Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security: The Future of Humanity 3030790711, 9783030790714

Citation preview

Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security

Hoda Mahmoudi · Michael H. Allen · Kate Seaman Editors

Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security The Future of Humanity

Editors Hoda Mahmoudi The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace University of Maryland, Baltimore College Park, MD, USA

Michael H. Allen Department of Political Science Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr, PA, USA

Kate Seaman The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace University of Maryland, Baltimore College Park, MD, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-79071-4 ISBN 978-3-030-79072-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Marina Lohrbach_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1

Introduction: Securing the Future of Humanity in Challenging Times Hoda Mahmoudi, Michael H. Allen, and Kate Seaman

1

Part I Leadership, Complexity and Global Governance 2

Section Introduction: Why We Need More Effective Leadership at the Global Level Kate Seaman and Hoda Mahmoudi

3

Where Democratization and Globalization Meet Craig N. Murphy

4

New Thinking About Global Governance in an Intermestic World W. Andy Knight

5

Fragmented Responsibility in a Global World Charlotte Ku

13 21

47 77

Part II Technology and Peace 6

Utilizing Technology for Peace: Seeking New Solutions Kate Seaman

103

v

vi

7

CONTENTS

Peace Data, Peace Finance, and Peace Engineering: Advancing the Design of Respectful Spaces and Sustainable Development Goals Aniek van Kersen, Joseph B. Hughes, Margarita Quihuis, and Mark Nelson

109

8

Decentralized Networks vs The Trolls Derek Caelin

143

9

Understanding Digital Conflict Drivers Helena Puig Larrauri and Maude Morrison

169

Part III Structural Inequalities 10

11

12

13

Acknowledging and Addressing the Inequalities in the International System Kate Seaman

203

Women, Peace, and Security: What Are the Connections? What Are the Limitations? Valentine M. Moghadam

209

Environmental Reproductive Justice: Intersections in an American Indian Community Impacted by Environmental Contamination Elizabeth Hoover Peace, Violence and Inequality in a Climate-Disrupted World Simon Dalby

239

269

Part IV Coda 14

Coda Introduction: Pushing Toward the Future Michael H. Allen, Kate Seaman, and Hoda Mahmoudi

15

Peace in Pieces: Limits to Progress in Economy, Ethics, and World Order Michael H. Allen

Index

293

299

323

Notes on Contributors

Michael H. Allen holds the Harvey Wexler Chair in Political Science at Bryn Mawr College, where he has taught for over three decades. He jointly chairs the Department of Political Science and the Program in International Studies. Allen has published in the fields of International Political Economy and Law, with special reference to Africa and the Caribbean. His books include: Globalization, Negotiation and the Failure of Transformation in South Africa (Palgrave, 2006), and Democracy and Modernity in Southern Africa: Development or Deformity? (Institute for African Development, Cornell University, 2017). He is a graduate of the University of the West Indies at Mona and the London School of Economics, where he completed doctoral research as a Rhodes Scholar from Jamaica. Derek Caelin is a technologist dedicated to the application of technology for social good. He has spent years training activists and civil society organizations in developing countries and conflict zones on how to use digital tools to mobilize, organize, and communicate. Derek is particularly focused on creating, researching, and sharing open source technology so that all people can benefit from free, collectively produced software. His writings on games for social impact, privacy, communitymaintained software, and the effect of tech platforms on society have been published in Foreign Policy and OneZero. Derek has worked at institutions like the United States Institute of Peace, Counterpart International, and Tech Matters. He received a Master’s Degree in Middle East Studies vii

viii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

from the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. Simon Dalby is Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, where he teaches in the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. He is co-editor of Reframing Climate Change (Routledge 2016) and Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (Routledge 2019) and author of Environmental Security (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), Security and Environmental Change (Polity, 2009) and Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability (University of Ottawa Press 2020). He has ongoing research interests in climate discourse in contemporary politics, environmental security and the burgeoning debate about the Anthropocene and its implications for politics and policy formulation. Elizabeth Hoover is an Associate Professor in the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management department at the University of California Berkeley whose work focuses on food sovereignty and environmental justice for Native communities. Her first book The River is In Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community, (University of Minnesota Press, 2107) is an ethnographic exploration of Akwesasne Mohawks’ response to Superfund contamination and environmental health research. Her second book project-in-progress From Garden Warriors to Good Seeds; Indigenizing the Local Food Movement explores Native American community-based farming and gardening projects; the ways in which people are defining and enacting concepts like food sovereignty and seed sovereignty; the role of Native chefs in the food movement; and the fight against the fossil fuel industry to protect heritage foods. She also recently co-edited a book Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States with Devon Mihesuah (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). Elizabeth has published articles about Native American food sovereignty and seed rematriation; environmental reproductive justice in Native American communities; and tribal citizen science and communitybased participatory research. Outside of academia, Elizabeth serves on the executive committee of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance (NAFSA) and the board of North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS) and the Freed Seed Federation.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ix

Joseph B. Hughes received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the University of Iowa in Civil and Environmental Engineering and a B.A. from Cornell College in Chemistry. He currently holds the position of University Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Drexel University. Dr. Hughes has received awards for his teaching and research including, the Georgia Engineer of the Year in education; the McKee Medal from the Water Environment Federation; and the Walter P. Huber Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers. He has been active in the National Academy of Engineering’s Frontiers of Engineering program and the Grand Challenge Scholars program. He served until March of 2018 as the Chair of the Science Advisory Board of the DOD/DOE/EPA research program SERDP, has served in advisory roles to the EPA and the NRC, and Co-Chairs the REMTEC National Conference. He has published extensively in journals, book chapters, edited books, peer-reviewed conference proceedings, and is invited to address audiences in issues ranging from his research specialties to global issues of sustainability, energy, environment, and most recently the new field of Peace Engineering. W. Andy Knight is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta and former Director of the Institute of International Relations (IIR), The University of the West Indies (UWI). A past Departmental Chair at the University of Alberta, Knight has had a distinguished career as an academic and scholar in Canada and was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) in 2011. He serves as Advisory Board Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Welfare of Children and was a Governor of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) from 2007 to 2012. Knight is author of several books and journal articles on the UN and Peace. He is currently co-editor-in-chief of African Security Journal and has co-edited Global Governance journal from 2000 to 2005, during which time he was also Vice Chair of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS). Charlotte Ku is Professor of Law and Director, Global Programs at the Texas A&M University School of Law. Previously, she was Professor of Law and Assistant Dean for Graduate and International Legal Studies at the University of Illinois College of Law and Co-Director, Center of Law and Globalization. She served as Acting Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge and was Executive

x

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Director and Executive Vice President of the American Society of International Law from 1994 to 2006. Her research focuses on international law and global governance. Recent publications include “The International Court of Justice,” in the Oxford Handbook of the United Nations (2018), “Evolution of International Law,” in International Organization and Global Governance (2018); with David P. Stewart, William H. Henning, and Paul F. Diehl), “Even Some International Law is Local: Implementation of Treaties through Subnational Mechanisms,” Virginia Journal of International Law (January, 2020) and co-editor with Shirley Scott of The UN Security Council and Climate Change (Edward Elgar, 2018). Hoda Mahmoudi has held The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland, College Park since 2012. As director of this endowed academic program, Professor Mahmoudi collaborates with a wide range of scholars, researchers, and practitioners to advance interdisciplinary analysis and open discourse on global peace. Before joining the University of Maryland faculty, Professor Mahmoudi served as the coordinator of the Research Department at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel. Prior to that, Dr. Mahmoudi was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northeastern Illinois University, where she was also a faculty member in the Department of Sociology. Professor Mahmoudi is co-editor of Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Dignity and Human Rights and of Children and Globalization; Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Professor Mahmoudi is also co-author of A World Without War, and co-editor of The Changing Ethos of Human Rights. Valentine M. Moghadam is Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Northeastern University, Boston. Born in Tehran, Iran, Professor Moghadam received her higher education in Canada and the USA. Her areas of research include globalization, transnational social movements and feminist networks, economic citizenship, and gender and development in the Middle East and North Africa. Among her many publications, Professor Moghadam is author of Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (first published 1993; second edition 2003; revised and updated third edition Fall 2013); Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (2005), which won the American Political Science Association’s Victoria Schuck award for best book on women and politics for 2005; and Globalization and Social Movements: The Populist Challenge and Democratic Alternatives (revised

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xi

third edition, 2020). She has edited seven books, including Empowering Women after the Arab Spring (2016, with Marwa Shalaby). With Shamiran Mako, she is author of After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa (Cambridge University Press, fall 2021). Maude Morrison is a specialist on social media and conflict. She is currently advisor on social media and conflict mediation at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, where she explores how mediation can minimize the impact of disinformation and social media on conflict. She was previously Deputy Director at Build Up, a non-profit focused on transforming conflict in the digital age. She has been based in Myanmar and Lebanon and now lives in France. She has a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the University of Oxford and an M.A. in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Craig N. Murphy is Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor at Wellesley College and was the founding director of the doctoral program in Global Governance and Human Security at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is a Fellow of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He is past president of the International Studies Association and recipient of its Distinguished Scholar Award in International Political Economy. He is also past chair of the Academic Council on the UN System and a founding editor of its journal, Global Governance, which received the 1996 Association of American Publishers award for the best new scholarly journal. His most recent book is Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880, co-authored with JoAnne Yates and published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2019. Mark Nelson former relief-worker, investment banker, and social entrepreneur, founded and co-directed Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, where he researched mass collaboration and mass interpersonal persuasion. Mark focuses on designing, catalyzing, incentivizing, and generating resources to scale up collective positive human behavior change. He has described a functional, quantitative definition of peace, in terms of the number and quality of technology-mediated engagement episodes across

xii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

social difference lines; in the process, he has identified innovative, automated ways to measure peace, both at the neighborhood and global level; and he has developed a formal structural description for Peace Data. He teaches the design of technology interventions to measurably increase positive, mutually beneficial engagement across difference boundaries. Mark’s mission is to create an entire new, profitable industry, where positive peace is delivered as a service, leading to a tradable, investable price signal for the value of peace in global capital markets. To that end, his current focus is to move the last decade’s research into widespread use beyond the lab. Helena Puig-Larrauri is Director of Build Up, a non-profit that works to identify and apply innovative practices to prevent conflict and tackle polarization, which she co-founded in 2014. She is a governance and peacebuilding professional with over a decade of experience advising and supporting UN agencies, multi-lateral organizations and NGOs working in conflict contexts and polarized environments. She specializes in the integration of digital technology and innovation processes to peace processes, and has written extensively on this subject matter. She is also an Ashoka Fellow. Helena previously served on the Boards of Elva Community Engagement, International Alert, ImpactHub Barcelona and the Stand-by Task Force, and currently serves on the Boards of Public Sentiment and Digital Peace Now. She holds a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University and a Masters in Public Policy (Economics) from Princeton University. Margarita Quihuis career has focused on innovation, technology incubation, access to capital and entrepreneurship. Her resume includes being the first director of Astia, a tech incubator for women entrepreneurs where her companies raised $67 million in venture funding, venture capitalist, Reuters Fellow at Stanford, and Director of RI Labs for Ricoh Innovations, and director of New Media at IDEO. She is a researcher at Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab, and co-directs the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab where she conducts research on innovation, behavior design and persuasive technology to change society for the better. She is a past member of the working group for the Stanford/Naval Postgraduate School/US Army Governance Innovation for Security and Development research project. She is a recognized thought leader in the areas of innovation, emergent social behavior and technology and has been part of

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xiii

the Aspen Institute’s Dialogue on Open Innovation and Dialogue on Diplomacy and Technology. Kate Seaman is Assistant Director of The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland. Prior to joining the Chair, Dr. Seaman was a Senior Fellow at The Nexus Fund. Dr. Seaman previously held positions at the University of Baltimore, the University of Bath and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Dr. Seaman received her Ph.D. from Lancaster University. She is the author of UN-tied Nations; The UN, Peacekeeping and the development of global security governance (Ashgate, 2014). Her research has been published in Global Governance and Politics and Governance. Dr. Seaman is also the co-editor of The Changing Ethos of Human Rights. Aniek van Kersen graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Governance, Economics, and Development from Leiden University College The Hague. With an emphasis on institutions and policy analysis, her research primarily focused on social capital theory in the Food Bank Model and food insecurity in The Hague. Throughout her studies, she worked for the United Nations Institute of Training and Research as Community Manager working with an onsite and virtual team across the globe and as a researcher for the Social Entrepreneur Support for Food Security non-profit. She recently transitioned from working as The Hague Project Manager for the Peace Innovation Institute, branching from the Peace Innovation Lab at Stanford where her research focused on research and development surrounding positive peace, peace as an investible mechanism, and peace engineering. The diversity of organizational roles led her to start her own company focused on innovation and project management.

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 11.1

Fig. 15.1 Fig. 15.2 Fig. 15.3

The Peace X diagram A visual conceptualization of magnitude and cultural blind spots in peace data Contextual framework for peace data A user reported me to an administrator. The report was addressed within a minute Affordances of technology for conflict Pyramid of digital conflict drivers and respective peacebuilding responses Military spending, MENA countries, 2010–2018 (Source World Bank, World Development Indicators [accessed March 2020]) Countries, Modes of Production and States Archetypes of Capitalism and Intercultural Contact Layered Ontologies

117 129 130 158 173 188

218 308 309 311

xv

List of Tables

Table 7.1 Table 9.1 Table 11.1

Existing definitions of Peace Engineering Affordances of technology for conflict—examples by category Structural and Institutional Constraints to Women’s Empowerment and Security, and Some Alternatives

123 174 232

xvii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Securing the Future of Humanity in Challenging Times Hoda Mahmoudi, Michael H. Allen, and Kate Seaman

World society faces immediate and long-term threats to peace and security. One long-term threat has already become immediate, and that is climate change and environmental degradation. There is mutually reinforcing feedback between greenhouse gases from industry and transportation, warmer atmospheric temperatures, melting glaciers, lower and shorter winter precipitation, more frequent forest fires, warmer ocean

H. Mahmoudi · K. Seaman (B) University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] H. Mahmoudi e-mail: [email protected] M. H. Allen Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_1

1

2

H. MAHMOUDI ET AL.

currents, more intense hurricanes, and greater disruptions to agricultural production. These disruptions are causing conflict over methods and locations of production, trade, migration, and human settlements. The global systems of production and trade themselves are in crisis because of the imperative for constant growth on one hand, and the unequal rewards from wealth-creation on the other. Moreover, as new technologies emerge, the ever more efficient production of large volumes of products, and growth of larger cities with their energy and infrastructure needs, accelerate the depletion and degradation of natural resources. Such processes displace human populations from rural settings of low technology and productivity and put pressure on urban spaces with poor housing and high unemployment or underemployment. Human encroachments for mining and agriculture, on habitats of other species also increases contact with previously unknown strains of viruses, leading to more frequent pandemics, such as SARS, ZIKA, and COVID-19. These in turn amplify and accelerate the inequalities of power, income, and access to remedies. The Covid-19 pandemic is a fresh reminder of the nature of global challenges that threaten the well-being, peace, and security of humanity. Had there been a coordinated global response at the onset of the Covid19 pandemic, we might have witnessed a profoundly different outcome. If Covid-19 has shown us anything, it has demonstrated the closely interlaced connections and interdependence of every facet of our global community. The lack of international coordination has led to the loss of many lives and has prolonged human suffering in both rich and poor countries. National leadership and institutional structures have largely looked to their own homebound concerns rather than developing new models and strategies capable of addressing global challenges. Even in rich and powerful countries, poor leadership has led to the avoidable loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. All of this increases social conflict as classes contend for greater shares of socially-produced wealth, and as people form associations based on an assortment of identities in order to build power for survival or dominance. Households absorb many of the resulting pressures of unequal power and exchange. Divisions of labor within households largely mean that women bear much of the burden of adjustment to economic pressures by increasing household labor to care for families and to supplement incomes. In many cases, inherited norms about gender roles are not updated to new social, economic, and environmental conditions,

1

INTRODUCTION: SECURING THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY …

3

making gender inequalities worse in spite of modernization efforts by governments and investors. Meanwhile, states compete to attract investment from global and transnational firms and financial institutions, and global markets respond favorably only to those countries where states and workers offer the best deals in tax rates, low wages, industrial peace, and efficient infrastructure. This adds to the competitive pressure between states to hold or acquire land and ocean territories that contain natural and logistical resources. Thus, the shockwaves of conflict radiate from the interstate and interfirm rivalries of global production, to national conflicts over unequal participation and reward, to ethnic and other forms of identity conflict over power and voice, to the micro-politics of gender inequality. Breaking out of this contradictory cycle of modernization, degradation, inequality and conflict will require leadership at local, national and global levels. Patterns have to be recognized and analyzed. Institutions of conflictresolution and policy formation must be updated or invented to meet the challenges of a world that has been reconfigured toward global systems of production, trade and discourse, and away from nationally embedded development paths. Any authoritative action mandated by new kinds of institutions must be relevant to the power configurations of world society in its new forms. At the same time, the insecurities, anxieties, and dislocations caused by the dynamics just described, stoke new fears and vexations which make democratic discourse at the levels of territorial states and their subnational institutions more complicated and incoherent, especially in a world comprised primarily of multi-national and multi-ethnic societies, and very few nation-states. An added danger of the times therefore, is that the exercise of authoritative leadership may degenerate into authoritarian forms, in the attempt to cut through complexity to provide short-term palliative solutions. This in turn undermines efforts to institute coordinated inter-state responses at the global level, because national bargaining positions may not arise out of widely-accepted scientific and social understandings of global challenges. Such agreements as are arrived at, are likely to be face-saving, tenuous documents, that do not enjoy widespread legitimacy, and do not provide for clear and concrete remedial steps, where the costs of change are equitably shared. The desired flow from recognition, to analysis, to relevant leadership and institutional responses, has not yet been obtained in contemporary world politics. The Westphalian interstate system of authority has been

4

H. MAHMOUDI ET AL.

rendered reactive to global pressures, rather than active in managing the current dynamics of global political-economy. Attempts at alternative systems of governance since the end of the Cold War have largely accepted the dysfunctional direction of global growth but have sought to reform aspects of it by technological fixes to carbon-based energy systems, or normative exhortations to limit the human rights abuses produced by the conflicts of the system itself. This is not enough. Today, the global commons are primarily governed by hegemonic powers and institutions aligned with their interests. However, what we consider as global commons, is changing and adapting as new technologies shift the way we understand the world. There are new global commons, both physical and functional, including cyberspace—a space which seems more akin to a Wild West of powerful players, a developing oligarchy of centralized private companies, and limited state regulators. This new terrain offers insight into new styles of governance. Cyberspace, a global ocean that has the potential to be divided into smaller manageable seas—where size matters for not only relevance and accountability, but also community management—offering up new ways of creating democratic decision making and options to opt out of toxic environments, both literally and culturally, in globalized markets, productive relations, and audiences of discourse. Throughout the volume the question of networks, systems, and size, is also critical. As networks grow and develop, their dynamics adapt to run in a range of different modes, from survival of the fittest and anarchic rule, based on strength (of states, firms, banks, media, religion, and other institutions) at one end of the scale, to tight centralized governance at the other, with its attendant risks of hegemony and coercion. This volume asks if it is possible instead to have democracy at the international level, within international law, that is founded in new ‘imagined communities’ outside the traditional territorial understanding of nations and states. This would require the decentralization of power, and a rethinking of leadership at the global level. While the global threats to the future of humanity may require greater democracy in global spaces, and decentralization may not be enough, it may also be an unavoidable component of future solutions. This volume brings together a range of perspectives, both scholars and practitioners, to examine the current state of the world, what is at stake if we do not think creatively and generate new solutions, and how we need to restructure our approaches to current global challenges. Contributors

1

INTRODUCTION: SECURING THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY …

5

to this volume challenge the current thinking and strategies in the field of global peace and security. Clearly, current global public and private institutions are inadequate for the challenges we face today. These challenges cut across borders and require a more coordinated and concerted effort to find workable solutions. The volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to the creation of solutions and is designed to be read both as a whole, and in sections, appealing to different readers, from students in the classroom to practitioners in the field. Each section begins with an introductory essay exploring how each challenge is connected to the others, the main ideas guiding current thinking and practice, and the motivations that drive the economic and political actions which in turn shape how these ideas are framed and received. A key aim of these introductory essays is to prompt readers to think more deeply, to engage more rigorously with these important debates, and to be more open to the need for creativity in the creation of solutions.

Structure of the Volume The volume is divided into four parts, the first three each addressing a fundamental challenge to global peace and security, and the final section exploring the need for a new approach. These sections are: 1. The need for more effective leadership at the global level. 2. The transformations that technology is introducing to global society. 3. The continuing structural inequalities fostering greater divides between the haves and have nots. 4. The need to push for a new approach to global peace and security. By exploring how we break out of the current framework in which we understand global activities and the distribution of resources, this volume provides new ways of understanding the material, cultural, political, and spiritual relations that form the basis of international society.

Leadership and Global Governance The volume opens with three chapters focused on leadership and global governance. The greatest challenge to global governance stems from

6

H. MAHMOUDI ET AL.

global problems which have produced undesirable consequences for humanity as a whole. Issues such as the climate crisis, technological disruptions, economic crises, racial and gender inequalities, weapons of mass destruction, and global pandemics are too large and complex for any one nation to tackle. Because of the global nature of these problems, their solutions must be global in nature, requiring systemic collaboration among international leaders. Such problems demand that leaders effectively manage complex intra and transnational systems and projects. Alternative models must also be developed. Today’s governance systems show their wear and tear and have proven unable to provide remedies for the stubborn, deeply rooted complexities of today’s interconnected world. Strong, cooperative national and international leadership is needed in order to address these environmental and political challenges facing our global community. Ignoring such challenges only increases the threats to international peace and security. Global problems—whether in the form of climate change or worldwide pandemics—demand global solutions. In his contribution, Where Democratization and Globalization Meet, Professor Craig N. Murphy argues that more emphasis needs to be placed on individual responsibility and on individual civic responsibility combined with a push for more democratization. This is followed by Professor Andy W. Knight’s contribution, New Thinking about Global Governance in an Intermestic World, with a focus on the need for transversal governance, a move beyond our current state-centric approach, to one more suited to the multiplex reality in which we live today. Summing up this section is Professor Charlotte Ku’s chapter on Fragmented Responsibility in a Global World, which digs into the diffusion of state power and authority, and how this limits current structures of world governance.

Technology and Peace Technology is changing the way the world works, how people communicate, interact, and view each other. Technology also has the potential to change conflicts, to foster peace, and to develop community. The ways in which it impacts society depends on how it is used, who it is used by, and for what purpose. How do the current dynamics of the world economy foster and promote technological innovation, and how does the deployment of technology in turn change the dynamics of production, conflict

1

INTRODUCTION: SECURING THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY …

7

and collective discourse and decision-making? Technology does not represent a neutral solution and its development and use comes with new and unforeseen challenges and consequences. In many ways the development of technology reinforces the underlying structural inequalities within societies, while at the same time providing new and innovative ways to address and challenge these same inequalities. The moral and ethical questions surrounding the development and use of new technology need to be explored in more detail, especially in relation to any potentially harmful outcomes. Technology intersects with many of the large-scale global challenges we face today, and we need to explore the connections with respect to the moral and ethical aspects in a more fundamental way. Doing so will help us understand the ways in which society is changing and being changed by technology, how our relationships to each other are altered, and how information and misinformation is driving our interconnected and technologically driven lives. One step in seeking solutions is through education, the contribution by Margarita Quihuis, Mark Nelson, Aniek Van Kersen and Professor Joseph Hughes, Peace Data, Peace Finance, and Peace Engineering: Advancing the design of respectful spaces and Sustainable Development Goals, tackles the integration of moral and ethical questions into the traditional fields of engineering, finance, and data education and benefits this can bring in designing respectful spaces. By shifting the focus from the global to the local, their argument is that community-driven and community-led initiatives offer the best way forward. Community is also at the heart of the contribution by Derek Caelin, Decentralized Social Networks vs. The Trolls. Caelin focuses on the role of regulation and moderation in different social network platforms and how this impacts on the communities who use them. The impact of technology on communities, and the potential risks and rewards continues in the chapter by Helena Puig Larrauri and Maude Morrison, Understanding Digital Conflict Drivers, which examines the ways in which technologies are affecting conflict dynamics, and the potential for transforming the space to create peace.

Structural Inequalities The underlying structure of the international system directly influences the ways in which we respond to insecurity, and in how we build peace. Without addressing the underlying inequalities within the system, there is

8

H. MAHMOUDI ET AL.

no way to create a more just and equitable way of responding to global challenges. Women make up over half of the population on the planet, but their roles in society are often marginalized. Described as the “weaker” sex, women’s role in peace and conflict is also similarly marginalized, with women most often viewed as victims. This however does not capture the entirety of women’s experiences in conflict, or the roles they can play in bringing about peace. Women’s full and equal participation in the workplace, economy, politics, and international relations is an essential precondition in bringing about humanity’s peace and security. Inequalities also impact other socially defined categories, including age, race, religion, ability, and class, and the intersection of these categories only increases the likelihood of discrimination and the loss of opportunity. This loss can be seen in the uneven impact of large-scale global challenges, such as climate change, on these groups. To tackle these inequalities we need to understand the history and context which has led to their perpetuation, and the ways in which we need to alter our responses to transform the underlying structures. The essays in this section criticize existing unequal structures and hegemonic discourses, but also offer insights on ways in which alternatives to them might be conceived and implemented. Recognizing the interconnection between the challenges faced by women, is central to Professor Valentine Moghadam’s chapter, Women, Peace, and Security: What are the connections? What are the limitations? Moghadam highlights the feminist contribution to peacemaking, while also uncovering the structural, institutional, and cultural obstacles to women’s security. Environmental security, and justice are the focus of Professor Elizabeth Hoover’s chapter, Environmental Reproductive Justice: Intersections in an American Indian Community Impacted by Environmental Contamination, which explores how toxic contamination threatens the reproduction of human beings and tribal culture. The impact of environmental degradation continues in the chapter by Professor Simon Dalby, Peace, Violence and Inequality in a Climate Disrupted World, which explores the intersection of globalization and environmental change and the potential for this to exacerbate human conflict.

1

INTRODUCTION: SECURING THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY …

9

Pushing Forward: A New Approach to Global Peace and Security The concluding section of the volume explores a new approach to understanding global peace and security. This requires a new approach to strategies of peace, one which focuses on the networks of relationships which are constantly shifting, reproducing and mutating, and begin from the bottom up. In Professor Michael H. Allen’s chapter, Peace in Pieces: Limits to Progress in Economy, Ethics, and World Order, he provides a coda to the volume which suggests a new way to think about the potential for coherence in peace analysis and action. By analysing the challenges of current approaches to peace, which are often contradictory, he identifies the ontologies of the diagnostic approaches, and how these could be combined to provide a more effective approach in the future. The interlinkages between the challenges we face are clear to see as we examine global systems and networks, and the overlap between markets and cultures. One key theme running throughout this volume is the question of choice, and the question of whether we might better be able to reduce conflict if people had more choice over the systems they trade in and identify with, as well as the rules and community forms they opt into and out of. Throughout the volume, by bringing together a range of disciplines, examining key challenges, and providing new perspectives and suggested solutions, we have sought to push the research agenda forward, as we tackle some of the biggest problems we face today.

PART I

Leadership, Complexity and Global Governance

CHAPTER 2

Section Introduction: Why We Need More Effective Leadership at the Global Level Kate Seaman and Hoda Mahmoudi

The current systems of global governance are in flux, the ongoing global pandemic has highlighted the ineffectiveness of global response mechanisms which rely on the political will and leadership of individual nation states. The rapidly spreading virus has laid bare the reality that as Beeson (2019) argues, the human race is unlikely to survive without some type of effective global governance. Relationships between nation states are politically unequal and largely dictated by more powerful states (Allen, 2004). The imbalance of power among nations has negative implications for less powerful states, which are vulnerable not only in terms of lack of resources but also in relation to acts of aggression. The imbalance also limits the ability to address multi-valent, complex global challenges that

K. Seaman (B) · H. Mahmoudi Bahá’í Chair for World Peace, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] H. Mahmoudi e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_2

13

14

K. SEAMAN AND H. MAHMOUDI

impact all nations. As later chapters in this volume highlight, the challenges we face are too large to be solved by individual states acting on their own. As Scholte (2011) argues “effective global governance could bolster disarmament, disease control and ecological integrity; yet flawed transplanetary regulation in these matters would, as now, preside over militarization, epidemics and environmental degradation.” The question is, how can we create more effective global governance? The first stage in reforming global governance requires moving beyond a limited notion of what global governance is (Hameiri and Jones, 2016). During the 1990s, structural shifts occurred within the international order. The world witnessed “a shift from a more or less cooperative system of states based on Westphalian sovereignty and intergovernmentalism to a global governance system (Zürn, 2018: 107).” The global governance system differed from the Westphalian model in its “double constituency”—a system where both states and societal actors have rights and obligations (Zürn, 2018: 107). Global governance today is not based on the creation of supranational institutions, although these still have a role to play. Instead, it is predominantly pursued through the transformation of states’ internal governance (Hameiri and Jones, 2016). This shift in loci makes global governance less tangible and less transparent. The increasing complexity of governance is demonstrated by the “plethora of forms of social organization and political decision-making exist that are neither directed toward the state nor emanate from it” (Dingwerth and Pattberg, 2006: 191). This raises questions about accountability, representation, and perhaps most crucially, legitimacy, as the future success of global governance regimes is inherently connected to their perceived legitimacy. As Amitav Acharya explains global governance “is distinct from global order, the former sustains the latter by creating norms and mechanisms for legitimizing the exercise of power and authority and enabling the management of transnational threats and challenges (Acharya, 2018: 195).” In this formulation of global governance, nations and their leaders have obligations to each other. Global governance indicates that there are domains of authority beyond the nation state, “without necessarily requiring a legal doctrinal acceptance of the supremacy of international law (Zürn, 2018: 36).” Although the current global governance system upholds certain standards, the system is not just or peaceful. The increasing complexity of governance at the global level leads to a governance “trilemma” where institutional legitimacy is judged on three

2

SECTION INTRODUCTION …

15

levels, representativeness, effectiveness, and leadership. Where institutions are viewed as unrepresentative, they are deemed both illegitimate and ineffective (Kirton, 2001). As Pouliot and Therien (2018) argue, “legitimacy is generally sought through a rhetoric of universal aspirations,” where the “universalizing tone” seeks to detach institutions and their decisions from “any particular point of view, moment in time, or place of origin.” This appeal to universal aspirations however, has a tendency to brush over “the more subtle politics among diverse actors working to influence who participates in (and is subject to) governance regimes, the scale at which these governance problems are conceptualized and solutions implemented, and the knowledge that informs such Decisions.” (Campbell et Al. 2016). As Pouliot and Therien (2018) recognize, this universalization also ignores the choices involved and the reality that these choices are often between distinct values, meaning that “global governance is always the product of competing normative systems.” This competition between normative systems has been more visible in recent years with the pushback to multilateralism generated by both the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in 2016. Leaders are crucial in creating and maintaining a functioning system of global governance. Today the Post-War and Post-Cold War system of governance is being challenged by leaders who want to focus on the national level, rather than the international. This can have lasting impact on how the world works, how people interact, and on the levels of conflict within the system. But the prevailing system can also be challenged by new leadership that rejects the return to zero-sum nationalism as well as the established neoliberal regimes of global governance that have been failing to acknowledge and address the systemic sources of conflict and degradation. The withdrawal from the international stage of once dominant states exposed the ways in which “Multiple forms of arbitrary structural power have pervaded transplanetary regulatory arrangements to date” (Scholte, 2011). The push for recognition of the structural inequities within the system has also shifted the balance of negotiations between rising powers, such as China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Nigeria, South Africa, South Korea, and Turkey, and the current incumbents, with questions remaining as to whether rising powers remain nascent supporters of the current systems, or rising challengers (Kahler, 2013). As Martin (2017) argues, “structural power is an important but inadequate source of leadership in global governance.” Although national governments remain essential gatekeepers to global institutions (Kahler, 2013), what

16

K. SEAMAN AND H. MAHMOUDI

is required is a reassessment of Scholte’s (2011) two key questions “Who are the authorities that need legitimacy in global governance as currently constructed?” and “Who are the constituents that would accord legitimacy to those authorities?”. Investigating these questions also requires an examination of accountability, responsibility, and democratization within the international system. As Martin (2017) notes “In today’s world, a more pluralistic form of global governance provides an essential means of responding to the risks and opportunities arising from higher levels of interdependence between states and peoples.” At this moment there are several potential directions in which global governance could develop. As Kahler (2018) outlines, we could see fragmentation, stagnation, or transformation. Fragmentation would occur as emerging powers, and regional organizations push for reform establishing alternatives to the current system. Stagnation would develop as the preferences of emerging and incumbent powers diverge, limiting the ability of current institutions and systems to adapt. Transformation will depend on a focus on non-state, sub-national new forms of governance, a more complex approach to governance. The transition from local to global leadership has the potential to create global alliances—a community of nations whose function is to strengthen networks of global governance. As Mahbubian explains, “global organizations and coalitions are controlled by a few powerful national governments that put their national interests ahead of the world’s (Mahbubian, 2010).” In his contribution to the volume Professor Craig Murphy outlines one way in which we could potentially transform global governance by emphasizing individual responsibility and civic engagement in order to democratize solutions to some of the global problems we face. In his chapter Murphy highlights the relationship between democratization and globalization. Focusing on accountability and legitimacy Murphy highlights the potential that the power of political imagination has to overcome negligence, and to create and implement solutions to the large-scale global problems we currently face. Continuing the emphasis on the need for new thinking, and imagination in relation to global governance Professor Andy W. Knight’s chapter focuses on transformation within global governance throughout history, and pushes for new approaches to today’s challenges. This “intermestic” approach to global governance highlights the impact of technology on our world, the shrinkage of time and space and the need to focus on what

2

SECTION INTRODUCTION …

17

Knight terms transversal governance. The idea of transversal governance moves beyond current thinking on global and international governance and proposes replacing the simplified state-centric vision of world order with one more appropriate for today’s multiplex reality in which a wider range of actors holds responsibility depending on their specific skill set, and constituency. The theme of responsibility continues in Professor Charlotte Ku’s contribution which examines state responsibility in the global environment. Digging in deeper, Ku examines the ways in which state power and authority have become increasingly diffuse, exposing the limitations of the current structure of world governance. Responsibility, for Ku, is defined within relationships which clearly identify the expectations and consequences for each actor. The state system, as currently manifested is based on self-perpetuating rules and mutual empowerment, but Ku argues that we need to look beyond the inter-state relationships to the wider international system. We need to engage with the responsibility of International Organizations, not only to states, but to individuals. Responsibility today can appear fragmented but both Murphy and Ku argue that we need to devote more attention to understanding our own individual responsibility, as well as holding other actors accountable to theirs. Each of these contributions provides an access point for examining three key challenges to global governance as it is currently constituted. As Scholte (2011) describes, “The conceptual challenge is to rethink notions of global governance and its constituents along nonstatist lines. The substantive challenge is to expand the bases of legitimacy in global governance beyond a focus on technical performance alone, to encompass legality, democracy, morality and charismatic leadership. The political challenge is to construct legitimacy in ways that successfully negotiate problems of contending policy priorities, cultural diversity and hegemony.” As you engage with these chapters, we encourage you to use the questions listed below to think about the issues raised and how we can improve global governance and leadership in future. 1. How do we identify authority within global governance? 2. Who can accord legitimacy to those authorities? 3. As challenges to governance become more complex, how do we create more effective global governance? 4. How do we ensure that accountability is built into the system?

18

K. SEAMAN AND H. MAHMOUDI

5. What can be done to make global governance more representative? 6. What responsibilities do we as individuals have in holding ourselves and our institutions accountable?

References Allen, Michael H. “Globalization and Peremptory Norms in International Law: From Westphalian to Global Constitutionalism?” International Politics, 41, September 2004. Acharya, A. 2018. Constructing Global Order: Agency and Change in World Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Beeson, M. 2019. Rethinking Global Governance. Macmillan International Higher Education. Campbell, L.M., Gray, N.J., Fairbanks, L., Silver, J.J., Gruby, R.L., Dubik, B.A. and Basurto, X. 2016. Global Oceans Governance: New and Emerging Issues. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 41, 517–543. Dingwerth, K. and Pattberg, P. 2006. Global Governance as a Perspective on World Politics. Global Governance, 12(2), 185–203. Hafner, M., Yerushalmi, E., Fays, C., Dufresne, E. and Van Stolk, C. “The Global Economic Cost of COVID-19 vaccine nationalism”. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RBA769-1.html#:~:text= Key%20findings,be%20%243.4%20trillion%20a%20year. Hameiri, S. and Jones, L. 2016. Global governance as state transformation. Political Studies, 64(4), 793–810. Kahler, M., 2013. Rising Powers and Global Governance: Negotiating Change in a Resilient Status Quo. International Affairs, 89(3), 711–729. Kahler, M. 2018. Global Governance: Three Futures. International Studies Review, 20(2), 239–246. Kirton, J. 2001. The G20: Representativeness, Effectiveness and Leadership in Global Governance. Guiding Global Order: G8 Governance in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 143–172. Mahbubani, K. 2010. “The Problem with Presidents” August 16, 2010. https:// www.newsweek.com/mahbubani-problem-presidents-71805. Morton, K. 2017. Political Leadership and Global Governance: Structural Power Versus Custodial Leadership. Chinese Political Science Review, 2(4), 477–493. Pouliot, V. and Thérien, J.P. 2018. Global Governance: A Struggle Over Universal Values. International Studies Review, 20(1), 55–73.

2

SECTION INTRODUCTION …

19

Scholte, J.A. 2011. Towards greater legitimacy in global governance. Review of International Political Economy, 18(1), 110–120. http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/41061588. Zürn, M. 2018. A Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Where Democratization and Globalization Meet Craig N. Murphy

A Democratic Solution to a Global Problem Let me begin with a number, a knowable number: the amount of carbon that human beings could put into the earth’s atmosphere each year without causing CO2 levels to rise, the amount that would cause no increased global warming, for example, the estimate provided by the French environmental engineer Jean-Marc Jancovici (2010). Take that number and divide it by eight billion and you have a second knowable number: the amount of carbon that each of us, individually, could put into the atmosphere each year without increasing global warming, assuming that everyone else does as well. Let’s take this second number—it is something like 400 kg per year— and call it the maximum emissions level that each of us could have to consider ourselves “global warming neutral.” This would be a slightly

C. N. Murphy (B) Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_3

21

22

C. N. MURPHY

higher number than the ones that are most often in the minds of those who think about being “carbon neutral”—that is, having no net carbon emissions. Nonetheless, achieving global warming neutrality can be thought of in the same way: It is a matter of reducing activities that contribute emissions and paying for reliable carbon offsets for those activities that one cannot reduce sufficiently. With this second number in mind, we can quickly calculate how close we are to global warming neutrality and dozens of organizations—some more reputable than others—will let us purchase carbon offsets to help assure our neutrality, for example, through the Nature Conservancy (2020). The same can be done for any aggregation of individuals, for organizations (based on their number of employees, the average time they work, and the particular nature of their business), for cities, for countries, etc. Now, imagine a world—say, three years hence—in which many people strive to be global warming neutral, a world in which students at Wellesley College’s Albright Institute for Global Affairs 1 want to know whether a professor is global warming neutral before registering for her course, a world in which the Institute itself has pledged to be global warming neutral and, every year, documents how it has done so. At the same time, the College as a whole has pledged to be neutral in another five years, and has published a credible plan to do so. The association linking the US’s elite women’s colleges and the Ivy League have made similar, if vaguer promises. In Boston, the state legislature is debating taking on this responsibility for all the state’s citizens and a parallel debate is taking place in Washington, D.C., a debate linked to the question of whether the US should ratify a new, well-monitored global treaty with automatic economic sanctions that requires all adhering states to assure the global warming neutrality of all of their citizens. Supporting these efforts, which exist in almost every organization and at every level of government throughout the world, is a rapidly expanding network of environmental scientists and engineers assessing and recalibrating our collective understanding of environmental neutrality, developing more and more effective means to monitor and assess the impact of different activities, perfecting environmental management systems that allow individuals, organizations, and political communities to plan the best way to achieve the environmental goals to which they are pledged, and designing and implementing

1 The author is on the faculty of Wellesley College.

3

WHERE DEMOCRATIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION MEET

23

ever more effective offset mechanisms that are needed because, for most people living in the most prosperous and most industrialized countries, that second number—the personal carbon limit—remains about a quarter or even a tenth of actual emissions before offsets. What I have described would be a big step toward a democratic solution to a global problem. By a “global” problem I mean one that cannot be solved by action (whether private or public) at a local, national, or even a continental level. The “democratic” characteristics of the steps toward a solution are multiple. They begin with a sense of individual responsibility and civic engagement that overcomes what political theorist Melissa Lane (2012, pp. 75–76) calls the social “negligence” created by a sense of individual “negligibility,” the feeling that our own efforts do not matter that pervades modern liberal societies where democracy is “representative” and market-like. Nonetheless, in this scenario the market-like aspects of liberal society play a role as well, including the decisions of studentsas-consumers. These students are part of a much larger group of people throughout the world who can use their market power to reward those who take the global good into account, and to punish those who do not. The similar pressures on Boston and Washington come from actions based on the rational calculations of constituents and, in the national capital, the strategic calculations of a democratic state that must cooperate with other states. Finally, inside the world of environmental scientists and engineers there is the fundamentally democratic system for developing consensual knowledge that is one of the defining characteristics of the modern world. My concern in this chapter is the relationship between democracy and another defining characteristic of our age: globalization, in particular, economic globalization (the cause of most global problems) and what the distinguished theorist of globalization and democracy, David Held (1997), named “political globalization,” or global governance. Here is the quandary: economic globalization may have led to political globalization, desires for economic globalization and the global problems created by it may have led to global governance or “what world government we have” (Murphy 1994, p. 10), but it is far from democratic. In fact, one of the small set of truly global problems is the weakening of national and local democracy by the forces of economic globalization. Given that, is there any hope that globalization and democratization can come together? I explore the issue by first considering the nature and sources of that small, but critical set of global problems that need to be the object of

24

C. N. MURPHY

some form of global governance, preferably democratic. Then I consider the sources of our actual, not particularly democratic, quasi-government at a global level, and point out some unexpected ways in which it has fostered democracy at national and local levels through activities undertaken as personal acts of conscience by United Nations’ (UN) staff members, and at the global level as result of the peculiar kind of direct democracy that operates in the world of voluntary consensus standard setting by scientists and engineers. The chapter concludes with hopeful message that links both of these unexpected connections between political globalization and democracy to each other and to the larger work of the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland. The message is about the power of political imagination to overcome the negligence that arises from a conviction that one’s individual efforts can only have negligible results. It is a message at the heart of the work of Elise Boulding and Robert Johansen, religiouslyrooted peace researchers who were some of early users of the term “global governance,” and it is a message readily understood by religious thinkers and political theorists who are able to put our modern liberal worldviews in a much larger context and it provides the ground on which globalization and democratization can meet.

