and risked being pushed into the sea. In a variety of ways, veterans shape military history, through their questions, their grievances, their struggles over reputation, their memories. This happens at many different sites and scales, including official and popular histories, and the networks of veterans behind them as well as other, independently published works. Over the course of veterans' lives, their war throws up questions and issues that become the subject of sometimes dueling and contradictory accounts. Through their history writing, they connect their war experience to Western traditions of battle historiography. They make their war speak to other wars. This is what military history is, and how it can come to produce and reproduce practices of war-making, at least in Anglo-American context. Of course, much of this history writing, like narrations of experience generally, reflects dominant ideologies, in this case discourses of the US Cold War in Asia. But counter-historians are also to be found among soldiers. The shocks and tragic absurdities of any given war produce research questions of their own. At risk of mixing metaphors, the veterans know where the skeletons are buried. They bear resentments and grievances about how their war was conducted that become research topics, and they often have the networks and wherewithal to produce informed and systematic accounts. So as well as reproducing hegemonic discourses, soldier historians are also interesting as a new critical resource for understanding war.This shouldn't be that surprising. In other areas of inquiry, amateur and practitioner scholars have often been a source of critical innovation. LGBTQ history starts outside the academy, among activists who turned their apartments into archives. Much of what we now call postcolonial scholarship also began outside the academy, among colonized intellectuals involved in anti-imperial struggles. Let me close this off by going back to the archive. There are really rich sources for this kind of project. Military historians of all kinds leave behind papers full of their research materials and correspondence. The commanders and others they wrote about often waged extended epistolary campaigns concerned with correcting and shaping the historical record. But more than this, by situating archival sources alongside what later became researched and published histories, what drops out and what goes in to military history comes into view. What is silenced, and what is given voice? We can then see how the violent and forlorn episodes of war are turned into narrated events with military meaning. What is the process by which war experience becomes military history?Given the interdisciplinary nature of your work, what field you place yourself in? And are there any problems have you encountered when writing and thinking across scholarly boundaries?In my head I live in a kind of idealized interdisciplinary war studies, and my field is the intersection of war and empire. Sort of Michael Howard meets Critical Theory and Frantz Fanon. This has given me a particular voice in critical IR broadly conceived, and a distinctive place from which to engage the discipline. The mostly UK departments I've been in have been broadly hospitable places in practice for interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching, so long as you published rather than perished. Of course, interdisciplinary is a complicated word. It is one thing to be multi-disciplinary, to publish in the core journals of more than one discipline and to be recognized and read by scholars in more than one discipline. But work that falls between disciplinary centers, which takes up questions and offers answers recognized centrally by no discipline, that's something harder to deal with. I thought after Soldiers of Empire won prizes in two disciplines that I'd have an easier time getting funding for the project I described earlier in the interview. But I've gotten nowhere, despite years of applications to a variety of US, UK, and European funders. Of course, this may be because it is a bad project! My point, though, is that disciplines necessarily, and even rightly, privilege work that speaks to central questions; that's the work that naturally takes on significance in disciplinary contexts, as in many grant or scholarship panels. I think another point here is the nature of the times. Understandably, no one is particularly interested right now in White men's military histories. What I think has really empowered disciplines during my time in the UK academy has been the intersection with audit culture and university management. Repeated waves of rationalization have washed over the UK academy, which have emphasized discipline as a unit of measurement and management even as departments themselves were often "schoolified" into more or less odd combinations of disciplines. Schoolification helped to break down old solidarities and identities, while audit culture needed something on which to base its measures. The great victory of neoliberalism over the academy is evident in the way it is just accepted now that performance has to be assessed by various public criteria. This is where top disciplinary journals enter the picture, as unquestionable (and quantifiable) indicators of excellence. Interdisciplinary journals don't have the same recognition, constituency, or obvious significance. To put it in IR terms, Environment and Planning D or Comparative Studies in Society and History, to take two top journals that interdisciplinary IR types publish in, will never have the same weight as, say, ISQ or APSR. That that seems natural is an indicator of change—when I started, RIS—traditionally welcoming of interdisciplinary scholarship—was seen as just as good a place to publish as any US journal. Now RIS is perceived as merely a "national" journal while ISQ and APSR are "international" or world-class. This kind of thing has consequences for careers and the make-up of departments. What I'm drawing attention to is not so much an intellectual or academic debate; scholars always disagree on what good scholarship is, which is how it is supposed to be. It is rather the combination of discipline with the suffocating culture of petty management that pervades so much of British life. Get your disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized in an audit culture environment, and you can really expand. For example, the professionalization of methods training in the UK has worked as a kind of Trojan Horse for quantitative and positivist approaches within disciplines. In IR, in the potted geographic lingo we use, that has meant more US style work. Disappearing is the idea of IR as an "inter-discipline," where departments have multi-disciplinary identities like I described above. The US idea that IR is part of political science is much more the common sense now than it was in the UK. Another dimension of the eclipse of interdisciplinary IR has been the rise of quantitative European political science, boosted by large, multiyear grants from the ERC and national research councils. It's pretty crazy, strategically speaking, for the UK to establish a civilizational scale where you're always behind the US or its European counterparts. You'll never do North American IR as well as the North Americans do, especially given the disparity in resources. You'll always be trending second or third tier. The British do like to beat themselves up. Meanwhile, making US political science journals the practical standard for "international excellence" threatens to make the environment toxic for the very scholarship that