Global Problems In her last published article, Susan Strange, a founder of the field of Global Political Economy, focused on global problems. Her “Westfailure system” argues that the global capitalist economy governed by 190-odd sovereign states “has failed to satisfy the long term conditions of sustainability” by ignoring “the processes of environmental damage that threaten the survival of not only our own but other species,” mismanaging “the institutions and markets that create and trade the credit instruments essential to the ‘real economy,’” and failing to balance “the constantly growing power of … the transnational capitalist class and that of the ‘have nots,’ the social underclasses, the discontents that the French call les exclus [the excluded].” (Strange, 1999). Global environmental problems (especially climate change, species loss, and pollution of the seas), global financial crises, and global inequalities are three of the small set of problems regularly pointed out by promoters of the new global public policy degree programs established throughout the world during the last decade. Kishore Mahbubani, Dean

3

WHERE DEMOCRATIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION MEET

25

of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, begins a widely cited op-ed on the subject with a rallying: Mao Zedong was right. We should always focus on the primary, not secondary, contradictions. And right now, our primary global contradiction is painfully obvious: the biggest challenges of governance are global in origin, but all the politics that respond to them are local. There are many wise leaders around the world, but there is not enough global leadership. (Mahbubani, 2010)

Programs like Mahbubani’s reflect a relatively democratic global governance paradigm that emphasizes subsidiarity, the principle that governance should take place at the lowest level at which it can be effective, as a way to enhance both accountability and legitimacy. That is why they focus on problems as those that require global action. Even within the constraints of a 650-word op-ed Mahbubani could easily explain why both some environmental problems and some financial crises have global effects and require global action. Other global problems demand more explanation. Consider inequality: Strange (1998) points to four global harms that come with the growth of material inequality and the inequality in power that goes along with it. First, she states that sometimes the frustrated underprivileged riot or, in a world where so many of the rich are separated by such great distances from the poor whose lives they control, the same frustration can make it easier for all sorts of political leaders to find recruits for terrorist campaigns. A second, even greater problem comes when les exclus come to believe that their relative deprivation is bound to get worse, not better. (Here Strange follows the empirical research of the 1990s that demonstrated connections between both domestic and international sources of deprivation and revolt from below); (see Boswell and Dixon, 1990 and Goldstone 2001.) Even more certainly, third, the world’s current levels of material inequality give us a much less dynamic, less innovative type of capitalism than we would otherwise have: “[A] flourishing market economy needs new customers, with money to spend, not homeless beggars and starving African farmers (Strange, 1999, p. 352).” Finally, Strange suggests, in what may now appear as something of a throwaway, the world’s underprivileged “may pass their new epidemic diseases to the rich,” something that was of widespread concern

26

C. N. MURPHY

in 1999 when the AIDS epidemic was still growing and existing treatments were unproven, and something of which we have been reminded by the Covid-19 pandemic. There is a related issue that was already well-documented in the public health literature of 1999, even if it was not yet part of our popular consciousness: High levels of inequality in any industrialized society are associated with health problems that affect everyone, even the most privileged (Crepaz and Crepaz, 2004). The issue became widely discussed in the UK and some other parts of the world after the publication of Spirit level, a best-selling book by two leading public health scholars (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010). Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband, immediately claimed to embrace the book’s thesis (Booth, 2010). This might not by itself make global capitalism unsustainable, but it certainly represents a global problem. The number of global problems is greater than the big three that are Strange’s focus. In fact, Mahbubani identifies pandemics as a fourth global problem, albeit not one that he connects to global inequalities. There are five more that, together with the first four, may constitute the entire set of problems that cannot be solved at a local, state, or regional level: the weakening of democracy at all levels, the nexus of organized crime, illegal drugs, and terrorism, the related arms trade, the humanitarian consequences of dictators and warlords, and over-militarization, the over-reliance on the military to solve economic and social as well as security problems. These nine problems fall readily into four clusters. The first includes both global environmental problems and pandemics. These problems arise from troubled relationships between human beings and the rest of the living world. They are the kind of problems that have often accounted for the downfall of complex societies (Ponting, 2007; Giosan et al., 2012). They are also problems that have been anticipated and sufficiently well understood by modern, technology-producing science, the knowledge system that evolved with, and that provides critical support for globalizing industrial capitalism (Stopford and Strange, 1991; Noble, 1977). The second cluster consists of global inequalities and the weakening of national and local democracy. Increasing material inequalities across countries, some of the inequality within countries, and some aspects of global inequality (inequality among individuals throughout the world) are effects of an increasingly global economy (Milanovi´c, 2016). If nothing

3

WHERE DEMOCRATIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION MEET

27

else, those who profit from exchanges all along the world’s ever increasing global value chains tend to cluster in particular places—wealthy cities in wealthy countries—and tax competition among countries assures that, wherever they live, they are able to keep more and more of what they accumulate (Avi-Yonah, 2009; Rixen, 2011; Palan et al., 2010). At the same time, despite the rapid economic growth and the anti-poverty policies that have transformed so many lives in China, India, Brazil, and a few other countries over the last fifteen years, more than a billion people in Africa and Asia continue to live in the kind of poverty that was general before the Industrial Revolution (Hulme and Wilkinson, 2013). The same forces weaken formal democratic institutions. As the economy expands beyond existing boundaries, democratic governments at all levels find that the tools they once used to shape society in the collective interest no longer work. Much has been written about the democratic deficits that exist at the level of the world’s weak global political institutions (Glenn, 2008) and within the more powerful European political system (Bellamy, 2010), but it is equally the case that economic globalization has made the governments of even the most democratic of states (e.g., Norway) less effective and less responsive to their citizens (Selle and Østerud, 2006). The most powerful of the formally democratic states, the United States, has also seen a weakening of democracy that some commentators link to economic globalization (Reich, 2007). Epidemiologists have even begun to identify links among economic globalization, democratic deficits, inequality, and the material deprivation and psychosocial factors that are the proximate causes of the strong correlations between inequality and poor health outcomes at every level of analysis (De Vogli et al., 2009). The third cluster of global problems: financial crises, the nexus of organized crime, illegal drugs, terrorism, and the arms trade, is the one that most interested Susan Strange. In her last unpublished paper, “‘What Theory?’ The Theory in Mad Money,” she writes: The other thing that has changed … is the involvement of organized crime in the international financial system. Of course, there have always been criminals active in financial markets, some of them respected pillars of society. Organized crime is different. Large, rich transnational networks flushed with profits from the international trade in drugs, arms, and illegal immigrants emerged in the 1980s as big players in international finance. Their operations were the basis for a boom in the business of

28

C. N. MURPHY

money laundering – the conversion of dirty money derived from crime into untraceable, legitimate investment funds. (Strange, 1998, pp. 14–15)

Strange explains how organized crime has not only been protected by mafia traditions of secrecy, but also by “the amazingly permissive market for transnational banking services, … [which] allowed bankers and accountants to share with priests the privilege of client confidentially” (Strange, 1998, p. 15). Finally, there has been the long-standing refusal of the developed countries … to apply the principles of agricultural support and protection that they used at home to support and protect export crops produced by the developing countries. Poor returns for coffee, tobacco, sugar, etc. compared with high returns from growing cannabis and opium and processing the material for an eager market. (Strange, 1998, p. 15)

The one element of this cluster that Strange missed became all too apparent shortly after her death. With the end of the Cold War and the related relative decline of state-sponsored terrorism when the money laundering networks maintained by global mafias and even mafia-like crimes aimed at raising cash for weapons, their operators have become essential to international terrorists. As one leading terrorism scholar puts it, “[T]he 1990s can be described as the decade in which the crime-terror nexus was consolidated … it is necessary to acknowledge, and to understand the crime-terror continuum to formulate effective state responses” (Makarenko 2010, p. 129). One should add that, given Strange’s analysis of the larger cluster, state-level responses would be insufficient. Strange argues that we live in a world in which the irresponsible behavior of powerful states and that of big business (especially big finance) reinforce each other. Powerful businesses welcome an ineffectively regulated global economy—one of tax havens and undocumented flows of drugs and arms. Governments, even the most powerful, rely on big finance to fund the states most expensive endeavors, especially war. Big finance, which has no choice but to use fiat money, cooperates when major powers “made desperate by the whip of war, practice financial deception on their own and other people” (Strange, 1999, p. 348). The magnitude of the problem, she argues, has gotten worse as the relative power of big business has increased, in part due to technological changes that have diminished the capacity of governments

3

WHERE DEMOCRATIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION MEET

29

to regulate financial flows, while, at the same time (the decades since the Second World War), successive governments of the most powerful states have chosen to deal with their greatest international challenges by going to war, and by going into debt to do it (Graeber, 2011, pp. 361–68). Just as the undemocratic and unequal global political economy that protects Northern farmers but forces Southern farmers to compete with each other connects the second cluster of global problems to the third, the arms trade connects the third to the fourth cluster that includes the humanitarian consequences of dictators and warlords and overmilitarization. The connection is so close that I believe we should include the arms trade in this cluster as well as in the third. The debate over the 2014 UN Arms Trade Treaty illustrates the connection to those dictators and warlords who would lose any claim to sovereignty under the principle of the Responsibility to protect because, rather than ‘protect,’ they systematically annihilate many of the people over whom they have authority. Supporters of the treaty such as the liberal Center for American Progress argue that the global trade in small weapons is responsible for undermining fragile states. The trade, supporters of the Treaty argue, empowers the warlords. That is why the first advocates of the treaty were civil society organizations in the parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America where such men have done the greatest harm (Stohl and Hoogendorn, 2010). It is significant that opponents of the treaty connected with the conservative Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Independence Institute do not dispute this analysis. They argue only that the treaty will not stop the trade and, therefore, it would be better to cut off aid to the worst dictators and arm their opponents (Kopel et al., 2010). The conservatives’ solution—to control the negative consequences of the proliferation of arms by the further proliferation of arms—is characteristic of an over reliance on military practices and military institutions. Over-militarization leads to treating them as the answer to economic and social questions as well as to all national security questions, including ones that might well be better answered by something like the Arms Trade Treaty. The contemporary problem of over-militarization in the United States has been analyzed in studies of the military industrial complex, military Keynesianism, and the like,2 but it is hardly limited to the US. 2 A good starting point is James Carroll’s (2006) history of the US military since the Second World War, Daniel Deudney’s (2007, pp. 193–287) analysis of how republican security theory can provide a design for the global governance of weapons of

30

C. N. MURPHY

It exists in societies as diverse as Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka, and South Africa. Moreover, the globalization of the problem arises, in part, because security practices in one state tend to come to mirror those in other, potentially antagonist states. Over-militarization contributes to both the horizontal proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (arising from the desire to find the ultimate military guarantee of security) as well as their vertical proliferation (the practice of maintaining many more weapons than are needed for effective deterrence), which, of course, undermines attempts to curb their proliferation horizontally.

The Origins of Global Governance and Its Resulting Impact on Democratization There is, as suggested earlier, a bias among teachers and students of global public policy toward thinking about “global governance” as something that should be a democratic practice directed toward solving global problems, and one that supports democratic governance at all other levels. That is why Mahbubani’s global governance program, like his analysis, emphasizes the accountability and legitimacy fostered by adhering to the principle of subsidiarity. That is why David Held devotes himself equally to global policy and to democratic theory. Unfortunately, the actually existing system of global governance is a bit different. It arose to serve the interests and realize the worldviews of particular global elites. Given the origins of the system, it is hardly surprising that it is something less than democratic. Most of today’s institutions of global governance—the agencies of the United Nations system, other global intergovernmental organizations such as the World Trade Organization, and the private global institutions that play a quasi-public role—have roots in the system of Public International Unions (PIUs) created (for the most part) in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to facilitate industrial commerce (primarily) among the European states and empires and (secondarily) with and among the independent states in the Western hemisphere and the handful of significant Asian and African states that escaped the New Imperialism (Murphy, 1994, pp. 46–81). The push to create the PIUs is best understood as a mass-destruction and the industrial complexes that support them, and Cynthia Enloe’s (2007) use of feminist methodology to reveal the connections between globalization and militarism.

3

WHERE DEMOCRATIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION MEET

31

particular historical instance of the pressure to create ever-larger industrial economies that are inherent to industrial capitalism. Other instances include the earlier processes of national economic integration in Germany and the United States. Capitalists push beyond the boundaries of existing states and existing limits of international governance for a variety of reasons, including those traditionally offered as explanations for the New Imperialism, post-Second World War neocolonialism, and the push for globalization since the late1970s: Capitalists want inexpensive resources, cheaper labor, and wider markets for the goods that they already produce. In addition, and unrelated to the logic of imperialism, wider markets also can make production of fundamentally new products feasible because the market has become large enough to justify the initial investments in research, training, necessary equipment, etc. (in the way that wider markets allow firms to achieve new economies of scale in the production of old products). Moreover, a number of critical economic sectors have network characteristics that inherently increase opportunities for profit as the size of the network grows. Each step in the stepwise growth of the market areas for industrial goods since the Industrial Revolution started with institutions that built or extended networks of transportation and communication. Thus, Friedrich List’s program for German integration began with an effort to build a German railway network and the telegraph wires that ran alongside it. Many of the earliest PIUs, including the International Telegraph Union (ITU) and the International Railway Bureau, were concerned with linking the same networks across the industrialized core of the empires of the New Imperialism. Other market-creating institutions followed: institutions protecting intellectual property and establishing industrial standards across the Inter-Imperial market area, followed by those concerned with establishing the rules of trade, money, and finance. The initial promoters of these institutions were, invariably, political entrepreneurs concerned for either the interests of a particular economic sector or the shared interest of European “civilization”—a larger-scale version of the nationalism of men like Friedrich List and Alexander Hamilton a generation or two earlier. Theirs were far from “democratic” movements in the way we think of such things today. Nonetheless, by the last decades of the nineteenth century some of the promoters of the PIUs with the least-narrow interests (many of them European princes) began promoting Unions aimed at serving the interests of those who were

32

C. N. MURPHY

initially harmed by the new, more global economy that the early Unions helped build. The German emperor supported the creation of an International Labor Office to serve a social movement aimed at establishing universal legislation to protect workers; the office eventually became the secretariat of the International Labor Organization. An Italian king and a philanthropic businessman from California, concerned about how oligopolistic freight carriers colluded against farmers in the new international economy, pushed for the PIU that eventually became the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. These are what I have called “market taming” or “market securing” international institutions, institutions that secured the new, more global market of the late nineteenth century against the potentially revolutionary opposition of those large groups that would otherwise gain little from the new industries and rapidly expanding international trade in the three decades before the First World War. This pattern was followed again after both world wars. One set of institutions was responded to capitalist interests in further internationalization: The ITU took on governance of all forms of telecommunication. The anti-fascist allies created the International Civil Aviation Organization to promote that essential infrastructure of the new global market. They also updated intellectual property organizations and established the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). And they ironed out rules for trade and money in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conferences. After the Second World War, the major capitalist powers put in place the more informal structures of what John G. Ruggie (1982) calls “embedded liberalism” to protect both workers and farmers in the industrialized West. Equally important “market taming” and “market securing” institutions ended up being established within the UN system (and within the governments of many industrialized nations) when the UN began to focus on decolonization and development in the late 1950s. We have seen the same process in the creation of the new economy of global manufacturing over the last generation. The stage was set in the 1960s and 1970s with intergovernmental and quasi-non-governmental agreements that helped create the transportation and communication infrastructure that made global manufacturing possible. The bandwidth built by Intelsat (founded in 1964) was significant; ISO’s standards for containerized shipping (from the 1970s), absolutely critical (Yates and Murphy, 2019, pp. 168–81). The neoliberal policies enforced by the IMF

3

WHERE DEMOCRATIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION MEET

33

and World Bank throughout the 1980s and 1990s encouraged competition among governments to make their countries nodes in the new global commodity chains. In 1994, the dramatic liberalization of global intellectual property rules (the project of a small number of firms in key global sectors) transformed investors’ expectations about the permanence of the new global economy (Sell, 2003, 2011). And the 1995 replacement of GATT by the stronger, more comprehensively liberal World Trade Organization completed the set of market-creating institutions required for this step in the globalization of industrial capitalism. Of course, as John Ruggie and many others have lamented, we have yet to create a related set of market-taming institutions at this global level; the liberal world economy has become “dis-embedded” from the wider set of social values that supported the welfare state in industrialized capitalist countries and decolonization and development in the rest of the world for at least three decades after the Second World War (Ruggie, 2008). This is sad because, while the story of global governance is not a story of economic and social democratization, its history has been linked to the triumph of ideals of social inclusion: The same European princes who pushed for international institutions to protect workers and farmers were leaders in the, sometimes overlooked, conservative part of the movement that secured the welfare state throughout the industrialized world, a process that Immanuel Wallerstein (1999, p. 31) identifies as central to “the democratization of the world.” Moreover, the institutions of global governance created some of the most important political space in which ideas of universal human rights have been articulated and promoted. In fact, when the global anti-fascist alliance, the original “United Nations,” first articulated its vision of the post-war world, those ideals, in Roosevelt’s “Four Freedom’s Speech” (freedom of religion and speech and freedom from hunger and fear), it was a vision of global governance serving human rights (Plesch, 2011; Ikenberry, 2001). Even today these ideals remain: When Secretary General Kofi Annan (very much influenced by John Ruggie) articulated his failed plan for revitalizing the UN system, he framed the UN as the means for realizing the Four Freedoms (Annan, 2005). There are, of course, still some deeds that match Annan’s words. Since the end of the Cold War, parts of the UN system have taken on elements of the broad set of human rights norms as their official mandates (Oestreich, 2007) and the UN development system has promoted representative democracy by offering election assistance and other services to

34

C. N. MURPHY

governments who ask for it. In fact, throughout this century the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the coordinator of the UN system’s development work in the field, has considered the promotion democracy as one of its primary functions (Murphy, 2006, pp. 319–21). Yet, it is far from clear how significant even that bureaucratic commitment of staff and resources in UNDP really is. Before he passed away in 2018, Robert W. Cox (who, like Susan Strange, was a founder of the field of Global Political Economy and a long-time analyst of global problems) regularly described today’s United Nations as just “poor relief and riot control – it’s humanitarian assistance and sending in a military force where civil order breaks down that’s become, in a way, the debased consequences of what was a great project” (quoted in Dale and Robertson, 2003, p. 21). Moreover, it is not democratic. In the 2000s, UNDP’s head even offered a plan to make UN agencies representative democracies that was useful, primarily, as a way of demonstrating how undemocratic its current decision-making is (Dervis and Özer, 2005). The world’s citizens are represented through their governments. Those governments are either given equal voice in proceedings or else the more powerful states are given greater voice. Even if all states were democratic, such a system would be far from democratic given the unequal distribution of population across states. At the same time, of course, organized pressure groups—nongovernmental organizations, parts of “international civil society”—are increasingly able to take direct or indirect part in the periodic global multilateral conferences that serve something of the legislative function in global governance, but those groups are neither representative—they rarely have proportional participation from the global South—nor are they systematically consulted (Talberg and Uhlin, 2012). Nonetheless, Cox argued that the decision-making structure of the UN itself was beside the point. The real problem is more that global capitalism, something fostered by that first stage of global governance reforms that ended in 1995, undermines democracy everywhere. The Indian journalist Pankaj Mishra explains the problem by building on the turn-of-the-century analysis of British philosopher, John Gray. Mishra laments: Even at the height of the previous decade’s artificial boom, serious contradictions had opened up between democratic politics, which respects the opinions of the majority, and the imperatives of global capitalism … Such are the lessons of Greece and India today – and indeed of many other

3

WHERE DEMOCRATIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION MEET

35

democratic countries, where the representatives of a much-withered state desperately figure out how to renegotiate their compact with re-politicized and increasingly enraged voters. (Mishra 2012)

Cox successfully steered clear of Mishra’s and Gray’s unhappy conclusion that the result will be “a congeries of rival, resentful, rancorous national capitalisms which will become locked in a life-and-death struggle” (Sidelsky, 1998, summarizing Gray). Cox argued that the forces pushing toward such “Westphalian” fragmentation were in a contest with two other forces. One advocated centralizing the world under a militarized system of governance promoting laissez faire capitalism. The other consisted of the truly democratic forces within local civil society. The outcome of this contest, he believed, remained unclear.

Acts of Conscience by UN Staff and Civic Engagement by Technical Experts Yet, even if Cox is correct about the current pressures that have prevented the creation of new institutions to tame the global market that the latest stage of global governance has helped create, he may be too pessimistic about the current impact of the UN on democratization simply because he discounts the impact that UN staff can have and overlooks the quasi-non-governmental side of global governance, and its international standard setting. A few years ago, I did a critical historical assessment of the work of UNDP (that coordinator of the UN system’s civilians working in the field) as one small part of the reform project under Kofi Annan (Murphy, 2006). In the course of the project, my view of both what the UN is—or, more accurately, who the UN is—and what it has done changed dramatically. I came to see the UN much more as its staff (what some scholars call the second UN) rather than the club of national representatives (the first UN) and I came to appreciate that the staff has consistently worked to support democratization, with surprisingly significant results, long before the post-Cold War era when the club of members formally told them to do so. In most countries, the UN is those people hired by it or seconded it: the about 100,000 peacekeepers, the 130,000 or so civilian field staff, and perhaps even the 30,000 or more staffers back in Western Europe or North America at the headquarters to which the field workers report. This

36

C. N. MURPHY

United Nations is all about the developing world. Almost all the peacekeepers are there, and the vast majority of them come from there, as well. All of the field offices are in the developing world or in Eastern European “transition countries,” and the vast majority of them are locally recruited. The headquarters’ staffs have much higher percentages of people from the developed world. As 40+ -year veteran local staff member in India once told me, “The UN is very much a big organization of brown people topped by a small group of white men.” Still, the work of almost half the headquarters’ staffers across the organizations, from the Food and Agricultural Organization to the World Meteorological Organization is directed toward the developing world. In any objective sense, “the UN system” and “the UN development system” are all but the same thing. This is significant because the UN system’s field staff, at least its civilian field staff, shares a culture and political values, largely social democratic or “Fabian” values. They do so, in part, due to the way the organization was created. The UN field staff was initially hired in what historians John Toye and Richard Toye (2004, p. 61) call a purely “patrimonial” manner by David Morse, a British civil servant whose key formative experience was a three-year ethnographic study of the British underclass at the height of the Depression. The study was overseen by John Maynard Keynes. Even 60 years after the UN was established, I found that almost everyone I asked on UNDP’s professional staff was closely linked to Morse through only one or two people. Many still shared Morse’s values and conscience. Another significant thing that I learned was that many of the things that we think of as the central missions of the UN development system were initially undertaken by UN staff members without any official mandate from the club member states that they officially serve, in UNDP’s case, without a prior mandate from its governing board, or from the Economic and Social Council or the General Assembly (to which the board reports). Such activities include the Human Development Reports and UNDP’s work on the Millennium Development Goals, the prevention and response to crises, and promoting democratic governance, all of which UNDP later officially pursued as central goals. This tendency to pursue important goals without the sanction of prior approval by the proper authorities is characteristic of the entire UN development system at least as far down the organizational hierarchy as the heads of the country offices of the different UN agencies (e.g., Unicef, the World Bank, and the World Food Programme, etc., as well as UNDP). In fact, some of UNDP’s seemingly “regular functions”—activities that

3

WHERE DEMOCRATIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION MEET

37

have been carried on for decades—have never been sanctioned by the proper authorities. These include what staffers call the “recycling democratic leader.” UNDP country officers regularly work to place democratic leaders displaced by military coups or threaten incarceration in temporary jobs outside their country, often within the UN system. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and former presidents Ahmad Tejan Kabbah of Sierra Leone, and Ricardo Lagos Escobar of Chile share this experience (Murphy, 2006, p. 141). Similarly, when developing countries face political turmoil due to economic crises (such as Indonesia in 1997) or threatened coups (as in Haiti in 2004) UNDP country office heads regularly use their prestige and their typically strong network of contacts with government officials, opposition leaders, and the key political and intelligence officers of regional and global powers to push the outcome of the crisis in a more democratic direction (Murphy, 2006, pp. 332–38). Some of the UN staff’s democracy-promoting initiatives have been known and sanctioned by important members, even if the same members have maintained a kind of official blind-eye to them. This has particularly been the case with the United States and some of its close allies relative to the UN’s highly successful work training leaders of revolutionary movements to become effective government leaders and leaders of traditional political parties in southern Africa, in former Portuguese colonies in other parts of the world, in Central America, and in Palestine (Murphy, 2006, pp. 172–77). Similarly, regional powers have often chosen to overlook the quite radically democratic vision promoted by some of the Human Development Reports. The prominent journalist and political scientist Fareed Zakaria (2011) has argued that the first Arab Human Development Report has been the most influential book published in the twenty-first century. It is not unique. For decades, regional, national, local Human Development Reports have promoted democratic change in all parts of the world. Moreover, the process followed to create such reports, itself often provides lessons in a kind of democratic social planning even in decidedly authoritarian countries. The UN funds local scholars to work development-oriented local non-governmental organizations to identify and study the issues that are raised. Even when reports are not completed (as has been the case reports from Iran since 1999) and that process itself has an impact (Murphy, 2013). If the “Fabian” culture of much of the UN system staff gives a particular direction to many of its acts of conscience, it is equally the case that

38

C. N. MURPHY

in another sphere of global governance, the processes that the similarlysituated people must follow encourage a similar culture that may have a similar impact. I am referring to the vast world of standard setting under the network of “voluntary consensus standard setting” (VCSS) bodies that has the ISO at its peak. Some scholars estimate that the entire network involves close to the same number of professionals as the UN system. That may be an overestimate, but there are certainly tens of thousands of engineers, management systems experts, supply chain managers, and corporate social responsibility professionals with part-time involvement in VCSS activities. These kinds of committees have been part of global governance almost from the beginning. They set most of the fundamental standards (such as measurements of length and weight) and industrial standards (including the digital codes that cross the Internet and the specification of shipping containers) that are an essential part of market creation. In the last twenty years, they also have become a primary means by which monitored international labor, environmental, and human rights standards have been set. Archetypically, the committees are meetings of experts—originally, only scientists and engineers—representing all those with a material interest in the product or process being standardized (e.g., companies that produce a product as companies that use it). They search for consensus on the “best way” to achieve their end—a goal and a process that reflects the scientific principles that there should exist a single best way to understand any phenomena (one that is the most consistent with the data and with our understanding of other phenomena) and that a consensus of experts in the field is a sign that the best understanding has (for the moment) been arrived at. Australian historian Winton Higgins argues that the people who take part in such meetings, understandably, tend to develop a democratic ethos: … [T]hey immerse themselves in civic culture – the discipline of open discussion and argument between equals, compromise, and accepting the experience of being outvoted by one’s peers. For those who come from hierarchical institutions, this experience is both novel and essential training for citizenship in a free society. . .. Jürgen Habermas has revealed one of the secret strengths of the kind of deliberative decision-making that these standards bodies deploy: “Communicative rationality” – the outcome of

3

WHERE DEMOCRATIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION MEET

39

open discussion and debate between equal individuals with different backgrounds – represents a superior rationality compared to the conclusions reached by experts and senior administrators in isolation, ones untested in debate. The standards produced by the typical standards body crystallize the communicative rationality that Habermas has in mind. (Higgins, 2005, pp. 28-29)

There is quite a bit of evidence that standards created by such committees do, in fact “work better” than standards created by many other means, but, perhaps more significantly, many of the experts involved certainly do speak and act as if participation really is a form of civic education. They become convinced that standardization through this form of deliberative democracy among relevant stakeholders is the correct way to make collective decisions and, on that basis, begin embracing a larger and larger democratic agenda. JoAnne Yates and I have documented the ways in which standard setting, for more than a century, has been the project of an international social movement of socially progressive engineers. From the beginning, some of those engineers have imagined the VCSS process being applied to global social and environmental issues. The standard setting bodies set up by these engineers have continually broadened their understanding of the relevant stakeholders that should be involved in setting particular standards to include the final consumers who use the products of industry, the workers who make them, and many other interest groups in society at large. Moreover, from time to time, engineers within the standards movement have acted as a significant group of advocates for establishing market-taming international institutions, advocates working inside internationalizing corporations, especially those operating in the lead-sectors of the day (Yates and Murphy, 2019). Strikingly, when a UN Secretary General with degrees from Ghana’s University of Science and Technology and MIT’s Sloan School of Management, frustrated by the recent failure to create market-taming institutions through interstate treaty turned to an “ISO-like” private solution through the Global Compact (Yates and Murphy, 2019, pp. 314–19), he found support within that movement. It has been far from uncritical support. For example, one of Nokia’s chief standard setters, Pekka Isosomppi (2009), who is a contemporary example of a lead-industry engineer involved in the standards movement, questions whether any standard through a process that invokes traditionally VCSS, but in fact, is simply an elite agreement and/or politically

40

C. N. MURPHY

expedient compromise can have any legitimacy. Isosomppi is especially critical of ISO’s own recent attempts to create market-taming global standards, which also were established through processes that, he believed, deviated from traditional VCSS. Nevertheless, at the same time that ISO and the UN’s attempts to create such standards are falling into disrepute, many of the Northern non-governmental organizations that have been the major promoters of the explosion of new private standards aimed at taming global markets have started embracing traditional VCSS methods. There is even reason to believe that the result will be the increased legitimacy of such environmental, labor, and human rights standards especially in the global South whose stakeholders are now increasingly involved (Yates and Murphy, 2019, p. 325).

Some Tentative Conclusions I want to return to political theorist Melissa Lane’s arguments about what the ancients can teach us about solving global problems in light of the information presented in the last section. Lane wants us to reconsider the modern Hobbesian, Lockean, Smithian rejection of Plato’s understanding of the relationship between individuals and the polity. For Plato, a good state, a balanced polity was, inherently, one made up of good, balanced individuals, individuals whose reason and passion work in harmony to keep in check their desires and compulsions. It is worth thinking about each of the four clusters of global problems in light of that (and similar) understandings. It is easy to see that we could solve each cluster of problems if the world were made up of individuals of a particular sort. Consider the first cluster, problems like global warming and global pandemics, problems that we know are real and that will not go away. If all of us were ruled by our reason, by our heads, not by our passions or our desires, we would have no trouble accepting the science and beginning to turn the great steamship of our carbon-based industrial economy in a different direction. The second cluster is more a matter of the heart (as it is understood today) a matter of general compassion, empathy, and fellow-feeling, something that Plato gave little attention in The Republic, perhaps something to which the West has always given too little attention. It would be better to draw on the similar lessons from another ancient tradition,

3

WHERE DEMOCRATIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION MEET

41

perhaps the Buddhist. A world of deeply compassionate men and women would not countenance the poverty and inequality that we live with, nor would it accept all the cruel ways in which the voices of those who are less advantaged can be silenced even in societies that claim to be formal democracies. For example, in my own country, the United States, we are currently witnessing massive concerted efforts to re-impose the kinds of restrictions on democratic participation that were commonplace in the American South 60 years ago. The third cluster of problems could be explained by any Platonist as easily as by any Buddhist. Financial excesses, organized crime, the unskillful pursuit of one’s livelihood through the arms trade (one of the few occupations the Buddha singled out for condemnation) all arise from excesses of desire, from greed. Moderation, restraint, is the antidote. A world of individuals skilled at restraint would be a world without these problems. For the fourth cluster, we can go back to Plato. As any school-kid who has faced up to a bully knows, over-reliance on force is usually a mask for fear. That may be true of over-militarized societies. Similarly, with enough courage, fear’s opposite, we can stand up to bullies, and dictators, and warlords, especially if we do it together. Courage is the passion that Plato would have us ally with reason (against excess desire) to give us the balanced individual, and the balanced society. Of course, all of us are not sufficiently, wise, compassionate, moderate, and brave to make a world without global problems, but if we social scientists are willing to consider the possibility that having more people with those characteristics might make those problems easier to solve, then perhaps we should be attentive to the existence of such people whenever we find them. One of my greatest joys—and one of my great surprises—in studying the history of the UN development system was meeting so many people who had so many of those qualities, and whose impact—at least on the topic of this chapter, democratization—was quite real, things that I probably would not have noticed if my sole aim had been to test the theories (rooted in liberal and Marxist thought) that have guided most of my research over the years. If we are not sufficiently wise, compassionate, etc., it is then worth asking how we and others could gain more of these virtues. Plato, the Buddha, and all the other Axial-Age figures had wonderful answers, which are still available in various religious traditions, or, as Lane demonstrates, by returning directly to the ancient sources. Yet, we can also learn

42

C. N. MURPHY

from the experiences of people from our own time. The lesson of the standard-setters story is simple: these are men and women whose reason is well-developed, but using that reason in a particular kind of collective endeavor (a form of deliberative democracy) helps them develop the personal quality—the fellow-feeling, the sense of global civic responsibility—that, if all of us were to have it, might assure that globalization and democratization meet. I suspect that Melissa Lane, who critiques Plato from a democratic perspective but would otherwise have us learn from him, would enjoy that lesson: follow reason’s rules for arriving at new knowledge and you will develop the compassion that will make you a democratic. Yet, there are certainly other ways to get to that end. Many Buddhists would say that you just have to start with recognizing the similarity of the condition of all living things while at the same time recognizing that the story your ego tells (the one about how you are still, somehow, even more special than everyone else) just is not true. I have long been struck by the ability of some peace researchers such as Elise Boulding or Robert Johansen, and even many more “mainstream” scholars of international affairs to stand firmly in the place where many of those social-movement oriented standard-setters like Pekka Isosomppi arrive after great struggle. They identify with the human interest rather the story our personal or national egos want us to believe (see Murphy 2006; Johansen, 1980). Ostensibly, they got there by following reason’s rules alone. Yet, their modesty, restraint, and compassion suggest other sources of their knowledge. To repeat what I said before, it behooves social scientists concerned with solving all global problems—not just the problem of globalization’s threat to democracy—to be attentive to the existence of such people whenever we find them, even among bureaucrats, technocrats, or scholars in our fields.

References Annan, K. (2005) In larger freedom: towards development, security, and human rights for all. New York: United Nations. Avi-Yonah, R. S. (2009) “The OECD harmful tax competition report: a retrospective after a decade.” Brooklyn journal of international law 34(3): 783–95. Booth, R. (2010) “The spirit level: how ‘ideas wreckers’ turned book into political punchbag.” The Guardian, August 13.

3

WHERE DEMOCRATIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION MEET

43

Bellamy, R. (2010) “Democracy without democracy? Can the EU’s democratic ‘outputs’ be separated from the democratic ‘inputs’ provided by competitive parties and majority-rule?” Journal of European public policy 17(1): 2–19. Boswell, T. and W. J. Dixon (1990) “Dependency and rebellion: a cross-national analysis.” American sociological review 55(4): 540–59. Carroll, J. (2006) House of war: the pentagon and the disastrous rise of American power. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Crepaz, M. M. L. and N. Crepaz (2004) “Is equality good medicine? determinants of life expectancy in industrialized democracies.” Journal of public policy 24(3): 275–98. Dale R. and S. Robertson (2003) “Interview with Robert W. Cox,” Globalization, societies, and education 1(1): 21. Dervis K. and C. Özer (2005) A better globalization: legitimacy, governance, and reform. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development. Deudney, D. (2007) Bounding power: Republican security theory from the polis to the global village. Princeton: Princeton University Press. De Vogli, D. Gimeno, and R. Mistry (2009) “The policies–inequality feedback and health: the case of globalization.” Journal of epidemiology and community health 63(9): 688–91. Enloe, C. (2007) Globalization and militarism: Feminists make the link. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Giosan, L. et al. (2012) “Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilization.” PNAS 109(26). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1112743109. Glenn, J. (2008) “Global governance and the democratic deficit: stifling the voice of the south.” Third world quarterly 29(2): 217–38. Goldstone, J. A. (2001) “Toward a fourth generation of revolutionary theory.” Annual review of political science 4: 139–87. Graeber, D. (2011) Debt: the first 5000 years. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing. Held, D. (1997) “Democracy and globalization,” Max Plank Institute for the Study of Societies Working Paper 97/5, May. Higgins, W. 2005. Engine of change: Standards Australia since 1922. Blackheath, Australia: Brandl & Schlesinger Book Publishers. Hulme, D. and R. Wilkinson (2013) “Moving from MDGs to GDGs: development imperatives beyond 2015,” in The Millennium Development Goals and Beyond Global Development After 2015. London: Routledge, pp. 1–16. Ikenberry, G. J. (2001) After victory: institutions, strategic restraint, and the building of order after major wars. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Isosomppi, P. (2009) “Voluntary commitment to social responsibility – the potential mechanisms for the ISO 26000 standard to shape CSR.” Paper presented at the CORE IV Conference, Berlin. June 16.

44

C. N. MURPHY

Jancovici, J.-M. (2010) “What do we really mean by stopping CO2 increase?” May. http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/gre enhouse/quota_GHG.html. Johansen, R. C. (1980) The national interest and the human interest: an analysis of US foreign policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kopel, D. B., P. Gallant, and J. A. Eisen (2010) “The arms trade treaty: Zimbabwe, the democratic Republic of the Congo, and the prospects for arms embargoes on human rights violators.” Penn State Law Review 114(3): 101–63. Lane, M. (2012) Eco-republic: what the ancients can teach us about ethics, virtue, and sustainable living. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mahbubani, K. (2010) “The problem with presidents.” Newsweek, August 30. https://www.newsweek.com/mahbubani-problem-presidents-71805. Makarenko, T. (2010) “The crime-terror continuum: tracing the interplay between transnational organized crime and terrorism.” Global crime 6(1): 129–45. Milanovi´c, B. (2016) Global inequality: a new approach for the age of globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mishra, P. (2012) “Democracy and capitalism are headed for a breakup.” Bloomberg, June 10. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-10/dem ocracy-and-capitalism-are-heading-for-a-bitter-breakup.html. Murphy, C. N. (1994) International organization and industrial change: global governance since 1850. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. (2006) The United Nations Development Programme: a better way? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2013) “The Role for ‘human security’ in an IR that can learn from difference,” in Reframing Development: Globalization, Difference, and Human Security. M. K. Pasha, ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Nature Conservancy (2020) “Calculate your carbon footprint,” http://www.nat ure.org/greenliving/carboncalculator/index.htm. Noble, D. F. (1977) America by design: science, technology, and the rise of corporate capitalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Oestreich, J. E. (2007) Power and principle: human rights programming in international organizations. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Palan, R., R. Murphy, and C. Chavagneux (2010) Tax havens: how globalization really works Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Plesch, D. (2011) America, Hitler, and the UN. London: I. B. Tauris. Ponting, C. (2007) A new green history of the world: the environment and the collapse of great civilizations. New York: Vintage. Reich, R. (2007) “How capitalism is killing democracy: welcome to a world where the bottom line trumps the common good and government takes a back seat to big business.” Foreign policy 162: 38–43.

3

WHERE DEMOCRATIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION MEET

45

Rixen, T. (2011) “Tax competition and inequality: the case for global tax governance,” Global governance 17(4): 447–67. Ruggie, J. G. (1982) “International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order,” International organization, 36(2, 82): 379–415. ———. (2008) “Taking embedded liberalism global: the corporate connection,” in Embedding global markets: an enduring challenge. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 231–53. Sell, S. K. (2003) Private power, public law: the globalization of intellectual property rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———. (2011) “TRIPS was never enough: Vertical forum shifting, FTAs, ACTA, and TPP” Journal of intellectual property law 18: 450–78. Selle P. and Ø. Østerud (2006) “The eroding of representative democracy in Norway.” Journal of European public policy 13(4): 551–68. Sidelsky, R. (1998) “What’s wrong with global capitalism.” Times literary supplement. March 27. http://www.skidelskyr.com/site/article/whats-wrong-withglobal-capitalism/. Strange, S. (1998) “‘What theory?’ the theory in Mad money,” Centre for the Study of Globalization and Regionalization Working Paper No. 18/98. University of Warwick, Coventry, December 10. ———. (1999) “The Westfailure system,” Review of international studies 25(3, 199): 345–54. Stohl. R. and E. J. Hoogendoorn, Stopping the destructive spread of small arms: how small arms and light weapons proliferation undermines security and development. Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, 2010. Stopford, J. and S. Strange (1991) Rival states, rival firms: competition for world market shares. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talberg J. and A. Uhlin (2012) “Civil society and global democracy,” in Global democracy: normative and empirical perspectives, Daniele Archibi et al., eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 210–32. Toye J. and R. Toye (2004) The UN and the global political economy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Wallerstein, I. (1999) The end of the world as we know it: social science for the twenty-first century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wilkinson, R. and K. Pickett (2010) Spirit level. London: Penguin. Yates, J. and C. N. Murphy (2019) Engineering rules: global standard setting since 1880. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Zakaria, F. (2011) “A decade after 9/11: enduring lessons for the Arab world,” CNN, September 12. https://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/ 12/a-decade-after-911-enduring-lessons-for-the-arab-world/comment-page1/?nav-edition=on.

CHAPTER 4

New Thinking About Global Governance in an Intermestic World W. Andy Knight

Introduction Those of us who have been following political and socio-economic trends since the end of the Cold War realize that our world has become increasingly ungovernable. The Post-Cold War period has been marked by the intensification of globalization, with all its “single core purpose in the accumulation of wealth” (Brunelle 2007, p. 1; Knight 2005a, pp. 252– 263), which has resulted in expanding the gaps between the wealthy and the poor, and in increasing social conflicts over scarce resources and raw materials. It has also been characterized as an era ushering in a new world disorder (Knight 2009b, pp. 160–165).

W. A. Knight (B) Professor Political Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] International and Area Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_4

47

48

W. A. KNIGHT

The institutions of global governance created after World War II and intended as instruments for managing and addressing the global problems we face and as mechanisms for steering us into a more peaceful, stable, equitable, just, sustainable, and prosperous world are, for all intents and purposes, “decisions frozen in time”. Created at an historical juncture when sovereignty-bound entities reigned supreme, today’s multilateral institutions are now forced to operate in a turbulent complex interdependent and “intermestic” era in which sovereign-free and sovereignty-bound actors compete and jostle for position on the global stage (Keohane and Nye 2012; Rosenau 1988, pp. 327–364).1 Under the ellipsoidal glare and intensity of the spotlight, post-World War II institutions of global governance are revealing themselves to be defective, inefficient, ineffective, and largely irrelevant in the twenty-first century. We are in the midst of a crisis of global governance; a pivotal point in our human history which has triggered an intense and growing interest in the nature of governance at all levels. I argue in this chapter that this is the propitious moment for a reconceptualization of global governance and for the construction of a new global governance paradigm. To accomplish this, we need to shift our analytical focus from problem-solving theorization to a critical theory approach that stands outside prevailing understandings of what global governance has come to mean (Cox 2001, pp. 45–60).2 In the Gramscian tradition, the late Robert Cox proposes an empirical examination of the patchwork concoction we call the “global governance architecture” and the late James Rosenau provides us with a description of the post-Cold War “fragmegrative”3 environment within which that architecture is being modified (Rosenau 2003a). Combining the exhortation of both Cox and Rosenau, it becomes clear that the time has come for us to focus not so much on reforming and adapting the post-World War II institutions of global governance but rather on transforming the very conception and raison d’être of “global governance,” in the absence of world government. This feat requires a Kuhnian paradigm shift away from the state-centric idea of 1 On complex interdependence see (Keohane and Nye 2012); On “sovereignty-free” and “sovereignty-bound” actors see (Rosenau 1988). 2 On this theoretical distinction, see (Cox 2001). 3 James Rosenau used the term ‘fragmegrative’ to describe the paradoxical trend, during

a period of intense globalization and the unravelling of world order, of clashes between forces of fragmentation and those of integration (Rosenau 2003a).

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

49

“international,” anarchic, and hierarchic governance to one that embodies notions of heterarchic, multi-centric authority and subsidiary arrangements (Knight 1996, pp. 31–52)4 that are more conducive to the self-organizing and steering of multiple and multi-level agencies (state and non-state, public and private) which can be operationally autonomous “yet structurally coupled due to their mutual interdependence” (Jessop 1998, p. 29).

The New World Disorder Global politics in the early part of the twenty-first century has been dominated by gruesome acts of rampant terrorism, multilateral and unilateral reprisals, global economic downturns, economic inequality, social exclusion, global apartheid, mounting civil strife, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This turbulent time reveals cracks, if not a total breakdown, in the prevailing global order and has led to ever-louder demands for the establishment of new institutions of global governance to replace, or at least complement, the worn-out existing ones. This is not the first time in world history when prevailing systems of governance have been challenged by pronounced structural forces for change. In past centuries, there have been repeated attempts at reforming existing institutions or creating new ones to tame the conflicts and disorders of those periods (Knight 2005a, pp. 252–263). More recently, during the immediate post-Cold War period, we witnessed the removal of some of the structural and ideological underpinnings of superpower conflict that characterized the last half of the previous century. Apart from the initial relaxation of global tensions, this changed structural condition ostensibly reduced the major security threat that the world faced during the Cold War, viz., the threat of nuclear war between two heavily armed military camps that could have resulted in Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). But the end of that precarious balance of power between the two superpowers (the USA and the USSR) created a climate of uncertainty with the rise in a number of civil conflicts and the spread of internecine violence in places like Afghanistan, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and the former Yugoslavia. In

4 On Subsidiarity arrangements, see (Knight 1996, pp. 31–52).

50

W. A. KNIGHT

the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been approximately 93 conflicts around the world in which over 5.5 million people were killed—75% of them being civilians (Keating and Knight 2004, pp. 1–4).5 Almost all of these conflicts were intra-state, thus explaining the disproportionate number of civilian casualties. This immediate post-Cold War period was also characterized by an exponential increase in transnational challenges. Some of these challenges included: the horizontal proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; the spike in the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons (SALW); the spread of hate material and ideologies of hate; the increased consumption of pornography and sex slavery; computer hacking and cyber theft; an increase in drug trafficking; trafficking in women and children; an increase in mass migration and the number of internally displaced persons; forced labour and organized criminal activity; global financial and market collapses; piracy on the high seas (especially in the Malacca straits and off the coasts of Somalia and Nigeria); and the circumvention of national regulatory policies and taxes. Clearly, “…the national institutions that are supposed to express people’s preferences in these matters are increasingly ineffective in coping with them” (Etzioni 2001, pp. 595–610). The post-World War II institutions that were designed to address interstate issues were suddenly showing signs, at the end of the Cold War era, not only of ineffectiveness but also of irrelevance. And many of the regional institutions did not fare any better. This raised the alert among scholars and practitioners of the need for a new global governance architecture and robust global regulatory regimes to effectively deal with transnational and intermestic issues.6 The debacle in Somalia, the Rwandan genocide, the at times indiscriminate but politically motivated slaughter in the DRC, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mozambique, Cote D’Ivoire, and the continued violence in other places such as the Middle East, Asia, Chechnya, and Latin America all indicate a persistent adherence to a culture of violence as hyper-nationalism,

5 These figures were calculated until 2004. Since then, the numbers of conflicts and the numbers of those killed in conflicts have risen exponentially. 6 One of the most recent examples of a comprehensive attempt to explore this urge to put together the many pieces of the global governance puzzle is a large volume, with 54 chapters, edited by (Weiss and Wilkinson 2018).

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

51

terrorism, and long-suppressed ethnic conflicts continued to rear their ugly heads in the latter part of the twentieth century. Other human tragedies and gross human rights violations occurred in so-called failed or failing states where the degeneration or total absence of national governance structures meant that civilians were particularly vulnerable to random acts of violence (kidnappings, murders, sexual assaults). Millions of innocent people fleeing violence became refugees and displaced persons—and thousands of children have been, and continue to be, recruited as child soldiers by both government and rebel forces. The destruction of national infrastructures and of governmental and societal institutions to the tune of billions of dollars was due at times to internecine violence but also at other times to natural and manmade disasters during this immediate post-Cold War period. Again, many national governments found it difficult to address the spill-over problems associated with internal conflicts and humanitarian disasters. Similarly, international governmental organization (IGOs), like the UN system, and regional inter-governmental bodies, like the African Union, the Arab League, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and the Organization of American States (OAS) found themselves struggling to cope with the increasingly transnational and intermestic nature of these problems. In general, the narrative painted above represents a panoramic picture of what can only be referred to as “a new world disorder”—an environment of turbulence, flux, fragmentation, disequilibrium, and uncertainty—which cries out for the establishment of novel forms of governance activity and institutions, since the existing ones seem so ineffectual. But this picture is only one part of the puzzle. There are other integrative/fragmentary forces at work which are also putting pressure on the extant international governance architecture.

Complex Interdependence and Globalization Forces It was the late James Rosenau who alerted us to some of the ways in which the advent of dynamic technologies has resulted in a decline of distances in the modern world (what he called ‘distant proximities’). Technological advances in communications and transportation have caused an increase

52

W. A. KNIGHT

in the level of complex interdependence (to use the phrase coined by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, chapter 2). Modern communications (in the form of newspapers, radio, television, telephones, fax machines, computers, the internet, e-mail, social media) are producing contradictory outcomes: uniting and fragmenting audiences; exacerbating social cleavages as well as bringing disparate groups together; heightening existing antagonisms as well as providing means through which such friction can be resolved; eroding national boundaries as well as propelling ultranationalist fervour; and increasing political cynicism as well as raising the level of civil society’s political consciousness. No doubt, individual citizens have been empowered as the result of the media’s influence. At the same time, because of their adeptness with the utilization of modern communications systems, state leaders have also been empowered vis-à-vis civil society. Modern transportation has allowed people of formerly distant societies to interact more frequently. It acts as a conduit for bringing individuals from different countries with similar interests together. But it has also served to facilitate transnational criminal activities and to ignite a spark in anti-immigrant sentiment. The overall effect of the above has been a shrinkage in social, political, economic, and cultural distances. As a consequence of this phenomenon, formerly dense and opaque frontiers are being dissolved, thus breaking down the Westphalian notion of ‘inside versus outside.’ National boundaries are no longer able to divide friend from foe (Camilleri and Jim Falk 1992, p. 88). Indeed, the technological revolution has the potential of creating in the minds of people around the world a sense of global citizenship which could result eventually in the transfer of individuals’ loyalties from ‘sovereignty-bound’ to ‘sovereignty-free’ governance bodies. The changing relationship between the public and private spheres and the virtual collapse of the dividing line separating the domestic from the external environment suggest a fluid but closely integrated global system substantially at odds with the notion of a fragmented system of nationally delineated sovereign states. However, it does not yet mean that a global civil society has been fully formed, although one can make the case that such an entity is in the process of being established, as will be shown later.7

7 On this point see (Walker and Thompson 2008).

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

53

Aided by the technological revolution, globalization has contributed to global space and time shrinkage. The globalization of trade, production and finance has resulted in a marked decline in some governments’ ability to control these sectors and has challenged the traditional concept of state sovereignty (Mittelman 1997, pp. 248–263). It has also expanded the number of players that can be involved in multilateral processes. The globalization movement and the seemingly paradoxical adherence to territorialism are two concepts of world order that stand in conflict but are also interrelated. The globalization of economic processes “requires the backing of territorially-based state power to enforce its rules.” But postFordism, the new pattern of social organization of production that is congruent with the globalization phenomenon, implicitly contradicts the lingering territorial principle that has long been identified with Fordism (Cox 1996, p. 115). The results of post-Fordist production have been, inter alia, the dismantling of the welfare state and the diminishing of the strength of organized labour. But it also has had the effect of increasingly fragmenting power in the world system, providing fodder for “the possibility of culturally diverse alternatives to global homogenization,” according to Robert Cox (Knight 1999, p. 278). If Cox is right, we can see how this dialectical ‘double movement’ of the globalization process can alter the relationship people have with the political arena and how it can eventually cause a reaction leading to what James Rosenau terms “explosive sub-groupism,” (Rosenau 2003a) as seen in the many anti-globalization protests since Seattle. This sub-groupism has already spurred the revival of what can be called civilizational studies that are further unearthing other anti-globalization movements and ideas, and a bottom-up form of governance (Smouts 1999, pp. 292–311). There are other ways in which globalization is facilitating the dissolution of formerly dense and opaque boundaries. For instance, economic globalization has resulted in a global division of labour that hardly respects state boundaries and sovereignty. It has to a large extent been responsible for the feminization of work, particularly in the developing world, which penetrates traditional gender boundaries. The international movement of capital via electronic transfers has also had a major effect on the relocation of authority and power structures (Strange 1997). Similarly, media globalization—via satellite new networks like CNN, the BBC, al Jazeera, and the internet superhighway—has contributed to the diffusion of power. Its impact raises the possibility of the development

54

W. A. KNIGHT

of a truly global civil society; something that could again transform the nature of multilateralism and the way we view governance. Finally, another challenge to the traditional notion of multilateralism and governance has to do with transnational and intermestic issues: for example, environmental pollution; global warming; currency crises; the drug trade; human rights degeneration; terrorism; the AIDS, SARS, Ebola, and COVID-19 epidemics, Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs); refugee flows; and gender inequality. These issues, by their very nature, all impel cooperation on a transnational scale, since in the majority of cases they cannot be resolved by individual states acting on their own or even bilaterally. Multi-centric actors have pushed many of the issues onto the global agenda. The impact of the multiplication of transnational and intermestic issues is that the state-centric multilateral intergovernmental institutions have had to find ways of acknowledging, if not embracing, the input of NGOs and other civil society actors who formerly would not have been considered important players on the international stage. The alternative of not embracing these entities could very well be the establishment of parallel multilateral arrangements that bypass existing state-centric multilateral bodies or compete with them. As James Rosenau reminded us, we live in a messy world, a world that seems in disarray due to high levels of poverty, division, ethnic and cultural conflicts, terrorism, over population, pollution, and other forms of environmental degradation (Rosenau 2003b, p. 223). Our world is a post-modern one of extraordinary complexity and uncertainty as contradictory forces are unleashed by the intensification of globalization. It is a world in which integrative forces coexist alongside fragmentary ones, and homogenization is being challenged by civilizational diversity. What is clear from the preceding overview is that complex interdependence and globalization phenomena have challenged international governance and raised the possibility of developing other forms of governance at the global level that can adequately address transnational and intermestic issues and problems.

Evolving Governance at the Global Level While the term ‘global governance’ is relatively new, the word ‘governance’ has a long tradition (Pagden 1998, pp. 7–15; Murphy 1994).

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

55

Etymological searches reveal that the term can be traced back to classical Latin and Greek words for the “steering of boats.” Originally, the word ‘governance’ therefore referred to the action or way of managing or coordinating interdependent activities. Throughout history there have been attempts to manage the interactions of peoples, clans, tribes, city-states, and states to ensure harmonious relations or deal with common problems. One can find examples of various forms of governance over the course of history, including empires/imperialism, balance of power, plurilateralism, formal and informal limited purpose intergovernmental organizations, formal and informal multipurpose international organizations, regional intergovernmental organizations, transnational international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and embryonic global governance institutions. The form of governance labelled as empires has a long association with imperialism. This form of governance has recurred at different points in history and in many different regions of the globe. Imperialism provides the ideology underpinning this form of governance. Imperial powers exercise dominance and control over the subjugated regions they conquer. As a result, they develop a form of governance that is based on power asymmetries, coercion, and attempts to enforce homogeneity. One can find evidence of governance by empires when the Greek city-state of Athens was a dominant power. But this form of governance has reappeared at different junctures in history, including during our contemporary period (Doyle 1986; Ferguson 2002). And each time it has appeared, it manages to provoke resistance, among those subjugated to this form of governance. Imperial powers have usually declined due in large part to military, economic, and imperial overstretch. Another prominent form of governance has been the balance of power system. This form of governance emerged after the peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the creation of the modern states system. It became the principal mechanism for maintaining international order in Europe. Underpinning the balance of power system were the ideological notions of self-preservation, particularly for those states that were predominant, and the preservation of the status quo. To accomplish these two things, the great powers of the day would use this balance of power mechanism of governance to prevent the emergence of a hegemonic or imperial power and prevent upstart powers from advancing up the hierarchical power ladder.

56

W. A. KNIGHT

Although diplomacy was utilized to manage the relations between states in the Euro-centric balance of power system, at other times balance of power governance utilized violent conflict to maintain equilibrium in the international system. War, or the threat of war, was used as a means of preserving equilibrium within the international system. Realists have described the balance of power well as one in which independent ‘rational actor’ states have little interaction beyond their borders, and one that emphasized order and stability. The Concert System By the nineteenth century, the balance of power form of governance gave way to a series of ad hoc and plurilateral conferences and congresses (Knight 2005b, pp. 93–114).8 While this form of governance was generally limited to the European states system and controlled by the great powers of the time (members of the Concert of Europe), eventually it broadened to include states in Latin America and Asia—thus expanding the scope of plurilateral multilateralism. However, because the Congresses and Conferences were intermittent, this form of governance stopped short of establishing formal intergovernmental institutions. In fact, by the mid-nineteenth century, the Concert of Europe became the first attempt at formalizing intergovernmental organization to govern interstate relations as contact between states increased (Claude 1971, p. 21). Out of this interaction, state leaders became increasingly aware of the common problems they faced and of the need for formal institutional devices and systematic methods for regulating their behaviour and relationships. This governance via formal organizations and regimes was steered by the Great Power directorship of the Concert and included such activity as regulating traffic on the great rivers of Europe, adjusting relations between belligerent and neutral states, the re-division of the Balkans and the carving up of the African continent. However, while the great powers of the nineteenth century proved relatively successful in governing the subordinate states in the international system, problems arose when the dominant powers clashed among 8 Note the examples of the Congresses of Vienna, Paris and Berlin (1815, 1856, 1878 respectively); the London Conferences (1871 and 1912–1913); the Hague Conferences (1899 and 1907); and the Algeciras Conference of 1906.

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

57

themselves. Since there was no higher power to mediate great power conflicts and those conflict open the door for rising powers to challenge the great powers, the Concert of Europe and the intermittent conference/congress system soon became ineffective and largely irrelevant. As Craig Murphy recalls, in the late nineteenth century there were also other challenges coming from this form of governance from civil society organizations which began to establish a presence on the global stage. Such organizations included the anti-slavery movement and financial and corporate interests, public international unions, the peace movement, as well as a number of private associations (Murphy 1994, pp. 56–57). This ‘parallel’ non-state system of governance, combined with emerging powers beyond Europe and a dramatic increase in the volume and scope of international activity, caused some major strains on the ad hoc conference/congress governance system. As Inis Claude puts it: “When all is said and done, the political conference system contributed more to awareness of the problems of international collaboration than to their solutions and more to opening up the possibilities of multilateral diplomacy than to realizing them” (Claude 1971, p. 28). But the conference/congress system did make a significant contribution to the institutionalization of modern-day multilateral/intergovernmental organization because it got European governments into the habit of meeting together to discuss and iron out problems of common concern (Murphy 1994, p. 56). At the start of the twentieth century, great efforts were made to establish more formal institutions of governance at the international level. International public unions began to regulate telecommunications and postal systems. Between 1860 and 1914 about two dozen organizations were created to govern interstate and transnational activity. Many of them were designed to foster industry and commerce, but most were focused on meeting social and economic needs as well as on managing a variety of conflicts stemming from the effects of the second industrial revolution and the increased volume and scale of interactions between states (Ibid., pp. 32–37). But note the persistence of non-state organizations, like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)—founded in 1919, which operated in parallel with state-centric organizations on the world stage.

58

W. A. KNIGHT

Advent of the League of Nations and Its Demise It took World War I to actualize the formal institutionalization of intergovernmental governance with the founding of organizations like the Permanent Court of International Justice and the League of Nations. Liberals have argued that the underlying cause of war was the balance of power’s failure to maintain stability, order, and ultimately peace. For this reason, Woodrow Wilson and other liberals sought to replace balance of power politics, with its ad hoc methods and reliance on military power and alliance politics, with a formal institutionalized system of law and conflict prevention mechanisms, including the collective security provisions outlined in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The League of Nations itself was an attempt to create an institutional framework to control war by eliminating or reducing states’ concerns about security. The principle of collective security was seen as a remedy for the security dilemma that confronted states. A collective security system is based on a number of critical assumptions. It assumes that wars are principally the result of acts of aggression conducted by one state against another. It also assumes that such wars could be deterred if potential aggressors knew that their actions would be met with the combined force of all the other states in the system either in the form of punishing sanctions or, ultimately, with coercive armed force. This brings into play other assumptions including, most importantly, the willingness of other states to respond collectively in the face of aggression. Collective security rests on the premise of shared vulnerability among states. Yet, in practice, few states were willing to leave their security in the hands of the collective security instrument devised at the League of Nations. This was especially true for those states—Japan, Italy, and Germany—which were dissatisfied with the prevailing international order. As they sought their own solutions to interwar security issues, other states took notice and felt threatened. So, this governance system via a multipurpose intergovernmental organization, the League of Nations, did not last long. As Leon Gordenker puts it: the League’s “prestige was fractured in the 1930s by national decisions that led to a war of unparalleled destruction. Despite some lasting accomplishments, governments that had founded it, soon largely ignored it” (Gordenker 2018, p. 224). This promising global governance institution’s inability to overcome the security dilemma has been seen by many as one of the greatest failures of the interwar period, leading to

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

59

the outbreak of war on the European continent in 1939. Of course, the League was not an entity on to itself, but rather it merely represented the collective will of its member governments. The United States, one of the world’s pre-eminent powers never took up membership and, by late 1930s, most of the disaffected powers— Germany, Japan, and Russia—had left this intergovernmental organization. Those powers that remained, principally Great Britain and France, were unwilling for a variety of domestic and foreign policy considerations to provide the League with the support it needed to respond to the political and military challenges that emerged in the international system during the 1930s. Beginning with Japan’s attack on Manchuria, through to Italy’s annexation of Abyssinia and on to the German Anschluss of Czechoslovakia in 1939, the League and its member governments shamefully stood by and did nothing. Yet it would be somewhat misleading the lay all the blame for World War II solely at the foot of the League. For some historians, the war that began in 1939 was a continuation of the European-wide war that had not ended in 1919, but merely paused as the combatants regained strength and armour. WWI had failed to resolve the pressing balance of power issues that had plagued the continent since the late nineteenth century. (see HistoryNet, “World War II”) States such as Germany and Italy remained dissatisfied with their place in the European power structure. Germany, especially, suffered from the punitive measures imposed on it as part of the Treaty of Versailles. From the Germans’ vantage point, there was much ground to recover. Added to all of these factors was, of course, the emergence of fascist regimes in Germany and Italy led respectively by Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler’s ambitious expansionist plans posed a direct and significant challenge to European and international order and to the fledgling intergovernmental governance (see HistoryNet, “Failed Peace”). In light of these factors war became a matter of when, not if. The UN System: An Improvement on the League The demise of the League of Nations, once World War II began, clearly indicated that the system of global governance via intergovernmental organizations needed to be reformed, at the very least. In August 1941, just months before the US (the emerging great power) entered that war, American President Franklin D. Roosevelt joined with British PM Winston Churchill to establish what became known as the Atlantic

60

W. A. KNIGHT

Charter. That Charter formed the basis for the Declaration of the United Nations, which was signed on 1 January 1942 in San Francisco by some 26 governments. In essence, the declaration was an attempt to introduce a permanent governance system for ensuring global security once the war was over. The victorious Allied countries were envisioned to be at the centre of this new system which, in effect, was expected to constitute the institutionalization of the immediate post-1945 world order. In San Francisco, on 25 April 1945, two weeks before Roosevelt’s death, the UN system was ushered into existence on the promise that it would not be a house of cards, like its ill-fated predecessor, but rather a stable, authoritative foundation for global tranquility and a reliable mechanism for preserving international peace and security. The UN was supposed to be a much more powerful and effective intergovernmental governance organization than was the League of Nations. Whereas the Covenant of the League made no provision for that organization to be involved in direct military action, the UN Charter envisioned a military staff committee to oversee military enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions. While the Covenant had contemplated decision by unanimity, the Charter pictured a majority capable of binding all UN members, and in some cases non-members, to its determinations. But there were many features of the League’s governance apparatus that were worth keeping. The Permanent institutional mechanism developed within the establishment of the League was preserved with the founding of the UN at the tail end of WWII. So too was the multipurpose infrastructure. Indeed, the institutionalization of the UN system was much more extensive than that of the League, with six main organs, a permanent secretariat and subsidiary bodies, as well as a large number of specialized agencies, functional commissions, regional commissions, committees, programmes, funds, research and training institutes, and related and affiliated bodies. The UN Charter listed some key governance goals for this multipurpose intergovernmental organization that went beyond the maintenance of international peace and security. These were as follows: developing friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples; achieving international cooperation in solving global socio-economic, cultural and humanitarian problems; encouraging and promoting respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all; and, becoming the centre for harmonizing

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

61

the actions of nations to attain the above common ends. Over the years since 1945, the UN has grown in size and mandate (Knight 2000). Its Charter goals were extended to include protecting the global commons, tackling climate change, and encouraging democratization across the globe (Knight 2009b, chapter 40) One could add to these the recent goal of countering terrorism that is reflected in UN Security Council resolution 1373, passed on 28 September 2001 in response to the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US. While the main purpose of international governance under the UN system was to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” this intergovernmental organization is mandated to address a variety of other issues, for example, economic development (UNDP), health (WHO), communications (ITU), human rights (OHCHR), refugees (UNHCR), women (UN WOMEN), children (UNICEF) and drugs and crime (UNODC). The UN retains its support for state sovereignty as exemplified in its membership and its resistance (until recently) to intervention in the internal affairs of states. It is for this reason that Rosenau considered it a ‘sovereignty-bound’ organization. It has been the principal forum in which newly independent states seek recognition and confirmation of their independence and de jure sovereignty. At the same time, it has been pursued by human rights advocates as the organization through which the rights of individuals against the state are to be advanced and ultimately protected; and by civil society organizations to gain their own recognition and opportunities for participating in the process of global governance. Challenges to the UN from Transversal Networks: The Decentring of Global Governance So, in essence, the UN—a sovereignty-bound organization—has had to find ways of accommodating non-state (sovereignty-free) actors that pursue some of the same goals it shares with them. It is clear, however, that this universal, intergovernmental organization has not always been successful in addressing many of the different representational concerns of its member governments. This explains the proliferation in the establishment of regional and sub-regional intergovernmental organizations (some multi-purpose and other single purpose) as well as the attempts to construct alternative institutional frameworks (hybrid global governance bodies) to meet diverse sets of interests. Jonathan Luckhurst refers to

62

W. A. KNIGHT

these potentially competing bodies as part of a transversal network of governance (Luckhurst 2019). In some cases, these bodies are viewed as alternatives of a complementary sort, but some of them can also be seen as alternatives that challenge the legitimacy, credibility, and relevance of the UN. If the contemporary global agenda seems crowded by the number and scope of activities that occur in so many different sectors, the response in governance terms is equally staggering. While the total number of transversal governance mechanisms is seemingly countless, the variety is clearly evident. At the interstate level alone, there are numerous formal groupings: G2, G3, G7/8, G20, G21, G25, G77, and G90. There are also now the seemingly ubiquitous ‘coalitions of the willing’—plurilateral regimes that take on governing tasks which the UN system may be unable to handle adequately. This considerable variety of intergovernmental bodies forms only one element of global governance institutions. Tanja Bruhl and Volker Rittberger make a conceptual distinction between ‘international’ and ‘global’ governance. They suggest that international governance consists of the “output of a non-hierarchical network of interlocking international (mostly, but not exclusively, governmental) institutions which regulate the behaviour of states and other international actors in different issue areas of world politics.” For them, global governance is the “output of a non-hierarchical network of international and transnational institutions;” not only IGOs and international regimes but also transnational regimes that are regulating actors’ behaviour. In other words, the authors differentiate between global governance and international governance by suggesting that in the case of the former there is a decreased salience of states and increased salience of non-state actors in the process of norm-building, rule-setting and compliance monitoring that occur at the global level (Bruhl and Rittberger 2001, p. 2). They also equate global governance with multi-level governance involving the management of the above processes at sub-national, national, regional, trans-regional and global levels. Amitav Acharya refers to this complex architecture of global governance as “multiplex global governance” (Acharya 2017, pp. 271–285).

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

63

Summative Governance: Towards a New Paradigm? The recent interest in multi-level and multiplex global governance stems, in large part, from a recognition of the scale of global change; the shrinkage of time and space witnessed over the past 76 years; the emergence of a transnational civil society; (Florini 2000) rising interdependence among actors (state and non-state) within international society; the rise in the number and complexity of transnational and intermestic issues that cannot be addressed adequately by the UN intergovernmental system; and national governments’ failure/inability not only to deal with the transnational and intermestic issues but also to provide common goods and security guarantees for citizens. Particularly since the end of WWII, we have witnessed at least three different challenges to traditional Westphalian international governance as represented in institutions like the UN system. First, technological revolution has made it possible for many other actors besides states to enter on to the world stage and demand a role in decision making that affects them directly. Second, the intensification of globalization has altered the relationship between citizens, the state, and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Globalization has facilitated greater participation of non-state actors in governance processes normally reserved for state actors. But because globalization is a double-edged sword, it has also made it easier for transnational criminal organizations and terrorist groups to command the attention of governance bodies at all levels. It has also widened the gap between the rich and the poor, thereby increasing the challenge to intergovernmental bodies. Third, the end of the Cold War can be seen as a historical turning point for intergovernmental institutions. It has resulted in an exponential expansion in the scope and agenda of IGOs, so much so that these organizations are having to contract out certain services (Weiss and Gordenker 1996). All three challenges have created new problems for global governance, including for the concept itself, and have ensured that even more actors are now involved in trying to manage those problems. Apart from states and IGOs operating at multiple levels, today we have a plethora of non-state actors vying for attention on the world stage: transnational corporations, business associations, public–private consortia, bond rating agencies, transnational social movements, transnational advocacy networks, epistemic communities, coalitions of non-governmental

64

W. A. KNIGHT

organizations, terrorist groups, security communities, private security companies, and so on. From MUNS to WOMP: The Future of Multilateralism and Global Governance Recently, there has been a plethora of critical works that stand outside the prevailing thoughts about multilateralism and global governance in order to give those concepts new meaning in what are considered to be changed circumstances. The most influential of these works was initiated by Robert Cox through his ‘Multilateralism and the United Nations System (MUNS)’ research project that began in 1992. Because the MUNS programme focused on long-term structural change, it was cognizant of attempts by the less powerful in society to create space for themselves in multilateral activity. Indeed, an explicit goal of the Fiesole symposium (1992) was the consideration of a future “new multilateralism built from the bottom up on the foundations of a broadly participative global society” (Cox 1997, preface). This bottom-up multilateralism is conceived as organic and network-based with discourse mechanisms as well as democratic structures to ensure accountability to the world’s peoples. At the same time, MUNS researchers were cognizant of the constraints imposed by the more powerful on the attempts of the less powerful to play a greater role in global governance. What emerged from the volumes of literature published by MUNS was an expanded and historically sensitive view of multilateralism obtained through careful empirical observations as well as through the questioning of conventional and traditional analyses of the phenomenon. Multilateralism in the MUNS’ orientation is accorded a broad meaning that encompasses all those entities that may be (or may become) relevant in dealing with general or sector-specific areas of policy that have relevance for the globe, whether they are trans-regional, regional, interstate, state or sub-state. Thus, the units of analysis for the MUNS group not only included the state but also encompassed forces in civil society, above and below the state (Krause and Knight 1995, p. 261). Another related paradigmatic shift in conceptualizing both governance and multilateralism is linked to a movement towards establishing a postCold War global agenda that has given rise to what Richard Falk calls a potential ‘counterproject’ to that of post-Cold War geo-politics (Falk 1994, pp. 145–154). At the base of this counter-project is a normative

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

65

pre-occupation with strengthening the role of civil society (sovereigntyfree actors) in matters of world affairs at local, regional, global locales to balance the influence of sovereignty-bound actors. This is now generally viewed as an essential ‘bottom-up’ counterbalance to the state-centric ‘top-down’ views of world order and global governance that are so deeply entrenched in much of the neo-realist and liberal institutionalist thinking and scholarship. In some respects, this conception of the counter-project has been borne out in anti-globalization protests and peoples’ movements. The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twentyfirst century proved to be a defining moment for bottom-up struggles against top-down governance at the global-level—what former UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali called a “Grotian Moment.” For Boutros-Ghali this moment is “one in which a renaissance of international law is needed to help transform the world scene in this new era that all States have entered” (Boutros-Ghali 1994, p. 1609). But, for others, the “Grotian Moment” involved a paradoxical confluence of events that can be traced back to a defining moment at the end of 1999 when the World Trade Organization’s Third Ministerial meeting collapsed because of the anti-globalization/capitalism protests in Seattle, Washington. However, this contestation between governmental/intergovernmental bodies versus non-state/civil society actors can be traced earlier to the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the embrace of democratization in formerly authoritarian states. Mary Kaldor writes authoritatively about civil society movements that sprung up against authoritarian states and actually brought down some of those regimes (Kaldor 2003). The end of several authoritarian governments from Central and Eastern Europe—opened the door for the emergence of a number of social counter-movements. One should note as well that this wave coincided with the emergence of a transnational, militant Islamic movement as well as with the coalescing of a number of other social movements (environmentalists, feminists, LGBTQIA2S+, slow food, human rights, indigenous peoples, Arab spring). Walden Bello considers the Seattle protests as the ‘turning point’ in the clash between bottom-up and top-down forces in the struggle for how the global economy will most likely be governed in the future (Bello 2001, p. 24). That particular protest involved an estimated 50,000 people, as well as “the rebellion of developing countries delegates inside the Seattle Convention Centre.” Although it may have been difficult

66

W. A. KNIGHT

to decipher the actual position of all of the protesters, what unified them was “their opposition to the expansion of a system that promoted corporate-led globalization at the expense of social goals like justice, community, national sovereignty, cultural diversity, and ecological sustainability” (Ibid., 24). These protests were met by a major assault on a largely peaceful gathering by Seattle police in full view of television cameras. Similar anti-globalization protests occurred subsequently during 2000 in Bangkok, in Washington, DC, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in Melbourne, Australia and in Prague, Czech Republic. In 2001, despite the attempts by government leaders in the major industrial states to find ways to keep demonstrators away from major summit meetings, we witnessed major civil society demonstrations in Windsor, Ontario, Canada at the Summit of the Americas and in Genoa, Italy where a protester was killed and many injured.9 The lack of civil society’s confidence in state governments and intergovernmental institutions was a sure sign that these top-down governance bodies were beginning to lose their legitimacy. These protests represented the clash between two worlds: a state-centric one and a multi-centric one. Rosenau and Durfee note that “alongside the traditional world of states, a complex multi-centric world of diverse actors has emerged, replete with structures, processes, and decision rules of its own.” These authors go on to label these two worlds in turn as ‘state-centric’ and ‘multi-centric’. As these two sets of structures intersect, one should expect that multilateralism at that specific juncture would be different in character from the multilateralism that emerged out of the immediate post-World War II period. Certainly, the empirical evidence points to a changed socio-political environment within which multilateral institutions are forced to operate today. The global stage is “dense with actors, large and small, formal and informal, economic and social, political and cultural, national and transnational, international and subnational, aggressive and peaceful, liberal and authoritarian, who collectively form a highly complex system of global governance” (Rosenau 2003b, p. 225). The large number and vast range of collectivities that clamber onto the global stage exhibit both organized and disorganized complexity 9 For a comprehensive examination of these civil society protest movements, see Tomás Mac Sheoin, “Policing and Repression of Anti-Globalization Protests and Movements: A Bibliography of English-Language Material,” Interface: A Journal for and About Social Movements, Vol. 2 (2), November 2010.

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

67

(Rosenau and Durfee 1999, p. 40). Literally, thousands of factions, associations, organizations, movements and interest groups, along with states, now form a network pattern of interactions, which reminds one of Burton’s ‘cobweb’ metaphor (Burton 1972). The advent of this bifurcated system of governance does not mean that states are in the process of disintegration. The interstate system will continue to be central to world affairs for decades to come. This proliferation of sovereignty-bound and sovereignty-free actors suggests that existing international governance systems have failed to deal adequately with the new transnational problems or with new actors’ aspirations. It would seem as though international governance has been reflexively adapting to these challenges in two ways: grafting new elements and transforming itself. But certainly, the concept itself is undergoing change. Governance can be distinguished from government in that the former is an umbrella concept while the latter constitutes the institutions and agents charged with governing. Government refers to “formal institutions that are part of hierarchical norm- and rule-making, monitoring of compliance rules, and rule enforcement” (Bruhl and Rittberger 2001, p. 5). It is basically what governments do. Governments have the power to make binding decision and to enforce those decisions, and they have the authority to allocate values (Stoker 1998, pp. 17–28). Indeed, at least over the past two decades, the term ‘governance’ has enjoyed a revival of sorts, linked to attempts by scholars to distinguish between ‘governance’ and ‘government’ (Rosenau and Czempiel 1992). And, since 1995, in particular, the term ‘global governance’ has become an integral part of the lexicon of scholars and practitioners globally, in large part because of the emergence of the academic journal, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations and the widely distributed report of the Commission on Global Governance titled Our Global Neighbourhood (1995). Why has there been a revival of the concept of governance of late? The answer seems to lie in the paradigmatic crises that occurred in the social sciences in the late 1970s and early 1980s in response to the systemic challenges referred to above. Bob Jessop once put it that the paradigmatic crises were “the possibility of culturally diverse alternatives to global homogenization and the capacity of paradigm in use to describe and explain the ‘real world’” (Jessop 1998, pp. 31–41). Finkelstein has written

68

W. A. KNIGHT

that political scientists have been “uncomfortable with traditional frameworks and terminologies associated with the idea of international relations in an interstate system” ever since the emergence of ‘complex interdependence’ and what James Rosenau aptly called “the crazy-quilt nature of modern interdependence” (Finkelstein 1995, p. 367). It should not come as a surprise to learn that the use of the term ‘global governance’ has paralleled the advent of the intensification of globalization. We are well aware of the fact that there is no world government at this juncture in our history. The reality is that no overarching government exists that can handle all facets of the globalization phenomenon. World Federalists are generally impatient with institutions like the UN system because it has not gone far enough in terms of its ability to control, steer, and address all levels of human activity that have transnational repercussions. But there is no denying the fact that while world government is not likely to emerge anytime soon, there are elements of global governance already in place and the activities of such governance can be found at many levels—global, trans-regional, regional, sub-regional, state, and local. The purpose of global governance is to steer and modify the behaviour of actors who operate on the global stage in such a manner that they will avoid deadly conflicts and reduce the level of intense socioeconomic and political competition. In that sense, global governance implies a purposive activity, in the absence of world government that involves a range of actors besides states. Marie-Claude Smouts describes this governance as “order plus intentionality” (Smouts 1998, p. 82). Global governance also refers to more than formal institutional processes. Informal networks and regimes can be involved in global governance. Indeed, the bulk of cross-border transactions these days are managed to a large extent by informal regimes (principles, norms, rules, practices, and decision-making procedures). While national governments and the UN system are very much central to the activities of global governance, they only form part of the overall picture. The Commission on Global Governance (1995, p. 2) defined this form of governance as “the sum of the many ways in which individuals and institutions, both public and private, manage their common affairs.” This definition is broad enough to allow for the participation of state and non-state actors in the schemes of global governance. At the present time, neither the UN system nor any regional or transnational body can hope to perform all the tasks of global governance on their own. Thus, the work of global governance requires the

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

69

actions of a plurality of actors, and not just the actions of a collection of nation-states. This can include civil society movements, NGOs, MNCs, and even wealthy individuals. Some of these non-state actors are playing a pivotal role in governance at every level and “changing perceptions and behaviour in fields as diverse as international health, environmental management, peace and security, human rights, and trade” (Foreman and Segaar 2004, p. 1). The concept of global governance, with the expanded contributing players, now has several layers of meaning and insinuated sub-texts. It implies that there is a measure of control, order, orderliness and manageability at its core. This is coupled with the implicit notion of functional administration. But added to that is another layer of intersubjective norms, principles and rules at play. There is also the implication that a global governance regime ought to be accountable and responsive to those it serves (i.e. not just state actors, but also non-state actors and populations at large). Connected to this notion is the expectation of transparency. In reconceptualising global governance for the twenty-first century, one can adopt at least three separate meanings of the term: (1) the centralization of authority at the global level; (2) authority that is limited to specific situations, levels and issues; (3) the sum of all diverse efforts of communities at every level to achieve specific goals while preserving coherence from one moment in time to the next. It is the last of these three definitions that seems most applicable to the needs of this historical moment. This is global governance as a summative phenomenon (Knight 2009a). To quote Rosenau, global governance “is the summarizing phrase for all sites in the world where efforts to exercise authority is undertaken” (Rosenau 2003b, p. 224). In this light, global governance has not replaced international governance; instead, both forms of governance operate alongside each other, sometimes complementing each other, sometimes clashing with each other.

Conclusion Oran Young once remarked at the end of the last century that “The demands for governance in world affairs has never been greater” (Young 1999, pp. 1–23). This explains the continued appeal of, growth in, and dependence on international organizations today. But as we entered into

70

W. A. KNIGHT

the new millennium, it was evident that the intergovernmental organization created at the end of WWII are no longer able to address successfully the myriad problems facing the globe. The massive ideological, sociopolitical, and economic changes that have occurred particularly since the end of the Cold War have put pressure on state-centric organizations to adjust to the post-modern era (Knight 2001). State-centric and sovereignty-bound intergovernmental organizations like the UN system have tried to institute reforms and adjustments to their structures, processes, and operations. But their efforts have been like changing the damaged wing of an airplane while it is still in flight. Major transformative changes that are required to those organizations are being put off because these organizations are saddled with trying to deal with so many complex problems that need to be addressed. Even though these organizations have expanded the range of their governance, proliferated in number, and increased the level of their influence, major questions remain about their efficiency, effectiveness, and relevance. These questions have intensified as the seeming ‘new world disorder’ unfolded. We have now come to the realization that there is a need for a new conceptualization of global governance to match what is occurring on the ground. Even states have begun to realize that governing the globe requires the cooperation not only of fellow-state actors but also of non-state actors. In the past, state-centric IGOs have tended to “act as a conservative force against radical change by conforming to the status-quo and by further institutionalizing the present international framework” (Bennett and Oliver 2002, p. 449). But those days have passed. For humankind to survive on this planet, in this global neighbourhood, we need a network of governance institutions that includes multipurpose and limited purpose international governmental organizations but also embraces international non-governmental organizations, transnational corporate bodies, civil society organizations, and influential individuals. This summative global governance architecture is needed now because of the character and nature of the new multilateralism and the realities of operating in an intermestic world. Anarchic governance is not possible in a world that is as interdependent as ours. Hierarchical (top down) governance served its purpose during the interwar and post-World War II period. However, both of these forms of governance have been challenged by new developing states as they shook off the chains of colonialism, by civil society groups demanding a place and a voice on the stage of

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

71

global politics, and by hybrid public/private consortia which operate in a modified capitalist space. As the theory catches up with the praxis on the ground, the best description of the emerging and new form of global governance might be “heterarchic governance”—a type of governance that involves “self-organized steering of multiple agencies, institutions, and systems which are operationally autonomous from one another yet structurally coupled due to their mutual interdependence” (Jessop 1998, p. 29). As we search for a new paradigm for global governance it would be useful to embrace the critical school position on multilateralism and global governance. It is an approach that allows one to stand back from the tedious details of current events and offer a more holistic and panoramic view of the landscape of global changes to existing ideas, material capabilities, and institutions. This reflectivist turn in the multilateral scholarship has pointed out at least five challenges to the Westphalian state system in which the traditional international organizations have operated in the past: 1. Emergence of bifurcated structures operating at the global level; 2. Increased complex interdependence assisted by the advent of dynamic communication and transportation technologies; 3. rapid globalization of economies which has taken economic and political decision-making power away from some states and thrust them in the hands of private actors like stock markets, banks, and bond-rating agencies; 4. Emergence and increased importance of transnational and intermestic issues with which individual states and IGOs cannot deal acting on their own; and, 5. Gendering of governance institutions and processes that operate on the global level. In effect, each of these challenges indicates a focus on dis-junctures and discontinuities. Understanding the impact of such changes on existing structures and processes of multilateralism is important for the reconceptualization of global governance. The structural changes that we are now witnessing in the early part of the twenty-first century are producing a complex, multi-level pattern of forces that challenge us to discard the oversimplified state-centric vision of world order and to replace it with

72

W. A. KNIGHT

a modified multiplex vision of reality. At this juncture of transformation, this interregnum, the governance system for the globe is clearly a bifurcated one. The interstate system of governance is still with us. But we are observing the emergence of a multi-centric system of diverse types of collectivities. Combined, we can label this as summative global governance. This emerging system of global governance resembles a network that has links to multiple centres of authority at multiple levels (universal, continental, transregional, regional, sub-regional, national, sub-national/local.) Some authors have referred to this as multi-level governance. It is the kind of governance that requires a subsidiarity principle to guide its operations (Knight and Persaud 2001, 29–56). It is a kind of governance that is more sophisticated and flexible than previous forms and it may be able to provide the space and time for traditional intergovernmental institutions to make the needed transformation in order to become not only more efficient and effective, but also more relevant in the twenty-first century.

Bibliography Acharya, Amitav (2017) “After Liberal Hegemony: The Advent of a Multiplex World,” Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 31, Issue 3 (Fall). Bello, Walden (2001) “2000: The Year of Global Protest against Globalization,” Canadian Dimension, Vol. 35, Issue 2. Bennett, A. Leroy and James K. Oliver (2002) International Organizations: Principles and Issues 7th edition (New Jersey: Prentice Hall). Boutros-Ghali, Boutros (1994) “A Grotian Moment,” Fordham International Law Journal, Vol. 18, Issue 5. Bruhl, Tanja and Volker Rittberger (2001) “From International to Global Governance: Actors, Collective Decision-making, and the United Nations in the World of the Twenty-first Century,” in Volker Rittberger (ed.), Global Governance and the United Nations System (New York: UN University Press). Brunelle, Dorval (2007) From World Order to Global Disorder: States, Markets, and Dissent (Vancouver: UBC Press). Burton, John W (1972) World Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Camilleri Joseph A. and Jim Falk (1992) The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Aldershot: Edward Elgar). Claude, jr., Inis (1971) Swords into Plowshares, 4th edition (New York: Random House).