has made British IR distinctive and attractive globally. The upshot of that will be another wave of émigré scholars, which the British academy's crises and reform initiatives produce from time to time. Think of the generation of UK IR scholars who decamped to Australia, an academy poised to prosper in the post-covid world (if the government there can get its vaccination program on track) and a major site right now of really innovative IR scholarship. To return to what you mentioned earlier regarding the hesitancy to go to the archives, this is also mirrored in a hesitancy to do serious ethnography, I think as well. Or there's this "doing ethnography" that involves a three-day field trip. This kind of sweet-shop 'pick and mix' has come to characterize some methodologies, because of these constraints that you highlight…A lot of what I'm talking about has happened within universities, it's not externally imposed or a direct consequence of the various government-run assessment exercises. Academics, eagerly assisted by university managers, have done a lot of this to themselves and their students. The implications can be far reaching for the kind of scholarship that departments foster, from PhDs on up. More and more of the UK PhD is taken up with research methods courses, largely oriented around positivism even if they have critical components. Already this gives a directionality to ideas. The advantage of the traditional UK PhD—working on your own with a supervisor to produce a piece of research—has been intellectual freedom, even when the supervisor wasn't doing their job properly. It's not great, but the possibility for creative, innovative, even field changing scholarship was retained. PhD students weren't disciplined, so to speak. What happens now is that PhD students are subject to a very strict four year deadline, often only partially funded, their universities caring mainly about timely completion not placement and preparation for a scholarly career, a classic case of the measurement displacing the substantive value. The formal coursework they get is methods driven. You can supervise interdisciplinary PhD research in this kind of environment, but it's not easy and poses real risks and creates myriad obstacles for the student. A strange consequence of this, as many of my master's students will tell you, is that I often advise them to consider US PhDs, just in other disciplines. That way, they get the benefit of rigorous PhD level coursework beyond methods. They can do so in disciplines like history or anthropology that are currently receptive both to the critical and the transnational/transboundary. That is not a great outcome for UK IR, even if it may be for critically-minded students. Outside of a very few institutions and scattered individuals, US political science, of course, has largely cleansed itself of the critical and alternative approaches that had started to flower in the glasnost era of the 1990s. That is not something we should be seeking to emulate in the UK.So yes, there's much to say here, about how the four year PhD has materially shaped scholarship in the UK. There is generally very little funding for field work. Universities worried about liability have put all kinds of obstacles in the way of students trying to get to field work sites. Requirements like insisting that students be in residence for their fourth year in order to write up and submit on time further limit the possibilities for field work. The upshot is to make the PhD dissertation more a library exercise or to favor the kind of quantitative, data science work that fits more easily into these time constraints and structures. Again, quite obviously, power sculpts knowledge. It becomes simply impossible, within the PhD, to do the kinds of things associated with serious qualitative scholarship, like learn languages, spend long time periods in field sites and to visit them more than once, to develop real networks there. Over time this shapes the academy, often in unintended ways. I think this is one of the reasons that IR in the UK has been so theoretic in character—what else can people do but read books, think and write in this kind of environment? As I say, the other kind of thing they can do is quantitative work, which takes us right back to the fate Walt and Mearsheimer sensed befalling IR as political science. Watch for IR and Data Science joint degrees as the next step in this evolution. Political Science in the US starts teaching methods at the freshman level. They get them young. We have discussed the rather grim state of affairs for the future of critical social science scholarship, at least in the UK and US. To conclude – what prospects for hope in the future are there?Well, if I had a public relations consultant pack, this is the point at which it would advise talking about children and the power of science to save us. I think the environment for universities, political, financial, and otherwise may get considerably more difficult. Little is untouchable in Western public life right now, it is only a question of when and in what ways they will come for us. The nationalist and far-right turns in Western politics feed off transgressing boundaries. There's no reason to suspect universities will be immune from this, and they haven't been. In the UK, as a consequence of Brexit, we are having to nationalise, and de-European-ise our scholarships and admissions processes. We are administratively enacting the surrender of cosmopolitan achievements in world politics and in academic life. This is not a plot but in no small measure the outcome of democratic will, registered in the large majority Boris Johnson's Conservatives won at the last general election. It will have far reaching consequences for UK university life. This is all pretty scary if you think, as I do, that we are nearer the beginning then the end of the rise of the right. Covid will supercharge some of these processes of de-globalization. I can already see an unholy alliance forming of university managers and introvert academics who will want to keep in place various dimensions of the online academic life that has taken shape since spring 2020. Often this will be justified by reference to environmental concerns and by the increased, if degraded, access that online events make possible. We are going to have a serious fight on our hands to retain our travel budgets at anywhere near pre-pandemic levels. I'm hoping that this generation of students, subjected to online education, will become warriors for in-person teaching. All of this said, it's hard to imagine a more interesting time to be teaching, thinking and writing about world politics. Politics quite evidently retains its capacity to turn the world upside down. Had you told US citizens where they would be on January 6th, 2021 in 2016, they would have called you alarmist if not outlandish. I think we're in for more moments like that. Tarak Barkawi is a professor of International Relations at LSE. He uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire. His most recent book, Soldiers of Empire, examined the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War, reconceiving Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms. Currently, he is working on the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior. This new project explores soldiers' history writing as a site for war's constitutive presence in society and politics.PDF version of this Talk

America's Global War on Terror has seen its share of stalemates, disasters, and outright defeats. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, the United States has watched its efforts implode in spectacular fashion, from Iraq in 2014 to Afghanistan in 2021. The greatest failure of its "Forever Wars," however, may not be in the Middle East, but in Africa."Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated," President George W. Bush told the American people in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, noting specifically that such militants had designs on "vast regions" of Africa.To shore up that front, the U.S. began a decades-long effort to provide copious amounts of security assistance, train many thousands of African military officers, set up dozens of outposts, dispatch its own commandos on all manner of missions, create proxy forces, launch drone strikes, and even engage in direct ground combat with militants in Africa. Most Americans, including members of Congress, are unaware of the extent of these operations. As a result, few realize how dramatically America's shadow war there has failed.The raw numbers alone speak to the depths of the disaster. As the United States was beginning its Forever Wars in 2002 and 2003, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in Africa. This year, militant Islamist groups on that continent have, according to the Pentagon, already conducted 6,756 attacks. In other words, since the United States ramped up its counterterrorism operations in Africa, terrorism has spiked 75,000%.Let that sink in for a moment.75,000%.A Conflict that Will Live in InfamyThe U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq opened to military successes in 2001 and 2003 that quickly devolved into sputtering occupations. In both countries, Washington's plans hinged on its ability to create national armies that could assist and eventually take over the fight against enemy forces. Both U.S.-created militaries would, in the end, crumble. In Afghanistan, a two-decade-long war ended in 2021 with the rout of an American-built, -funded, -trained, and -armed military as the Taliban recaptured the country. In Iraq, the Islamic State nearly triumphed over a U.S.-created Iraqi army in 2014, forcing Washington to reenter the conflict. U.S. troops remain embattled in Iraq and neighboring Syria to this very day.In Africa, the U.S. launched a parallel campaign in the early 2000s, supporting and training African troops from Mali in the west to Somalia in the east and creating proxy forces that would fight alongside American commandos. To carry out its missions, the U.S. military set up a network of outposts across the northern tier of the continent, including significant drone bases – from Camp Lemonnier and its satellite outpost Chabelley Airfield in the sun-bleached nation of Djibouti to Air Base 201 in Agadez, Niger — and tiny facilities with small contingents of American special operations troops in nations ranging from Libya and Niger to the Central African Republic and South Sudan.For almost a decade, Washington's war in Africa stayed largely under wraps. Then came a decision that sent Libya and the vast Sahel region into a tailspin from which they have never recovered."We came, we saw, he died," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked after a U.S.-led NATO air campaign helped overthrow Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, in 2011. President Barack Obama hailed the intervention as a success, but Libya slipped into near-failed-state status. Obama would later admit that "failing to plan for the day after" Qaddafi's defeat was the "worst mistake" of his presidency.As the Libyan leader fell, Tuareg fighters in his service looted his regime's weapons caches, returned to their native Mali, and began to take over the northern part of that nation. Anger in Mali's armed forces over the government's ineffective response resulted in a 2012 military coup. It was led by Amadou Sanogo, an officer who learned English in Texas and underwent infantry-officer basic training in Georgia, military-intelligence instruction in Arizona, and was mentored by U.S. Marines in Virginia.Having overthrown Mali's democratic government, Sanogo and his junta proved hapless in battling terrorists. With the country in turmoil, those Tuareg fighters declared an independent state, only to be muscled aside by heavily armed Islamists who instituted a harsh brand of Shariah law, causing a humanitarian crisis. A joint Franco-American-African mission prevented Mali's complete collapse but pushed the militants into areas near the borders of both Burkina Faso and Niger.Since then, those nations of the West African Sahel have been plagued by terrorist groups that have evolved, splintered, and reconstituted themselves. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on motorcycles — two to a bike, wearing sunglasses and turbans, and armed with Kalashnikovs — regularly roar into villages to impose zakat (an Islamic tax); steal animals; and terrorize, assault, and kill civilians. Such relentless attacks have destabilized Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger and are now affecting their southern neighbors along the Gulf of Guinea. Violence in Togo and Benin has, for example, jumped 633% and 718% over the last year, according to the Pentagon.U.S.-trained militaries in the region have been unable to stop the onslaught and civilians have suffered horrifically. During 2002 and 2003, terrorists caused just 23 casualties in Africa. This year, according to the Pentagon, terrorist attacks in the Sahel region alone have resulted in 9,818 deaths — a 42,500% increase.At the same time, during their counterterrorism campaigns, America's military partners in the region have committed gross atrocities of their own, including extrajudicial killings. In 2020, for example, a top political leader in Burkina Faso admitted that his country's security forces were carrying out targeted executions. "We're doing this, but we're not shouting it from the rooftops," he told me, noting that such murders were good for military morale.American-mentored military personnel in that region have had only one type of demonstrable "success": overthrowing governments the United States trained them to protect. At least 15 officers who benefited from such assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror. The list includes officers from Burkina Faso (2014, 2015, and twice in 2022); Chad (2021); Gambia (2014); Guinea (2021); Mali (2012, 2020, and 2021); Mauritania (2008); and Niger (2023). At least five leaders of a July coup in Niger, for example, received American assistance, according to a U.S. official. They, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as that country's governors.Military coups of that sort have even super-charged atrocities while undermining American aims, yet the United States continues to provide such regimes with counterterrorism support. Take Colonel Assimi Goïta, who worked with U.S. Special Operations forces, participated in U.S. training exercises, and attended the Joint Special Operations University in Florida before overthrowing Mali's government in 2020. Goïta then took the job of vice president in a transitional government officially charged with returning the country to civilian rule, only to seize power again in 2021.That same year, his junta reportedly authorized the deployment of the Russia-linked Wagner mercenary forces to fight Islamist militants after close to two decades of failed Western-backed counterterrorism efforts. Since then, Wagner — a paramilitary group founded by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former hot-dog vendor turned warlord — has been implicated in hundreds of human rights abuses alongside the longtime U.S.