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

73

Cox, Robert W. (2001) “The Way Ahead: Towards a New Ontology of World Order,” in Richard Wyn Jones (ed.), Critical Theory and World Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner). Cox, Robert W. ed. (1997) The New Realism: Perspectives on Multilateralism and World Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press/UNU Press). Cox, Robert W. (1996) Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Doyle, Michael W. (1986) Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Etzioni, Amitai (2001) “Beyond Transnational Governance,” International Journal (Autumn), pp. 595–610. Falk, Richard (1994) “From Geopolitics to Geogovernance: WOMP and Contemporary Political Discourse,” Alternatives, Vol. 19, Issue 2 (Spring). Ferguson, Niall (2002) Empire (London: Basic Books). Finkelstein, Lawrence S. (1995) “What is Global Governance?” Global Governance, Vol. 1, Issue 3. Florini, Ann M. ed. (2000) The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). Foreman, Shepard and Derek Segaar (2004) “New Coalitions for Global Governance: The Changing Dynamics of Multilateralism,” Centre on International Cooperation (New York). Gordenker, Leon (2018) “The UN system”, in Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson (eds.), International Organization and Global Governance, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge). HistoryNet, “World War II: Facts, Information and Articles about World War II, 1939–1945,” found at https://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii, accessed on 1 January 2021. HistoryNet, “Failed Peace: The Treaty of Versailles, 1919,” found at https:// www.historynet.com/failed-peace-treaty-versailles-1919.htm, accessed on 1 February 2021. Jessop, Bob (1998) “The Rise of Governance and the Risks of Failure: The case of Economic Development,” International Social Science Journal, Issue 155 (1998). Kaldor, Mary (2003) Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Cambridge: Polity Press). Keating, Thomas and W. Andy Knight, eds. (2004) Building Sustainable Peace (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press and Tokyo: United Nations University Press). Keohane, Robert and Joseph Nye (2012) Power and Interdependence, 4th edition (New York: Pearson). Knight, W. Andy (1996), “Towards a Subsidiarity Model for Peacemaking and Preventive Diplomacy: Making Chapter VIII of the UN Charter Operational, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 17, Issue 1 (March), pp. 31–52.

74

W. A. KNIGHT

Knight, W. Andy (1999), “Engineering Space in Global Governance: the Emergence of Civil Society in Evolving ‘New’ Multilateralism,” in Michael G. Schechter (ed.), Future Multilateralism: The Political and Social Framework (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan) Knight, W. Andy (2000) A Changing United Nations: Multilateral Evolution and the Quest for Global Governance (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Knight, W. Andy ed. (2001) Adapting the United Nations to a Post-Modern era: Lessons Learned (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Knight, W. Andy (2005a) “Global Governance and World (Dis)orders,” in Janine Brodie & Sandra Rein (eds.), Critical Concepts: An Introduction to Politics, 3rd edition (Toronto: Pearson Education Canada). Knight, W. Andy (2005b) “Plurilateral Multilateralism: Canada’s Emerging International Policy?” in Andrew F. Cooper and Dane Rowlands (eds.), Canada among Nations, 2005: Split Images (Ottawa: McGill/Queen’s University Press, 2005). Knight, W. Andy (2009a) “Global Governance as a Summative Phenomenon,” in Jim Whitman (ed.), Palgrave Advances in Global Governance (London: Macmillan Publishers). Knight, W. Andy (2009b) “Democracy and Good Governance,” in Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws (eds.), The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Knight, W. Andy and Randolph B. Persaud (2001) “Subsidiarity, Regional Governance, and Caribbean Security,” Latin American Politics and Society, Vol. 43, Issue 1 (Spring). Krause, Keith and W. Andy Knight eds. (1995) State, Society, and the UN System: Changing Perspectives on Multilateralism (Tokyo: UNU Press). Luckhurst, Jonathan (2019) “Governance Networks Shaping the G20 Through Inclusivity Practices,” South African Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 26, found at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10220461. 2019.1699159, accessed on 8 February 2021. Mittelman, James (1997) “Rethinking Innovation in International Studies: Global Transformation at the turn of the Millennium,” in Stephen Gill and J. H. Mittelman (eds.), Innovation and Transformation in International Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 248–263. Murphy, Craig (1994) International Organization and Industrial Change (Cambridge: Polity Press). Pagden, Anthony (1998) “The Genesis of Governance and Enlightenment Conceptions of the Cosmopolitan World Order,” International Social Science Journal, Vol. 50, Issue 1, pp. 7-15. Rosenau, James (2003a) Distant Proximities: Dynamics beyond Globalization (NJ: Princeton University Press).

4

NEW THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL GOVERNANCE …

75

Rosenau, James (2003b) “Governance in a new Global Order,” in David Held and Anthony McGrew (eds.), Governing Globalization, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Polity Press). Rosenau, James (1988) “Patterned Chaos in Global Life: Structure and Process in the Two Worlds of World Politics,” International Political Science Review, Vol. 9, Issue 4 (October 1988). Rosenau, James and Mary Durfee (1999) Thinking Theory Thoroughly: Coherent Approaches to an Incoherent World (Boulder: Westview Press). Rosenau, James N and Ernst-Otto Czempiel eds. (1992) Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Sheoin, Tomás Mac (2010) “Policing and Repression of Anti-Globalization Protests and Movements: A Bibliography of English-Language Material,” Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements, Vol. 2, Issue 2 (November). Smouts, Marie-Claude (1999) “Multilateralism from Below: A Prerequisite for Global Governance,” in Michael G. Schechter ed. (1999), Future Multilateralism: The Political and Social Framework (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan). Smouts, Marie-Claude (1998) “The Proper Use of Governance in International Relations,” International Social Science Journal, 155 (March). Stoker, Gerry (1998) “Governance as Theory: Five Propositions,” International Social Science Journal, Vol. 50, Issue 55. Strange, Susan (1997) Casino Capitalism (New York: St. Martin’s Press). The Commission on Global Governance (1995) Our Global Neighbourhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Walker, James W. St. G. and Andrew S. Thompson, eds. (2008) Critical Mass: The Emergence of Global Civil Society (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press). Weiss, Thomas G. and Rorden Wilkinson eds. (2018) International Organization and Global Governance, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge). Weiss, Thomas G. and Leon Gordenker eds. (1996) NGOs, the UN, and Global Governance (Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers). Young, Oran (1999) Governance in World Affairs (Cornell University Press).

CHAPTER 5

Fragmented Responsibility in a Global World Charlotte Ku

State Responsibility in a Global Environment At the beginning of the new millennium in 2000, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan observed that: …while the post-war multilateral system made it possible for the new globalization to emerge and flourish, globalization, in turn, has progressively rendered its designs antiquated. Simply put, our postwar institutions were built for an inter-national world, but we now live in a global world. Responding effectively to this shift is the core institutional challenge for world leaders today. (Annan 2000, p. 11)

The same challenge exists for states and the legal underpinnings of the international order. The nature of the issues and the variety of people and institutions that are now affected by and crucial to a state’s effective

C. Ku (B) Texas A&M University School of Law, Fort Worth, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_5

77

78

C. KU

functioning are profoundly changing our understanding of responsibility in international law. Governance in the twenty-first century is a dense, thick, and multilayered phenomenon involving numerous individual units acting with different levels of authority, legitimacy, accountability, and responsibility. Yet the structure of world governance has not changed in a century since the first efforts were made to coordinate and to direct a state’s responsibility through institutions at the international level in 1919 after World War I. This has resulted in a piecemeal system of responsibility where multiple capacities exist, but are fragmented and limited in practice. A state’s power and authority are now diffused and shared, but the state remains significant as the single most organized and recognized global unit and actor. In international law and politics, the state maintains its position as the principal source of authority although that authority is subject to increased and frequent internal and external reviews to affirm its legitimacy. Even before the 2019–2020 COVID-19 pandemic exposed the weaknesses in worldwide governance by failing to respond to and to control the virus effectively, the post-World War I and II set up of institutions and assumptions about state responsibility and accountability were under stress. Yet, efforts to strengthen and to change them have lacked a shared vision and leadership. Globalization has fostered greater connectivity, but has made harder the alignment of diverse outlooks, attitudinal adjustments, structural improvements, and political forces needed for change. Globalization’s relentless pace and intensity of activity complicates any effort to assess governance and responsibility holistically. Failures of individual actors, behaviors, issues, systems, and institutions are called out and held to account, but less so in relationship to each other as part of an overall system of governance. Unless the system-wide impact of individual actions is understood, it will be difficult to sustain effective governance. In law and social behavior generally, the concept of responsibility is part of defining relationships. It not only specifies behavior, but also importantly creates expectations as to the consequences of that behavior. Responsibility tests the assumptions on which relationships are built and generates the responses and actions to manage old and new problems and phenomena. Responsibility defines the relationship of one unit in the system to another and determines how effective these elements work together. Understanding the responsibility of one unit to another provides the structure for action and change. Today’s systems of responsibility and

5

FRAGMENTED RESPONSIBILITY IN A GLOBAL WORLD

79

accountability were created and developed over time, but struggle to be effective in an environment of multiple actors, varied sources of authority, and weak political will. Annan focused above on the inadequacy of international institutions in a global world above. It appears evident that unless the responsibilities of states are understood in their global application, there will be little improvement in governance.

Sovereignty and the Expanding Responsibility of States In December 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) introduced the world to the “responsibility to protect”—“the idea that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe – from mass murder and rape, from starvation—but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states” ICISS 2001, p. viii). In doing so, the ICISS highlighted the responsibility that came with the latitude allowed to sovereign states in the international system. The traditional understanding of state responsibility was the responsibility of one state to another. The responsibility to protect expanded state responsibility to the broader community in the treatment of a state’s own people. Individuals accept a sovereign’s power and authority over them in the expectation of security; the exercise of that power and authority is now subject to outside scrutiny and action if inappropriately carried out. The accretion of responsibility not only to other states individually, but also to the international community of states developed over centuries. As UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said, “[t]he time of absolute sovereignty…has passed, its theory was never matched by reality” (ICISS Supplementary Volume 2001, p. 5). In his study, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, Hendrik Spruyt identified a “distinct central locus of authority,” as one of the key assets provided by the sovereign state over other models of political organization such as city states, feudal lordships, or multinational empires bound together by allegiance to a sovereign (Spruyt 1994, p. 6). The looser forms of authority made sense when physical control of vast territories was difficult. However, once economic, social, and political needs required more regularized and frequent cooperation and coordination, the looser forms became less effective. For example, sovereign states were better at war once warfare required larger amounts of revenue and numbers of

80

C. KU

soldiers (Spruyt 1994, p. 178). The state became the dominant political unit in the seventeenth-century international system because it most ably met the governance needs of its time. The operating principles for the state system reflected those needs: “coexistence of a multiplicity of states, each sovereign within its own territory, equal to one another, and free from any external earthly authority” (Gross 1948, pp. 28–29). Sovereign states acquired the privilege of control and power over territory and population to the exclusion of any competing authority within their borders. The exercise of that power and authority, however, came with the responsibility to ensure the coexistence of other states and to do no harm to them, absent a declaration of such intent in advance. The responsibility of one sovereign state to another is a core concept of international law and relations. Responsibility is tied to the concept of sovereignty in both legal and political terms, since it recognizes the authority of a state to govern a defined population and territory and to incur obligations, and thereby to be held accountable for its actions. Sovereignty means that although states are free to pursue their interests and policies with little limit beyond their ability to do so, they cannot use that freedom to trample the freedom and interests of other states. Over the centuries, a state’s responsibility increased as internal demands multiplied to assure the well-being of populations, economic security, and stewardship of a state’s physical space. These needs created more complex state-to-state relationships by increasing the responsibilities states had to each other and increasing pressure to define common interests. If responsibility in the early days of the state system was horizontal and thin, it has now become a thicker set of relationships with more layers and vertical dimensions. The state system was self-perpetuating through a process of “mutual empowerment,” whereby “[s]overeign states only recognized particular types of legitimate players in the international system”—other states (Spruyt 1994, pp. 178–179). In the twentieth century, admission to the United Nations (and before it to the League of Nations) became the principal sign of this recognition, since member states decide if an aspiring member is eligible for membership after scrutiny by the Security Council and General Assembly (UN Charter Article 4). The rules governing this system reflect its operating principles and values, including state responsibility for breaches of international obligations or duties owed to another state. The need for general rules on the responsibilities of states to each other to bolster the specific obligations they incurred became more

5

FRAGMENTED RESPONSIBILITY IN A GLOBAL WORLD

81

pressing as states took on more and more multilateral obligations. (Of the more than 5,800 multilateral treaties now in existence, fewer than 8% were concluded prior to 1900) (Gamble, no date, Comprehensive Statistical Database of Multilateral Treaties). Changing state expectations of each other are reflected in the drafting history of the Draft Articles of the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, the codified expression of international law on this subject (Draft Articles 2001). Roberto Ago described these rules as the way “to determine whether [an] obligation has been violated and what should be the consequences of the violation” (Crawford 2002, p. 5). The law of state responsibility was the subject of a failed codification conference called by the League of Nations in the 1930s. The United Nations’ International Law Commission began its work on the subject in 1956 focusing on a state’s right to exercise diplomatic protection in cases of “injuries to aliens and their property” (Crawford 2002, p. 1). United Nations Charter Article 13 provided for the progressive development and codification of international law. Established in 1947 to fulfill a portion of that task, the International Law Commission (ILC) is made up of thirty-four individuals “with recognized competence in international law.” Members serve in their individual capacities, but are nominated by UN member states and elected by the General Assembly for terms of five years (Statute of the International Law Commission). In the matter of state responsibility, a significant number of ILC members found the focus on diplomatic protection too narrow, and by 1961, the Commission agreed that states were also responsible to each other in the areas of human rights, disarmament, environmental protection, and the law of the sea (Crawford 2002, p. 5). This reflected the erosion of sovereignty, de facto by forces of nature and technology as well as de jure by international agreements and practices. There was pressure within the ILC to expand the concept beyond the responsibility of one state to another to include the responsibility of a state to the international community as a whole. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) took a step in this direction in the 1962 Barcelona Traction case when it distinguished …between the obligations of a State towards the international community as a whole, and those arising vis-à-vis another State in the field of diplomatic protection. By their very nature the former are the concern of all States. In view of the importance of the rights involved, all States can be

82

C. KU

held to have a legal interest in their protection; they are obligations erga omnes. (International Court of Justice 1970, p. 33)

In 1963, the ILC’s Draft Articles introduced the concept of international crime to cover these erga omnes obligations, but states were not yet prepared to accept the notion of crime as part of state responsibility and the concept did not survive into the final 2001 draft. The final draft adopted the broader concept of “Serious Breaches of Obligations under Peremptory Norms of General International Law” (Crawford 2006, p. 518). This imposed an obligation on all states to cooperate to end the breach, not to recognize any situation created by the serious breach, and not to provide assistance to maintain the situation (Crawford 2002, p. 69). Article 15 of the 2001 Draft Articles dealt with the concept of systemic conduct or composite acts that might result in a breach that is of particular relevance to violations of human rights obligations (Crawford 2006, p. 521). Article 15 described these breaches as “a series of actions or omissions defined in aggregate as wrongful, occurs when the action or omission occurs which, taken with the other actions or omissions, is sufficient to constitute the wrongful act” (Draft Articles 2001, p. 62). The ILC also struggled with the notion of interest, i.e., whose interests needed to be harmed or injured for state responsibility to be applicable. This issue came up before the ICJ in the 1960 South West Africa cases in which Ethiopia and Liberia asserted a public interest in their effort to invalidate South Africa’s League of Nations mandate because of the imposition of apartheid in those territories. The ICJ’s 1966 judgment found that Ethiopia and Liberia did not have “any legal right or interest” to assert the claims because they were not directly harmed by South Africa’s actions (International Court of Justice, South West Africa Cases, 1966). Article 48 of the 2001 Draft Articles attempted to remedy this by providing that “[a]ny State other than an injured State is entitled to invoke responsibility of another State…if the obligation breached is to a group of States…or the obligation is owed to the international community as a whole” (Crawford 2002, p. 71). As Crawford noted, “the new formulation permits States to act in the collective public interest, a welcome development for the implementation of international responsibility of States in areas concerning collective good or the common welfare” (Crawford 2006, p. 527).

5

FRAGMENTED RESPONSIBILITY IN A GLOBAL WORLD

83

Institutionalizing State Responsibility to the International Community By the early twentieth century, states began to respond to complex issues that involved a range of emerging authorities and governing capacities. These issues and pressures came from both outside and inside the state. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan described this as a move from a sovereign’s sovereignty to peoples’ sovereignty (ICISS 2001, p. 11). International human rights obligations freely accepted by states in treaties elaborated the rights of individuals and made a state’s sovereignty contingent on maintaining particular standards and behavior, including toward its own people. A failure to do so can invite an international response as a breach of a state’s international responsibility. Effective governance more broadly required flexibility and agility to tackle new issues. States became managers of sovereign rights and responsibilities rather than enforcers; multiple authorities even within one state had to be coordinated to pursue a policy (Chayes and Chayes 1995, pp. 109–111). As Chayes and Chayes observed: …sovereignty no longer consists in the freedom of states to act independently, in their perceived self-interest, but in membership in reasonably good standing in the regimes that make up the substance of international life. (Chayes and Chayes 1995, p. 27)

This changed the responsibility relationships of states to each other. On the international level, this change was institutionalized following World War I in the establishment of the League of Nations in 1919. League members undertook to resolve conflicts through fact-finding, conciliation, mediation, and other forms of peaceful settlement prior to resorting to the use of force. Explicit in the idea of the League was that its states members as a group would act collectively to resolve a conflict. The range of tools provided to them in the League’s Covenant was vast, including the breaking of diplomatic relations, sanctions, and the use of force itself. The tools themselves were not new, but the locus of decisionmaking authority was. Members of the League Council had to agree unanimously before any action—collective or individual—could be taken. Structurally, the world was not ready for this shift in authority, and states were not prepared to accept the obligation to restrain their individual freedom to act. Indeed, the United States never joined the League of

84

C. KU

Nations because it did not wish to be bound to such a collective obligation even though it would have had a privileged position as a permanent member of the Council.1 An important legacy from the League experience was the supervisory and reporting requirements imposed on states who accepted responsibility for a particular kind of dependent territory or former colony called a mandate. Mandatory powers, i.e., those responsible for the territory, had to report to a Permanent Mandates Commission created by Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Eleven individuals “appointed by the Council and selected for personal merit and competence” from both mandatory and non-mandatory powers, supervised the administration of the fifteen mandate territories (Wright 1930, p. 622). Commission members served in their individual capacities, not as government representatives. Nine of the eleven states represented were colonial powers: Great Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan, joined by Sweden and Norway. The intensity of supervision was mixed, but the idea of supervision by non-government representatives through an international organization, thereby limiting a state’s freedom of action in its administration of these territories, was path breaking. Mandatory powers were responsible for reporting on what they were doing to develop the territories and people under their temporary care. The mandate agreements made clear “(1) that the mandated territories are not under the sovereignty of the mandatories, and (2) that the inhabitants of these territories are not nationals of the mandatories” (Wright 1924, p. 30). This introduced the concept that, even in matters of internal jurisdiction concerning the governing of those for whom a state is responsible, a state’s actions were subject to oversight by the collective of states represented by a League of Nations commission. State responsibility thus extended beyond that of mutually reinforcing responsibility state to state, and now included responsibility to each other as a group institutionalized in the League. This institutionalization of collective responsibility

1 The League Council initially, under the Covenant, had 9 members—5 permanent

ones: the British Empire, France, Japan, Italy, the United States and 4 rotating ones. After they joined the League, the U.S.S.R. and Germany became permanent members of the Council. The United States never joined. Germany became a permanent member in 1926 but withdrew in 1933. The U.S.S.R. became a permanent member in 1934 and was expelled in 1939.

5

FRAGMENTED RESPONSIBILITY IN A GLOBAL WORLD

85

continued with establishment of the United Nations in 1945. The UN succeeded to the functions of the League, including oversight of old and new mandates, renamed trust territories (UN Charter Article 77). In its Charter and 75-year history, the UN has focused on the relationship between a state and its people—at home, in dependent territories, and generally, including the advancement of human rights law and institutions, starting with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. Mindful of the institutional weaknesses that appeared to bar the League from preventing the outbreak of war, the UN’s founding states attempted to provide the UN with more robust organs, including a General Assembly of all members (now 192) and a 15 member Security Council that includes 5 permanent members—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (UN Charter Article 23). The Security Council’s authority to decide when an act is a threat to international peace and security gives it a central role in determining a breach of state responsibility (UN Charter, Chapter VII). With the “responsibility to protect,” the UNSC’s role now extends beyond determining that a state’s actions injure another state to encompass protection of the people under its own jurisdiction. The standard for this protection is that of international human rights initially codified in the 1948 Universal Declaration.

The Emerging Responsibility of International Organizations An important step in establishing the UN’s authority to review states’ treatment of their own populations was the sanctioning of South Africa for its practice of apartheid, condemned as a violation of one of the purposes of the Charter to reaffirm fundamental human rights (UN Charter Article 1). At the first session of the General Assembly in 1946, India raised the issue of South Africa’s treatment of its Indian population, and apartheid came under further scrutiny in the UN’s oversight of South Africa’s actions as the mandatory power in Namibia (formerly the German colony of South West Africa) after 1919. The League and the UN initially provided a structure and venue for states members to assess their mutual responsibilities. However, the UN itself is now subject to meeting standards of responsibility as it carries out a range of operations around the world. Although never provided the military infrastructure, including

86

C. KU

troops, foreseen in the Charter, the UNSC has been active in developing peacekeeping operations (PKO) to address numerous and varied threats to international peace and security (UN Charter Articles 44–47). These operations have created additional forms of responsibility—that of international organizations (IO) to states and to the people who come into contact with PKO and other IO missions (Draft Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations 2011). In the earliest days of the UN, the 1948 assassination of Swedish diplomat, Folke Bernadotte, in Jerusalem while serving as UN mediator in the Arab–Israeli conflict, raised the question of what measures the UN could take on an individual’s behalf. The General Assembly asked the ICJ to clarify the following: In the event of an agent of the United Nations in the performance of his duties suffering injury in circumstances involving the responsibility of a State, has the United Nations, as an Organization, the capacity to bring an international claim against the responsible de jure or de facto government with a view to obtaining the reparation due in response caused (a) to the United Nations, (b) to the victim or to persons entitled through him? (International Court of Justice 1948, p. 8)

Historically, the capacity to lodge a claim against a state belonged only to other states, based on the concept of sovereign equality. Since an international organization did not have all of the attributes of a state, it followed that it could not make such a claim. Yet in its 1949 Advisory Opinion, the ICJ concluded that: the Organization was intended to exercise and enjoy, and is in fact exercising and enjoying, functions and rights which can only be explained on the basis of the possession of a large measure of legal personality and the capacity to operate upon an international plane. It must be acknowledged that its Members, by entrusting certain functions to it, with the attendant duties and responsibilities, have clothed it with the competence required to enable those functions to be effectively discharged. (International Court of Justice 1949, p. 9). [emphasis added]

The ICJ found that the UN possessed legal personality on the basis of its functions—not equal to that of a state, but sufficient to make a claim on behalf of a UN agent who had suffered harm from a state in the discharge of his duties. The Court reasoned that to decide otherwise would have made it impossible for those working on behalf of the UN, and therefore

5

FRAGMENTED RESPONSIBILITY IN A GLOBAL WORLD

87

the UN, to carry out the duties specified in the Charter. The ICJ opinion was a major step in bolstering the independence of the UN as an institution that could function not only on behalf of, but also independently, of its members. This legal status became more relevant after 1990 when the UN undertook complicated peace-building missions involving large numbers of personnel in tasks that bring them into close and even hostile contact with local populations. As a result, when UN operations have brought harm to the populations under their protection, the organization finds itself facing issues of responsibility and liability (“UN Sued over Haiti Cholera Epidemic” 2013). An example of this was the effort to claim damages from the UN on behalf of the nearly one million Haitians who suffered, and the 10,000 who died, from cholera, brought to Haiti in 2010 by UN peacekeeping troops from Nepal. The class action lawsuits filed in the United States in 2013 were dismissed in 2017 because of the immunity under the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations that the UN enjoys in the United States (“Court Dismisses Remaining Lawsuit Against UN” 2017). In an effort to provide some compensation to the victims, the UN started a voluntary trust fund with contributions from states and private entities, but the fund remains small (UN Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office). Complicated issues of responsibility and accountability arise when international organizations mandate operations conducted by troops contributed by member states. Although the political direction of the operation may belong to an international body like the UN Security Council or the African Union, contributing states maintain responsibility for the performance and conduct of their troops. This responsibility can be difficult to carry out when national forces are sent into tactical and operational situations that change rapidly, for which they are not prepared, and over which they have little strategic control as to objectives and capabilities. The experience of a Dutch battalion serving as part of the UN mission (UNPROFOR) to protect the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995 shows how responsibility can be discharged by using the national legal system of a troop-contributing state. In 2019, the Supreme Court of The Netherlands handed down its decision in The Netherlands v. Respondents & Stichting Mothers of Srebrenica that ended a long legal battle (Boon 2020, pp. 479–486). As Kristen Boon wrote:

88

C. KU

The central legal issue in the case was whether the Dutch state, via the acts of Dutchbat, was responsible in whole or in part for the deaths of the Bosnian victims. The plaintiffs were the Stichting Mothers of Srebrenica (Stichting Mothers) who represented the relatives of 6,000 victims. They initiated suit against the Netherlands and the United Nations in 2007. The plaintiffs argued that the defendants should be held responsible for the deaths because they did too little to protect the population of the [UN designated] safe area around Srebrenica and during the evacuation of the refugees, and cooperated in the separation of males from other refugees. The Dutch state argued that the deaths were caused by the acts of the VRS. [Army of Republika Srpska] (Boon 2020, p. 480)

The Court’s finding was a narrow one that focused on the “probabilities of survival of the victims,” rather than attributing responsibility (Boon 2020, p. 485). Despite this failure to attribute wrongdoing, the case remains significant as an effort to seek damages for victims from national authorities for actions taken as part of a multinational international operation. The issue of individual responsibility has now emerged from incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse by personnel on UN missions, including peacekeeping forces. The 2003 UN Bulletin on Special Measures for Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse stipulates that any acts of sexual exploitation or sexual abuse committed by UN staff members or persons under contract to the UN “constitute acts of serious misconduct and are therefore grounds for disciplinary measures, including summary dismissal” (UN S-G Bulletin on Special Measures). Responding to this growing problem, the UN Secretary-General commissioned in 2004 a study to develop a Comprehensive Strategy to Eliminate Future Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (Zeid Report 2004). Since 2005, the UN Secretariat has worked with non-governmental organizations to create complaint and response systems for investigating and prosecuting complaints of sexual exploitation and abuse. It has taken concerted steps to train its personnel on standards of personal conduct, including respect for the population of a host country and its culture, traditions, customs, and practices (United Nations, no date, Conduct in Field Missions). The UN has also created a small trust fund with voluntary contributions from member states and private organizations to:

5

FRAGMENTED RESPONSIBILITY IN A GLOBAL WORLD

89

a. support specialized services, which provide assistance and support required by complainants, victims and children born as a result of sexual exploitation and abuse, including medical care, legal services, and psycho-social support; b. address service gaps in the provision of assistance and support; c. undertake community outreach; and d. identify additional support and communications for complainants, victims and children born as a result of sexual exploitation and abuse (UN Trust Fund in Support of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse). Measures to enforce codes of conduct, prevent acts of sexual exploitation and abuse, and provide remedy when they occur have reduced the number of these incidents despite the increased number of UN-affiliated personnel deployed around the world (Stern 2015). (More than 100,000 personnel from 123 countries make up UN peacekeeping operations in 2020) (UN Peacekeeping). Attributing responsibility and seeking remedy for such misconduct, however, remains difficult. As Jenna Stern noted: Peacekeeping missions operate in a complex working environment; peacekeepers are dispersed across the globe, speak different languages, and have different relationships with the U.N. depending on their classification. Further, victims may be reluctant to report sexual exploitation and abuse, as many face stigmatization and ostracism from their families and communities. (Stern 2015)

The conduct of IO personnel in relief efforts and operations following natural disasters also can raise issues of responsibility. David Fidler framed the issue: Linking international human rights law and natural disasters also extends scrutiny of disaster policy beyond short-term responses to include longterm recovery activities as part of efforts to ensure that such activities do not discriminate on gender, racial or ethnic grounds; that the rights of children are adequately addressed, and that property rights of the poor and vulnerable are respected. Framing natural disaster policy as a matter of international human rights law differs politically from presenting the problem as one of humanitarian compassion. (Fidler 2005, p. 469)

International relief operations and national policy may clash. In 2008, Cyclone Nargis created storm surges in the Irrawaddy Delta that took

90

C. KU

the lives of an estimated 84,500 people, with another 53,800 missing, in Myanmar. The International Federation of the Red Cross estimated that 2.4 million people were affected by the cyclone (International Federation of the Red Cross 2011). But concerned about maintaining control over the country and fearing outside military interference, the ruling military junta refused international assistance by denying visas to aid workers and others prepared to deliver relief and emergency services. After weeks of international outcry and intervention by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, aid workers were allowed to enter the country, although assistance from military vessels was refused. This included the resources of the US, British, and French navies that had deployed seaborne medical facilities and other disaster assistance expertise and equipment. The people of Myanmar suffered because of their own government’s decisions. IGOs and NGOs have generally respected national sovereignty and domestic authority by requesting permission and invitation for the delivery of assistance. However, public international institutions and private aid organizations now also require that such assistance be distributed to all elements of a population, not only to certain ethnic and religious groups, but also to the most vulnerable, including women, children, the elderly, and those with infirmities. This can potentially set up a conflict between relief efforts and governments that fail to meet their own responsibility to protect their people.

Emerging Individual and Global Responsibility Increased layers of state responsibility since 1919 and still-developing responsibility emanating from the operations of international organizations are shaping a thickening system of global responsibility. States are increasingly regarded as “trustees of humanity,” having cumulative international obligations to “the efficient and sustainable management of global resources, to equality of access to global goods and protection from global harms, and to democracy (specifically in relation to the diminishing opportunities for individuals to participate in shaping the policies that affect their lives)” (Benvenisti 2013, p. 332). International organizations created to enhance the ability of states to cooperate and to handle new issues must now validate their own actions. They are accountable for them down to the level of individuals serving on international missions. Accountability and responsibility are also required of the private sector, not only domestically, but internationally, in such initiatives as the UN

5

FRAGMENTED RESPONSIBILITY IN A GLOBAL WORLD

91

Global Compact and Sustainable Development Goals, to advance human rights, labor rights, and environmental protection in businesses around the world. An increasingly sophisticated system of human rights courts, commissions, review procedures, and domestic applications holds states accountable and responsible for the treatment of their own people. If a state fails to protect its own population or if it is the perpetrator of violence against its own people, other states members of the international community—preferably through the UN—must now act to do so (ICISS 2001). But the question of authorization, as well as which external state and non-state actors may intervene, to address the breach of an international norm remains unresolved. If a veto prevents UNSC authorization, one or more other UN members might still be willing to act. Aside from a moral obligation to the peoples of the United Nations, who created the Charter, states have a self-interest in doing so because of the spillover effects of such violence in a mobile and interconnected world that includes pandemics, refugee flows, and human trafficking. The enhanced role of individuals and private enterprises in the international arena reflects a post-Westphalian environment in which individuals, IOs, NGOs, and the private sector interact without a state or public intermediary. Described as “cosmopolitan democracy” by David Held, the ability of individuals to assert rights and challenge their own government’s actions in court or through institutions like the World Bank Inspection Panels also means their acquisition of direct international responsibility (Held 1995). Individuals and other non-state actors can be held accountable for mass violations of human rights, as in the 2009 indictment of Sudan’s president Omar-al Bashir for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide in Darfur (International Criminal Court 2009). Oversight of the private sector has become a more pronounced feature of a state’s international responsibility since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. On September 28, 2001, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1373, drafted by the United States, under the mandatory provisions of the Charter in Chapter VII. It directed that all states “prevent and suppress the financing of terrorist acts; criminalize such activity; freeze such assets; and prohibit any person from making these funds available for terrorist activities” (Scott and Ku 2018, p. 7). Resolution 1373 created the UNSC Counter-Terrorism Committee comprised of fifteen UN members to monitor the implementation of the resolution. Nearly twenty years later, the CTC remains and is now aided by a Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate to assist

92

C. KU

governments around the world to comply by regulating their banks and financial institutions. The Security Council has become a venue for UN members to discharge their responsibility to each other to maintain international peace and security by sharing information about and curtailing activities that have a long-term impact on global stability. This includes denying illicit financial transactions, prosecuting sexual violence, and encouraging cooperation of national and local law enforcement agencies to prevent drug trafficking and other trans-border crimes. It further includes the mitigation and prevention of climate change, the protection of cultural heritage, food and water security, and cybersecurity in the private sectors. States have come to rely on the Security Council as a forum for information sharing that helps them define their responsibilities to those under their protection and to each other (UN Security Council, Arria Formula Meetings). COVID-19 has demonstrated that individual responsibility at the international level has shifted beyond officials who commit terrible crimes against their own people to individual citizens whose actions have global repercussions. As early as 2004, the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change noted that “[a]ny one of 700 million international airline passengers every year can be an unwitting carrier of a deadly infectious disease” (“A More Secure World” 2004, p. 1). Views of individual responsibility to mitigate the spread of COVID19 differ around the world. The Netherlands has relied on its centurieslong ethos of personal responsibility, invoked by Prime Minister Mark Rutte in March 2020: “I want to call on everyone to keep an eye on one another. Help each other where possible…. [T]he challenge we face is enormous, and all 17 million of us will have to work together to overcome it” (Tullis 2020). In contrast, France adopted a more regulated and centralized response. In the United States, mask-wearing became a matter of political partisanship, defined as a question of personal liberty, not responsibility to others. As a 29-year-old power line worker in Florida described his decision not to wear a mask: “Making individual decisions is the American way” (Taylor 2020). The pandemic has shown that without cooperative individual behavior, governments, even in countries with stringent regulation, are hard-pressed to discharge their obligations to their own people and to other states. A state will be held responsible if it fails to discharge its

5

FRAGMENTED RESPONSIBILITY IN A GLOBAL WORLD

93

obligations to the international community, but the (in)actions of individuals may prevent it from doing so. Within a state’s domestic jurisdiction, individuals can be prosecuted and fined for failing to comply with relevant ordinances and regulations, but the failure of a state to ensure compliance may result in its international legal jeopardy and liability. States today are expected to provide for their people, safeguard their environment, and generally enhance well-being through productive interactions within their own societies and transnationally across borders. Meeting these expectations and responsibilities requires them to coordinate and orchestrate levels of individual responsibility, but the international responsibility of individuals holding no official position is not yet recognized in legal terms. Their importance can certainly be seen, however, in the consequences of individual actions, for better or for worse, on such global, transnational challenges as climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and cybersecurity. These areas share examples of similar experiences of successful cooperation at the local level or within a particular network, but not on a large global scale. As governments have become involved in more aspects of life and are responsible for more tasks, the apparatus of government has grown, with an increasing number of cabinet-level ministries and offices reflecting the demands of their citizens. Governance today occurs in a much more open and participatory environment than it did only a few decades ago. This move toward greater openness and participation is occurring at all levels: within a state, as well as in international institutions and throughout the private sector in corporate and other non-state entities. Scholarship on the development of Global Administrative Law finds common governing principles around the world regarding participation, transparency, review, and accountability, designed to regulate cross-border or transnational behavior outside of formal legislative and rule-making practices and without regard to status or place in any hierarchy (Kingsbury and Donaldson 2011, paragraph 10). The sovereign state is now part of a thick system of legal interactions involving national and subnational institutions, IOs, and a host of private actors, including individuals. These interactions grew out of specific historical circumstances and evolved in response to specific needs that changed governance relationships by producing new institutions, norms, structures, partnerships, and responsibilities. These have empowered new actors and shaped new values that form the basis of an emerging concept of responsibility in which the locus of authority and responsibility

94

C. KU

varies from location to location and issue to issue. While this promises over time to increase capacity to address an issue, in the short term it has created a fragmented system of multiple parties where the de facto locus of authority does not correspond to the de jure structure of responsibility and accountability (Wenham 2016).

Fragmented Responsibility in the Global Environment The actors, institutions, and processes for generating global shared responsibility exist. However, as varying national and local responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic consequences revealed, the diffusion of responsibility across multiple levels of governance and actors results in shifting accountability and subpar action. Theories of international cooperation taught that states’ working together could foster habits of cooperation to meet new challenges and shape future behavior (Milner 1992). They further speculated that cooperation or coordination on technical matters would cultivate interpersonal relationships and habits that could mitigate national differences over time. The pandemic has shown the urgent need for both coordination and cooperation at multiple levels around the world, but the World Health Organization’s (WHO) lack of influence on national policies demonstrates the limits of relying on technical coordination to overcome political differences (Benvenisti 2020). Acknowledging the need for shared responsibility has not resulted in collective action and accountability (Wenham 2016). From 1648 to 1918, the principal focus of international activity was the development and strengthening of the nation-state. Global governance in the Westphalian order meant facilitating relations among sovereigns and sovereign states. Individuals benefited or suffered as a by-product of state interest. The privilege of religious freedom established in the 1555 Peace of Augsburg (cuius regio, eius religio) provided that freedom to the sovereign, who then dictated the religion of the realm (Gross 1948). Individuals dissenting from the established religion risked deprivation of property rights, lower status, expulsion, pogroms, and mass killings. As long as the effects of a state’s actions did not spill over into another state, its rulers generally were free to govern within their territory as they deemed appropriate.

5

FRAGMENTED RESPONSIBILITY IN A GLOBAL WORLD

95

This changed in the late nineteenth century as industrialization enhanced global mobility and trade; governments were increasingly expected to respond to the needs of their citizens and subjects abroad. In the twentieth century, as Louis Henkin observed, the international system turned its attention from state values to human values in its diplomatic activity and treaty making (Henkin 1995). IOs were at the center of this shift, starting with the work of the League of Nations to suppress the opium trade and to preserve the rights of minorities granted in the post-World War I peace settlement, followed by the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It seems commonplace today for an IO like the UN to call attention to an area of international concern, but the creation of such a voice independent of states in the early twentieth century was accepted with extreme caution and skepticism. The political environment created by the existence of an IO was something on which other actors, including non-governmental organizations and the private sector, capitalized to promote their own agendas. A century has passed since the League of Nations was founded and its members accepted the concept of collective responsibility to each other. States today operate in a more complex governing environment in which they discharge their responsibilities subject to increased external scrutiny. States and their leaders now answer to each other, to their people, and to various public and private international institutions. How to do all this effectively in the face of multi-sector and multi-level issues like pandemics, climate change, cybersecurity, food and water security is the question facing all those involved in global governance today. Leaders of nation-states profoundly affected by two world wars created a network of institutions in the twentieth century that still undergird international relations in 2020. Globalization and the COVID-19 pandemic are transforming existing governing relationships and responsibilities at the local, domestic, international, and global levels. Change in the aftermath of this crisis may be less top down than bottom up as the peoples of the United Nations demand effective action from their governments and access to the equipment and medicines needed to overcome the disease. In a complex environment of shared responsibility and accountability, governance relationships will need to more closely mirror the world that we are in, linking private individual actions and capacities to public ones at both the domestic and international levels.

96

C. KU

One hundred years after the founding of the League of Nations, a coherent and operable system of global responsibility has not emerged to match the forces of globalization propelled by these international institutions, technological changes, and local political activism. As the worldwide physical and economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate, the cost of the present system of fragmented responsibility is high. A solution, however, will require no less than the same level of commitment and determination to rebuild and to re-create a world order that motivated leaders to act after the world wars of the twentieth century. Twenty years after UN Secretary-General Annan’s call on world leaders to consider needed change, this has now become the common task of all humankind individually and through their networks and institutions.

References Annan, Kofi A. (2000) “We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century,” available at https://www.un.org/en/events/pastevents/ pdfs/We_The_Peoples.pdf. Benvenisti, Eyal. (2013) “Sovereigns as Trustees of Humanity: On the Accountability of States to Foreign Stakeholders,” American Journal of International Law, 107. Benvenisti, Eyal. (2020) “The WHO: Destined to Fail?: Political Cooperation and the Covid-19 Pandemic,” available at https://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/blog/ who-destined-fail-political-cooperation-and-covid-19-pandemic-prof-eyal-ben venisti. Boon, Kristen. (2020) Case Note in International Decisions, American Journal of International Law, 114. Chayes, Abram and Chayes, Antonia Handler. (1995) The New Sovereignty: Compliance with International Regulatory Agreements. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ‘Court Dismisses Remaining Lawsuit Against the UN’. (2017) New York Times available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/world/americas/haiticholera-lawsuit-united-nations.html. Covenant of the League of Nations available at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ 20th_century/leagcov.asp. Crawford, James. (2002) The International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility: Introduction, Text and Commentaries. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Crawford, James. (2006) “State Responsibility,” in Oxford Encyclopedia of Public International Law. Oxford University Press.

5

FRAGMENTED RESPONSIBILITY IN A GLOBAL WORLD

97

Fidler, David P. (2005) “Disaster Relief and Governance after the Indian Ocean Tsunami: What Role for International Law?” Melbourne Journal of International Law, 16. Gamble, John, Director Emeritus. (no date) Comprehensive Statistical Database of Multilateral Treaties, a project of the Honors Program, Behrend College, Pennsylvania State University. Gross, Leo. (1948) “The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948,” American Journal of International Law, 42. Held, David. (1995) Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Henkin, Louis. (1995) International Law: Politics and Values. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. ICISS. (2001) The Responsibility to Protect: Research, Bibliography, Background: Supplementary Volume to the Report of The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. International Court of Justice. (1948) Reparation for Injuries Suffered in the Service of the United Nations Request for Advisory Opinion available at https://www.icj-cij.org/en/case/4. International Court of Justice. (1949) Reparation for Injuries Suffered in the Service of the United Nations Advisory Opinion available at https://www.icjcij.org/files/case-related/4/004-19490411-ADV-01-00-EN.pdf. International Court of Justice. (1966) South West Africa Cases, Overview of the Case available at https://www.icj-cij.org/en/case/47. International Court of Justice. (1970) Case Concerning The Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company, Judgment available at https://www.icj-cij.org/ public/files/case-related/50/050-19700205-JUD-01-00-EN.pdf. International Criminal Court. (2009). The Prosecutor v. Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir, http://www.icc-cpi.int/menus/icc/situations%20and%20cases/situat ions/situation%20icc%200205/related%20cases/icc02050109/icc02050109? lan=en-GB. International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC). (2011) “Myanmar: Cyclone Nargis 2008 facts and figures,” IFRC 3 available at https://www.ifrc.org/ en/news-and-media/news-stories/asia-pacific/myanmar/myanmar-cyclonenargis-2008-facts-and-figures/#:~:text=On%202%20May%20200. Kingsbury, Benedict and Donaldson, Megan. (2011) “Global Administrative Law,” in Wolfrum, Rudiger ed., Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law. Ku, Charlotte. (2018) “Security Council Responsibility to Respond to Climate Change,” in eds. Scott, Shirley V. and Ku, Charlotte. Climate Change and the Security Council. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. Milner, Helen. (1992) “International Theories of Cooperation Among Nations: Strengths and Weaknesses,” World Politics, 44.