-backed Malian military, including a 2022 massacre that killed 500 civilians.Despite all of this, American military aid for Mali has never ended. While Goïta's 2020 and 2021 coups triggered prohibitions on some forms of U.S. security assistance, American tax dollars have continued to fund his forces. According to the State Department, the U.S. provided more than $16 million in security aid to Mali in 2020 and almost $5 million in 2021. As of July, the department's Bureau of Counterterrorism was waiting on congressional approval to transfer an additional $2 million to Mali. (The State Department did not reply to TomDispatch's request for an update on the status of that funding.)The Two-Decade StalemateOn the opposite side of the continent, in Somalia, stagnation and stalemate have been the watchwords for U.S. military efforts."Terrorists associated with Al Qaeda and indigenous terrorist groups have been and continue to be a presence in this region," a senior Pentagon official claimed in 2002. "These terrorists will, of course, threaten U.S. personnel and facilities." But when pressed about an actual spreading threat, the official admitted that even the most extreme Islamists "really have not engaged in acts of terrorism outside Somalia." Despite that, U.S. Special Operations forces were dispatched there in 2002, followed by military aid, advisers, trainers, and private contractors.More than 20 years later, U.S. troops are still conducting counterterrorism operations in Somalia, primarily against the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab. To this end, Washington has provided billions of dollars in counterterrorism assistance, according to a recent report by the Costs of War Project. Americans have also conducted more than 280 air strikes and commando raids there, while the CIA and special operators built up local proxy forces to conduct low-profile military operations.Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the U.S. has launched 31 declared airstrikes in Somalia, six times the number carried out during President Obama's first term, though far fewer than the record high set by President Trump, whose administration launched 208 attacks from 2017 to 2021.America's long-running, undeclared war in Somalia has become a key driver of violence in that country, according to the Costs of War Project. "The U.S. is not simply contributing to conflict in Somalia, but has, rather, become integral to the inevitable continuation of conflict in Somalia," reported Ẹniọlá Ànúolúwapọ Ṣóyẹmí, a lecturer in political philosophy and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. "U.S. counterterrorism policies are," she wrote, "ensuring that the conflict continues in perpetuity."The Epicenter of International Terrorism"Supporting the development of professional and capable militaries contributes to increasing security and stability in Africa," said General William Ward, the first chief of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) — the umbrella organization overseeing U.S. military efforts on the continent — in 2010, before he was demoted for profligate travel and spending. His predictions of "increasing security and stability" have, of course, never come to pass.While the 75,000% increase in terror attacks and 42,500% increase in fatalities over the last two decades are nothing less than astounding, the most recent increases are no less devastating. "A 50-percent spike in fatalities tied to militant Islamist groups in the Sahel and Somalia over the past year has eclipsed the previous high in 2015," according to a July report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution. "Africa has experienced a nearly four-fold increase in reported violent events linked to militant Islamist groups over the past decade… Almost half of that growth happened in the last 3 years."Twenty-two years ago, George W. Bush announced the beginning of a Global War on Terror. "The Taliban must act, and act immediately," he insisted. "They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate." Today, of course, the Taliban reigns supreme in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda was never "stopped and defeated," and other terror groups have spread across Africa (and elsewhere). The only way "to defeat terrorism," Bush asserted, was to "eliminate it and destroy it where it grows." Yet it has grown, and spread, and a plethora of new militant groups have emerged.Bush warned that terrorists had designs on "vast regions" of Africa but was "confident of the victories to come," assuring Americans that "we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail." In country after country on that continent, the U.S. has, indeed, faltered and its failures have been paid for by ordinary Africans killed, wounded, and displaced by the terror groups that Bush pledged to "defeat." Earlier this year, General Michael Langley, the current AFRICOM commander, offered what may be the ultimate verdict on America's Forever Wars on that continent. "Africa," he declared, "is now the epicenter of international terrorism."This article has been republished with permission from TomDispatch.

With a whirlwind of dramatic events gripping the world's attention, it can be easy to forget that we are now less than one year away from the 2024 presidential election.Despite their expected focus on domestic issues, candidates will have a lot to answer for this cycle when it comes to foreign policy as the war in Ukraine drags on and U.S.-China relations continue to deteriorate.The Democratic Party has chosen not to hold debates despite growing concerns about President Joe Biden's chances next year. With only a couple of months to go before the primaries start, the Quincy Institute decided that it would be useful to survey Biden's challengers from the left on how they would handle a range of foreign policy issues if elected.The candidates' responses show interesting differences on a range of questions, from a potential Israeli-Saudi normalization deal to the possibility of using military force to fight the cartels in Mexico. The questionnaire went out before the October 7 Hamas attacks against Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, but we pulled together candidates' reactions to the events where possible.We received responses from Democratic candidate Marianne Williamson as well as independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. Biden's campaign declined to participate, so we have aggregated relevant quotes and information about the president's stances where possible. We did the same for Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who entered the race in late October and has not responded to our requests. We will update this page if we receive further responses.Biggest challenges to U.S. security; how to avoid war with China; potential negotiations to end the war in Ukraine; U.S. role in Saudi-Israeli normalization; withdrawing troops from Middle East; military force and the Mexican cartels; Israel-Hamas warWhat, in your view, are the three most pressing challenges to U.S. national security?Joe Biden (D)While President Biden has not directly addressed this question, his national security adviser said the following about the White House's 2022 National Security Strategy: "Our strategy proceeds from the premise that the two strategic challenges — geopolitical competition and shared transnational threats — are intertwined. We cannot build the broad coalitions we need to out-compete our rivals, if we sideline the issues that most directly impact the lives of billions of people." He further argued that "this is a decisive decade for shaping the terms of competition, especially with the PRC [China]. This is a decisive decade for getting ahead of the great global challenges — from climate to disease to emerging technology."Marianne Williamson (D)"The three most pressing challenges to U.S. national security are the nuclear threat, climate change, and our inability to go beyond the adversarial positioning in which countries view each other. We are closer to nuclear war than we've been in a long time. We must move towards a nuclear-free world, and we must begin by adopting a no first use policy. Once we adopt this policy, it will be much easier for us to get other nuclear-armed countries to do the same. There is no threat I am more concerned about than climate change. We are living through the last few years where we have a chance to save humanity. We must immediately undergo a just transition from a dirty fossil fueled economy to a clean renewable economy, and create millions of good jobs in the process. The time for incrementalism on climate is over. If we only view other countries through an adversarial lens, in terms of how they can harm or serve our interests, then we cannot deal with these crucial issues that challenge the security of all of us. We must work together with the international community for the common interest so that we can begin to deal with climate change, nuclear weapons, pandemics, and other threats."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)"The most pressing challenges are the ones we have created ourselves. First is the risk of nuclear war, which belligerent and provocative U.S. policy has elevated to levels not seen since the Cold War.The second is the bankrupting of America's wealth, the result of decades of elevated military spending. The trillions spent on armaments could have gone toward building modern infrastructure, feeding and housing people, tackling chronic disease, and nourishing a thriving domestic economy.A third threat to national security is the epidemic of violence in our streets and in our homes. When we wage endless wars abroad, their mirror image afflicts us at home. Realistically, our nation is not threatened by an armed invasion by a foreign power. We have to broaden what we mean by 'national security' to include the things that actually make Americans feel insecure."Cornel West (I)"Climate Change: Climate change is not an endpoint that awaits us in the distant future, it is among us right now and impacting lives across the country and the entire world, especially the most vulnerable and most disadvantaged populations here in the U.S. — Black, Brown, Indigenous, and the poor. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), climate change-related damages cost the United States an estimated $165 Billion in 2022, Hurricane Ida, a Category 4 storm that massacred communities in Florida, including the loss of 150 lives, cost taxpayers approximately $112.9 Billion alone. Moreover, NOAA estimates that in the last 40 years, 341 storms exacerbated by climate change have cost the nation more than $2.5 Trillion. To put that into perspective, that's $80 Billion more than the national deficit of approximately $1.7 Trillion, thus far, for Fiscal Year 2023, and 1.5 percent of the national debt that stands at $161.7 trillion and counting. A nation already in massive debt, coupled with the astronomical costs of a growing climate crisis is the direct antithesis of national security. It's undeniable that more calamities associated with the climate crisis, including more powerful weather incidents that induce extreme flooding, extreme heat, and other environmental stressors, are inevitable. These events will have profound impacts on myriad systems and institutions that are necessary to maintain a livable society including, but not limited to, the production of food, access to clean water sources, the quality and availability of housing, transportation, education, and healthcare. The collapse of these systems could reasonably engender massive social unrest that would result in the massive displacement and forced migration of people as we are already witnessing with the United Houma Nation, Pointe-au Chien Indian Tribe, and Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw of present-day Louisiana, who are the first federally recognized climate migrants, whose land is literally sinking due to oil and gas extraction in the Gulf of Mexico, which has rendered their land susceptible to the impacts of climate change. In fact, the United Nations Office of the High Commissions for Refugees has predicted that more than 200 million people, globally, will be forced to relocate due to climate change, including 40% of United Statesians who currently reside in coastal areas. From the atrocities of Hurricane Katrina to the current situation at the United States border with Mexico, we have already witnessed the consequences of climate-related breakdowns of social, economic, and other systems necessary to maintain quality of life and life itself breakdown all coupled with mass migration of innocent people seeking refuge.Increased Militarism: The United States is the single biggest military spender in the world with an annual budget roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets combined. According to records kept by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), in any given year, military spending accounts for over half of the federal government's annual discretionary budget. The U.S. military's bloated budget is utilized to build weapons and warcraft, which are in turn utilized to threaten other nations and demand their cooperation with the perceived U.S. military hegemony or offered to cooperative nations as part of military alliances. In FY 2023 alone, out of a $1.8 trillion federal discretionary budget, $1.1 trillion – or 62 percent – was for militarized programs. On top of war and weapons for the Pentagon, these expenditures include domestic militarism for police departments across the country and mass incarceration, as well as increased detentions and deportation, which represent direct threats to the security of Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor people in the United States. As we are witnessing right now, the current administration is complicit in thousands of civilian deaths by giving Israel military aid at $3.8 billion this year, half of which goes to Israel's missile system. They are now requesting a combined supplemental aid package at $106 billion for Israel along with Ukraine, Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific region, and US immigration enforcement at the US-Mexico southern border. To put this in perspective, combined with the estimated $113 billion in military aid the US has already sent to Ukraine, should the Congress grant President Biden's additional $105 billion package to Ukraine and Israel, this would represent almost 60% of the initially estimated $379 billion in climate change expenditures over 10 years included as part of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. Further, the $105 billion military aid package to Israel and Ukraine is one hundred times the paltry $1 billion that the US pledged to the Green Climate Fund earlier this year, to fund climate mitigation and adaptation in the formerly colonized countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific. Our friends at IPS also indicate that the U.S. could safely redirect at least $350 billion from the Pentagon's current spending per year and achieve true security by ending wars, reducing our aggressive posture overseas, and reining in