98

C. KU

Scott, Shirley and Ku, Charlotte. (2018) “The UN Security Council and Global Action on Climate Change,” in eds., Scott, Shirley and Ku, Charlotte, Climate Change and the UN Security Council. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. Spruyt, Hendrik. (1994) The Sovereign State and Its Competitors. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stern, Jenna. (2015) “Reducing Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in UN Peacekeeping: Ten Years after the Zeid Report,” Stimson Center available at https://reliefweb.int/report/world/reducing-sexual-exploitationand-abuse-un-peacekeeping-ten-years-after-zeid-r. Statute of the International Law Commission available at https://legal.un.org/ docs/?path=../ilc/texts/instruments/english/statute/statute.pdf&lang=EF. Supreme Court of The Netherlands, The Netherlands v. Respondents & Stichting, Mothers of Srebrenica No. 17/04567 available at https://uitspraken.rechts praak.nl/inziendocument?id ¼ ECLI:NL: HR:2019:1284. Taylor, Adam. (2020) “How the Split Over Masks Sums Up America’s Chaotic Coronavirus Response,” Washington Post available at https://www.washingto npost.com/world/2020/06/25/face-masks-america-divided/. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). (2001) The Responsibility to Protect, December 2001, VIII available at http:// responsibilitytoprotect.org/ICISS%20Report.pdf. Tullis, Paul. (2020) “Dutch Cooperation Made an ‘Intelligent Lockdown’ A Success,” available at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-0605/netherlands-coronavirus-lockdown-dutch-followed-the-rules. ‘UN Sued over Haiti Cholera Epidemic,’ (9 October 2013) available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/09/un-sued-haiticholera-epidemic. United Nations. (2001) Draft articles on the responsibility of international organizations, with commentaries available at https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/ins truments/english/commentaries/9_11_2011.pdf. United Nations Charter available at https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-cha rter. United Nations, Conduct in UN Field Missions including Ten Rules of Personal Conduct for Blue Helmets available at https://conduct.unmissions.org/tenrulescode-personal-conduct-blue-helmets. United Nations Counter Terrorism Committee members available at https:// www.un.org/sc/ctc/about-us/member-states/. United Nations Global Compact at https://www.unglobalcompact.org/what-isgc/mission/principles. United Nations Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office and UN Haiti Cholera Response available at http://mptf.undp.org/factsheet/fund/CLH00.

5

FRAGMENTED RESPONSIBILITY IN A GLOBAL WORLD

99

United Nations Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. (2004) “A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility,” available at https://www.un.org/ en/events/pastevents/pdfs/secure_world_exec_summary.pdf. United Nations Peacekeeping Operations available at https://peacekeeping.un. org/en. United Nations Security Council Report, Arria-Formula Meetings including table of Arria-Formula meetings available at https://www.securitycouncilreport. org/un-security-council-working-methods/arria-formula-meetings.php. United Nations Secretary-General Bulletin on Special Measures for Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse available at https://www.un.org/ preventing-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse/content/policies. United Nations Sustainable Development Goals at https://www.un.org/sustai nabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/. United Nations Trust Fund in Support of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse available at https://www.un.org/preventing-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse/ content/trust-fund. United Nations Zeid Report. (2004) available at https://reliefweb.int/sites/ reliefweb.int/files/resources/421DA870DF78A2BCC1256FDA0041E979Zeid%20report%20_A-59-710_%20English.pdf. Wenham, Clare. (2016) “Ebola responsibility: moving from shared to multiple responsibilities,” Third World Quarterly available at https://www.tandfonline. com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2015.1116366. Wright, Quincy. (1924) “Status of the Inhabitants of Mandated Territory,” American Journal of International Law, 18. Wright, Quincy. (1930) Mandates under the League of Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

PART II

Technology and Peace

CHAPTER 6

Utilizing Technology for Peace: Seeking New Solutions Kate Seaman

Technology has altered our perceptions of place, space, and time. We connect in ways previous generations could not imagine, with devices in our pockets that give us instantaneous access to information, experiences, and knowledge. As Katsh and Rainey (2011; 86) note, “As citizens of a world in which the virtual and the physical are merging, we don’t do things the way we used to. Increasingly mobile citizens and an increasingly accessible government are involved in a transition from a relationship that was shaped by a very different sense of both time and space.” Developments in communication technology are reshaping the ways in which we interact within our communities and the wider world. The impacts of these technological developments are also raising questions about how society is changing, how our perceptions of truth can be altered, and how this changes our relationships with others.

K. Seaman (B) Bahá’í Chair for World Peace, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_6

103

104

K. SEAMAN

Technology is not neutral, and technological solutions come with consequences. The recognition of this is increasingly important as “New technological gains are profoundly reshaping the boundaries of the possible. Innovations in Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) have led to efficiency breakthroughs across sectors, Big Data has transformed how we observe, analyse and predict how society functions, and the Internet of Things (IoT) is redesigning how we interact with and benefit from technology” (Miklian and Hoelscher 2018; 189). With the rapid pace of development and change in how we use and apply technology, more attention needs to be paid to the ethical consequences of these innovations. We are essentially living in “a state of experimentation as we readjust both our minds and our activities to an accelerated and more complex information and communication environment” (Katsh and Rainey 2011; 86). In this more complex environment, the impact of technology is not neutral. The viral spread of disinformation, matching the viral spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, highlights the potential risks that come from our more interconnected and technologically driven ways of living. “Innovations in scientific and technical research have always been used for military purposes and therefore had a strong influence on warfare” (Reuter 2020; 10). However, technology also affects other aspects of the international system, as “New technological capabilities may also alter the practical meaning of well-established concepts of international relations and may blur the distinctions among previously distinct categories” (Weiss 2015; 417). The example that Weiss (2015) uses to highlight this is climate change, where the growing concern over the effects of climate change have morphed discussions over national energy policy from a domestic to international issue, or what Cha (2000) refers to as an “intermestic” issue. As the previous chapters in this volume highlight, these challenges are too large to be solved by individual states alone. The potential harmful consequences of technological development also fall under the banner of an “intermestic” issue, where “the secondary effect of wireless technologies – whose primary effect is to enable the development of innovative and valuable services – becomes a form of implicit total surveillance of individuals, their habits, their movements, and their activities” (Ardagna et al. 2011; 201–202). Large-scale data collection, and the consequent uses of those data, represent a new form of “global governance of humanity” (Barnett 2013; 379). As Jacobsen and

6

UTILIZING TECHNOLOGY FOR PEACE: SEEKING NEW SOLUTIONS

105

Fast (2019; 162) argue, “Whoever owns and controls these data, therefore, possesses leverage and power.” The implicit power of ownership and control of data can be compared with other large-scale technological developments; it has the potential to affect “the international competitiveness of countries and hence the relative position of nation-states in the geopolitical or economic pecking order” (Weiss 2015; 417). The fact is that “new technology reinforces existing structure of inequality” (Jacobsen and Fast 2019; 157). Without concerted effort to challenge the underlying systems, and to encourage technology companies and innovators to embrace their potential role as positive change agents (Miklian and Hoeschler 2018), these inequalities will persist. Technology does however present new opportunities to challenge these systemic inequalities. As Bergren and Bailard (2017; 895) outline, “the capacity to successfully organize for collective action does hinge, to some degree, on communication costs—and it is these communication costs that have been profoundly altered by the introduction of new ICTs.” By reducing the cost of communication, “new technologies are changing how and when we learn about events and choose to respond to them….With technology usage expanding rapidly in the developing world, new avenues of participation, engagement, and accountability are emerging. Globally, more people now have the opportunity to actively participate and make use of these tools to impact processes that affect their societies” (Puig et al. 2013; 1). The following chapters in this volume examine different ways in which new technologies are being utilized to impact global society. Transforming approaches to traditional fields of study, is one component in transforming the application of technology in the field. The chapter by Margarita Quihuis, Mark Nelson, Aniek van Kersen, and Joseph Hughes, highlights the impact of incorporating new ways of thinking, through their examination of the emerging fields of peace engineering, peace data, and peace finance. These three fields have the potential to be transformed by recognizing the impacts of the past, specifically colonialism, and refocusing the future on positive peace outcomes. A key to this transformation is the restructuring of education in each of the three fields—engineering, finance, and data analysis—to better prepare students to incorporate multiple perspectives and structures into account when working on projects. This is achieved through the exposure of social complexities and cultural blindspots which might lead to unintended consequences, especially when projects are being undertaken in ongoing

106

K. SEAMAN

conflicts. This approach also requires shifting the perspective from the global to the local, and focusing on community-driven initiatives, and community-led governance. Community-led governance is also a thread running through the next contribution from Derek Caelin, which highlights the importance of the governance of online spaces, and examines how these spaces can be democratized and decentralized. By comparing the decentralized Fediverse with other social network platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, Caelin explores the different options for regulation and moderation. Caelin’s insight into the Fediverse provides an alternative vision of community creation in a virtual world, one in which communities work together to create safe, responsive, social spaces. The chapter also helps to highlight the risks with current large social network platforms, and the failures to regulate and moderate hateful or violent content, the consequences of which were most evident in the January 6, 2021 attacks on the US Capitol building. The success of moderating action within the Fediverse is reliant on the human moderators, who have the contextual awareness, and are embedded in the communities they serve. This again, underpins the argument that technology is not neutral, it does not represent a solution in and of itself; what matters is how the technology is used. The use of technology and its consequences is also central to the contribution of Helena Puig Larrauri and Maude Morrison. Their chapter examines the digital drivers of conflict and explores how technologies are affecting conflict dynamics. Puig Larrauri and Morrison also highlight the ways in which peacebuilders can mitigate the effects of technology on conflict dynamics, and how technology can also be used to support peacebuilding. By exposing the dual uses of technology, this chapter brings to the fore the complexity in the ways in which technology mediates our experiences, and the ways in which it changes the dynamics of our interactions. The chapter provides a framework for peacebuilders to understand how technology can exacerbate conflict, but also how it can transform the space for creating peace. By pushing for the examination of technology as integral to the conflict context, and not separate from it, Puig Larrauri and Morrison, also push us to examine the wider consequences of our increasing reliance on technology. The three chapters in this section highlight both the risks and rewards of technology. They emphasize that technology itself is not a neutral solution, and that understanding the context of its deployment, and the

6

UTILIZING TECHNOLOGY FOR PEACE: SEEKING NEW SOLUTIONS

107

potential consequences, is crucial to ensuring that the technology does not reinforce already existing inequalities. Each contributor has outlined that “as enablers and connectors, technologies can be used as important transformative tools for enhancing sustainable human development and preventing violent conflict. But technologies can also become dividers in a conflict context.” (Puig Larrauri and Kahl 2013; 2) The challenge is how to ensure that the potential for positive change is not lost. While you work your way through the following contributions, we encourage you to think about the questions below, and how we can develop our ethical and moral approaches to better fit the technological developments occurring in our time. 1. How has technology changed the ways in which you interact with the world around you? 2. How can we mitigate the negative effects of technological development? 3. When technology does reinforce structural inequalities, what can we do to alter the underlying system to limit any negative consequences? 4. Who should be accountable for the negative impacts of technological advancement? 5. What can we do to ensure that our virtual communities are as responsive and caring as our “real world” communities? 6. How can we push for innovations which better support a sustainable and positive peace?

References Ardagna, C.A., di Vimercati, S.D.C. and Samarati, P., 2011. Personal Privacy in Mobile Networks. In Mobile Technologies for Conflict Management (pp. 201– 214). Dordrecht: Springer. Barnett, M.N., 2013. Humanitarian Governance. Annual Review of Political Science, 16, pp. 379–398. Bergren, A. and Bailard, C.S., 2017. Information and Communication Technology and Ethnic Conflict in Myanmar: Organizing for Violence or Peace? Social Science Quarterly, 98(3), pp. 894–913.

108

K. SEAMAN

Cha, V.D., 2000. Globalization and the Study of International Security. Journal of Peace Research, 37 (3), pp. 391–403. https://doi.org/10.1177/002234 3300037003007. Heinzelman, J., Brown, R. and Meier, P., 2011. Mobile Technology, Crowdsourcing and Peace Mapping: New Theory and Applications for Conflict Management. In Mobile Technologies for Conflict Management (pp. 39–53). Dordrecht: Springer. Jacobi, E., 2011. Burma: A Modern Anomaly. In Mobile Technologies for Conflict Management (pp. 141–157). Dordrecht: Springer. Jacobsen, K.L. and Fast, L., 2019. Rethinking Access: How Humanitarian Technology Governance Blurs Control and Care. Disasters, 43, pp. S151–S168. Jasanoff, S. 2004. Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society. In S. Jasanoff (Ed.) States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order (pp. 13– 45). London: Routledge. Jones, E., Kendall, S. and Yoriko Otomo., 2018. Gender, War, and Technology: Peace and Armed Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 44, pp. 1, 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2018.148 1340. Katsh, E. and Rainey, D., 2011. ODR and Government in a Mobile World. In Mobile Technologies for Conflict Management (pp. 81–92). Dordrecht: Springer. Malkki, L., 1996. Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology, 11(3). pp. 377–404. Miklian, J. and Hoelscher, K., 2018. A New Research Approach for Peace Innovation. Innovation and Development, 8(2), pp. 189–207. Morrison, C. 2015. Engaging with Local Communities to Prevent Violence: What Role for ICTs? Brighton: IDS. Phillips, F., 2020. From My Perspective: Toward Peace Engineering. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 158, p.120148. Reuter, C., 2020. Towards IT Peace Research: Challenges at the Intersection of Peace and Conflict Research and Computer Science. S&F Sicherheit und Frieden, 38(1), pp. 10–16. Poblet, M., 2011. Introduction to Mobile Technologies, Conflict Management, and ODR: Exploring Common Grounds. In Mobile Technologies for Conflict Management (pp. 1–12). Springer: Dordrecht. Puig Larrauri, H., and A. Kahl. 2013. Technology for Peacebuilding. Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 2(3), p. Art. 61. https:// doi.org/10.5334/sta.cv. Quihuis, M., M. Nelsson, and K. Guttieri. 2016. Peace Technology: Scope, Scale and Cautions. Washington, DC: Building Peace. Ury, W. 2000. The Third Side: Why We Fight and How We Can Stop. New York: Penguin. Weiss, C., 2015. How Do Science and Technology Affect International Affairs? Minerva, 53(4), pp. 411–430.

CHAPTER 7

Peace Data, Peace Finance, and Peace Engineering: Advancing the Design of Respectful Spaces and Sustainable Development Goals Aniek van Kersen, Joseph B. Hughes, Margarita Quihuis, and Mark Nelson Introduction A respectful space is one that is safe, inclusive, actively empowers community voices, and has an ecosystem-centered, non-colonial (non-extractive,

A. van Kersen · M. Quihuis (B) · M. Nelson Peace Innovation Institute, The Hague, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] M. Nelson e-mail: [email protected] J. B. Hughes Peace Engineering Program, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. Quihuis · M. Nelson Peace Innovation Lab, Stanford, CA, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_7

109

110

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

non-exploitive, net-beneficial to all parties) design approach. This chapter discusses a systems approach to designing respectful spaces that includes three new, emerging fields: Peace Engineering, Peace Data, and Peace Finance. The growth of information systems, technology, large-scale infrastructure, and global markets has resulted in their “addition” to both the deepening of, and solutions to, large-scale societal challenges including peace. The emergence of fields of Peace Data, Peace Engineering, and Peace Finance has developed “organically” in recognition of the need to integrate impacts and opportunities in design on the outcome of Peace (Guadagno et al. 2018; Jordan et al. 2020; Koerner 2018; Marinakis et al. 2021; Vesilind 2006). Our focus on finance, engineering, and data science stems from our time in Silicon Valley (Peace Innovation Lab Stanford 2020). The emergence of tech giants such as Facebook stimulated a push to rethink how, through technology, we can help thousands of people at the same time promote positive peace and share local solutions globally (Fogg 2008). Our approach utilizes the power of relationships between people across technologies to transform these fields into prosocial, positive peace outcomes (Peace Innovation Institute 2020). This chapter highlights the contextual importance of the business sphere, the digital social sphere, and the institutional sphere, and their interactions, and we argue that the collaborative nature of these three fields provides a step toward non-colonial design. To design respectfully means transforming the current approach to the fields of engineering, data science, and finance to improve their structures and move along the continuum to human-centered and eco-centered. This holistic view expands Design Thinking to more fully include the needs of all humans; both marginalized communities, and all life on the planet. Additionally, just as empathy is a necessary central theme in Design Thinking, empathy needs to be included in the design workflows for data science, finance, and engineering projects. By focusing on the design of respectful spaces, it may be possible to overcome two design roadblocks within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the worldwide call for action and mission to solving 17 identified global issues expanding across people, planet, prosperity, and peace by 2030 (Jordan et al. 2020; Vesilind 2006; Yarnall et al. 2021). The current 17 SDGs are listed as: 1. “No Poverty - End poverty in all its forms everywhere” (#Envision2030 Goal 1, 2016).

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

111

2. “Zero Hunger - End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture” (#Envision2030 Goal 2, 2016). 3. “Good Health and Well-Being - Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages” (#Envision2030 Goal 3, 2016). 4. “Quality Education - Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” (#Envision2030 Goal 4, 2016). 5. “Gender Equality - Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” (#Envision2030 Goal 5, 2016). 6. “Clean Water and Sanitation - Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all” (#Envision2030 Goal 6, 2016). 7. “Affordable and Clean Energy - Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all” (#Envision2030 Goal 7 , 2016). 8. “Decent Work and Economic Growth - Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all” (#Envision2030 Goal 8, 2016). 9. “Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure - Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation” (#Envision2030 Goal 9, 2016). 10. “Reduced Inequality - Reduce inequality within and among countries” (#Envision2030 Goal 10, 2016). 11. “Sustainable Cities and Communities - Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” (#Envision2030 Goal 11, 2016). 12. “Responsible Consumption and Production - Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns” (#Envision2030 Goal 12, 2016). 13. “Climate Action - Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts” (#Envision2030 Goal 13, 2016). 14. “Life Below Water - Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development” (#Envision2030 Goal 14, 2016). 15. “Life on Land - Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss” (#Envision2030 Goal 15, 2016).

112

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

16. “Peace and Justice Strong Institutions - Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels” (#Envision2030 Goal 16, 2016). 17. “Partnerships to achieve the Goals - Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development” (#Envision2030 Goal 17 , 2016). First, the SDGs are shaped through a colonial lens, with the primary development of the goals being led by Western powers (Lempert 2017). This includes utilizing and emphasizing homogenous western baseline standards such as the Human Development Index that are more focused on income statistics than resource protection (Lempert 2017). The goals do not reflect on cultural integrity of specific groups especially when referencing cultural protection of cultural production and consumption options, nor does it take steps to “reverse any legacy of colonialism and builds new self-sufficient communities rather than reinforcing dependency” (Lempert 2017). Second, conflict and violence impede the achievement of the goals. The SDG’s targets for reduction of conflict and violence are at a “nation-state level,” but success will be driven at an individual and community level. Respectful spaces as are a tool with broad application by individuals and communities, toward the SDGs overcoming both roadblocks. By emphasizing the different group identities within all layers of a society (from the intrapersonal to intergroup) as foundational to understanding outcomes of interactions, and being consistently contextually sensitive in directions across both space and time, the SDGs can be tackled through an inherently more equitable and equal view. This includes efforts toward utilizing collective intelligence through conduction of short, precise, tiny experiments that explore prosocial engagement behaviors. The pressure to achieve the SDGs is real and urgent, stemming from the rising changes in our climate, civil unrest and discontent, and further global challenges resulting from our colonial history (Union of International Associations 2020). Rapid progress requires action through community driven initiatives and the creation of respectful spaces. In order to dismantle the current institutions’ negative consequences and empower communities and individuals, we must actively seek to transform societies and push toward the integration of positive peace principles in finance, engineering, and data science.

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

113

Peace Finance, Peace Data, Peace Engineering At the WEEF&GEDC 2020 conference, Dr. Mira Olson (Drexel University) stated “[We can engage in] Problems that aren’t typically engineering problems, but problems where we can show up as good partners where we listen, come with a sense of humility, share, and not necessarily lead.” With this vision in mind, to create respectful, inclusive spaces that positively engage with, and generate equitable opportunities for all members of society, we need to increase empathic, ethical design within the domains of finance, engineering, and data science. In order to have a biosphere in which our own species can advance social structures and wellbeing, we will need to extend this design of respectful inclusive space to all forms of life (WEEF & GEDC 2020a). This section outlines a systems model with a behavioral focus, that promotes a combined vision engaging finance, engineering, and data science to create respectful spaces and increase the focus of all participants on the proactive, even preemptive value creation and distribution behaviors of “positive peace.” Of these three domains, finance and engineering are fundamentally about human interaction, and data science frequently supports it. When engaging in any collective endeavor, the primary focus is often on minimizing conflict and violence. This “negative peace” approach to reducing destructive behavior has therefore historically been the primary focus within intervention design. Negative peace is defined as the absence of violence/fear of violence, and engagement in violence reduction (Galtung 2011). Positive peace is creative, and less concisely defined. Galtung’s definition of positive peace refers to “the integration of human society” with a focus on the structures and institutions that create and maintain peaceful societies (Grewal 2003). This has been developed further by many actors (i.e., The Institute of Economics and Peace and the Positive Peace Warrior Network). Within the Peace Innovation Institute, and Peace Innovation Lab at Stanford, we’ve applied a behavioral lens, to focus on episodes and sequences of mutually beneficial behavior, between individual members of different groups (Guadagno et al. 2018). We see these tiny engagement behaviors—and the resulting behavior sequences that reliably lead to mutually beneficial outcomes—as fundamental elements of positive peace. Thus, we describe positive peace as a sequence of positive, prosocial engagement behaviors that maximize mutually beneficial outcomes with others (Guadagno et al. 2018).

114

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

In this paper, we present an introduction to each node in the systems model for creating respectful spaces with a focus on positive peace that we refer to as the PeaceX diagram. In PeaceX, each contributing node is an input to a Peace field: Peace finance, Peace engineering, and Peace data. Peace Engineering includes human-centered and ecology-centered design principles, ethics, and harm reduction/detection to connect fields in engineering to social sciences and enhance the innovation process. Peace engineering uses systems thinking to bring engineering back to its core: solving problems about people and societal needs. This is a transformative field and serves as a vision where collaboration between disciplines is necessary to achieve the global priorities for the next decade: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This includes taking a community-based approach and centering individual needs as the foundation of an engineering project. Peace Finance steps beyond current ethical and impact finance, to consider the entire Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment framework through the lens of value creation behavior, specifically measured by episodes of engagement behavior across difference boundaries. The practice of Peace Finance creates peace capital as an output. Peace capital is a new, investable asset class. We accomplish this by selecting for the sequences of positive engagement behavior that most reliably lead to mutual benefit, in excess of the cost of engagement, between any two individuals, groups, or entities (including species). The excess value these mutually desirable outcomes generate, enables sustainable, scalable, symbiotic relationship growth between groups, as some of the surplus value can be reinvested in making the next episode of engagement even better—thus strengthening and growing the relationship over time. We propose structuring these net mutually beneficial behavior sequences as the new asset class of peace capital because: a. we view them not only as “the means of (peace) production,” but also because b. we view them as fundamental to all value creation, and thus c. as describing a fundamental relational infrastructure. Why fundamental? We assert this relational infrastructure (the ability for two entities to cooperate in such a way that the result exceeds the sum of

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

115

what both could achieve alone) is the means by which human civilizations are able to create our more familiar infrastructure networks, such as transportation, power transmission, communications, water, food, and labor, since individual humans can only create these more tangible infrastructure networks as a result of this relational infrastructure, across specializations, because no single individual has sufficient ability to create them alone. However, until the advent of the internet, this network of relationships was largely invisible and unmapped. The emerging peace finance field has the potential to be transformative, because it provides a sustainable, scalable roadmap to measurably increase both the quantity and quality of positive peace behaviors (that is, mutual value creation and distribution behaviors) between any two groups or entities. How? By transforming the raw material of conflict and violence (group differences) via a structured collaboration process, into the raw materials for creating new wealth via innovation—and distributing (that is, reinvesting) it back into all the participants, in order to repeat the process at larger scale and higher quality. This pushes the community’s GDP upwards through a repeatable, augmentable transaction cycle of hyper-equality.1 Peace Data is a conceptual framework and an accompanying methodology that utilizes passively collected sensor data about social behavior, especially value-creation and value distribution behavior, from the real world—not a controlled lab environment. This standardizes measurement of three key peace variables:

1 We define Hyper-equality as equality of rate, not state. That is, between any two entities, with hyper-equality we are more interested in the equality of the rate of progress for both, rather than the relative state of progress between them at any given moment. Hyper-equality is thus a dynamic “left-foot, right foot” process of one group intentionally investing in over-empowering another, so as to deliberately advance the second group beyond them rather than just to the same level, so that the second group can then return the favor for the first, in what is thus a repeatable cycle of rapid shared progress. This allows both groups to quickly advance in a manner analogous to two legs walking, where each in turn helps launch the other past them. Contrast this with our current view of equality, where one’s left foot would only cooperate to bring the right foot up to where it is—but no further, as this would violate equality in the other direction—which is perceived as something to be avoided! The key concept here is to model the cooperative socio-economic advance of two otherwise competing groups over time, so that we are measuring a shared, dynamic rate of progress rather than trying to achieve some fixed but static parity in relation to each other.

116

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

1. Group identities; 2. Episodes of engagement between group members; 3. Contexts in which they occur, mapped in terms of unique intersections of difference boundaries. Formalizing the description and measurement of these three variables allows us to benchmark the strength of social interaction (referred to above as relational infrastructure) in any human organization, which in turn allows us to benchmark both diversity and inclusion. Last but perhaps most important, this Peace Data approach gives us a standardized way to correlate all these factors with organizational performance, which in turn allows us to start approximating a value for positive peace behaviors—helping to enable a key outcome of our work: to establish a price signal for the value of peace in global capital markets. This allows us to better value (and therefore invest in) the inclusion of those with different experiences and perspectives, and to recognize the value of intersectionality, not only to pinpoint cultural blind spots, but to improve value creation and distribution to all participating groups. This in turn generates long-term incentives for promoting diversity, while stabilizing society with measurable improvements in both the quality, and quantity, of positive peace behavior, and the net mutual benefit that results. The world’s global issues rely on the collaboration of different fields as active participants in order for them to be successful. By adding finance, data, and engineering to peace design contributes more participants in the interdisciplinary necessity to solve global issues. Herein we aim to strengthen their participation and support accelerated achievement of the SDGS 1 (No poverty), 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing), 5 (Gender Equality), 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), 10 (Reduced Inequality), 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), 16 (Peace and Justice Strong Institutions), and 17 (Partnerships to achieve the Goals) (THE 17 GOALS | Sustainable Development, n.d.). Through this contextual benchmarking, we apply this quantitative, empirical, peace data-driven approach to positively transform culture and organizations, by making visible the cost and risk of colonial (i.e. extractive, non-sustainable, and ultimately destructive) sequences of engagement episodes, between any groups (or entities) and across any difference boundaries. These blind spots and biases in current data analysis techniques can be seen in many qualitative ethnographic studies in co-cultural

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

117

communication theory, and in quantitative studies which standardize western statistics as the baseline and the global norm (Held 2019; Orbe 1997). For example, in recent years, we have started to see the shift in healthcare practice where the body mass index (BMI) has traditionally been used to scope an individual’s weight and height as an indicator for emaciation/obesity. As BMI is calculated based on the European body, other populations are incorrectly measured and provided unfit healthcare for their needs (Strings 2019). Although not focused on medicine, the Peace Data framework and accompanying methodology specifically tailors itself to local contexts and recognizes the role of culture as an active variable in defining and comparing results. Figure 7.1 presents the inherently collaborative nature of the three peace-fields (Peace Finance, Peace Engineering, Peace Data) where the synergies between the peace-fields, help to prioritize global themes that can only be tackled by incorporating efforts from the other peace-fields. Between the three peace-fields the following synergies are identified.

Fig. 7.1 The Peace X diagram

118

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

Figure 7.1 also represents the synergy between the three core fields of peace: Engineering, Finance, and Data. Growth in one field is only possible through simultaneous growth in the other two. Between the three peace-fields, we identify the following synergies: Peace Finance ← → Peace Data By incorporating a non-colonial (i.e. non-extractive, mutually beneficial, and hyper-equal) approach to data about interpersonal behavior, the emphasis on relating positive peace outcomes to finance allows for standardized metrics to improve businesses and communities’ social investment opportunities. New requirements for measurable Environmental, Social, & Governance (ESG) investment impacts, beyond profit alone, are driving a massive, rapid reallocation of institutional investor capital. However, due to the subjective nature of available analytics, it is difficult to identify suitable investments (Mülbert and Sajnovits 2020; Przychodzen et al. 2016). The associated metrics of Peace Data offer an opportunity to navigate the ESG space and reallocate capital from investments that do not strengthen social fabric. This is the beginning of measuring the value of peace for an organization. Peace Data ← → Peace Engineering By including the socio-demographic experiential data, engineering projects can develop an additional layer of positive peace when designing within a community. Peace data aims to effectively provide a means to measure magnitude-based harm and whether the product of innovation in question is having a positive or negative impact. This helps identify any unintended consequences of designing a project in a given community space, while enhancing ecological and human-centered design in engineering. Peace Engineering ← → Peace Finance From the first day of design, peace financing emphasizes that engineering projects have to be sustainable, long-lasting, human-centered, and ecologically-centered. This serves to create contextual awareness for the practicing engineer as their work and its impact outlasts the time they spend on the project. Currently, many engineers are not equipped with

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

119

general knowledge in the space of finance, and funding. Empowering peace engineers with peace finance teaches them how to ethically fund their projects, and creates a transformative path from the current state of engineering and finance with a focus on the future. Additionally, this helps large development agencies such as the World Bank find large-scale investment opportunities that also measurably strengthen the environment and society. Overall, the three peace-fields’ fusion empowers one another and allows for the collective strengthening of our institutions around data science, finance, and engineering to be inclusive and non-colonial. We emphasize the focus on engagement with non-colonial approaches because all peace-fields need to use contextual awareness as the foundation. Respectful design here goes beyond contextual awareness and requires us to engage with the leadership of intersectional and interdisciplinary works and move away from the hierarchical power dynamics to become eco-centric where human and environmental/ecological needs are weighted equally (Peace Innovation 2020). The exploration and conceptual development of the peace-fields results in the emergence of three global themes that need to be activated in order to create respectful design spaces. These include: Emphasizing intersectionality, intersectionality is key in improving the business and community spheres from a peace data perspective. By pushing for social inclusiveness in data, engineering and finance it can further empower communities. Therefore, peace data uses individual socio-demographic data and contexts of local and national environments to retrieve unbiased results to derive social conclusions. Re-designing engineering education, peace engineering pushes for the inclusion of social variables in engineering design (Amadei 2019). There is an emerging recognition by engineering and computer science faculty of the need to integrate ethics and ethical concerns into the engineering curriculum. Faculty, students, and society have recognized the unintended harms created by the technology sector. In addition, incoming engineering students are increasingly disillusioned by the disconnect they perceive between engineering curricula, the engineering career path and the urgent social and planetary challenges that engineers could help to create solutions to. Re-engineering prosperity, using an ethical peace approach to financial incentives in regard to ESG investment opportunities, we can create the instruments and mechanisms to offer ethical opportunities and

120

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

solutions for all populations. Stakeholder capitalism pushes companies to maximize short-term financial gains at the expense of larger social economic wellbeing for its employees. By adding new categories of Return On Investment (ROI)—Social Return On Investment (SROI), Environmental Return On Investment (EROI), companies, shareholders and stakeholders can more accurately measure actual prosperity for the broadest number of people. In order to remain action-oriented, we must re-engineer, not re-imagine. Therefore, a new design for finance is required in order to empower communities. Recognizing Impacts of Colonialism Colonialist and capitalist ideals embedded into existing systems prohibit collective action toward achieving the SDGs’ target outcomes (Gärde 2016). The current structure in which institutions operate prevents an inclusive society (Eddo-Lodge 2017). One of the main challenges institutions need to prioritize is the uplifting of marginalized groups socially, politically, culturally, and economically (Crenshaw 2017). To gain insight into the true scope of our world’s current state we must include: the voices of activists, individuals outside academia, and experiential knowledge to un-bias the current institutional structures we live in (Nakata 2007). A significant limitation in research is the process of academic imperialist knowledge creation, retrieval, and interpretation (Chilisa 2011). Too often, our research studies and samples are WEIRD [Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic] and they become the baseline for measurement and communication theories that exclude marginalized groups from research (Downey 2010). As a result, no direct representation or unbiased second-hand representation is able to access the necessary systems to tackle the global challenges we face today. Western Intervention Over the centuries, Western nations have infiltrated other Nations either patronizingly through colonialism or paternalistically, imposing a saviors ideology (Alaso et al. 2020). This prevents economies outside of the West from optimizing non-corrupt institutions that provide ethical opportunities for citizens as the colonialist history is embedded in the structures of these Nations. The intention versus impact consequence results

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

121

in unintended consequences through this method of paternal infiltration (Resolutions Northwest 2019). The necessity to include contextual awareness and recognition of remaining colonial power dynamics is key in how a Western organization accesses and operates within another Nation (Samoff et al. 2016). Capitalism A review of capitalist history demonstrates structural inequalities and unintended negative consequences toward different social identities. These have hindered the design of inclusive, equitable spaces for all living species. Illustrative examples can be found in works by Svart, exploring how capitalistic mechanisms in society place low-income families on the losing side of a power hierarchy, leaving them beholden to their employers (Svart 2019). Or in the works of Lynn, showing how transcendence of socio-economic status identities as a target market for capitalist corporations, intersecting identities with marginalized race, religion, gender, and sexuality identities, increases difficulty in accessing additional support to leave their exploited position and others in-group populations (Lynn 2014). However, capitalist mechanisms have lifted much of humanity out of abject sustenance poverty. While recognizing their shortcomings, here we consider ways to retool capitalist mechanisms in more mutually beneficial ways—in particular to democratize greater participation in them—and then by extension for the rest of the biosphere. We need to center histories beyond the western design space to increase the scope and the ethical opportunity of a non-colonial future. By focusing on inclusive, respectful spaces, the centering of marginalized voices, histories, and experiences can help society develop toward a respectful non-colonial future (Nakata 2007). The importance of recognizing the influence of Western intervention, and negative aspects of capitalism indicates the colonial lens forming our global ambitions (Gärde 2016). Using the SDGs as an example, they contain great ideas, but are currently lacking in terms of their implementation. The primary limitations from our perspective, stem from the focus on macro-level population intervention in a top-down fashion. To shift away from the current perspective, the use of non-colonial metrics that are focused at the individual level to cater for communities can create the opportunity to better listen to and engage with perspectives outside of the western lens. This starts with contextual sensitivity approached from a systems view, looking at the spatial aspect in which the context operates, including the

122

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

history, the current setting, and the future possibilities of the context, and the multiple societal layers in which the interactions occur. This also focuses on shifting from short-term income metrics to evaluating long-term per capita GDP and inclusion of all stakeholders in the analysis. The following three sections explore in more detail these questions and the potential for each of these three fields to be transformative, especially in how they promote respectful design.

Peace Engineering Peace Engineering is a new field of engineering and interest in the field has been growing rapidly. Introduced in The Bridge “Peace, conflict, and violence are emergent properties of complex systems. A more peaceful world is only possible when a wide range of practices and professions are fully engaged. On a global level, diplomatic, informational, military, and economic institutions combine in these efforts. Peace Engineering does not replace these functions. It is an additive capability made possible by a technological world” (Hughes and Breedlove 2020). Definitions of Peace Engineering have evolved as this interest and interdisciplinary contributions to the field have grown. A list of definitions is highlighted in Table 7.1. From the multitude of definitions outlined above, peace engineering is inherently a solution oriented interdisciplinary field. By teaching how to utilize problem-solving techniques and technologies for positive peace purposes, engineers can directly improve communities’ livelihood and wellbeing. The trickle-down effect of using an engineer’s tools for social needs means we can respectfully start to engage formal institutions and businesses in how to be ethical and transparent in their incentives for project design and implementation. The goal for peace engineering is to impact how we provide for societal needs, using a breadth of tools and methodologies. A particular need for peace engineering lies at the convergence between the social sciences and engineering. This section explores the different lines of effort currently in the works for peace engineering and a look into how this field aims to be transformative and focused on re-designing engineering education. The traditional role of an engineer is to navigate, design, and build a project that balances the needs of a particular environment’s institutions, businesses, and community members. Unfortunately, in many cases, the engineer is often provided the parameters for a project and does

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

123

Table 7.1 Existing definitions of Peace Engineering Attribution

Peace Engineering definition

Vesilind (2013)

“The pro-active use of engineering skills to promote a peaceful and just existence for all people” Peace Engineering is the intentional application of S&T (science and technology) principles for trans-disciplinary systemic-level thinking to directly build and support conditions for peace with safe, ethical deployment of emerging technologies “a new field of blended engineering and finance that engages diverse backgrounds, integrates conflict sensitivity, diversity and a culture of inclusion into engineering practice, promotes sustainable development and leverages the use of measurement, data models, analytics, visualization and prediction as a means of contributing to peacebuilding, peacemaking and peacekeeping” “…[Peace Engineering] is the intentional application of science and technology principles for trans-disciplinary systemic-level thinking to directly build and support conditions for peace with safe, ethical deployment of emerging technologies…” “the field of engineering that directly engages in the avoidance and/or reduction of conflict as a primary goal of design, decision analysis, and operation of engineering systems”

Jordan et al. (2021)

Smith (2019)

Peace Innovation Institute (2020)

Hughes (2020)

(continued)

not directly engage with one or more of the environment’s stakeholders (Quihuis and Lane 2021). To enhance and create long-lasting positive peace projects, peace engineers must be empathetic in their work and more inclusive of community members in their design. Building trust is vital for the success of a project. Trust is the key element for the engineer in promoting transparency, ethical representativeness, and participation between stakeholders in project design and implementation.

124

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

Table 7.1 (continued) Attribution

Peace Engineering definition

World Engineering Education Forum & Global Engineering Deans Council (Jordan et al. 2018)

“The intentional application of systemic-level thinking of science, technology and engineering principles to directly promote and support conditions for peace. Peace Engineering works directly towards a world where prosperity, sustainability, social equity, entrepreneurship, transparency, community voice and engagement, ethics and a culture of quality thrive. Engineers have the power to play a vital role in the creative solutions that can radically transform and improve the wellbeing of people and other living systems, day to day. We want a new mindset for all existing disciplines, not only engineering, and new ones we have to create to address the global challenges”

For these reasons, Peace Engineering started by integrating peacebuilding and diplomacy elements into the engineering discipline (Drexel University 2020). Engineers must navigate complex social environments to approach conflict given their technical specialization. To be contextually aware, peace engineering aims to include ethics across the entire degree program. This is based on diverse works from other disciplines that challenge students to be aware of unintended consequences (Frisk and Larson 2011). The push toward ecology stems from non-colonial futures design, emphasizing awareness in all contexts (Peace Innovation 2020). Systems thinking prioritizes peace engineering education; systems thinking requires the designer to take multiple perspectives and structures into account when looking at a specific project (Senge and Sterman 1992). One example used by Drexel University is an assignment asking students to design a refugee camp and think of both the camp’s social context and infrastructure system’s design. Peace Engineers here are educated as generalists to have the tools and competencies to see the social complexities, uncover cultural blind spots, and consider how engineering design can productively contribute to conflict reduction/avoidance. On a wider spectrum, this also requires the provision of collaborative opportunities for engineers to design with the community

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

125

and other stakeholders for which a project is implemented. Using the Drexel case study, students must think about what consequences could result from their design and potential implementation problems. Unfortunately, thinking about the result of an action is not enough. For this reason, virtual testing needs to be made available to ensure any activity that directly affects communities, especially from a negative peace perspective, can be calculated in order to ensure it will not have a physical effect on the primary stakeholders. The creation of the SDGs provided an entry point for peace engineering with its foundations in conflict resolution, diplomacy, and peacebuilding (Amadei 2019). By recognizing the role of conflict and violence and the barriers these represent to the achievement of the SDGs and the diverse forms in which conflict arises, thrives, and is engaged throughout all levels of society (Plump 2019) the multitude of drivers of conflict implicitly shows how a diverse group of actors must take part in resolving it (Plump 2019). The primary SDG that impacts how we teach peace engineering is SDG 16—Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions (WEEF&GEDC 2020a). SDG 16—“Promotes peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provides access to justice for all and builds effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels” (United Nations 2018). The two key indicators within the goal are 16.6: “[to] develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels” and 16.7: “[to] ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels” (United Nations 2018). The goal has a unique link to all other SDGs, as to have an inclusive society is to create an equal and equitable society with no life being excluded socially, politically, economically, and culturally (Townsend 2020). With security and the rule of law in mind, engineers can take a variety of approaches to enhance accessibility, availability, and improve the utilization of resources. For example, the water conflict of the Nile Basin has a strong cultural, governance, and environmental impact, in this case engineers can work to meet the needs of the 14 bordering countries (Swain 2008). Taking the broad meaning of, and personal need for, security into design, engineers can hereby help build positive peace infrastructures that support local and national institutions for communities. Peace Engineering is at the forefront of engineering disciplines bridging the gap to the social sciences. With the SDGs in mind, collaboration across disciplines and global backgrounds is necessary to meet the

126

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

goals and build an inclusive, fair, and respectful future for all populations. This transformation is currently pushing to move beyond human-centered design and toward ecologically-centered approaches. With the current efforts to bridge the gap between social sciences and engineering, the peace-engineering field leads the global theme of re-designing engineering education. By including social variables and community voices in engineering design, engineers are capable of making smarter decisions that are more ethically viable. By including ethics throughout the degree program, peace engineers know their work has avoidable unintended consequences. Historically, it has been impossible to conduct evaluations of negative peace interventions due to ethical considerations, but the growth of simulation environments (“virtual testbeds”) presents an opportunity to rigorously test multiple intervention strategies. Using these “virtual testbeds” for negative peace intervention simulations, project design will create a more respectful space for both engineering and the stakeholders affiliated with the project to challenge ethical concerns. Peace Engineering is reforming education, and offers opportunities to help overcome current limitations in achieving the SDGs. Peace Data In the rise of the “data economy,” data is becoming one of the most valuable resources (Orlowski 2020). Currently, available data is driven by tech giants in Silicon Valley that have used persuasive technology to retrieve more data about individual people (Orlowski 2020). By stirring planned behavior sequences, apps like Facebook and Instagram can keep an individual scrolling for hours with addictive content fueled by their algorithms (Orlowski 2020). In the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal, the world watched how data could be maliciously used to harm democracy (Amer and Noujaim 2019). This accelerated a larger discussion on whether using mediating technologies suppresses a citizen’s freedom of choice. This is the new surveillance capitalism, using your data for profit (Zuboff 2019). Although measures are being set up to combat these harmful effects, the integration of ethics in data science, and how social data is approached is still limited. From a positive peace approach, peace data aims to redirect the design of how we look at the data to be contextually based and not dependent on the individual’s identity. Rather, measuring the experiences, environment, and interpersonal relationships is the focus in peace data, working to compose an ethical prosocial manner approach

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

127

to socio-demographic data. One way is to connect it to human-centered incentives directly. This section takes a closer look at what peace data is, how it focuses on contexts and experiences, and how this highlights the importance of emphasizing intersectionality. If one person sends an email to their colleague, information is tracked around the digital interaction or episode of engagement (Guadagno et al. 2018). Details including timestamp, the number of communications, whether the engagement was reciprocal, all surrounds this one individual having an interpersonal relationship across a mediating technology.2 What makes this important is the group identities that belong to the individual. Group identities are the socio-demographic identities and other identities that make up an individual as presented via a mediating technology—a technology service used to interact with other people (Guadagno et al. 2018). In the case of Instagram, a user’s feed is tailored to what the algorithm thinks they want to see based on their previous engagement on the app. Qualities such as whether the individual is a dog-person or likes cooking, all make up the user’s collective identity. From this information, starting with “the Big Eight” Social Identities (Class, Gender Orientation, Sexual Orientation, Religion, Age, Nationality, Ability), we can identify an initial surface level of diversity within teams (Allen et al. 2012). Then, analyzing patterns in the engagement episodes of peace data, and how these different macro-identities interact with one another, we can begin to detect more novel, relevant, and context-based group identities, at ever higher resolutions. For example, a study conducted over 6 months in an Australian Bank observed the use of Yammer between employees across genders (Guadagno et al. 2018). The case examined male to female communication patterns, and they discovered in a cross-gender collaboration that females initiated most communications (Guadagno et al. 2018). Analyzing these group dynamics shows the necessity for diverse teams and helps create mechanisms that stimulate engagement across different boundaries (Guadagno et al. 2018). In this context, the group identity consisting of “women employees of this particular Australian bank, who use Yammer, to initiate work conversations with their male colleagues” is a much more interesting and relevant group identity for understanding interaction dynamics in that workplace, than any or all the “big eight” macro social identities. 2 Mediating technology: any technology of which two or more people can communicate across (Guadagno et al. 2018).

128

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

This discovery of relevant group identities and interactions from the local, contextual peace data, is part of how the design of respectful spaces is custom tailored to. Difference in boundaries are the differences between the group identities of two or more individuals. Here, the boundary is the group identifier (i.e., nationality), and the difference is found between the group identity of the people in question (i.e., the individual’s nationality) (Guadagno et al. 2018). Group identities and difference boundaries under a closer lens require a series of variables to understand the dynamics of social interactions without retrieving invasive information (i.e., contents of emails and messages). To combat this, a set of variables can look at interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup relationships from a conflict perspective. This entails using exogenous and endogenous variables that affect the relationship outside of language criteria (Cox 2003). Next, Peace Data goes beyond the front-facing layer of socio-demographic identities and aims to measure the magnitude of individual’s experiences of a specific social identity within their environment. This is also why we refer to social identities as socio-demographic identities because we can only understand the identity within the environment and context it resides in. Figure 7.2 shows the conceptual representation of what this magnitude looks like. Each socio-demographic identity is a different size showing larger circles that have had more impact on Person A than smaller circles. Upon knowing the individual’s context, we can start to compare how the magnitude relates to the global population statistics of her local and business environment and whether a blind spot (dotted line) exists (Shamoa-Nir 2017). On a larger scale, especially within teams, having diverse groups has three positive peace outcomes. Firstly, improving accuracy and precision in measuring episodes of engagement can improve the product a team is working on. For example, currently, most programmers working in AI are predominantly white cis-men (Cave and Dihal 2020). As Joy Buolamwini states, “who codes matters” by having a more diverse team of coders, AI algorithms are less likely to reflect on the implicit biases of the cultural blindspot of the programmers (Buolamwini 2016). Second, positive peace as an interpersonal behavior requires prosocial behaviors. The prosocial behavior added by diverse teams has positive economic output as the product in question is by design built by more perspectives than if the team had primarily similar or identical group identities. Finally, by improving diversity in socio-demographics, teams can

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

129

Fig. 7.2 A visual conceptualization of magnitude and cultural blind spots in peace data

build ethical, social capital where teams can link, bridge, and bond across difference boundaries. One of the biggest limitations in peace data is overcoming the subjectivity of how an individual can objectively measure their experience as the magnitude of importance to an identity. We argue it is vital to explore this limitation further, to overcome the ethical issues of using front-facing identity data. Furthermore, the subjectivity and the shift of current mechanisms by which we standardize information leads peace data to be entirely based on contextual awareness of the different business, social-digital,

130

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

and institutional levels. Figure 7.3 shows an adaptation of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat (DESA) framework explaining how the different structural contexts fit together to explain the results of social-digital relationships (Atkinson and Marlier 2010). This includes Context 1 as an overarching business environment questioning the interactions within the business in question against the international, and national business environments. Context 1 reveals the systemic characteristics and environment of the institutions,

Fig. 7.3 Contextual framework for peace data

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

131

cultural norms, and societal standards in which the business is evaluated. This system of contexts help benchmark how to standardize the digitalsocial space (Context 0) respectfully as we compare the local and national environments as the baseline for understanding the interaction rather than comparing against the other businesses in question. The advancement of SDG’s will be accelerated by scalable approaches to implementation and impact. Peace data as a tool is a network asset (i.e., it gains value as the number of users increases) and therefore creates an opportunity to improve intersectionality on global scales. Gender equality (SDG 5) reduced inequalities (SDG 10) are specific goals where Peace Data can rapidly catalyze progress, globally. Within data, the implicit biases of who controls the majority of the field needs to be reformed to be more contextually aware. Emphasizing intersectionality is one of the most important global themes that needs to be addressed to make data science an ethical, prosocial and positive peace-oriented field.

Peace Finance Peace Finance, as we conceptualize it (WEEF&GEDC 2020b) is the professional practice of creating and distributing Peace Capital, for investment by second or third parties. Peace Capital, in turn, consists of financial instruments created against underlying assets that are structured to meet at least one of three criteria, for (1) reducing rivalry, (2) reducing exclusion, or (3) increasing mutual benefit. To this end, Peace Finance is the next step of an ongoing initiative, to establish a price signal for the value of peace in global capital markets, to effectively reallocate resources toward investments that have measurable peace outcomes. Since the creation of the West’s formal property system, there have been a series of means for citizens to generate capital within their spaces (De Soto 2001). Access to this property system has been an increasingly dividing factor, with increasing inequalities between poor (no formal property system) and rich nations, leading to further Western power accumulation (De Soto 2001). To correct this, we introduce criteria for

132

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

positive peace outcomes in the design of new financial instruments, which in turn reveal current structural limitations of capital.3 This leads us to: 1. Recognize how our behavior and our positive interactions enable productive, prosocial outcomes—especially new value creation and distribution; 2. Formalize the means by which we describe and measure positive interactions; 3. Create new forms of capital—new financial instruments—whose value is based on these positive interactions, and the resulting relationships of net mutual benefit they create. In Peace Finance we view these net mutually beneficial relationships (interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup) as a fundamental form of enduring asset; most other wealth creation (and distribution) depends on this underlying relational infrastructure. This lets us create previously unavailable means to invest directly in people, rather than tangible, durable assets (e.g. commercial real estate, or infrastructure)—and more fundamentally, to invest directly in the relationships between people—thus strengthening social fabric and society. In their current form, many capital assets in our global economy are limited by two old technological constraints. These can be broadly categorized as constraints on perception, and constraints on computation (the processing of perceptual data into new knowledge): 1. Constraints on perception, due partly to technological limitations, where both our view of assets, and our resulting knowledge about them, are static rather than dynamic. What caused these limits? The old, static view of an asset (imagine a given piece of land, it’s location, it’s dimensions and boundaries, the structures on it, it’s best uses, title, insurance, etc.) was the only feasible perception when sensor acuity is limited to human eyes and ears.

3 Notes from the Proceedings of the preparatory workshop for the first international Peace Engineering Summer Institute, Aug 2019 between Jacob Øvernes, Himanshu Gautam, Mark Nelson, and Aniek van Kersen (unpublished).

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

133

2. Similarly, constraints on computation have been the historic norm when information processing is limited to human, cognitive computation of paper documents, and significant decision-making depends on mass parallel human computation (e.g. board members debating a course of action; shareholders or union members voting; or lawyers, judge, and jury reaching a legal verdict). As a result of these perceptual and processing limits, too many current assets take structural forms that can drive conflict: 1. Rivalrous goods (e.g. food, clothing) drive rivalry 2. Excludable goods (e.g. private clubs) create exclusion 3. By contrast, not enough assets are structured as network goods (e.g. phones, whose communication value to each user increases, in proportion to how many other people also buy phones). Network goods can directly strengthen relationships, but also generate surplus value that can be reinvested into those relationships. As an additional peace benefit, network goods can create incentives to coordinate collective action, since participants will often all be better off if they choose the same approach, rather than pursuing individual strategies. So, with Peace Finance, we aim to shift the foundations of the economy to produce more Peace Capital, against more peace-generating assets. Thus, we seek to structure more underlying assets as non-rivalrous, nonexcludable, and networked goods. And we seek to create Peace Capital with more inclusive, hyper-equal, and mutually beneficial financial instruments, against those more peaceful assets. As a result, both the underlying assets and the capital created against them will often have an enduring quality (actually increasing in value over time) that many current tangible, depreciating assets do not. Increased scientific knowledge and engineering know-how are just a few examples of these kinds of enduring assets. Toward these ends, we have identified some primary “raw materials” or “principal components” of active positive peace that, when combined, help us structure an underlying asset to meet our criteria for peace capital creation:

134

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

1. Peace Acts, or positive peace behavior. This is social behavior, done by one entity to benefit another, and for our peace capital creation purposes also includes: a. the peace data that measures and describes said behavior; b. the positive, sustainable relationships that result from that behavior; 2. Group identities. We include these as behavioral descriptions of who we do things with, for, and to—intentionally or otherwise, to track who our capital is creating peace for, and—in the case of unintended harms—to whom reparations should be made. 3. Difference boundaries: the difference gradients, described in terms of group identity, that describe a precise address in social space where a social behavior occurs. 4. New knowledge, created from and about the relationships in 1b above. Peace finance uses peace data to create, manage, and maintain peace capital, in order to generate a price signal for the value of peace. Peace behavior is prosocial behavior to initiate, strengthen, and extend relationships where mutual benefit exceeds the cost of engagement, between any two entities, to increase the value of the relationship for both. To provide context, a relationship topic may be a business collaboration on a given product (the relationship is the efforts of the partners; the topic is the product). The capital type underlines the difference boundaries, revealing the higher the distance of the magnitude of identities, the more diverse the perspectives centered around the topic of the relationship. For this relationship to be financially investable, the investment must provide incentives for partners to contribute positive, prosocial behavior in kind. This allows investors to positively reinforce collaboration between the parties, while challenging each party to improve the relationship to benefit all (Hulkko-Nyman 2016). This leads to the final type of capital: the new knowledge produced from the relationship. What makes this possible is already deployed mediating technologies, primarily in the workplace, to measure the relationship’s objective quality and outcomes. This is seen through the same vision as peace data—to track the relationship and interactions’ progression. The wider transformation of peace finance includes transforming peace capital to become investable in different forms. By utilizing the

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

135

capacity from Peace Data, financial instruments such as new ethical contracts that are inclusive allow for peace capital to be successful and have a high ROI. In the spirit of relationships, peace finance urges businesses to be inclusive in their financial processes—this specifically regards including clients/customer segments as integral populations in the business’s decision-making processes (“Community Jury” 2020). The result of this inclusive decision-making, and investment in relationships is the growth of GDP per capita in communities to whom finance is available. This is possible by including stakeholders as well as shareholders in the investment process to stimulate economic activity across a community rather than extracting profits straight to the shareholder in a traditional business model. Peace entrepreneurs can then design mediating technologies that directly measure service effectiveness with peace data, to create peace capital and unlock the resources of peace finance. By centering business activities around peace capital, peace entrepreneurs pioneer ecological and systems thinking to promote inclusive, interactive design between communities, businesses, and other stakeholders. Using peace data, peace entrepreneurs can more effectively design peace technology. Peace technologies are positive applications of persuasive (not coercive) technology which measurably increase the quantity and quality of positive peace behaviors. This directly connects peace entrepreneurs to ESG investment, because the social “S” component of ESG impact investment drives the price signal for the value of peace, providing a more objective means to allocate resources to the many opportunities where the benefits of peace far exceed the costs. Within the SDG’s, the goals of zero poverty (SDG 1) and decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), and industry, infrastructure and innovation (SDG 9) are directly impacted by the growth of Peace Finance. A roadblock to achieve these SDG goals in current finance models is the absence of intersectionality, growth at the bottom of the pyramid, and community well-being, in value creation. Peace finance seeks to eliminate these roadblocks, create equitable and sustained growth, and transform the path to SDG completion. In conclusion, Peace Finance enables a shift of resources from conflict consequent or conflict-neutral assets, into peace capital that is nonrivalrous, non-excludable, and networked. Ultimately this accelerates widespread prosperity while strengthening diversity, inclusion, and, more resilient social fabric. Finance was created for people to make trading

136

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

easier. We cannot afford to separate this as we have the SDGs in mind. Here, Peace Finance encompasses ecology and human-centered design to invest in long-lasting relationships constructed of positive, prosocial peace behaviors.

Summary and Conclusion Overall, this paper aims to provide an approach toward respectful spaces design that includes three fields that are additive in design (finance, engineering, and data science). To align the global ambitions of the international community, we prioritize three global themes: re-designing engineering education, re-engineering prosperity, and emphasizing intersectionality. The intention of the peace-fields is to enhance community vision, and respect for individual identities. This includes reforming the traditional fields to incorporate non-colonial tools and metrics. To reiterate the fields, Peace Engineering uses systems thinking to enhance engineers’ contextual awareness, community building, and aims to incorporate ethics across the entire degree program. With roots in peacebuilding and diplomacy, peace engineering is given a unique entrance to its approach to solving the SDGs. One of the more encompassing goals, SDG 16, is a place for peace engineering to use systems thinking to approach security and the rule of law from an engineering perspective (#Envision2030 Goal 16 2016). Peace Data is a methodological framework based on using local and national contexts to understand social interactions in a given space (often a business) as a baseline for how interpersonal relationships create value, and how including the value experiences concerning socio-demographic identities can have a high ROI in the long term. This includes highlighting individual engagement in data. We see SDG 5 (gender equality), and SDG 10 (reduced inequalities) to be the goals that have immediate impact following a peace data approach (#Envision2030 Goal 5 2016; #Envision2030 Goal 10 2016). Peace Finance structures more assets to be non-excludable, nonrivalrous, and networked, thus reducing rivalry and exclusion, while increasing and strengthening mutually net-beneficial relationships between stakeholders—and then creates more democratized, inclusive Peace Capital against this new asset class, to make it more investable. This emphasizes the importance of investing in people and the enduring relationships between them, which directly influences SDGs 1 (zero

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

137

poverty), 8 (decent work and economic growth), and 9 (industry, infrastructure, and innovation) (#Envision2030 Goal 1 2016; #Envision2030 Goal 8 2016; #Envision2030 Goal 9 2016). Overall this reinforces positive, ethical, collaborative behavior that can then tap the large pools of capital earmarked for ESG investment. Collectively, this presents an interdisciplinary and intersectional system. The objective is to overcome roadblocks in respectful space design illustrated by our ubiquitous colonial history and the impacts of conflict. The addition to the growing peace fields of data science, engineering, and finance allow design to become community oriented, positive, ecocentered, and post-colonial. This includes shaping values, and metrics within these fields to prioritize the voice of individual and community wellbeing. We hypothesize that the rise of ethical opportunities and ethical solutions in respectful design will be facilitated by this systems approach.

References Alaso, O., Nielson, K., Lubega, W. and Nyanjura, S. (2020) Purpose [WWW Document]. No White Saviors. Available at: https://nowhitesaviors.org/ who-we-are/purpose/ (Accessed 22 December 2020). Allen, E. et al. (2012) Race Matters. In Implementing Racial Identity Development Theories into the Classroom. 2012 Diversity Summit. Amadei, B. (2019) Engineering for Peace and Diplomacy. Sustainability, 11, 5646. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11205646 Amer, K. and Noujaim, J. (2019) The Great Hack. Netflix Official Site. Available at: https://www.netflix.com/nl-en/title/80117542 (Accessed: 7 December 2020). Atkinson, A. B. and Marlier, E. (2010) Analysing and Measuring Social Inclusion in a Global Context. United Nations. Buolamwini, J. (2016) How I’m Fighting Bias in Algorithms. TedxBeaconStreet. Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/joy_buolamwini_how_i_m_ fighting_bias_in_algorithms?language=en Cave, S. and Dihal, K. (2020) The Whiteness of AI. Philosophy & Technology, 33(4), 685–703. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00415-6 Chilisa, B. (2011) Indigenous Research Methodologies. Sage. Community Jury—Azure Application Architecture Guide [WWW Document]. (2020) Microsoft. Available at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ architecture/guide/responsible-innovation/community-jury/ (Accessed 22 December 2020).

138

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

Cox, K. B. (2003) The Effects of Intrapersonal, Intragroup, and Intergroup Conflict on Team Performance Effectiveness and Work Satisfaction. Nursing Administration Quarterly, 27 (2), 153–163. https://doi.org/10.1097/000 06216-200304000-00009 Crenshaw, K. (2017) Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More Than Two Decades Later [WWW Document]. Columbia Law School. Available at: https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle-crenshaw-int ersectionality-more-two-decades-later (Accessed 7 December 2020). De Soto, H. (2001) The Mystery of Capital. Finance and Development, 38(1), 29–33. Downey, G. (2010) We Agree It’s WEIRD, but Is It WEIRD Enough? Neuroanthropology. Available at: https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/10/weagree-its-weird-but-is-it-weird-enough/ (Accessed 22 December 2020). Drexel University. (2020) Peace Engineering [WWW Document]. Drexel University College of Engineering. Available at: https://drexel.edu/engineering/aca demics/areas-of-study-programs/peace-engineering/ (Accessed 7 December 2020). Eddo-Lodge, R. (2017) Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Bloomsbury Publishing, London. #Envision2030 Goal 1: No Poverty | United Nations Enable. (2016, February 9). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal1. html #Envision2030 Goal 2: Zero Hunger | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal2. html #Envision2030 Goal 3: Good Health and Well-Being | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envisi on2030-goal3.html #Envision2030 Goal 4: Quality Education | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal4. html #Envision2030 Goal 5: Gender Equality | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal5. html #Envision2030 Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envisi on2030-goal6.html #Envision2030 Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envisi on2030-goal7.html

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

139

#Envision2030 Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilit ies/envision2030-goal8.html #Envision2030 Goal 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilit ies/envision2030-goal9.html #Envision2030 Goal 10: Reduce Inequalities | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envisi on2030-goal10.html #Envision2030 Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilit ies/envision2030-goal11.html #Envision2030 Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/ disabilities/envision2030-goal12.html #Envision2030 Goal 13: Climate Action | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goa l13.html #Envision2030 Goal 14: Life Below Water | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envisi on2030-goal14.html #Envision2030 Goal 15: Life on Land | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goa l15.html #Envision2030 Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilit ies/envision2030-goal16.html #Envision2030 Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals | United Nations Enable. (2016, March 3). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envisi on2030-goal17.html Fogg, B. (2008) With Persuasive Tech, Computers Know Best, Talk of the Nation [WWW Document]. Available at: https://www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=87984362 (Accessed 22 December 2020). Frisk, E. and Larson, K. L. (2011) Educating for Sustainability: Competencies & practices for Transformative Action. Journal of Sustainability Education, 2(1), 1–20. Galtung, J. (2011) Peace, Positive and Negative. In The Encyclopedia of Peace Psychology. American Cancer Society. https://doi.org/10.1002/978047067 2532.wbepp189 Gärde, R. (2016) Preserving the Colonial Other: A Postcolonial Discourse Analysis of the Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals.

140

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

Grewal, B. S. (2003) Johan Galtung: Positive and Negative Peace. School of Social Science, Auckland University of Technology, 30, 23–26. Guadagno, R. E., Nelson, M. and Lock Lee, L. (2018) Peace Data Standard: A Practical and Theoretical Framework for Using Technology to Examine Intergroup Interactions. Frontiers in Psychology, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2018.00734 Held, M. B. E. (2019) Decolonizing Research Paradigms in the Context of Settler Colonialism: An Unsettling, Mutual, and Collaborative Effort. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18. https://doi.org/10.1177/160 9406918821574 Hughes, J. B. (2020) Peace Engineering: A Convergent Area of Engineering Research and Education. Presented at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX. Hughes, J. B. and Breedlove, P. (2020) Peace Engineering. The Bridge, 50th Anniversary Edition, National Academy of Engineering, National Academy Press, In Press. Hulkko-Nyman, K. (2016) Making Strategy Work: Sense and Sensibility of ResultsOriented Pay Systems. Aalto University. https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi:443/handle/ 123456789/20263 Jordan, R., Agi, K., Maio, E., Nair, I., Koechner, D. and Ballard, D. (2018) Invitation to Shape Peace Engineering from November 12–16, 2018. WEEFGEDC. Jordan, R., Agi, K., Amadei, B., Casuse, T., Koechner, D., Nair, I., Nelson, M., Olson, M., Quihuis, M. and Tangorra, J. (2020). Outcomes of the First Global Peace Engineering Conference. Procedia Computer Science, 172, 803– 810. Jordan, R., Agi, K., Arora, S., Christodoulou, C. G., Schamiloglu, E., Koechner, D., Schuler, A., Howe, K., Bidram, A., Martinez-Ramon, M. and Lehr, J. (2021) Peace Engineering in Practice: A Case Study at the University of New Mexico. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 173, 121113. Koerner, L. (2018) Paradigm Shifts Necessary for 21st Century Learning for Peace Engineering. 2018 World Engineering Education Forum-Global Engineering Deans Council (WEEF-GEDC), 1–6. Lempert, D. (2017) Testing the Global Community’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Against Professional Standards and International Law. Consilience (18). https://doi.org/10.7916/consilience.v0i18.3887 Lynn, D. (2014) Socialist Feminism and Triple Oppression: Claudia Jones and African American Women in American Communism. Journal for the Study Radicalism, 8, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.14321/jstudradi.8.2.0001 Marinakis, Y., Harvey, H. A. and Walsh, S. T. (2021) The Emergence of Peace Engineering and Innovation. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 170, 120867.

7

PEACE DATA, PEACE FINANCE, AND PEACE ENGINEERING …

141

Mülbert, P. O. and Sajnovits, A. (2020) The Inside Information Regime of the MAR and the Rise of the ESG Era. European Corporate Governance InstituteLaw Working Paper (548). Nakata, M. (2007) An Indigenous Standpoint Theory. In Disciplining the Savages: Savaging the Discipline. Aboriginal Studies Press. Orbe, M. P. (1997) Constructing Co-cultural Theory: An Explication of Culture, Power, and Communication. Sage. Orlowski, J. (2020) The Social Dilemma. Netflix Official Site. Available at: https://www.netflix.com/nl-en/title/81254224 (Accessed: 7 December 2020). Peace Innovation (2020) Inclusion and Diversity in Design-Thinking with Aishatu Gwadabe | PeaceX. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Yn92hzF3vr8&ab_channel=PeaceInnovation (Accessed: 7 December 2020). Peace Innovation Institute (2020) Peace Innovation Institute [WWW Document]. Peace Innovation Institute. Available at: https://www.peaceinnovat ion.com (Accessed 7 December 2020). Peace Innovation Lab Stanford (2020) Peace Innovation Lab Stanford [WWW Document]. Peace Innovation Lab Stanford. Available at: https://www.peacei nnovation.stanford.edu (Accessed 17 December 2020). Plump, W. (2019) Conversations: Olson and Tangorra on Peace Engineering, Drexel University College of Engineering. Available at: https://drexel.edu/ engineering/news-events/news/archive/2019/March/conversations-olsonand-tangorra-on-peace-engineering/ (Accessed: 7 December 2020). Przychodzen, J. et al. (2016) ESG Issues Among Fund Managers—Factors and Motives. Sustainability, 8(10), 1078. https://doi.org/10.3390/su8101078 Quihuis, M. and Lane, M. (2021) Harms Modeling for Ethical Technology & AI with Microsoft’s Mira Lane - Solve for X: Solutions that Spark Change [WWW Document]. Podcast on Spotify. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3xCecPNDjbiNqTVAB9NPlO?si=nEz LYPhJQ3a4mkjtXKLwBA (Accessed 6 January 2020). Resolutions Northwest (2019) Impact vs Intent by Nyanga Uuka. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBMWkHHAkN8&ab_channel=Res olutionsNorthwest (Accessed 22 December 2020). Samoff, J., Leer, J. and Reddy, M. (2016) Capturing Complexity and Context: Evaluating Aid to Education. Elanders Sverige AB, Stockholm. Senge, P. M. and Sterman, J. D. (1992) Systems Thinking and Organizational Learning: Acting Locally and Thinking Globally in the Organization of the Future. European Journal of Operational Research, 59(1), 137–150. Shamoa-Nir, L. (2017) The Window Becomes a Mirror: The Use of the Johari Window Model to Evaluate Stereotypes in Intergroup Dialogue in Israel. Israel Affairs, 23, 727–746.

142

A.

VAN

KERSEN ET AL.

Smith, P. (2019, June) Presentation on Global Society of Peace Engineers. Summer Institute of Peace Engineering, Hague. Strings, S. (2019) Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. NYU Press. Svart, M. (2019) Capitalism Isn’t “Broken”. It’s Working All Too Well—And We’re the Worse for It | Maria Svart | Opinion [WWW Document]. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2019/jun/12/capitalism-isnt-broken-its-working-all-too-well-and-were-theworse-for-it (Accessed 22 December 2020). Swain, A. (2008) Mission Not yet Accomplished: Managing Water Resources in the Nile River Basin. Journal of International Affairs, 61, 201–214. THE 17 GOALS | Sustainable Development. (n.d.). Available at: https://sdgs.un. org/goals(Accessed 23 August 2021). Townsend, S. (2020) Your 2030 Sustainability Targets Are Wrong [WWW Document]. Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/solitairetow nsend/2020/06/07/your-2030-sustainability-targets-are-wrong/ (Accessed 6 January 2020). Union of International Associations (2020) Colonialism | World Problems & Global Issues | The Encyclopedia of World Problems [WWW Document]. The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential. Available at: http:// encyclopedia.uia.org/en/problem/132691 (Accessed 17 December 2020). United Nations (2018) Sustainable Development Goals. Available at: https:// sdgs.un.org/ (Accessed: 7 December 2020). Vesilind, P. A. (2006) Peace Engineering. Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice, 132(4), 283–287. Vesilind, P. A. (2013) Peace Engineering. When Personal Values and Engineering Careers Converge (2nd ed.). Lakeshore Press. WEEF&GEDC (2020a) Studio 3 Day 2.3 Inclusivity in Engineering+Intercultural Competencies: What Engineering Should [WWW Document]. Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9t jTY0uGGs&feature=emb_title&ab_channel=PennyLaneStudios (Accessed 23 December 2020). WEEF&GEDC (2020b) Studio 3 Day 2.2 Financing Peace: A Financial Proposition on the Value of Peace Empowering Engineers. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LukJtTnn4Jc&%3Bfeature= emb_title&%3Bab_channel=PennyLaneStudios (Accessed: 02.05.21). Yarnall, K., Olson, M., Santiago, I., & Zelizer, C. (2021) Peace Engineering as a Pathway to the Sustainable Development Goals. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 168, 120753. Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: Barack Obama’s Books of 2019. Profile Books.

CHAPTER 8

Decentralized Networks vs The Trolls Derek Caelin

Introduction Technology is exploding the concept of community, as it always has. The history of society is one of continuous expansion and interconnection, and technology has often been the driver. When humans first started creating communities, group identity used to rely primarily on factors such as birth and physical location (Gupta 2020); gradually the advent of newspapers, railways, and eventually mass telecommunications technologies have expanded and mixed human relations so that today a person might more readily identify with a contact in an online social network than with his or her neighbor. As the world grows more connected and human interactions increasingly take place in online spaces, the future for humanity depends on our ability to govern online social spaces effectively. Our ability to wield this new technology effectively matters, especially to minority or historically marginalized populations. Says Zeynep Tufekci: “Technologies alter our ability to preserve and circulate ideas and stories, the ways in which

D. Caelin (B) Social Impact Technologist, Rocky Hill, CT, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_8

143

144

D. CAELIN

we connect and converse, the people with whom we can interact, the things that we can see, and the structures of power that oversee the means of contact” (Tufekci 2017), essentially, the things that matter most. The rules and tools we use to govern our online spaces shape the experiences we have within them. This chapter explores how one decentralized social network—the Fediverse—has sought to navigate a new technology, better the experience of its community, and deal with the issue of bad actors who have sought to establish a platform for dangerous content. The following is the result of research and interviews I conducted over the course of several months in early 2020. In that time I spoke with 80 people, primarily on the decentralized microblogging social network Mastodon, including 12 interviews of social network administrators and moderators as well as hate speech monitors and experts in dangerous speech. I also conducted a survey of Mastodon users, with 670 respondents.

The Challenge of Centralized Social Media Big social networks are in a tough spot. Amid quirky memes, family stories, and news updates, big social platforms, particularly Facebook and Twitter, are also saturated with content that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence against another group. The effect of social media upon the spread and impact of “dangerous speech”—that is, “any form of expression (e.g. speech, text, or images) that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or participate in violence against members of another group” (Dangerous Speech Project 2020) has been dramatic. Speakers with fringe ideologies can find an audience and interact in “echo chambers,” bolstering one another and spreading their narratives even further. Despite modifying their policies to disallow hate speech and evicting many prominent white nationalists (European Commission 2020), Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have failed to excise Nazi and white nationalist content from their sites. The question remains what to do about it. In some cases, social media companies have gradually taken steps to regulate bad behavior. Facebook has banned hate speech (“Community Standards,” n.d.), and haltingly extended their content moderation policies to prevent explicit support and representation of white nationalism and white separatism (Cox and Kobler 2019). Calling for or encouraging the harassment of

8

DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS VS THE TROLLS

145

others (Murphy and Cacace 2020) is also prohibited. Twitter, likewise, has made cautious evolutions over time; it first banned hate speech (“Hateful Conduct Policy,” n.d.), then updated the policy to include religious dehumanization (Wright 2019). Notwithstanding this, hate speech, harassment, and incitement to violence still appear on the big social media sites, often with dramatic consequences. When in 2019 a gunman live-streamed his attack on the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, the video was viewed thousands of times, despite Facebook’s active effort to expunge it (Facebook 2019). A June 2020 Civil Rights Audit of Facebook criticized the company’s track record in addressing bad content, even as it evolves on a policy level: While Facebook’s Community Standards prohibit hate speech, harassment, and attempts to incite violence through the platform, civil rights advocates contend that not only do Facebook’s policies not go far enough in capturing hateful and harmful content, they also assert that Facebook unevenly enforces or fails to enforce its own policies against prohibited content. Thus harmful content is left on the platform for too long. (Murphy and Cacace 2020)

There is plenty of room to critique social media companies for their slowness to address the issues of dangerous speech and disinformation on their platforms. At the same time, many of the problems they face in addressing content are structural, and not solvable simply through policy. Twitter measures its monthly active users in the hundreds of millions (Statista Research Department 2021b), Facebook, in the billions (Statista Research Department 2021a). At the time of writing, 28% of the world population is on Facebook (Internet World Stats 2020). The task of reviewing content is gargantuan and outstrips many of the tools that the big tech companies have at their disposal. Tech companies rely both on human and machine resources to process content, and both are imperfect resources. Facebook users, for example, flag over one million pieces of content worldwide, but “the vast majority of items flagged do not violate the Community Standards of Facebook. Instead content flags often reflect internal group conflicts or disagreements of opinion” (Klonic 2017). Artificial Intelligence is capable of sifting through vast swaths of content, but still frequently fails to account for context or misidentifies the nature of posts (Copia Institute 2020).

146

D. CAELIN

Mike Masnick, a technology researcher and the editor of Tech Dirt says that “Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well” (Masnick 2019a) First, Moderation is likely to anger whomever is moderated—and the more people in a social network, the more types of differing views, mindsets, and perspectives the policy will need to be represented by policy. Second, says Masnick, content moderation is inherently subjective, relying on judgment calls in gray areas that are bound to be questioned. Third, there is an issue of scale: Getting 99.9% of content moderation decisions at an “acceptable” level probably works fine for situations when you’re dealing with 1,000 moderation decisions per day, but large platforms are dealing with way more than that... On Facebook alone a recent report noted that there are 350 million photos uploaded every single day. And that’s just photos. If there’s a 99.9% accuracy rate, it’s still going to make “mistakes” on 350,000 images. Every. Single. Day.

Large social networks appear to have trouble responding swiftly to hateful or violent content. I asked people who monitor hate speech how rapidly social networks responded to the content they found and reported. Jacqueline LaCroix, who researched hate speech at PeaceTech Lab and other places (“PeaceTech Lab | Hate Speech,” n.d.), tells me that “it generally took several weeks for Twitter to remove them, if they did.” I reported accounts that were either blatantly equating racial or ethnic groups with animals or other inhuman characteristics or were advocating violence against certain groups… most of these were eventually banned from Twitter but I think it took around 2-4 weeks at least.

One technologist based in Pakistan who conducts social media monitoring campaigns reflected that: “We have dismantled many cyber armies on Twitter. We would report material against minorities, violent extremism, dangerous speech. At times Twitter responded. At times they didn’t.” And so, the behemoth social media companies stumble on, removing millions of posts per day, but unable to resolve the issue of harmful content on their sites.

8

DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS VS THE TROLLS

147

The Fediverse In May 2008, a Montreal-based developer named Evan Prodromou published the first post on a humble new social network. Identi.ca became a darling of many free and open software advocates (Behrenshausen 2013), and presented a creative take on social media allowing many different machines to run the network. Rather than relying on a single company to host the service, any developer could spin up an Identi.ca server and start communicating with other users. This sort of relationship relied on a protocol—a communication standard that anyone could use to build a compatible service—which would go through several iterations, eventually becoming the ActivityPub protocol in 2018. After it was recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium as a way for two social services to communicate with each other (W3C 2018), the technology has blossomed and been adopted as a communication standard by a range of different platforms. ActivityPub drives a suite of alternatives to the well-known and familiar services that make up the daily Internet. PeerTube is a free and decentralized alternative to video hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. Pixelfed stands in for image-based social networks like Instagram. WriteFreely replicates Medium. The largest and most active of the ActivityPub-based services is Mastodon, a Twitter-like social network with 500-character posts presented in a reverse-chronological timeline. Together, these and other services form a federated universe of social networks. Each of these applications employs the ActivityPub protocol to communicate, so that different services can speak to one another and exchange content; for example, a user of Mastodon could subscribe to a PeerTube video channel and comment on videos as they are posted. This network of connected servers and services sharing content and users is called the “Fediverse” (an amalgamation of “Federated” and “Universe”). Today, with 4.4 million users, Mastodon is the largest and most established of these networks, and it is made up of thousands of servers (called “instances”) that focus on different topics and communities. Mastodon.social is one of the oldest and largest instances, but it has deliberately stopped accepting new applicants so as not to grow too large and drown out the other Mastodon servers. There are instances for a variety of interests: Mastodon.technology is a place for techies to talk shop (or anything else that comes to mind)—Social.coop is where enthusiasts for

148

D. CAELIN

cooperatives congregate. There are instances for political communities, instances for advocacy, for LGBTQ communities, and for writers. Soon after its launch, Mastodon gained a reputation for being a sort of anti-Twitter. The creator of the technology, Eugen Rochko, explicitly critiqued Twitter’s failures to address harassment and hate speech in his reasons for starting the service (Rochko 2017). Early coverage of the network praised its “diverse yet welcoming online environment” (Rhodes 2017) where users are “authentic” and active in creating safe spaces (Jackson 2018). Even as Mastodon won praise from its users, commentators speculated what would happen when a decentralized network grew beyond the control and moderation reach of its creator (Morse 2017).

Here Come the Trolls In June of 2019, a worried developer began a conversation about white supremacists. Github user Laurelai voiced a concern that had saturated her community for weeks, ever since Gab, a far-right social network known as a safe haven for neo-Nazis and white supremacists, had announced its intention to launch a new platform. Gab’s previous site had been taken offline in October 2018, after a platform user killed eleven people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, and scrutiny of the Gab by its hosting and financial service providers shone a spotlight on its acceptance and encouragement of hate speech (Rosenberg 2018). Gab was descending on the Fediverse, whose users were particularly dismayed that the open source code Gab’s developers were exploiting originated from Mastodon. Developers worried that unless something were done, Gab’s hundreds of thousands of users would spill over and contaminate their own social networks. “Not to put too fine of a point on it but we have about a month before the monsters come,” said Laurelai, pointing to the July start date of the new server (Laurelai 2019). When i first started getting into mastodon i tried to tell people these types would show up eventually and got laughed at and ridiculed for it. Now the barbarians are at the gates and we are not ready and a lot of people just want to let them in…If we aren’t prepared these fascists will overrun and destroy our communities.

8

DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS VS THE TROLLS

149

The migration of Gab marked a major test for the Fediverse. Because no one authority controlled the policies of the network, it would be impossible to bar Gab with a single sweeping action, the way centralized social networks such as Facebook or Twitter might. Instead, it would take a mass movement of administrators, moderators, and technology providers to block, isolate, and moderate the new server. For years, users of the Fediverse had touted that its design favored kinder interactions and provided more tools for moderators to address the threat of bad actors online. That design would now be put to the test. Laurelai’s fears were soon realized. Within a day of launching, Gab had swollen to become the largest node in the Fediverse, reportedly more than doubling the size of the next largest server (Robertson 2019). The worst had happened; the trolls had deposited themselves in the new frontier. In the year following the advent of Gab, however, the Fediverse demonstrated why its design is resilient to bad actors, and how decentralization and powerful moderation tools have succeeded in making a social network that better—though not perfectly—protects its users, not only from neo-Nazis, but to some extent from racism and trollish behaviors. The Fediverse’s success in dealing with a wealth of bad actors like Gab demonstrates how the decentralized social network is better-equipped to provide a safer, more positive online experience than the centralized alternatives. In interviews, conversations, and surveys of users of the Fediverse, users and administrators pointed to three elements that helped them to address the issues of bad content and bad actors: codes of conduct at the instance level, moderation by humans, and an array of effective moderation tools.

Codes of Conduct Codes of conduct are rules of behavior that govern a particular instance within the Fediverse. By being a member of an instance, a user is required to adhere to that instance’s rule set. In a decentralized network, this means that many different instances can maintain different codes of conduct, and that users will interact with people governed by different rules. Administrators in the Fediverse will often use words like “evolving,” or “changing” to describe their codes of conduct. Depending on the instance these rule sets can be either far more exacting or loose,

150

D. CAELIN

depending on the interests of the administrator or the communities they support. Within the Fediverse the spectrum of policies ranges from promoting unrestricted speech to defining explicit rules for acceptable behavior. For example, Qoto.org, an instance for “scholars in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM),” enacts few regulations on member behavior. “We are a free speech, no censorship zone,” says the instance’s “about” page (Qoto.org, n.d.). “Feel free to talk about whatever you want, say whatever you want, as long as it is legal and you engage respectfully you won’t ever get banned from the server. With that said we do have a few rules: No spam, and no using multiple accounts to circumvent personal bans, and a few others.” On the other end of the spectrum is an instance like Mastodon.technology, which maintains a long list of rules (Mastodon.technology, n.d.). The policies are intentionally broad (in a way that might give the policy team at Facebook heartburn). “No racism. No sexism,” says the rule list. “No discrimination based on gender, sexual minority, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), or national origin.” Seventeen bullets down, just in case the reader thought there was some form of vice that would be tolerated, a catch-all, somewhat tongue-in-cheek rule is added: “No other unethical conduct.” When selecting a home in the Fediverse, a user might end up selecting an instance not only based off the stated interests of the server, based on the code of conduct, and what rules they want to be governed by. People who favor unregulated environments gravitate in one direction, others who want to exist in places with specific rules governing members go in another. In this way, users get to choose what sort of experience they want to have. The Fediverse achieves a flexibility that can’t happen in centralized social networks. Where big social media platforms tend to restrain behavior only in limited circumstances, many Fediverse servers adopt sweeping regulations, depending on the wishes of the administrator and the denizens of the instance. While social media companies tend to update their policies only after public scrutiny and pressure, leaving harmful content online, codes of conduct on Mastodon appear to change quickly to meet the needs of their community to address user needs. Emi Do, a moderator on Social.coop, describes a process by which people highlight concerns, discuss them, and vote on them using an open

8

DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS VS THE TROLLS

151

source, online decision-making tool called Loomio. “If we feel like we need to actually write something new into our code of conduct, then we raise that in the community working group in Loomio, and then we raise that with the all members in the general Loomio group.” Maff, the administrator of Queer.party, tells me that their server’s code of conduct “started out as more or less a boilerplate ‘please don’t do crimes, common sense is an important life skill’, but as more users signed up and more waves of people shifted to mastodon, a lot of stuff came up that it felt important to actually -state-,” such as their policy around pornographic images. Mastodon.technology’s code of conduct has also changed dramatically over time. “Originally it was a sort of a plug and play,” Furrow said. He employed a “…Creative Commons license code of conduct, and then when we had the blow up [of new users] we went through it… People gave feedback, and we debated different points, and we took things out and put things in. Yeah, it was a lot of discussion. It was about a three month process. That was really, really interesting and raised all sorts of issues that I hadn’t even considered.” Accommodating New Users In November 2019, Mastodon administrators began seeing a spike in new users from across India. Twitter had come under intense criticism in recent months for twice suspending a prominent lawyer who argued before the Indian Supreme Court (Khan 2019). Sanjay Hegde’s account had run afoul of Twitter’s automated moderation tools, which failed to understand the meaning behind his use of a picture of August Landmesser, a German national who refused to salute Adolf Hitler (Basu 2019). Indian users were also critical of how Twitter distributed “blue-checks,” the icon after a person’s username to indicate a verified account. “Blue check marks on @Twitter have become… a matter of caste divide, assertion & privilege,” said Supreme Court lawyer Nitin Meshram (News18 2019). After Hegde publicly migrated to Mastodon, frustrated by Twitter’s intransigence and lack of responsiveness, many Indians began to follow suit. The new and distinct user group wanted their Mastodon moderators to behave differently from Twitter, and they campaigned for changes in their instances’ rules governing behavior. “There was a big push to remove casteism from the Fediverse, which is discrimination based on caste,” said

152

D. CAELIN

Ash Furrow, the administrator of Mastodon.technology. “It’s not something that I had ever considered for, it’s something that we added to our code of conduct because it’s something our new users need.”