military contracts that drain public coffers for private gain - all measures that would actually increase national security, while making resources available for critical domestic needs including, but not limited to, increased access to healthcare, improving the nation's broken education system - including an iniquitous student loan debt crisis, and real action to address the climate crisis. With the largest military in the world, the US is the single largest greenhouse gas emitting institution and consumer of fossil fuels on the entire planet, with a carbon footprint bigger than 140 other countries. The environmental and climate impacts of global militarism and war are staggering. Militarization continues to increase greenhouse gas emissions and pollute and poison land, water and air through weapons production, storage, and use, which is ironic Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, himself recently declared, 'There is little about what the Defense Department does to defend the American people that is not affected by climate change. It is a national security issue, and we must treat it as such.'Rising White Supremacy and Nationalism: We have already observed how the interlinked crises of the calamities associated with climate change, which push those disproportionately impacted further to the margins and thereby increasing the militarization of the southern border, urban areas, and throughout the world to address associated entropy of social systems and infrastructure tends to increase sentiments that beguile far too many U.S. residents to embrace elements of white supremacy ideology, thereby increasing instances of violence and acceptance of authoritarian and fascist paradigms that represent clear and present dangers to national security – no one knows this better than the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2001, Attorney General, Merrick Garland admonished the Senate Appropriations Committee stating, in part, "Domestic violent extremists pose an elevated threat in 2021 and in the FBI's view, the top domestic violent extremist threat we face comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race." This salient issue has the potential to literally tear our nation asunder. A nation this divided is itself a national security risk that can be taken advantage of by nations hostile to the U.S. due to imperialist and interventionist past and present foreign policies of our country and their lasting impacts to [a] marked number of nations across the globe. Dismantling growing white supremacy and nationalism will require a multifaceted and intersectional approach that seeks to deracinate the root causes of this epidemic that prevents the U.S. from living up to its best self while also remaining a seemingly indelible threat. This will require tying requisite economic relief from an oligarchic approach to wealth accumulation and redistribution that exacerbates the white supremacy ideology ensconced in the fabric of this nation in such a way that has been negatively radicalizing poor white folk who may not even realize how the capitalist domination system upheld by the political duopoly extract from them as much as non-white people they are bamboozled to hate and stigmatize. I am confident that my Economic Justice prescriptions that include establishing a federal Universal Basic Income commission, wealth tax on all billionaire holdings and transaction, ending all tax loopholes for the oligarchy, and establishing a national $27 minimum wage, with special considerations for specific geographies where $27/hour would not be a family-sustaining wage, will be key steps in eviscerating the rise of white supremacy and nationalism in our nation that hurts the people perpetrated against as much as the people doing the perpetrating."As president, what would you do to avoid a direct military confrontation with China?Joe Biden (D)Biden has not directly addressed this question since becoming president, but a White House readout from his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last year gives a good summary of his administration's stated approach to relations with China. "President Biden explained that the United States will continue to compete vigorously with the PRC, including by investing in sources of strength at home and aligning efforts with allies and partners around the world. He reiterated that this competition should not veer into conflict and underscored that the United States and China must manage the competition responsibly and maintain open lines of communication. The two leaders discussed the importance of developing principles that would advance these goals and tasked their teams to discuss them further. President Biden underscored that the United States and China must work together to address transnational challenges – such as climate change, global macroeconomic stability including debt relief, health security, and global food security – because that is what the international community expects."Marianne Williamson (D)"We absolutely cannot have a direct military confrontation with China, which would be one step away from World War III and nuclear Armageddon. The U.S. must accept that we are in a multipolar world. While I am deeply concerned about China's authoritarianism and serious violations of human rights, I do not think that China is interested in invading the U.S. or in starting a war with us. While we should do what we can through peaceful diplomacy to lessen Chinese human rights violations, we cannot start World War III between two nuclear-armed countries. Our military must stop trying to encircle China in the South China Sea. Instead, we must talk to China and seek peaceful coexistence."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)"We believe that China has no desire for military confrontation. We will therefore ratchet down the tensions and cease the provocations in the South China Sea and elsewhere. We will adopt a posture that does not see China as an 'adversary,' and begin to negotiate arms control treaties in good faith so that both countries can reduce military spending to better the lives of their citizens."Cornel West (I)"We all know where a direct military confrontation with the People's Republic of China (PRC) will lead — irreparable nuclear holocaust that will lead to the loss and alteration of hundreds of millions of innocent lives over a conflict engendered by two so-called superpowers. We need to be honest with the people of the world, the U.S. and PRC are currently in a cold war that must be thawed to save lives and a global economy both hanging in the balance. The first step in thawing the current cold war will require a cessation to the myriad proxy wars that use nations like Ukraine, Taiwan, and numerous global south nations from Africa to Southeast Asia, to Latin America as pawns in an arms and resource extraction race. As president I will cease the saber rattling and chest beating that are doing nothing but instigating the PRC with military war games in waterways of Southeast Asia such as the Sea of Japan, Yellow Sea, East China Sea and others. I am confident this will open pathways for diplomacy that leads to cooperation in lieu of competition with the PRC. I agree with the Quincy Institute's assessment that the current administration's rhetoric of competition with the PRC is a feckless attempt to marginalize and exclude the nation from the global community, which in turn pushes them to form alliances with nations the U.S. also finds itself in a contemporary cold war with including, but not limited to, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia. One