Human Moderation Unwelcome content will inevitably emerge in social environments, especially when participants are interacting with communities with different codes of conduct. When this happens, the presence of a moderator whose role is to process and address conflict can be essential. “This is not Twitter,” says the About page of Queer.party. “Reporting posts that make you feel uncomfortable, or that you feel should be brought to our attention, is highly encouraged. Your reports will not be ignored, and will be dealt with (usually) within a few days.” Users appreciate having active moderation to address issues when they arise. “Places that have very active moderation… even places that are larger but have a more involved mod team like Playviscious.social will have a quick and often more satisfying response to reports,” one user of the latter instance told me. “It’s also a question of content,” the user continued, highlighting how differing codes of conduct can result in clashes between two instances. “If the instance has a [code of conduct] that allows for racists to participate in their community, they’re obv not going to be as sensitive to those types of abuse reports. If they host a bunch of irony poisoned lefty edgelords, they’re not going to respond to reports that request sensitive content warnings and such.” Because of their massive scale, centralized social networks face significant challenges in moderating content, even with the aid of automated moderation. Even its vast array of in-house and third party moderators (Wong 2019) have not allowed Facebook to fully address its content moderation problems. By contrast, the Fediverse moderators I spoke with in this research project tended not to feel overwhelmed by their tasks. Mastodon.technology, an instance with 20,000 users (roughly 2,000 of which are active every month) needs its four moderators to take action only about a dozen times a week. “A single mod can handle most of the load,” said Daniel Supernault, the developer for PixelFed and the sole moderator for the flagship instance for the ActivityPub equivalent of Instagram, “We don’t get many reports, the latest one on Pixelfed.Social is three months old.” The moderators of

8

DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS VS THE TROLLS

153

Social.coop, an instance of about 2,000 people, only need to intervene once or twice a week. LGBTQIA.is acts a couple of times a month. “I pretty much never see things that are outright hateful due to a combination of network effects and my mods being really proactive about trying to firewall off the kind of spaces that cultivate dickwads,” one user, Starkatt, told me (katt, fracturing 2020). “The great thing about the mods is they’re community members so they’re embedded in the relevant social context. This means they’re able to act based on subtleties that might be invisible to outsiders. It also means their curation is very active because they don’t want to deal with dickwads either.”

Moderation Tools What about when moderators need to take action? What levers do moderators pull when dealing with content on their instances? Moderators and administrators have a range of options at their disposal, ranging from facilitated discussion to an instance-wide ban. Interestingly, not all moderation tools are the same across platforms, leading to different challenges between different social networks. Discussion The beginning of most interventions can be as simple as asking people to engage. Emi Do, a moderator for Social.coop, explained how she and other moderators on her team try to deal with issues when conflict arises on her server. Most of the things that we are intervening on are people who are concerned about the behavior of people off our instance, not necessarily on our instance. There’s a lot of agreement in terms of our community code of conduct. If there is an issue, if we just point to the code of conduct and facilitate a conversation between the person who has raised the issue and the person who perpetrated the issue, people are very open to taking down posts, editing, engaging in conversation. But I think that’s just who we are attracting to our instance. I think the reason why people are on our instance might be different from the reasons why they would be on Twitter.

154

D. CAELIN

Silencing Moderators also have the ability to “silence” a user or an instance, meaning that their content will not be seen in timelines unless they are followed by a user. This option allows users to follow users and interact with if they seek it out, but it will not make other users on the view the same content. Silencing can be an appropriate tactic if there is a single bad user on a server, but if the bad actor is representative of the server as a whole, it may be worthwhile to take extreme measures: defederation. Defederation Moderators and administrators have real power using Mastodon, within their own domains. It’s within the ability of moderators to block individuals from interacting with their users or—if necessary—defederate with the server altogether, preventing any content or users from one site showing up on their server. The administrator of Queer.party, who goes by “Maff” online, explained the more dramatic measures instance admins can take to protect their users from bad actors. “When an instance values free speech above all, to the detriment of all (e.g. Gab) the standard policy is to de-federate it - mark the domain as ‘suspended’, preventing any communication between it and [another instance] This also applies when the instance either outright does not perform any moderation, or when their policies explicitly allow harmful activity or bad actors. It doesn’t feel great, but the alternative is that the federated timeline gets filled with hate, or users … get harassed by people from those instances.” The hashtag “#Fediblock” is one way users and administrators make reports on bad actors, explaining which instances or users they’d recommend blocking proactively, and why. When I interviewed users about their Fediverse experience, they explained that their moderators proactively watched the #Fediblock hashtag and took action prior to issues emerging on their own instance. Accounts like @[email protected] maintain a recommended blocklist for admins looking to deny Gab and its affiliates access to the broader Fediverse.

8

DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS VS THE TROLLS

155

Defederation in Action In March of 2020, the administrator of Queer.party logged in and discovered that a member of their community had filed a request for moderation. The admin, Maff, was a software security specialist based in Scotland who had moderated the instance since they founded it in 2017. Since that time they had seen moderation reports in all the variety that the Fediverse had to offer, so when they saw a reported comment which read, “Reality: The redskins started fights they couldn’t win and paid dearly,” they knew they’d need to do some research in order to choose how best to respond to the message. At first, they assumed that the message might be related to American sports, since they were aware that a team in the U.S. was named “The Redskins.” But after exploring the context of the post, they soon realized that the reference was not to sports but to American history, and that the term “redskin” was a derogatory term for Native Americans. By itself, the comment may not have caught the attention of the major social media companies. But Queer.party’s code of conduct explicitly disallowed “racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and any other discriminatory conduct which attacks any individual or group of individuals based on what they are or what they believe in,” and the post—both the derogatory phrase and the callous justification of violence—fell outside the bounds of acceptable conduct within the instance. Given the content of the message, Maff felt that their role as administrator required an intervention. The question remained—how to respond? The reported post had come from outside Queer.party, so Maff’s next step was to check the code of conduct of the user’s instance. If they found that the terms of service of the poster’s home instance disallowed this sort of posting, they might be able to initiate a dialogue and engage the moderator of the other instance in a dialogue with the poster. What they found was dismaying. Far from being an ordinary member, the poster in question was on the instance’s moderation team. What is more, the server’s code of conduct was filled with red flags. “No LGBTQ. Period,” it read. “No homosexuality. No men who think they’re women or women who think they’re men. No made up genders.” The instance’s rules made it clear that they’d be unsympathetic to Maff raising the issue of the admin’s conduct for discussion. Given the diametrically opposed values of the two instances, Maff made the decision to make an instance-wide block—no messages from any of the remote instance’s users could now be seen by members

156

D. CAELIN

of Queer.party. The instances had been “defederated”—firmly separated from one another within the broader Fediverse. Now none of the users on their instance would see content from the offending site, and ultimately, it was to be hoped, they would have a better experience on the Fediverse. This example of moderation, which plays out with countless different permutations in the Fediverse, illustrates the difference between moderation on a federated social network and in a centralized social media company. It is likely that if the post were reported on Twitter or Facebook, it may not have been processed for some time, and also possible that would not have qualified as “hate speech” in the terms that the larger platforms would have recognized it. Maff was highly aware of the space they were engaging in, and was able to delve into the context surrounding the content, both in terms of the subject matter and the background of the poster. After examining options for intervention, which included everything from dialog, to silencing or blocking an individual, the administrator was able to take a step to not only respond to an individual user’s report, but to proactively protect the community at large. This structure is ultimately one of the reasons that the Fediverse feels “friendlier” to many of its users, because instance administrators are able to isolate themselves from bad actors. Instances that make no effort to moderate content can find themselves speaking only to their own communities or like-minded networks. It isn’t that the Fediverse doesn’t have bad actors—tools like Mastodon simply give communities more tools to isolate and remove them from their communities. Not All Moderation Tools Are the Same Not all moderation tools are created equal in the Fediverse. For example, many users independently told me that video management tools like PeerTube often have a hard time maintaining a clean environment for their users. “There [are] no moderation tools [on PeerTube], so on a peertube instance that federates, it takes a lot of work just to avoid nazi/rape/gore video to be appearing,” @Kyzh, the administrator of Rage.love told me. (Several PeerTube instance administrators I spoke with have entirely cut themselves off from other servers in order to avoid this issue.) PeerTube admins have been asking for years to access the tools that Mastodon admins enjoy (Chocobozzz/PeerTube, n.d.), such as the ability to block entire instances. PeerTube’s developers were aware of this issue, which is why they raised funds to improve software’s moderation features (Framasoft 2020).

8

DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS VS THE TROLLS

157

The experience of PeerTube users, who have sometimes confronted with child pornography or pro-Nazi imagery, is evidence that simply decentralizing social media isn’t enough—administrators must be equipped with powerful moderation tools to be able to tend to their communities. Scale Impacts Moderation Speed and Quality In a poll I conducted on Mastodon, 42% of the 674 respondents said that they had reported something, whether it had been a spam account or hateful content, to their instance’s moderator. For those who reported on response times (about 60 users across 49 instances), the average upper limit response time for a moderator to address an issue was 21 hours, with some saying they get feedback in an hour, or even in minutes. To test the moderation speed of their server, one user reported me to their own instance admin to see how long it would take to respond—within a minute, the admin had circled back with a joke (puffball 2020) (Fig. 8.1). At the same time, scale does seem to play a factor in the quality of moderation. Based on my interviews and discussions with Mastodon users, scale of the instance is a factor that can impact the quality of the moderation response. Mastodon.social, the “flagship” Mastodon instance maintained by the technology’s creator, Eugen Rochko, has four moderators maintaining a community of about 39,000 active users (the instance itself has more than half a million users). At a 1:9800 moderator/active user ratio, it’s one of the lowest on the Fediverse (outside of Mastodon.social, the average ratio of moderator to active user that I encountered was around 1:150). While some users said that their reports to Mastodon.social had been addressed between 24 and 48 hours, others mentioned that they never received feedback on their moderation requests, and one user from Friend.camp told me that they found the bigger instances to be unresponsive. “The reports I send to larger, louder instances often see no action,” said the user. “But the smaller more mindfully cultivated instances respond almost immediately/within a day or so… Places like Radical.town and Mastodon.social where there are easily 1k active members are basically a black hole for reports.” To address this issue, some instances have pre-emptively sought to slow their growth: Octodon.social has switched to member-invites only, “because it’s big enough” (Octodon, n.d.). This may be part of the reason the average size for a social network on the

158

D. CAELIN

Fig. 8.1 A user reported me to an administrator. The report was addressed within a minute

Fediverse is relatively small; according to Fediverse.space, the average size of a Fediverse instance is 870 people.

The Limits of Decentralization The Fediverse is not inherently immune from the moderation challenges that trouble larger networks. Many users are critical of the design decisions Mastodon has made, particularly around user and content discoverability (Valens 2019), which impact a user’s visibility to the broader network, and potential vulnerability to attack. Bad actors can be discouraged from interacting with other servers, but they are free to establish echo chambers in their own spaces. Even the most powerful tools at a moderator’s disposal have their limits. Even as some users praise the Fediverse for behaving differently from centralized solutions, others (often from vulnerable or marginalized communities) feel that there is more to be done.

8

DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS VS THE TROLLS

159

Echo Chambers in Isolation The Fediverse is far from being all friendly. By design, any instance in the Fediverse can follow its own code of conduct, and if that means having free-wheeling, offensive, even racist conversations, nothing about the design of these platforms prevents it. There are consequences to fostering spaces that support hateful behavior. The last post of Robert Bowers on Gab before he killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018 was “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Prior to this he had been in a space that glorified hatred, replete with antisemitism and a community that supported violence against Jews, among other ethnic groups. When a poster on Gab asked, “Do you support the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, Robert Bowers?”, nearly 25% of respondents said they did. One poster replied “Robert Bowers literally did nothing wrong” (Conway et al. 2019). There is a fair critique to be made that an impact of open source, decentralized technology like Mastodon enables bad actors to metastasize on the internet, out of reach of a governing authority. In this respect, the Fediverse has fared no better than centralized platforms in fully expunging bad actors. However, while open protocols and open social networks have allowed instances like Gab to congeal, Mike Masnick points out that “we already have those people infesting the various social networks, and nothing so far has been successful in getting rid of them” (Masnick 2019). ...the larger point is that this would likely quarantine them to some extent, as their content would be less likely to get into the most widely used implementations and services on the protocol. That is, while they would be able to be vile in their own dark corners, their ability to infect the rest of the internet and (importantly) to seek out and recruit others would be severely limited.

Defederation and Filter Bubbles Critiques of Facebook and Twitter also focus on the fact that these platforms help to generate “filter bubbles”—groups in which users are exposed mostly to like-minded opinions and perspectives. Peacebuilding practitioners at Build Up explain that social media platforms “make it easier for us to surround ourselves with like-minded people, interact with people with differing views in ways that emphasize our differences, and

160

D. CAELIN

generally deepen political divides” (Build Up 2019). One could argue that moderators defederating their communities from dissimilar instances generates polarization at a community, rather than individual level. As Siva Vaidhyanathan points out, the platforms we use may or may not limit our vision or entrench our tribalism, and studies of this phenomenon would rely on data kept closely by the platforms themselves. Moreover, the platforms may simply be facilitating the natural human tendency to filter and sort content for themselves. “The arguments about whether the filter bubble exists or how much it matters too often get bogged down in a false dichotomy: is it the fault of technoogy or is it the fault of humans? The answer is always yes” (Vaidhyanathan 2018). Users of Fediverse instances who are separated from one another on the basis of differing codes of conduct or interests experience the same filtering and sorting as users of other big platforms. Imperfect Defederation By definition, a decentralized social network will struggle to apply a single policy across independently-run nodes. In the Fediverse, this means that moderators’ actions will have an unexpected or incomplete result outside the domains they control. When necessary, moderators will block a hostile user or instance in order to prevent their content from showing up on their home instance. The user or instance will fall silent, but moderators will learn that the silencing may not go both ways. Due to confusing sharing agreements between instances—their own users’ posts may remain visible on the banned server. Moderators expressed frustration that a by-product of blocking users means they are unable to address misinformation or libel when it happens online. Users occasionally told me about “code wars” where the maintainers of different platforms seek to circumvent each others’ content blocking policies. Sometimes these circumventions have less to do with protocols and more to do with human behavior; subversive community members are fully able to take pictures of other users’ posts and spread them among their detractors. And sometimes hostile users will be blocked, only return to harass from a different server the next day, forcing admins of targeted communities to play a continuous game of “whack-a-mole.” I asked users whether steps could be taken to address these problems. While some called for structural changes to Fediverse platforms source

8

DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS VS THE TROLLS

161

code, such as requiring Federation to be a consensual process rather than the default, others thought that the worst of the behavior they witnessed couldn’t be addressed through changes in code. “I wish more people understood that technology can’t solve inherently human problems,” one user told me. “Turns out,” said another, “no amount of coding will solve the systemic problems of poor human behaviour. Solving these things needs a cultural shift. And this place simply has not delivered, despite all the BirdSite™ rhetoric and the hubris of people talking about how great this place is.” Putting power in the hands of human moderators and giving them powerful moderation tools and communities bound to representative codes of conduct may address many of the ills of social networks, but the Fediverse is no utopia. Many find the rules of the Fediverse insufficient. Structures can shape human behaviors—encourage some actions, and discourage others, but making a healthy online environment also requires a mass effort.

Gab Is Isolated The effort to block out Gab (and other bad actors) played out in myriad ways. Activists like Laurelai campaigned hard to get web-clients to block Gab’s domain at the software level. Another user, who at the time went by the name Yowlen, pressured App repositories like F-Droid to tag Fediverse client apps with “Promotes bigotry” if they didn’t hardcode blocks to Gab and similar repositories (Yowlen 2019). The user, who now goes by the handle KitsuneAlicia, posted the following message on the F-Droid servers: We need a way to combat the bigotry and harassment that goes on in online spaces, and the first step needs to be holding the developers themselves accountable for enabling said bigotry in the first place. If your stance is clearly pro-Nazism, people need to have that warning that your software may not be safe for them.

As a result of public pressure like this, at least four of the major Fediverse clients (Tusky, Toot,! Mast, and Amaroq) block Gab in some fashion (Robertson 2019). And, at the instance level, a vast number of Fediverse communities simply don’t associate with it and other similar actors.x’

162

D. CAELIN

Catgirl, the administrator for LGBTQIA.is, recalled their experience when Gab entered the scene: “I remember when Gab first came out, I checked it out and immediately you had one of the guys saying to ‘shove jews back on a train’…that goes beyond a “freedom of speech” server, it’s more of a freedom to incite violence server.” When I asked whether Gab was an isolated instance they replied, “No one wants to federate with them. It’s a circlejerk of people spreading hate.” Ash Furrow explained his decision to not only defederate his server from Gab, but even from instances that federate with Gab. Setting up two degrees of separation from Gab is a rare step, but Furrow sees it as a necessary step, since through them negative content might seep into the instance he maintains. It’s either the case that they agree and they’re like ‘oh wow, I don’t want to be associated with this at all’ or they see it in sort of free speech absolutionist terms….And, you know, I can kind of see where they’re coming from – and listen, I’m Canadian, I’m not really a very vocal person, I don’t like confrontation – but I’ll tell them, ‘is federating with Gab more important than federating with Mastodon.technology?’ It’s a decision that I put in their field.

Through these dynamics, communities of communities have formed within the Fediverse, the divisions formed through different codes of conducts and different definitions for acceptable speech. Instances like Rage.love, Stardew.city, and Social.linux.pizza, publicize lengthy blocklists detailing the servers they don’t federate with, or whose users they silence. Instances with lengthy codes of conduct can end up with weak ties or no ties to instances with relatively few restrictions. “Islands are forming, more or less connected, and that’s ok,” Arteteco, a moderator on Qoto.org, told me, describing how his instance, which places relatively few restrictions on user behavior, has ended up being blocked by many servers. The effect even more pronounced with Gab is at the center of one of those islands in the Fediverse—disconnected from the broader whole. Almost one year after it had joined the Fediverse, Gab’s CTO Rob Colbert took to the platform to announce that the instance was packing up its bags (5/29/2020). In his post he expressed frustration with Gab’s isolation, that “the implementation will change and we won’t be compatible with this Fediverse.”

8

DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS VS THE TROLLS

163

Truth be told (and this data is public) Gab is 99.3% insular. 0.7% of people on Gab mention someone who isn’t on Gab. So, Gab is wasting resources importing bags of shit no one reads … so that 0.7% of the community can (occasionally) mention someone off-site.

It’s unclear what the defederation timeline is for Gab’s departure, or what form the site will take. But it is clear that isolation has impacted the network’s plans and dimmed their hopes of finding a broader community in a decentralized social network. The Fediverse had rejected Gab.

What’s Next for Social Media? As more public focus is directed on social media and its impact on society, both centralized and decentralized networks are trying to adapt and address their challenges with bad actors. The Future Centralized Social Media In December 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took to the platform to announce an initiative to create an “open and decentralized standard for social media” (Dorsey 2019). Citing a range of issues plaguing social media companies, Dorsey proclaimed that the initiative, dubbed “bluesky,” would explore a standard for communication that could be used by many social media companies, including Twitter. In his thread, Dorsey cited Mike Masnick’s article, “Protocols, Not Platforms,” which lays out an argument in favor of a decentralized social network (Masnick 2019). Rather than have all social interactions take place within a handful of services, a vast collection of smaller social networks could adopt open protocols for communication, much the same way that email service providers operate using the shared, open protocols. According to Dorsey, not only would such a system encourage innovation by allowing other companies to compete with big social media providers for their users, it would improve moderation by distributing it from one central authority to a vast array of moderators. Dorsey promised to “either find an existing decentralized standard they can help move forward, or failing that, create one from scratch.” He signaled his expectation to build a new protocol from the ground up, saying “we’d expect this team not only to develop a decentralized standard for social media, but to also build open community around it.”

164

D. CAELIN

I asked Fediverse moderators what they thought about Twitter developing an open protocol, potentially even adopting the ActivityPub standard upon which their own networks depended. Reactions ranged from concern to indifference. “I don’t think they will implement ActivityPub,” said Catgirl. “The amount of tweets would flood other instances. Many instance owners told me they will block Twitter.” When I asked if he was worried about Twitter adopting an open protocol, Ash Furrow said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” The Future for the Fediverse I tracked Laurelai down and asked her how she felt about the way that Mastodon and the broader Fediverse had adapted to bad actors. I was disappointed to learn that she wasn’t happy: she felt that Mastodon had failed to take some steps that would make users safer (making federation between servers a mutual act, changing the way that block rules function). After Gab had first arrived, she packed up and migrated to a new server and installed custom modifications to improve the safety of her users. She doesn’t think the Fediverse will exist, in the long run. And yet, it means something that Laurelai is still here, occupying a corner of the decentralized social network. Decentralization and open protocols make it possible for people to build communities according to the rules they want, and human moderators—context aware, embedded in the communities they serve—make these spaces safer and more reflective of their users values. As the world grows increasingly connected and more people come online, big social media companies are vying to be the platform that hosts online human interaction. Due to their sprawling size and slowness to address fundamental content issues, these platforms are ill-equipped for creating safe spaces for people to interact. Perhaps, as decentralized networks grow in scale and sophistication, they will emerge as a viable alternative to the centralized networks, and prove that social spaces can be safe, responsive, and truly our own.

References ‘A Further Update on New Zealand Terrorist Attack’ (2019) Facebook, 20 March. Available at: https://about.fb.com/news/2019/03/technical-upd ate-on-new-zealand/ (Accessed: 24 August 2020).

8

DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS VS THE TROLLS

165

‘ActivityPub Is Now a W3C Recommendation | W3C News’ (2018), 23 January. Available at: https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6785 (Accessed: 22 August 2020). Basu, N. (2019) ‘SC Lawyer Sanjay Hegde Tangles with Twitter over “Defiance” Photo from 1936 Nazi Germany’, ThePrint, 27 October. Available at: https://theprint.in/india/sc-lawyer-sanjay-hegde-tangles-with-twi tter-over-defiance-photo-from-1936-nazi-germany/312064/ (Accessed: 22 August 2020). Behrenshausen, B. (2013) ‘Pump.io: The Decentralized Social Network That’s Really Fun’, Opensource.com. Available at: https://opensource.com/life/13/ 7/pump-io (Accessed: 22 August 2020). Caelin, D. (2020) ‘Derek Caelin (@[email protected])’, Mastodon for Tech Folks. Available at: https://mastodon.technology/@Argus/104178423 480881678 (Accessed: 23 August 2020). ‘Chocobozzz/PeerTube’ (n.d.) GitHub. Available at: https://github.com/Cho cobozzz/PeerTube (Accessed: 23 August 2020). ‘Community Standards’ (n.d.) Facebook. Available at: https://www.facebook. com/communitystandards/objectionable_content (Accessed: 21 August 2020). Conway, M., Scrivens, R. and Macnair, L. (2019) ‘Right-Wing Extremists’ Persistent Online Presence: History and Contemporary Trends’, International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/res rep19623 (Accessed: 17 September 2020). Copia Institute (2020) ‘Content Moderation Case Study: Facebook’s AI Continues to Struggle with Identifying Nudity’. Available at: https://www. techdirt.com/articles/20201211/15111245871/content-moderation-casestudy-facebooks-ai-continues-to-struggle-with-identifying-nudity-2020.shtml (Accessed: 31 August 2021). Cox, J. and Kobler, J. (2019) ‘Facebook Bans White Nationalism and White Separatism, Motherboard’. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en_ us/article/nexpbx/facebook-bans-white-nationalism-and-white-separatism (Accessed: 22 August 2020). ‘Dangerous Speech: A Practical Guide’ (2020) Dangerous Speech Project. Available at: https://dangerousspeech.org/guide/ (Accessed: 1 October 2020). Dorsey, J. (2019) ‘Jack on Twitter’, Twitter. Available at: https://twitter.com/ jack/status/1204766078468911106 (Accessed: 22 August 2020). European Commission (2020) ‘The Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online’, European Commission. Available at: https://ec.europa. eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/QANDA_20_1135 (Accessed: 24 August 2020).

166

D. CAELIN

‘Facebook World Stats and Penetration in the World—Facebook Statistics’ (2020) Internet World Stats. Available at: https://internetworldstats.com/facebook. htm (Accessed: 1 October 2020). Framasoft, ‘V3 Roadmap Moderation, Let’s Improve Plugins and Playlists!’ (2020) JoinPeerTube. Available at: https://joinpeertube.org (Accessed: 23 August 2020). Gans, J. and Leigh, A. (2019) Innovation + Equality: How to Create a Future That Is More Star Trek Than Terminator. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gupta, Anika (2020) How to Handle a Crowd. Tiller Press ‘Hateful Conduct Policy’ (n.d.) Available at: https://help.twitter.com/en/rulesand-policies/hateful-conduct-policy (Accessed: 22 August 2020). IsolateGab (2020) ‘IsolateGab: mastodon: (@[email protected])’, Todon.nl. Available at: https://todon.nl/@isolategab/104254977308985846 (Accessed: 24 August 2020). Jackson, Gita (2018) ‘Twitter’s Emerging Competitor Doesn’t Want To Be Twitter’, Kotaku. Available at: https://kotaku.com/twitters-emerging-competitordoesnt-want-to-be-twitter-1829069122 (Accessed: 1 October 2020). Katt, fracturing (2020) ‘katt, fracturing (@[email protected])’, The Vulpine Club. Available at: https://vulpine.club/@starkatt/104210054305766763 (Accessed: 23 August 2020). Khan, F. (2019) ‘Twitter Won’t Restore Sanjay Hegde’s Account, Lawyer Says Will Move Court’, ThePrint, 5 November. Available at: https://theprint. in/india/twitter-wont-restore-sanjay-hegdes-account-lawyer-says-will-movecourt/315904/ (Accessed: 22 August 2020). Klonic, K (2017) ‘The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech’. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pap ers.cfm?abstract_id=2937985 (Accessed: 31 August 2021). Laurelai (2019) ‘Hardcode a Block for Gab’s Instance by Default · Issue #108 · Florence-Social/Mastodon-Fork’, GitHub. Available at: https://github.com/ florence-social/mastodon-fork/issues/108 (Accessed: 22 August 2020). Masnick, M. (2019a) ‘Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible to Do Well’, Techdirt. Available at: https://www. techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masnicks-impossibility-the orem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well.shtml (Accessed: 22 August 2020). Masnick, M. (2019b) ‘Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University’. Available at: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-atechnological-approach-to-free-speech (Accessed: 22 August 2020). Morse, J. (2017) ‘Bye, Twitter. All the Cool Kids Are Migrating to Mastodon’, Mashable. Available at: https://mashable.com/2017/04/04/mastodon-twi tter-social-network/ (Accessed: 1 October 2020).

8

DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS VS THE TROLLS

167

Murphy, Laura and Cacace, Megan (2020) ‘Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit— Final Report’, Facebook, p. 42. Available at: https://about.fb.com/wp-con tent/uploads/2020/07/Civil-Rights-Audit-Final-Report.pdf (Accessed: 30 September 2020). ‘Netizens Accuse Twitter of Caste Bias for Verifying Users in India’ (2019) News18. Available at: https://www.news18.com/news/tech/netizens-accusetwitter-of-caste-bias-for-verifying-users-in-india-2376411.html (Accessed: 30 September 2020). Octodon (n.d.) ‘Mastodon Hosted on octodon.social’. Available at: https://oct odon.social/about/more (Accessed: 23 August 2020). O’Donovan, C. et al. (2019) ‘YouTube Is Still Struggling to Rein in Its Recommendation Algorithm’. Available at: https://www.buzzfeednews. com/article/carolineodonovan/down-youtubes-recommendation-rabbithole (Accessed: 23 August 2020). PeaceTech Lab | Hate Speech (n.d.) ‘PeaceTech Lab | Putting the Right Tools in the Right Hands to Build Peace’. Available at: https://www.peacetechlab. org/hate-speech (Accessed: 23 August 2020). Puffball (2020) puffball (@[email protected]), librepunk. Available at: https://www.librepunk.club/@wgahnagl/104210345911497659 (Accessed: 23 August 2020). Qoto Mastodon (n.d.) ‘Mastodon hosted on qoto.org’. Available at: https://qoto. org/about/more (Accessed: 22 August 2020). Rhodes, M. (2017) ‘Like Twitter But Hate the Trolls? Try Mastodon’, Wired, 13 April. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/like-twitter-hatetrolls-try-mastodon/ (Accessed: 1 October 2020). Robertson, A. (2019) ‘How the Biggest Decentralized Social Network Is Dealing with Its Nazi Problem’, The Verge. Available at: https://www.the verge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-networkgab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking (Accessed: 22 August 2020). Rochko, E. (2017) ‘Learning from Twitter’s Mistakes’, Official Mastodon Blog. Available at: http://blog.joinmastodon.org/2017/03/learning-fromtwitters-mistakes/ (Accessed: 22 August 2020). Rules | Mastodon.technology (n.d.) ‘Mastodon Hosted on mastodon.technology’. Available at: https://mastodon.technology/about/more (Accessed: 22 August 2020). Rosenberg, A. (2018) ‘Gab, a Racist-Friendly Alt-Twitter, Has Been Banned by PayPal and Others’, Mashable. Available at: https://mashable.com/article/ gab-paypal-stripe-joyent-synagogue-shooting/ (Accessed: 1 October 2020). Sample, I. (2019) ‘Study Blames YouTube for Rise in Number of Flat Earthers’. Science | The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/sci ence/2019/feb/17/study-blames-youtube-for-rise-in-number-of-flat-earthers (Accessed: 23 August 2020).

168

D. CAELIN

Schulze, E. (2019) ‘EU Says Facebook, Google and Twitter are Getting Faster at Removing Hate Speech Online’, CNBC. Available at: https://www.cnbc. com/2019/02/04/facebook-google-and-twitter-are-getting-faster-at-rem oving-hate-speech-online-eu-finds--.html (Accessed: 22 August 2020). Statista Research Department. (2021a) ‘Facebook: Active Users Worldwide’, Statista. Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/num ber-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ (Accessed: 03 December 2021). Statista Research Department. (2021b) ‘Twitter: Number of Employees 2019’, Statista. Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employ ees-of-twitter/ (Accessed: 03 December 2021). ‘Telecommunications Act of 1996 | United States [1996]’ (n.d.) Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Telecommunic ations-Act (Accessed: 23 August 2020). ‘The Commons, an Intervention to Depolarize Political Conversations on Twitter and Facebook in the USA, 2019 Report’ (n.d.). Build Up, p. 3. Available at: https://howtobuildup.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/The Commons-2019-Report_final.pdf (Accessed: 30 September 2020). Tufekci, Zeynep (2017) Twitter and Teargas. Yale University Press Vaidhyanathan, Siva (2018) Antisocial Media: How FAcebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. Oxford University Press. Valens, A. (2019) ‘Mastodon Is Crumbling—And Many Blame Its Creator’, The Daily Dot. Available at: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/mastodon-fedive rse-eugen-rochko/ (Accessed: 23 August 2020). Van Dijck, J., Poell, T. and De Waal, M. (2019) The Platform Society: Public Values in A Connective World. New York: Oxford University Press. Wong, Q. (2019) ‘Facebook Content Moderation Is an Ugly Business. Here’s Who Does It’, CNET . Available at: https://www.cnet.com/news/fac ebook-content-moderation-is-an-ugly-business-heres-who-does-it/ (Accessed: 15 October 2020). Wright, L. (2019) ‘Twitter Bans Religious Dehumanization’, Dangerous Speech Project. Available at: https://dangerousspeech.org/twitter-bans-religious-deh umanization/ (Accessed: 22 August 2020). Yowlen (2019) ‘Fedilab, Librem Social Supports the Pushing Out of Marginalized Groups - Apps - F-Droid Forum’, F-Droid Forums. Available at: https://forum.f-droid.org/t/fedilab-librem-social-supports-the-pus hing-out-of-marginalized-groups/6470 (Accessed: 24 August 2020).

CHAPTER 9

Understanding Digital Conflict Drivers Helena Puig Larrauri and Maude Morrison

This chapter explores digital drivers of conflict. We examine how technologies are affecting conflict dynamics and what peacebuilders can do to mitigate these effects. We argue that because digital technologies are fundamentally altering the human experience, they are by extension fundamentally altering conflicts. We propose a framework for understanding the impact of technology on conflict, and for categorising different types of peacebuilding interventions. Together, these interventions contribute to the emerging field of digital peacebuilding.

H. Puig Larrauri Build Up, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Morrison (B) Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, Geneva, Switzerland

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_9

169

170

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

Part I: Introduction Over the past 15 years, the peacebuilding field has begun to recognise the importance of digital technology—both in fuelling conflict and in supporting peacebuilding work. Initially, this led to the emergence of the term ‘peacetech’, referring to a growing body of peacebuilding practice that deployed technology as part of its strategic objectives. Across the globe, peacebuilders began to recognise that technology could enhance the impact of the work they had been doing for decades. During the early phases of ‘peacetech’ work, many practitioners approached technology as neutral, as a tool that can be used for positive or negative effect depending on how we choose to use it. As Margot Wallstrom (2015, p. 36) noted in a 2015 issue of Building Peace dedicated to Peacetech, ‘technology in itself is neutral and can be used for both good and evil’. This idea was supported by numerous examples of both positive and negative uses of technology. As positive examples, people pointed to ways technology was enabling more or different voices to participate in discussions about peace, allowing new stories to surface and creating new opportunities for connection. At the same time, it was becoming clear that technology does not automatically lead to peace or positive social change. Negative and violent uses of technology were not hard to find: from video games promoting a culture of violence, to recruitment into armed groups through social media, the use of messaging apps to spread hate speech, and online surveillance by authorities. This dual use led to many viewing technology as a ‘double-edged sword’ (Youngs 2014). The narrative of peacebuilding and technology was one of a binary choice between threat and opportunity. However, this vision of technology as a neutral tool ignored a key complexity—the fact that technology is fundamentally altering the human experience. Today, technology is a mediator of our experience of reality and to approach it as external to the conflict context is to miss the dynamics it fuels regardless of negative intent. In other words, technology is not just a tool that can be used to fuel the flames of violence or to dampen them, depending on the intention of the user. Instead, technology should be considered an integral part of the context in which conflicts occur, and peacebuilding responses should recognise and address these technological factors.

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

171

Before we expand our argument, two caveats. First, we are not claiming that technology is inherently bad because it affects our human experience. Indeed, it can still have positive and negative effects. Technology can divide communities or bring them together. It can provide incredible opportunities for innovation and equally incredible opportunities for destruction. The dual nature of its effects are not disputed. We dispute only the view that technology is a tool external to a context, and can be addressed as separate from the underlying causes of a given conflict. Second, this chapter is not focused on cyber warfare and the use of digital tools as weapons of violence. The deliberate use of technology to inflict harm (for example through the use of drones or cyberattacks on infrastructure) is a distinct topic with a different set of challenges. The responses to these challenges are also different to those we propose here. Those responses are less likely to involve community peacebuilding and more focused on diplomatic efforts, such as the Digital Peace Now campaign which is working to outlaw state-sponsored cyberattackscyber attacks through an international agreement.1 We will not address these issues in this chapter. Instead, this chapter proposes a framework for peacebuilders to understand how technological factors are fundamentally altering (and driving) conflict in certain ways. We examine the ways in which technology creates the enabling conditions for conflict drivers that increase societal division, erode social cohesion, and amplify polarization—and can eventually lead to violent conflict. By better understanding this socio-technological context, peacebuilders can begin to think of digital technologies as a space for peacebuilding action: there is a need for conflict prevention and transformation in the digital space that addresses digital conflict drivers.

Part 2: Framework The potential for positive uses of technology to address conflict has been well documented. Years ago, Puig Larrauri and Kahl (2013) published a framework outlining the functions that technology can play in peacebuilding—data processing, communication, engagement, and gaming.

1 The Digital Peace Now Initiative is a global movement calling for an end to cyber warfare https://digitalpeacenow.org/about-us/.

172

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

Since then, that framework has been revised and updated as countless examples of peacebuilders using technology have emerged.2 In this chapter, we repurpose that framework to explore the role that technology can play in driving conflict. We posit that there are three core ways in which technology interacts with a context, creating the enabling conditions for conflict. They can be categorised as ‘affordances’, or what technology enables one to do. Across each of these core affordances, technology has the potential to alter our experience, and to shape conflict. The three core affordances are: – Strategic communications : The use of digital technologies to create and spread divisive content, such as hate speech, misinformation and disinformation. – Data management : The use of digital technologies to target and accelerate the spread of divisive content. This is currently most evident through algorithmic profiling, deliberate targeting and surveillance. – Networking : The use of digital technologies to generate network effects that continue to drive communities apart. This is currently most evident through affective polarization, divisive identity formation and recruitment into violence. The three categories of affordances are interconnected. The strategic communications affordance refers to the content that can drive conflict. The data management affordance refers to a set of tools that enable conflict actors to more effectively use that content to sew division. The networking affordance creates a set of enabling conditions that make the combination of content and tools even more pervasive. None of these three categories are purely technological issues. They refer to drivers of conflict that predate the current digital era—strategic communications to spread hate through offline media, offline networks of informant-based surveillance, and the polarization effects of conspiracy theories spread by word of mouth, for example. The Rwanda genocide serves as evidence of how these three factors can come together to cause

2 See for example this course developed by Build Up introducing a framework for digital peacebuilding https://howtobuildup.org/community-learning/courses/digital-pea cebuilding-101-introducing-technology-for-peacebuilding/.

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

173

Affordances of Technology Strategic communications The creation and spread of divisive content, such as hate speech, misinformation and disinformation. Networking Generation of network effects that further drive communities apart. Eg. affective polarization, divisive identity formation and recruitment into violence.

1

2

Data management The targeting and accelerated spread of divisive content. Eg. algorithmic profiling, deliberate targeting and surveillance.

3

Fig. 9.1 Affordances of technology for conflict

conflict on a major scale, even without the support of modern day technologies. To over-simplify, hate speech was widespread (strategic communications), messages were targeted to specific communities on specific radio stations (data management) and that in turn led to creation of divisive identities whose network effect further fuelled conflict (networking). Thus, digital technologies are not creating new drivers of conflict, but rather exacerbating and enabling existing ones. As such, the drivers outlined below are what we call ‘socio-technological’ issues—societal issues that, when combined with technology, take on new dimensions (Fig. 9.1; Table 9.1). Strategic Communications A well-recognised benefit of digital technologies is the ability to share information more widely, at a lower cost and greater speed. Social media in particular, has provided new avenues for sharing information in real time. This is in many ways an opportunity for peacebuilding— from understanding what is happening on the ground as it happens, to diffusing messages that can mitigate or prevent conflict and building campaigns calling for peace. However, it is also enabling divisive content to be created more easily and spread more rapidly. In particular, there are three key content-types that can serve as conflict drivers.