area where I believe we should especially be cooperating rather than competing with the PRC is the climate crisis. While it's true that the PRC is the largest emitter in the world, the U.S. remains the largest historic emitter despite only representing five percent of the world's population. Planetary survival literally requires less finger pointing at who is most responsible for the climate crisis and more finger pointing towards mutual and cooperative solutions. And rather than compete with the PRC for requisite critical resources to develop the infrastructure for renewable energy and regenerative economies, we must cooperate with them such that we don't render the need to address the climate crisis into a rationalization for casus belli over possession critical resources that will also drag global south nations into proxy wars they want no part of. The PRC, the U.S., and the entire world has a collective interest in protecting lives and the planet from the impacts of climate change. As president, my first step in avoiding a military confrontation with the PRC would be to invite and work with them to be a leading partner in addressing the climate crisis by exchanging ideas, resources, and technologies that can rapidly emancipate both nations from reliance on fossil fuels, which will improve relations, cooperation, and the habitability of the planet at once, while also preventing a military confrontation that will take more lives than the climate crisis."Is it in the U.S. national interest for the president to convene negotiations in an effort to end the war in Ukraine?Joe Biden (D)Biden generally emphasizes that Ukraine should be the driving force behind any peace negotiations and has argued that Russian President Vladimir Putin has not shown signs that he is ready to negotiate. He has, however, helped to convene several international conferences to discuss a diplomatic path forward, one of which reportedly included discussions about concessions that Ukraine may make in exchange for peace. (The administration denied these reports.)Marianne Williamson (D)"Firstly, this question is framed in terms of the 'U.S. national interest,' but I think it's time we start concerning ourselves more with the interests of humanity as a whole than the interests of the American government or American corporations, which is usually what is meant by 'U.S. national interest.'Yes, I think the U.S. should convene negotiations with Russia and Ukraine. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a despicable crime, and we should support Ukraine and their autonomy. However, we need to do what we can to bring about a just but realistic peace. It seems extremely unlikely that either side in this conflict will have a complete victory over the other anytime soon, so if we don't want to let this draw out for two decades like our war in Afghanistan, then we should press for negotiations. I think that the withdrawn letter by progressive Congress members from last year that urged negotiations was a good and reasonable letter, and they should not have buckled to pressure and withdrawn it."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)"Yes. Current U.S. strategic thinking is that the war serves the national interest by weakening Russia. That thinking is faulty on two counts. First, it is not weakening Russia. Second, a weak and unstable Russia would make us much less secure, not more secure. The United States and the world will be best served when Russia knows that we are not out to destroy her."Cornel West (I)"The conflict between Ukraine and Russia is not going to be ameliorated by military means. With $113 billion of taxpayer dollars already sent to Ukraine leading to no more than an endless war of attrition, as well as poll numbers indicating dithering support for a series of blank checks to continue it, it's clear the people of the United States have had enough. It's not just in the national interest for a diplomatic solution to this conflict, it's the duty of the President of the United States to lead this process with our global partners in Europe, Asia, and Africa. As president, I will give Ukraine no other choice but to enter a diplomatic process as part of my commitment to cease all war funding and weapons to Ukraine and instead invest in peacemaking."If Saudi Arabia agreed to normalize relations with Israel but requested a guarantee from the United States to defend the Kingdom militarily in exchange, would you seek to ratify a treaty making that commitment?Joe Biden (D)President Biden has not directly commented on this proposal, but his administration has led the initiative to negotiate a defense commitment in exchange for normalization.Rep. Dean Phillips (D)Phillips has endorsed the Biden administration's approach. "Never did we imagine it possible in our lifetimes to see the possible normalization of relations between the Saudis and Israelis. It's an extraordinary and historic opportunity not just for these two countries, but for the entire world," he told NPR. "The United States plays a significant role relative to a defense pact with the Saudis equipment and materiel relative to their military and potentially a civilian nuclear program as well. If those things can be met and also meeting some of the needs of the Palestinians, this could be an extraordinary legacy at a time the world surely needs it." Marianne Williamson (D)"No. The U.S. cannot get involved in another war in the Middle East – especially not in order to defend Saudi Arabia, arguably the worst human rights violator in the region. It is time the U.S. stops aiding Saudi Arabia and Israel in their egregious human rights violations."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)"We think the premise of this question to be unlikely. Saudi Arabia is armed to the teeth and has no need of such a guarantee. As it has good relations with most other nations, its [only] plausible national security threat is Iran. However, much of the Sunni-Shiite conflict in the past arose from U.S. geopolitical maneuvering that elevated tensions throughout the region."Cornel West (I)"I wouldn't even qualify this request as a treaty as it would be more of a death sentence for innocent civilians in the region and more service members, too many who have already been lost due to U.S. empire building in the Middle East, mainly to protect oil profits of fossil fuel cartels both domestically and globally. We need less iron domes and a more iron-clad diplomatic process that leads to lasting peace and mutual dignity for all people in the Middle East. To this end, as president I would insist that any normalization of relations between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the State of Israel include immediate steps to liberate Palestinian people from occupation and a wanton cycle of violence that's killing precious Palestinian and Israeli lives alike."As Commander-in-Chief, would you bring home the U.S. troops currently stationed in Iraq and Syria?Joe Biden (D)While Biden has not directly addressed this question, a senior Pentagon official recently said the U.S. "has no intent to withdraw in the near future" from Syria.Marianne Williamson (D)"Yes I would, but in Syria, I would first negotiate an agreement that ensures the Kurds will not be harmed before withdrawing the troops that are protecting them."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)"Yes. Those nations do not want our troops there. I will instigate bold peace initiatives in places where there are still military tensions, in some cases replacing troops with international peacekeepers."Cornel West (I)"As indicated in my Policy Pillars Rooted in a Movement of Truth, Justice, and Love, as president I would immediately embark on a responsible and expeditious closure of global U.S. military bases as part of a larger initiative to cease and desist U.S. empire building and maintenance and slash the bloated military budget, including the disbanding of NATO, such that we can reinvest those funds in myriad social and economic justice programs domestically. As tensions in the Middle East associated with the crisis in Palestine/Israel grow, the U.S. presence is only exacerbating an already incendiary situation while putting brave service people in harm's way for no other reason than to maintain U.S. empire and a military hegemony in a region that needs less bullets and rockets and more diplomacy. To this end, as president, I would bring those troops home immediately, honor them for their service and ensure a Just Transition so that they can use the skills they gained in the military and put them to use for beneficial services to the people of the U.S."If elected, would you request an authorization from Congress to use military force against drug cartels in Mexico?Joe Biden (D)Biden has not commented directly on calls to authorize military force against the cartels, but a National Security Council spokesperson said in April that the administration "is not considering military action in Mexico.""Designating these cartels as foreign terrorist organizations would not grant us any additional authorities that we don't already have," the spokesperson added.Marianne Williamson (D)"No. The U.S. has invaded and militarily intervened in Latin America time after time, and it has only brought violence and misery and fueled the immigration that we now complain about. It is time we reject the imperialist Monroe Doctrine, which declared Latin America our backyard. It is time we respect our neighbors to the south and stop invading their countries."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)"Absolutely not. The Mexicans have the power to overcome the drug cartels themselves. We can aid them by sharing intelligence, by shutting down the illegal weapons trade, by cracking down on money laundering activities of US banks, and by prosecuting the cartels' collaborators in this country."Cornel West (I)"Absolutely not. To be clear, asking the Congress for authorization to use military force in Mexico would essentially be asking Congress to approve a military invasion through a declaration of war against Mexico. The so-called war against drugs in the United States has been and continues to be an abject failure. This 50-year war has been used as a rationalization for crimes against humanity, especially those most marginalized by failed drug policies - Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor people, who have been subjected to a racialized and classist mass incarceration pogrom that has needlessly locked up over 400,000 people for non-violent drug-related crimes between 1980 and 1997 alone. A failed domestic drug war should not be an impetus to start a foreign drug war in the sovereign territory of one of our North American partners. It should instead be an impetus to enact efficacious policies that treat addiction as a national threat to public health. Instead of increasing militarism and launching a foreign war, we should declare war against the lack of access to healthcare and the lack of economic opportunities that contribute to drug use. Reducing and decriminalizing drug use in the United States will directly reduce the amount of drugs that are smuggled across the border, thereby reducing revenues for drug cartels in Mexico. This is less an issue of militarism and more an issue of addiction driven by supply and demand."Reactions to Israel-Hamas warJoe Biden (D)In a speech on Oct. 20, Biden said: "In Israel, we must make sure that they have what they need to protect their people today and always.The security package I'm sending to Congress and asking Congress to do is an unprecedented commitment to Israel's security that will sharpen Israel's qualitative military edge, which we've committed to — the qualitative military edge.We're going to make sure Iron Dome continues to guard the skies over Israel. We're going to make sure other hostile actors in the region know that Israel is stronger than ever and prevent this conflict from spreading.Look, at the same time, [Prime Minister] Netanyahu and I discussed again yesterday the critical need for Israel to operate by the laws of war. That means protecting civilians in combat as best as they can. The people of Gaza urgently need food, water, and medicine."Rep. Dean Phillips (D)In a long tweet, Phillips said, "The destruction of Hamas is necessary, but the military campaign must follow international law and conventions of civilized nations. [...]I support a pause in hostilities and the immediate safe passage of civilians from Gaza into temporary shelters in Egypt and/or Jordan and the largest humanitarian relief effort in world history.I am pro-Israeli and anti the Netanyahu government — and [its] enabling of settlements on Palestinian land. [...]Israel has a right to exist, defend itself, and ensure the terror and butchering of Oct 7 never happens again.Palestinians have a right to a nation of their own, and that begins with a free and fair election for the first time since 2006 in which a choice can be made; peace or war.Israelis must also be afforded the same right to choose peace or war."Marianne Williamson (D)Williamson tweeted: "For Israel to prosecute an all out war on Gaza is already a catastrophe for the people of Gaza. It can easily become a catastrophe for the people of Israel as well. There's no end game there, for them or for the rest of the world, that doesn't multiply the horror. The United States should join an international consortium — Egypt, Jordan and others — in efforts to secure release of the hostages and cessation of the bombing."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)On Oct. 7, Kennedy said the following in a statement: "This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state's right to self-defense. We must provide Israel with whatever it needs to defend itself — now. As President, I'll make sure that our policy is unambiguous so that the enemies of Israel will think long and hard before attempting aggression of any kind.I applaud the strong statements of support from the Biden White House for Israel in her hour of need. However, the scale of these attacks means it is likely that Israel will need to wage a sustained military campaign to protect its citizens. Statements of support are fine, but we must follow through with unwavering, resolute, and practical action. America must stand by our ally throughout this operation and beyond as it exercises its sovereign right to self-defense."Kennedy later warned against using the attacks and subsequent war as a justification for war with Iran. "It didn't take long for the neocons in Washington to spin the Hamas terror attacks to advance their agenda of war against Iran," he tweeted on Oct. 27. "If President Biden doesn't resist them, they might get their wish."Cornel West (I)














In a recent statement, West said, "US taxpayers want no part in funding the Israeli war machine that is committing genocidal war crimes in Gaza. We need stronger, clearer headed representation like this within our highest levels of government." He has also said, "We want a ceasefire. We want an end of the siege. We want an end of occupation. We want equal rights, equal dignity, and equal access for Palestinians and Jews."