174

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

Table 9.1 Affordances of technology for conflict—examples by category Strategic communications: digital technologies to create and spread divisive content

Hate speech

Misinformation

Disinformation

Data management: digital technologies to target and accelerate the spread of divisive content

Algorithmic Profiling

Deliberate targeting

Surveillance

Networking: digital technologies to generate network effects that continue to drive communities apart

Affective polarization

Identity polarization

Recruitment

Using speech, text or images to demean or attack a person as a member of a group Spreading incorrect information without the intent to deceive (often as the result of manipulation) Creating and spreading incorrect information to intentionally deceive or manipulate others Using large amounts of data to inform personalised recommendation algorithms Using digital data to deliver tailored messages with the intent to manipulate specific individuals or groups Active collecting of digital data about individuals to exercise control Online behaviours and actions that drive people with different opinions further apart Online behaviours and actions to construct identities that fuel division Targeting people with certain online behaviours and actions to recruit them into violent groups and ideological networks

– Hate speech: the use of speech, text or images to demean or attack a person as a member of a group – Misinformation: the spreading of incorrect information without the intent to deceive – Disinformation: the creation and spread of incorrect information to intentionally deceive or manipulate others

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

175

These phenomena all predate the digital age. However, the way in which they are being shared online—faster and more effectively than before— make them ‘digital conflict drivers’. Hate Speech ‘There is no internationally recognised legal definition of hate speech’ (UN Strategy and Action Plan on Hate Speech 2019, p. 2). The UN defines it as ‘any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor’ (UN Strategy and Action Plan on Hate Speech 2019, p. 2). In its community standards, Facebook defines hate speech as ‘a direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics – race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity and serious disease or disability…we define attack as violent or dehumanising speech, harmful stereotypes, statements of inferiority or calls for exclusion or segregation’ (Facebook Community Standards). The link between hate speech and violence is well explored in research and practice. Studies point to the link between hate speech and violence in Rwanda, for example, even before the current digital age (Yanagizawa 2012). Whilst all forms of hate speech can precede violence, we are particularly interested in hate speech that is relevant to conflict lines. For example, hate speech that references specific subcultures of language regarding a particular party to (or victim of) a conflict. The use of coded language to refer to a specific group within a conflict is a tactic that goes back well beyond the digital era. However, digital technologies have led to an increased ability for hate speech to spread effectively and in a more targeted manner. In South Sudan, for example, fake news and hate speech spread online and promoted by social media influencers has been used to incite violence. Researchers have shown that social media figures, often based in the diaspora, play an outsize role in influencing events on the ground (Patinkin 2017). Whilst hate speech posted online might not be seen by large swathes of the South Sudanese population due to low internet penetration rates, content shared on Facebook is often then spread through private groups and eventually by word-of-mouth, diffusing its impact well beyond the digital realm. A UN panel of experts report on South Sudan

176

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

from November 2016 supports this view, claiming that ‘social media has been used by partisans on all sides, including some senior government officials, to exaggerate incidents, spread falsehoods and veiled threats or post outright messages of incitement’ (United Nations Security Council 2016, p. 10). Misinformation Misinformation can be defined as the spreading of incorrect information without the intent to deceive (often as the result of manipulation). The Covid-19 pandemic led to a flood of health-related misinformation and a concerted international effort to tackle it. In April 2020, the UN Secretary General launched the United Nations Communications Response initiative to combat the spread of mis- and disinformation, in recognition of the particularly potent combination of the pandemic, social media and misinformation. Just as there are many forms of hate speech, there are many forms of misinformation. For the purposes of this chapter, we are interested in misinformation that has the potential to cause conflict harm. For example, misinformation about an incident of violence or misinformation that peddles false information about a particular community that is relevant to a conflict. Social media platforms themselves make a distinction between misinformation writ large, and misinformation that can contribute to violence or physical harm (Kozlowska 2018). Misinformation is often widely spread using digital technology. The barriers to entry into the online space are significantly lower in the social media era. Misinformation is often more engaging than verifiable information: it speaks to people’s core emotions, it is often punchy with appealing titles, and in general makes for the kind of clickbait that social media algorithms are primed to promote (more on this in later sections). In addition, once spread, misinformation is particularly hard to combat. It is ‘challenging to persuade people with facts once they have adopted a belief or position because of confirmation bias’ (The Omidyar Group 2017). As an example, there is some evidence that when Facebook added a flag to show when an article has been disputed by fact-checkers, it in some cases led to increased popularity (Levin 2017). Examples of misinformation on social media leading to offline violence are numerous. In 2018, rumours about a gang of child abductors spread on WhatsApp in India, sparking a series of mob lynchings that led to at least 17 deaths (Murty 2017). In Sri Lanka, rumours that police had

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

177

seized sterilization pills from a Muslim pharmacist led to widespread communal violence (Taub and Fisher 2018). In 2014, a rumour spread on Facebook that a young Buddhist woman had been raped by two Muslim men in Myanmar’s second city of Mandalay. In response, a mob formed outside the teashop of the alleged attackers, sparking altercations that led to two deaths (Waheed 2015). The examples are so numerous that the link between misinformation and violence can no longer be disputed. Disinformation Disinformation can be defined as the creation and spread of incorrect information to intentionally deceive or manipulate others. Disinformation differs from misinformation in intent. Whereas misinformation spreads because people share it unwittingly, disinformation is spread as a result of deliberate efforts, often deploying the tactics of deliberate targeting outlined below. As a result of the digital tools available, the opportunities for disinformation to spread are now greater than ever before. Disinformation includes the concept of coordinated inauthentic behaviour—defined by Nathanial Gleicher, head of Facebook security policy as ‘groups of pages or people working together to mislead others about who they are or what they are doing’ (Gleicher 2018). Coordinated efforts at disinformation have targeted conflict settings and actors around the world. In Libya, coordinated networks have been used to bolster Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) (Grossman et al. 2020) or to undermine UN-led attempts to forge peace (Stanford Internet Observatory 2020). These networks have been shown to originate outside of Libya, notably in Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Russia. One particularly pernicious form of disinformation is what is sometimes referred to as ‘manufactured consensus’: using robots to repeat a point of view or fake story online to create the impression that it is mainstream, that many people agree or believe it to be true. This can in turn make it easier to polarize a conversation and harder to find common ground. The structure of social media platforms in turn supports this kind of disinformation, as popularity is often conflated with legitimacy (The Omidyar Group 2017). This tactic has been used in election discourse, to subtly manipulate online discussions in favour of one party—the concept of ‘informational measures’ (The Omidyar Group 2017). In Brazil, the use of disinformation during Jair Bolsonaro’s election campaign demonstrates the power of disinformation to influence political

178

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

outcomes, and to create societal divisions that lead to real-world tensions and violence. During his 2018 run for presidency Bolsonaro’s team (and Bolsonaro himself) fuelled the fabricated story that his opponent Fernando Haddad had administered ‘gay kits’ to indoctrinate Brazil’s youth. The story, and many other stories later proven to be false, were disseminated through a vast network of WhatsApp groups by a digitally savvy campaign team (Sidericoudes 2020). The tools of deliberate targeting were put to use, driving Bolsonaro’s popularity and fuelling existing social cleavages. Several hate crimes against members of the LGBT community were recorded in the run-up to the elections, with perpetrators making direct links between Bolsonaro’s campaign and their attacks (Sullivan 2018). Data Management We now turn to a set of data management tools that enable divisive content (i.e. hate speech, misinformation and disinformation) to spread more effectively. Concretely, data can be used to identify groups, to target them with the purpose of manipulation, and to support mass surveillance. These tools serve to further entrench the cleavages opened by the strategic communications affordance. To some extent, the use of data in this way is not new—it has shaped our lives for a long time. However, the advent of digital technologies in their current form has enabled this to happen on a vastly different scale, and to a much greater level of specificity. This ‘Industrial Revolution of Data’ has led to such a multiplication of data points that the tools for data management look fundamentally different today than they did even a few years ago. The use of data is fundamental to the view that technology is not neutral. By gathering masses of data about us—what we do, what we prefer, where we go etc.—technologies can use automated or semiautomated rules (algorithms) to make decisions about what information we are presented, thus nudging and influencing our choices, opinions and behaviours. This alters our experience of reality and can, in a conflict context, alter the dynamics of a given conflict. There are three main elements of data management that can drive conflict. These are not in themselves issues of conflict. Instead, they serve as crucial tools that, when combined with divisive content, can spread division and sow the seeds of violence.

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

179

– Algorithmic profiling : The way that algorithms are structured provides us with polarizing content – Deliberate targeting : Enabling actors to deliberately increase polarization through profiling – Surveillance: Collecting data and using that data to exert control. To distinguish between these three elements, consider a scale getting deeper the further you go from profiling to targeting to surveillance. Profiling is about how algorithms are structured to serve up things that polarize us. Targeting is about how we can deliberately increase that polarization by using profiling. Surveillance is about going out to deliberately collect data and then using it to exert control. Algorithmic Profiling In 2020, the average internet user created 2.5 quintillion bytes every day (Bulao 2021). Using mobile phones to browse the internet, update social media profiles, shop, navigate and follow the news, individuals across the world are leaving behind them a vast trail of data points. These individual data points are in many cases protected as users and regulators become more aware of privacy rights, although even where individually identifiable data is protected, aggregate use of the same data may be permitted. The power of this data lies in creating profiles of people with similar characteristics. When coupled with powerful algorithms (recommender systems that determine what we will like based on information from our user profile), these profiles inform many aspects of our lives—from what we see when we browse the internet and who we befriend on social media to how easy it is for us to find a job (Tisne 2018). This algorithmic profiling is particularly concerning on social media and search platforms, where algorithms target us with information and narratives that we are most likely to agree with. They expose us only to certain people or experiences. If we show some tendencies towards a certain opinion, the algorithm will entrench that tendency by showing us more of that type of content. ‘You watch one video that’s lightly critical of feminism…and YouTube’s algorithm leads you down a rabbit hole of videos that grow increasingly misogynistic, never urging you to stop or change course’ (Wood 2019). Algorithms are providing positive feedback loops to division, fuelling additional polarization, even where the user is not actively seeking it.

180

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

This is problematic for two reasons. First, it creates different realities depending on who we are. This is concerning from a conflict perspective because it further drives people apart and reduces any sense of common experience. Second, when coupled with a focus on user engagement at all costs it exposes people to more extreme positions. This is problematic from a conflict perspective because it makes it harder to find common ground or third poles for dialogue. Social media algorithms are designed to promote engagement, and particularly ‘affective engagement’: creating emotional reactions to content based on flashes of positive or negative feeling. Social media platforms compete in an ‘attention economy’, and are therefore focused on winning as much audience engagement as they can (Bhargava and Velasquez 2020). As a result, more extreme, violent or polarizing content tends to drive more engagement, so algorithms amplify divisive content over more neutral content. In this way, they funnel users towards more extreme content. As explored in a study by William J. Brady et al. (2017), Tweets using moral and emotional language receive a 20% boost for every moral and emotional keyword used. This algorithmic focus on affective engagement not only ensures that more emotional and divisive posts spread more widely on social media, but in some cases, they can also gain in perceived legitimacy as a result of this sharing. These posts then take on greater significance in the wealth of available information, in turn influencing the worldview of those who see them. This means we have two results: algorithmic profiling divides people according to their preferences and it turns those preferences more divisive and extreme. Numerous examples highlight the real-world impact of this algorithmic profiling on conflict—often through the radicalisation of individual viewpoints towards the extremes. Caleb Cain (2019) has openly documented how he ‘fell down the alt-right rabbit hole’, falling prey to the cycle of YouTube recommendations. Through YouTube’s ‘Up Next’ recommendation, Cain—who started out as a ‘liberal college drop-out’—found himself being drawn closer to a radicalised ideology, eventually ending up deep in an alt-right community. His journey highlights how the YouTube recommendation algorithm makes assumptions about individuals that in turn can push them towards more extreme content, driving conflict. Facebook uses algorithmic profiling to help users expand their individual networks through the ‘suggested friends’ feature. This feature uses

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

181

algorithmic profiling to help bring like-minded individuals together. But in 2018, research emerged showing that algorithmic profiling has helped terrorists build networks of like-minded individuals (Ratner 2018). By bringing people of like-mind together, algorithmic profiling inadvertently served to bolster extremist networks. Deliberate Targeting Whilst algorithmic profiling serves to provide users with divisive content through automated recommendation formulae, the concept of deliberate targeting takes this to the next level. Digital technologies, and social media and search platforms in particular, make it possible to deliver tailored messages to individuals, or to groups of people based on certain characteristics. This targeting has been used by conflict actors both to undermine individuals whose views are opposing theirs, and to manipulate specific groups with the intent of creating divisions. Doxxing—the deliberate leaking of personal information about an individual online for harassment or negative intent—can be used to undermine the efforts of activists or those critical of a regime. Doxxing begins with a search for online clues that can then be used to reveal private information such as passwords, enabling the perpetrators to build detailed profiles of their targets. In a conflict setting, doxxing can be used to undermine opponents or to discourage peace efforts by targeting prominent peace activists. In Hong Kong, the use of doxxing has targeted individuals on all sides of the conflict between government and protesters. Student protesters have had their personal information revealed, many on a site called HKLeaks, which ‘targets activists, journalists, social workers and even media magnates’ (Borak 2019). Borak explains how private messaging channels such as Telegram have also been used to spread personal information—of both pro and anti-Beijing individuals—in an attempt to intimidate individuals and prevent them from further engaging in protests. There are increasing fears that this tactic leads to real world violence, as some victims of doxxing have already faced attacks. Several protesters have received threatening calls following the leak of their personal information, whilst other offline events have been linked to doxing (MENAFN 2020). Whereas individual victims of doxxing will often know they have been targeted, subtler forms of targeting exist that are perhaps more concerning, largely because those who have been targeted are rarely

182

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

cognisant of the targeting. As with data aggregation, this tactic is not unique to the digital era. However, the ability to target with an everincreasing degree of specificity, when coupled with the data discussed above, makes the current issue uniquely challenging. Highly targeted content is increasingly being deployed as a tactic by divisive actors intent on polarizing conversations. Using the data aggregation discussed above and the sophisticated advertising tools provided by social media platforms and search platforms, individuals are able to serve particular groups with particular content. This is of particular concern in conflict settings, where it becomes possible to target groups along conflict lines with divisive content, further driving opposing groups apart. Group targeting uses certain characteristics to build audiences that in turn can be sent specific messages. Facebook Ads audience creation setting, for example, allows the administrator of any Facebook page to design sophisticated audiences based on demographic and geographic information. Audiences can be built based on criteria such as location, age, gender, language, as well as interests and connections. Administrators can then run particular Ads to one specific group. Once an audience is made, A/B testing enables content creators to test different messages to maximise their engagement. This tactic enables advertisers to refine their techniques by showing them which content is working best for which audiences. All of this can be done on a very limited budget. One step up from group targeting is the ability to target specific individuals. ‘Sniper targeting’ enables pernicious actors to hone in on individuals they want to receive a particular narrative. The use of sniper targeting by a disillusioned Mormon to convince his wife to abandon the church is well documented—and was so successful that the user deployed the tactic on several other members of the Mormon community (Faddoul et al. 2019). Targeting is a marketing tactic—we are not disputing it. However, the ability to micro-target can serve to drive conflict in two core ways. First, it allows actors to foster division by targeting groups along conflict lines. It can be used to create parallel narratives that in turn further drive people apart. Second, it is often used in parallel with problematic content, such as misinformation along conflict lines. Perhaps the most well-known example of deliberate targeting causing real-world division is the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which used data from 50 million Facebook users to target specific groups with unique

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

183

advertisements in the run-up to the 2016 US election. Data collection was done via a personality quiz which enabled Cambridge Analytica to gather large amounts of data on individual characteristics. This, coupled with vast amounts of Facebook data and electoral register records, enabled a detailed profiling of individuals which was in turn used to deliberately target specific groups with specific messages through Facebook Ads. Whilst measures have been taken to limit the particular data collection method utilised by Cambridge Analytica, micro-targeting remains a highly accessible tool for actors seeking to promote certain ideas to certain communities. Surveillance Third, data technologies make it possible for certain actors—especially governments—to actively collect digital data about individuals at a large scale. This kind of surveillance data can be used to exercise control, especially in conflict situations. Surveillance to control is not a new tactic, but the same digital exhaust that is used to create profiles for marketing can be used to track and control individuals. This can be done by asking technology companies to hand over certain information (usually a prerogative of governments), by deploying hacking tactics to access this data from the companies or from individuals (e.g. through malware), or by directly collecting individually identifiable data and processing it with artificial intelligence (e.g. AI-powered CCTV networks). Where algorithmic profiling affects most of us and deliberate targeting is available to many conflict actors, the use of surveillance data to control groups in ways that contribute to conflict is limited to a smaller set of actors who have the capacity to command sufficient data through one of the three techniques above. These actors may be fewer, but their impact in conflict contexts can be deeper. In Venezuela, the Maduro government has used the Homeland ID card as a mechanism to exert control over citizens. The cards link users’ data to a government database and connect holders to social welfare platforms through digital QR codes, enabling the government to keep tabs on its citizens (Puyosa 2019). Puyosa explains how in the 2018 presidential election, the government linked food distribution to individuals passing through pro-Chavist kiosks, demonstrating the power of digital surveillance to influence citizens. In response to COVID-19, many governments have rolled out track and trace systems that rely on location surveillance data. The Electronic

184

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

Frontier Foundation has sounded the alarm about these measures being rolled out too quickly and with little regard for digital rights (Schwartz and Crocker 2020). In Israel, for example, the move by the government to use geolocation data collected by cellphone providers to track the spread of the virus was hotly contested as it could open the door to tracking individuals across conflict lines (Halbfinger et al. 2020). Not all surveillance is conducted by governments though. In South Africa, a number of private companies (most notably Vumacam) are driving the roll-out of smart CCTV systems across most major cities. These AI-powered systems scrutinise peoples’ demographics and movement for a pre-coded set of unusual behaviours that only thinly disguise a racial bias, exacerbating post-apartheid injustice and tensions (Kwet 2019). Dialogue and Networking Strategic communications refers to the divisive content that technology enables the spread of. Data management refers to a set of tools that enable that content to further divide. The networking affordance in turn creates a set of enabling conditions that further enhance division. To understand how networking is used to increase divisions, we explore three different aspects. – Affective polarization: the way that technology serves to drive people apart – Construction of identities : the importance of technology in constructing certain identities – Recruitment : the use of technology to recruit individuals into violent actions. Affective Polarization Polarization refers to a set of behaviours and actions, intended and unintended, that drive people with different perspectives further and further apart. Affective polarization is division that in turn leads to relational group hate. Whilst some researchers posit that polarization is not happening because of technology (Laurenson 2019), there are some online behaviours and actions that drive people with different opinions

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

185

further apart—even if that is not their intention. This kind of polarization is driven by certain features of online technologies. Take for example, the structure of social media. We know from the above sections that misinformation and divisive content has increased reach. We know that the tools of targeting and algorithmic profiling can make that reach even more specific. In addition, certain features of social media serve to simplify narratives and further polarize communities. Conversations on digital platforms are short, immediate and publicly recorded, making quickly identifying with positions more attractive than slowly parsing out common needs. These features serve to make the online environment one of polarized positions, where constructive disagreement and debate is rarely seen. You might think that people would flee such a rarified environment, but we know they don’t. This is partly explained by what we explored in the first section: polarizing content is more appealing to the human brain, triggering neurological responses that satisfy a need to belong and build human capital, and in this sense is somewhat addictive. Social media platforms know this, and they have built notification and nudge features to build on this addiction—with each ping comes another dopamine hit. Affective polarization matters for conflict. With polarization, comes the absorption of neutral actors into increasingly more rigid and extreme positions taken in opposition to other factions. In turn, polarization supports the strengthening of convictions in different factions, making it less likely for someone to break from their personal value system. Finally, polarization can result in distorted perceptions and simplified stereotypes along with diminished trust or agreement with other factions over basic facts and realities. The combination of these factors contributes to limited opportunities or desire for shared dialogue. Well-established models of conflict escalation signal that these constitute warning flags for future violent confrontations. Indeed, ‘conflict theorists pay attention to polarization because increased polarization is a warning sign for armed conflict’ (Laurenson 2019, p. 3). Affective polarization serves to sharpen the impact of the content and tools outlined above. When misinformation goes viral, it does so in an already polarized environment. When deliberate targeting is used to serve a particular narrative to a community, that community is already being pushed further away from its counterparts. In essence, spreading hate speech or engaging in deliberate targeting is adding fuel to an existing fire. As such, looking at divisive content or micro-targeting as

186

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

isolated instances with impact on certain individuals is to miss the broader, systemic issue that results from the network effects of a polarized online environment. Online Identity Construction The tools and content outlined above can serve as conflict drivers regardless of the online environment. However, just as polarization can serve to make those issues more dangerous, so too does the impact of these technologies on individual identity formation. Research has shown that social media alters our incentives and affects how we construct discourse—as a result it impacts how our collective and individual identities are shaped and expressed. The role that social media has in constructing identity can and has been exploited by conflict actors. Actors can use the tools of deliberate targeting to spread disinformation with the intention of constructing identities that fuel division. The internet is rife with digital tribes that oppose other digital tribes. This doesn’t affect as many people as affective polarization, but it can be a powerful force in divided societies. Identity formation is well documented as a driver of conflict in the offline space.3 As that process is increasingly playing out online, understanding the link between digital technologies and divisive identity formation is crucial (although still underexplored). Recent research by Build Up gathered examples of social media conversations that impact identity formation in conflict settings. They found that the most common way to express divisive identities online is to dismiss an opinion or position through mockery. Fake news was a key theme in the expression of divisive identities, often to accuse a group of a behaviour or associate them with a negative identity marker. In addition, the research found that the way conversations unfold on social media can contribute to deepening divisions about identities, for example through escalation in comment threads that lead to extreme position.4 Recruitment Finally, some actors use digital tools to recruit people into violent groups and ideological networks. Hallmarks of extremist recruitment include 3 See for example https://www.beyondintractability.org/userguide/identity-conflicts. 4 See Build Up present the results of their research at the Stockholm Forum 2020 on

‘Online Identity Formation: A Growing Challenge to Peace’ here https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=dbCwaM20kXQ.

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

187

the sharing of videos depicting violence (such as the livestream of the Christchurch mosque shooting in 2019), hate speech and targeted online messages. Sniper targeting, for example, could serve to identify specific individuals at risk of radicalisation and enable groups to target them with recruitment materials tailored to their specific identity. This, coupled with the affective polarization and identity formation outlined above, can make for a potent cocktail of division. This is a more sustained and aggressive approach than the construction of conflict identities online, but it usually flows from it.

Part 3: Peacebuilding Responses Part 2 outlines digital conflict drivers; Part 3 looks into what peacebuilding practitioners could do about them. Most responses to date have focused on one aspect of these challenges: the most egregious or evident forms of digital harm, including recruitment, hate speech and overt targeting. Few attempts have been made to lay out a comprehensive framework for peacebuilding responses to deeper, or less evident, digital conflict drivers. The pyramid below attempts to set out such a framework for peacebuilding responses to digital conflict drivers. Each layer of this pyramid requires different approaches, and no single actor is well equipped to address the full spectrum of issues. However, this framework can help peacebuilding actors situate their work, recognise where they add value and coordinate with other actors. It is our hope that this could lead to the beginning of a more holistic view of the emerging field of ‘digital peacebuilding’ (Fig. 9.2). Level 1: The Signal At the highest level, we have the ‘signals’—things that we can easily see when looking at the digital environment. These include hate speech, surveillance, recruitment and the overt targeting of individuals e.g. sniper targeting or doxxing. These activities often point to deeper issues that are driving conflict. Hate speech spreading on social media, for example, is often a signal of deeper conflict issues. To date, much of the discourse on these signals has focused on their removal—hate speech reporting, content moderation or restrictions on overt targeting. These approaches are important, but they only go so far.

Human Communication Social cohesion

Identity Construction

Affective Polarisation

Algorithmic Profiling

Misinformation

Identity Polarisation

Manufactured Consensus

Covert Targeting

Disinformation

Overt Targeting

Recruitment

Hate Speech

Human Neurology

Fig. 9.2 Pyramid of digital conflict drivers and respective peacebuilding responses

Non-Violent Communication

Changes to Platform Structures

Ethical Rules & Controls on Platform

Platform Rules & Terms of Service

Personal & Collective Transformation

Depolarisation & Behavior Change Programs

Digital Literacy

Content Moderation

188 H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

189

First, by ‘burying the signal’, we risk ignoring the underlying issues. To remove hate speech after it has occurred, but not to address the deeper issues is equivalent to addressing the symptoms but not the disease. In addition, moderating hate speech on one platform simply results in that speech going elsewhere—and often to places where it is harder to find (but no less powerful in reaching its intended audience). Peacebuilding Responses Hate Speech Monitoring and Content Moderation The monitoring of hate speech is often done by civil society actors or NGOs, largely as a way to better understand the issue rather than to resolve it directly. The PeaceTech Lab, for example, has developed a set of ‘hate speech lexicon’ in order to define problematic content in countries such as Yemen, Sudan and Kenya.5 These lexicon and other efforts to monitor and report hate speech can serve to inform other peacebuilding responses to these issues. The response of social media platforms to hate speech has been focused on content moderation. To detect and remove hate speech, platforms rely on a combination of Artificial Intelligence and user reports. These user reports often come from civil society actors who proactively report content to platforms such as Facebook. To support increased detection of hate speech, Facebook has been working to educate users on their community standards—the rules of engagement with the platform that explicitly prohibit hate speech. In Myanmar, where Facebook has faced significant backlash against its failure to tackle hate speech, Facebook published its community standards in Burmese and hired additional Burmese speaking monitors, in order to increase its detection of hate speech. To date, the effectiveness of content moderation efforts is limited—hate speech continues to be present on social media platforms. In addition, content moderation does not address any of the underlying causes that enable hate speech to thrive online. Countering Activities Responses that seek to counter, rather than remove, the effects of hate speech recognise the limitations of content moderation and reporting. There is a wide body of work on effective tools to counter hate speech

5 See for example, https://www.peacetechlab.org/toolbox-lexicons.

190

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

online. These methods emphasise, for example, shared identity, demonstrating intergroup friendships, whilst cautioning around employing empathy-only approaches. Effective responses often involve the community in the development of counter-messages ensuring that narratives unite rather than divide the public square. Countering methods have also been used to interrupt recruitment efforts into extremist groups. #IAmHere is a network of tens of thousands of online volunteers fighting hate speech on Facebook (Bateman 2019). Volunteers scan Facebook for conversations happening on popular pages, often run by mainstream media organisations, which are overwhelmed with racist, misogynistic or homophobic comments. Volunteers don’t attempt to change the minds of people posting hate or argue directly with extremists. Instead they collectively inject discussions with facts and well-argued reasonable viewpoints. The idea is to provide balance so that other social media users see that there are alternative perspectives beyond the ones offering up hate and division. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s Counter Conversations programme seeks to counter recruitment into radical groups (Davey et al. 2018). ISD, a global think tank dedicated to countering extremism, identified that extremist groups deploy a clear strategy for radicalising and recruiting new supporters online: marketing their ideas through the spread of propaganda and then engaging interested individuals in direct, private messaging to recruit new members to their causes. The Counter Conversations programme identified individuals who were demonstrating signs of radicalisation on Facebook, and engaged these individuals in direct, personalised and private ‘counter-conversations’ on Facebook Messenger for the purpose of de-radicalisation from extremist ideology and disengagement from extremist movements. Education on Privacy Whilst combating government-led surveillance is a challenge, many civil society actors have taken the approach of informing citizens about their digital safety, encouraging them to enhance their privacy settings. SalamaTech is a project of the SecDev Foundation, a Canadian think tank that works at the cross-roads of conflict, development and new technology.6 Since 2012 SalamaTech has helped Syrian peacebuilders

6 You can view their work at https://en.salamatech.org/.

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

191

stay safe online so they can make their voices heard. Syrian civil society actors are increasingly targeted through cyberspace by a range of actors. Digital threats manifest across multiple and distributed channels, through targeted attacks, profiling of personnel and supports, and theft of sensitive information. SalamaTech assists Syrians who have had their accounts hacked. They protect Syrian civil society organisations with Digital Safety Audits, which build the capacity of CSOs to protect their data and use the internet safely. They have a network of on-the-ground Digital Technology First Responders who provide in situ training to protect Syrian civil society organisations. By providing these protections, SalamaTech ensures that Syrian CSOs can continue their work. Level 2: Below the Surface Just below the surface lie the second set of digital conflict drivers—issues that are somewhat harder to find than those at the top, but that still point to deeper drivers below. In this category we place disinformation, covert targeting, manufactured consensus and the construction of identities online. These are issues that the end user may not be aware that they are exposed to (for example group targeting), but that can be identified with some level of awareness. Although less familiar than those at the surface level, these challenges have received increasing attention recently. The Covid-19 pandemic saw an increased prevalence of disinformation, leading the UN to declare an ‘infodemic’, in turn prompting a growing number of conversations about how to tackle it (UNODC 2020). At the same time, discussions around covert targeting, manufactured consensus and identity construction have been recently making the news and entering popular discourse. Peacebuilding Responses Debunking Disinformation Efforts to combat disinformation take many forms, from researchers developing ways to detect disinformation, to those working to debunk disinformation once it emerges. In Lithuania, a group of citizen volunteers known as ‘elves’ tackle Russian-driven disinformation. They work to identify and address disinformation through a combination of tactics designed to mitigate the divisive potential of these efforts (Peel 2019).

192

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

Social media platforms seek to tackle disinformation through the identification and removal of coordinated campaigns. Policies on inauthenticity and on coordinated inauthentic behaviour seek to remove deliberate attempts to deceive or manipulate the debate through inauthentic means. Facebook’s policy on inauthentic behaviour bans users from ‘artificially boosting the popularity of content’ (Facebook). However, their policies on disinformation remain opaque, with several civil society actors criticising the platforms for failing to share the criteria on which they decide what counts as misinformation. Others criticise platforms (particularly Facebook) for their restrictive sharing of data, preventing researchers from getting a granular analysis of the problem. Social Cohesion Campaigns Supporting the construction of common identities and combating the creation of divisive identities is a pillar of traditional peacebuilding. Several peacebuilding organisations are now taking that work into the online space. For example, online campaigns that call for the construction of common identities. The Peace Factory seeks to forge common identities and tackle divisive identity positioning in the Middle East through campaigns such as ‘Israel loves Iran’.7 In Myanmar, a local civil society organisation led a Facebook campaign seeking to bring young people together around a common identity (the names of the organisation and campaign have been removed to protect the identity of those involved). Integrating Social Media into Peace Agreements To date, most peacebuilding responses to disinformation have sought to address the problem ‘downstream’ (i.e. tackling the distribution and consumption of disinformation). Fewer responses have sought to intervene ‘upstream’ (i.e. preventing the production of disinformation). In response, some mediation actors have begun exploring the concept of ‘social media peace agreements’, or the integration of social media clauses into existing peace agreements and dialogue processes. This work aims to discuss social media activity directly with conflict parties, and facilitate agreements in which parties agree to exercise restraint in the digital space. Whilst still a relatively new area of intervention, the Centre for

7 You can view their campaigns at https://www.facebook.com/the.Peace.Factory/.

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

193

Humanitarian Dialogue (HD) is leading efforts to forge such agreements, including around elections. In Indonesia’s 2020 local elections, for example, HD helped facilitate a social media code of conduct in an attempt to restrain the production of disinformation around the election. Level 3: Across the Board Below these challenges, lie the issues of misinformation, algorithmic profiling and affective polarization. These more deep-seated issues require a different set of approaches from peacebuilding actors. In addition, they are less often discussed and addressed by peacebuilding actors, and still lack mainstream attention in the conflict field. Peacebuilding Responses Combatting Misinformation Social media platforms have taken several steps to combat misinformation—from labelling content as misinformation, to informing people that content has been debunked by fact checkers before they share it, to removing misinformation that can contribute to violence or physical harm. Facebook has fact-checking partnerships with multiple civil society organisations that help them spot and tackle misinformation on their platform. WhatsApp introduced measures to limit the sharing of messages to more than five people in response to growing problems of misinformation on its platform. Twitter adds labels to provide warning messages and context on Tweets containing misinformation. In response to the Covid19 pandemic and in the midst of growing public awareness of the issue, platforms expanded their misinformation policies. Digital Literacy In response to the increasing challenge of misinformation, there has been an uptick in digital literacy efforts. These have been led by civil society organisations, local and international NGOs, UN agencies and social media platforms themselves. The Myanmar ICT for Development Organisation (MIDO) works to promote technology for social change in Myanmar and to promote media and digital literacy through a range of programmes. They run a Facebook page that incorporates a Messenger chatbot to promote media literacy in Myanmar. MIDO’s page and chatbot provide a fact-checking function where people can report in rumours and hear back within hours whether

194

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

the MIDO team can verify the rumour, serving as a novel way to debunk misinformation. A separate chatbot also provides media literacy e-learning content. In a context where low media literacy is closely tied to intercommunal conflict and misinformation contributes to increasing polarization and division, MIDO’s work helps minimise the impact of fake news and misinformation that can incite intercommunal violence. Policy Responses Many governments have introduced policies that address aspects of misinformation: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the USA and the Digital Services Act in the EU are two such policies whose reach and applicability are currently much debated. Several advocacy bodies are calling for stronger regulation to stop data being misused. Some of these call for greater individual ownership of data, others for more transparency on how data is used. Martin Tisne (2018) calls for A Bill of Data Rights that would give people rights to decide how their data is used. Tisne argues that existing discussions based on the idea of ‘data ownership’ are flawed as they ignore the broader problem of how data is used in the aggregate. His proposed bill of data rights could start from the following principles: • The right of people to be secure against unreasonable surveillance shall not be violated. • No person shall have his or her behaviour surreptitiously manipulated. • No person shall be unfairly discriminated against on the basis of data. Depolarization Efforts Build Up’s The Commons project seeks to tackle depolarization on social media in the United States (Build Up 2019). The project identifies people engaged in political conversations on Twitter and Facebook in the USA, analyses what kinds of behaviours may denote a person is exposed to polarizing narratives or dynamics, and targets people with these characteristics with automated messages that invite them into a conversation about bridging divides. If they respond, one of Build Up’s trained dialogue facilitators has a conversation with them on the platform (Twitter and Facebook). These facilitated conversations seek to help people understand and make

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

195

different choices in their interactions, online and offline, particularly around political differences, and offer skills and resources to promote constructive conversations, listening and respect. Redesigning Algorithms Several researchers are proposing the redesign of social media platform algorithms, to counter the divisions fostered by algorithmic profiling. Amongst others, Helberger et al. (2016) explore what a ‘diversitysensitive design’ would look like when applied to algorithms. They posit a redesign of algorithms that would actively encourage diverse exposure to information, breaking down filter bubbles. Laurenson (2019) refers to research that distinguishes between ‘connection-promoting’ vs ‘nonconnection promoting’ social media use. She explores the possibility of designing social media platforms in a way that could model less polarizing interactions on social media. Rose-Stockwell (2018) in turn suggests the retraining of social media algorithms to refine the concept of ‘meaningful content’. He suggests excluding content that is categorised as ‘outraged, toxic and regrettable’ from algorithms’ definition of meaningful. Countering the Algorithm The Redirect Method is a project of Moonshot CVE, a technology company that works to counter violent extremism.8 The project analysed how people searching for certain words or phrases on Google find ISIS videos on YouTube, aided by algorithmic profiling. To counter this, Moonshot CVE bought Adwords on Google—these are advertisements that can be targeted at people who search for certain words or phrases. They used these advertisements to ensure that when people searched for words or phrases that would have previously led them to ISIS propaganda videos, they instead saw videos debunking ISIS recruitment themes. This open methodology was developed from interviews with ISIS defectors. It also respects users’ privacy and can be deployed to tackle other types of violent recruiting discourses online.

8 You can find out more about this at https://redirectmethod.org/.

196

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

Level 4: The Roots At the very bottom of the pyramid lie the most intractable parts of this digital conflict context. These issues have received the least amount of attention to date, and require research that goes well beyond the limits of this chapter. However, there is growing evidence that digital technologies are not only affecting our context, but our brains as well. Researchers have explored links between social media addiction and dopamine levels (Parkin 2018). An open question remains about how much technologies are, for example, shifting our incentives, or altering our decision-making processes. Whilst these are open questions, it is clear that digital conflict drivers touch on some of the deepest roots of the human condition—our mode of communication, our neurology and, ultimately, how we live together. Few peacebuilding approaches have yet sought to address these digital conflict drivers directly. However, we believe that the tools that have been used by peacebuilders to bring about personal and collective transformation in the offline realm may be needed in the digital realm. Ultimately, approaches such as non-violent communication may help to shift behaviours in a way that allow us to build peace in today’s new socio-technological context.

Conclusion In our increasingly connected world, the distinction between online and offline elements of a conflict is no longer clear. As technology has become deeply intertwined with our experience of the world around us, it has begun to shape the structures of power that bind us as communities and define us as individuals. It no longer makes sense for peacebuilders to view technology as separate from the conflict context—as either a tool for positive change or as a weapon for fuelling war. Instead, we need to understand technology as integral to a context, and dig deeper into the dynamics of socio-technological conflict. The above framework for categorising digital conflict drivers can advance this goal. Peacebuilders can then begin to situate their interventions in the pyramid of responses outlined above, connecting their work more deliberately to the complex links between technology and conflict. In doing so, it is our hope that peacebuilding as a field won’t just tackle the surface level problems in the

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

197

use of digital technology, but take on the most challenging aspects of how conflict is evolving and re-emerging in the digital age.

References Bateman, J, 9 June 2019, ‘#IAmHere’: The People Trying to Make Facebook a Nicer Place’, BBC Trending, Accessed 23 February 2021 https://www.bbc. com/news/blogs-trending-48462190 Bhargava, V. R. and Velasquez, M., 2020, ‘Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction’, Business Ethics Quarterly. Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–39. Build Up, 12 December 2019, ‘Scaling the Commons: An intervention to depolarize Political Conversations on Twitter and Facebook in the USA’, Medium, Accessed 23 February 2021, https://howtobuildup.medium.com/ scaling-the-commons-969b15c98012 Borak, M, 10 October 2019, ‘Doxxing Has Become a Powerful Weapon in the Hong Kong Protests’, Abacus, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://www. scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3032268/doxxing-has-become-powerfulweapon-hong-kong-protests Brady, W, Wills, J, Jost, J, Tucker, J and Van Bavel, J, 2017 ‘Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks’ PNAS, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3NfwG0qz3qOaU l5bVZpQWRWc2c/view Bulao, J, 22 January 2021, ‘How Much Data Is Created Every Day in 2020’, TechJury, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://techjury.net/blog/ how-much-data-is-created-every-day/#gref Cain, C, 8 June 2019, ‘The Making of a YouTube Radical’, The New York Times, Accessed 16 February 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ 2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html Davey, J, Birdwell J and Skellet R, 2018, ‘Counter Conversations: A Model for Direct Engagement with Individuals Showing Signs of Radicalization Online’, ISD, Accessed 23 February 2021, https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/ uploads/2018/03/Counter-Conversations_FINAL.pdf Facebook, Community Standards, Hate Speech, Accessed 16 February 2021 https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/hate_speech Facebook, Community Standards, Inauthentic Behaviour, Accessed 23 February 2021, https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/inauthentic_beh avior Faddoul, M, Kapuria, R and Lin, L, 10 May 2019, ‘Sniper Ad Targeting’, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/ default/files/sproject_attachments/sniper_ad_targeting_final_report.pdf

198

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

Gleicher, N, 6 December 2018, ‘Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Explained’ Facebook Newsroom, Accessed 17 February 2021, https://about.fb.com/ news/2018/12/inside-feed-coordinated-inauthentic-behavior/ Grossman S, H K, DiResta, R, Kheradpir, T and Miller C, April 2 2020, ‘Blame It on Iran, Qatar, and Turkey: An Analysis of a Twitter and Facebook Operation Linked to Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia’, Stanford Internet Observatory: Cyber Policy Center, Accessed 17 February 2021, https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/20200402_ blame_it_on_iran_qatar_and_turkey_v2_0.pdf Halbfinger, D, Kershner, I and Bergman, R, 16 March 2020, ‘To Track Coronavirus, Israel Moves to Tap Secret Trove of Cellphone Data’, The New York Times, Accessed 23 February 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/ 16/world/middleeast/israel-coronavirus-cellphone-tracking.html Helberger, N, Karppinen, K and D’Acunto, L, 2016, ‘Exposure Diversity as a Design Principle for Recommender Systems’, Information, Communication & Society, 21(2), 191–207, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://doi.org/10. 1080/1369118X.2016.1271900 Kozlowska, H, 19 July 2018, ‘Facebook Is Actually Going to Start Removing Fake News—Or Some of It’, Quartz, Accessed 16 February 2021, https:// qz.com/1331476/facebook-will-start-removing-fake-news-that-could-causeharm/ Kwet, M, 22 November 2019, ‘Smart CCTV Networks Are Driving an AIPowered Apartheid in South Africa’, Vice, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa7nek/smart-cctv-networks-are-drivingan-ai-powered-apartheid-in-south-africa Laurenson, L, July 2019, ‘Polarisation and Peacebuilding Strategy on Digital Media Platforms’, Toda Peace Institute Policy Brief No. 44, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://toda.org/assets/files/resources/policy-briefs/t-pb44_laurenson-lydia_part-1_polarisation-and-peacebuilding-strategy.pdf Levin, S, 16 May 2017, ‘Facebook Promised to Tackle Fake News. But the Evidence Shows It’s Not Working’, The Guardian, Accessed 16 February 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/16/facebookfake-news-tools-not-working MENAFN, 18 September 2020, ‘Anonymous Site Ramps Up ‘Doxxing’ Campaign Against HK Activists’, MENAFN , Accessed 23 February 2021, https://menafn.com/1100816816/Anonymous-site-ramps-up-doxxing-cam paign-against-HK-activists Murty, B V, 22 May 2017, ‘Jharkhand Lynching: When a WhatsApp Message Turned Tribals into Killer Mobs’, Hindustan Times, Accessed 16 February 2021, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/a-whatsapp-message-cla imed-nine-lives-in-jharkhand-in-a-week/story-xZsIlwFawf82o5WTs8nhVL. html

9

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL CONFLICT DRIVERS

199

Parkin, S, 4 March 2018, ‘Has Dopamine Got Us Hooked on Tech?’, The Observer, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/tec hnology/2018/mar/04/has-dopamine-got-us-hooked-on-tech-facebookapps-addiction Patinkin, J, 15 January 2017, ‘How to Use Facebook and Fake News to Get People to Murder Each Other’, Buzzfeed News, Accessed 16 February 2021, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonpatinkin/howto-get-people-to-murder-each-other-through-fake-news-and Peel, M, 4 February 2019, ‘Fake News: How Lithuania’s ‘Elves’ Take on Russian Trolls’, Financial Times, Accessed 23 February 2021, https://www.ft.com/ content/b3701b12-2544-11e9-b329-c7e6ceb5ffdf Puig Larrauri, H. and Kahl, A, 2013, ‘Technology for Peacebuilding’, Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 2(3), p.Art. 61, Accessed 15 February 2021, https://doi.org/10.5334/sta.cv Puyosa, I, November 2019, ‘Venezuela’s 21st Century Authoritarianism in the Digital Sphere’, Toda Peace Institute. Policy Brief N°62, Accessed 23 February 2021, https://toda.org/assets/files/resources/policy-briefs/t-pb-62_iria-puy osa_venezuelas-21st-century-authoritarianism.pdf Ratner, P, 11 May 2018, ‘How Facebook Helps Members of ISIS and Other Extremists Find Friends’, Big Think, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/how-facebook-algorithms-helpedisis-and-continue-to-aid-extremist-groups Rose-Stockwell, T, 30 April 2018, ‘Facebook’s Problems Can Be Solved with Design’, Quartz, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://qz.com/1264547/fac ebooks-problems-can-be-solved-with-design/ Schwartz, A and Crocker, A, 23 March 2020, ‘Governments Haven’t Shown Location Surveillance Would Help Contain Covid-19’, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Accessed 18 February 2021, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/ 2020/03/governments-havent-shown-location-surveillance-would-help-con tain-covid-19 Sidericoudes, S, 9 March 2020, ‘The Power of Bolsonaro’s Message in his Campaign’, Diggit Magazine, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://www.dig gitmagazine.com/articles/bolsonaro-message-campaign Stanford Internet Observatory, 15 December 2020, ‘Stoking Conflict by Keystroke’, Stanford Internet Observatory, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/africa-takedown-december-2020 Sullivan, Z, 29 October 2018, ‘LGBTQ Brazilians on Edge After Self-Described ‘Homophobic’ Lawmaker Elected President’, NBC News, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/lgbtq-brazil ians-edge-after-self-described-homophobic-lawmaker-elected-president-n92 5726

200

H. PUIG LARRAURI AND M. MORRISON

Taub, A and Fisher, M, 21 April 2018, ‘Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match’, New York Times, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/world/asia/fac ebook-sri-lanka-riots.html?auth=login-email&login=email The Omidyar Group, 1 October 2017, ‘Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy’, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://www.omidyargroup.com/wp-content/ uploads/sites/7/2017/10/Social-Media-and-Democracy-October-5-2017. pdf Tisne, M, 14 December 2018, ‘It’s Time for a Bill of Data Rights’, MIT Technology Review, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://www.technologyreview. com/2018/12/14/138615/its-time-for-a-bill-of-data-rights/ United Nations Security Council, 2016, ‘Interim Report of the Panel of Experts on South Sudan Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 2206’, Accessed 16 February 2021, https://www.undocs.org/S/2016/963 United Nations Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech, 2019, Accessed 16 February 2021, https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/ UN%20Strategy%20and%20Plan%20of%20Action%20on%20Hate%20Speech% 2018%20June%20SYNOPSIS.pdf UNODC, 31 March 2020, ‘UN Tackles ‘Infodemic’ of Misinformation and Cybercrime in COVID-19 Crisis’, UNODC Department of Global Communications, Accessed 23 February 2021, https://www.un.org/en/un-corona virus-communications-team/un-tackling-%E2%80%98infodemic%E2%80%99misinformation-and-cybercrime-covid-19 Waheed, A, 18 October 2015, ‘Rape Used as a Weapon in Myanmar to Ignite Dear’, AlJazeera, Accessed 16 February 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/ features/2015/10/28/rape-used-as-a-weapon-in-myanmar-to-ignite-fear Wallstrom, M, 2015, ‘Plugging Governments into Peace’, Building Peace, Issue 5 ‘#Peacetech’, Accessed 16 February 2021, https://creativeconomy.britis hcouncil.org/media/uploads/files/Alliance_for_Peacebuilding_-_PeaceTech_ Doc.pdf Wood, M, 21 March 2019, ‘Extremists Online: How a Troll Becomes a Terrorist’, Marketplace, Accessed 19 February 2021, https://www.marketplace.org/ 2019/03/21/extremists-online-how-troll-becomes-terrorist/ Yanagizawa, D, 2012, ‘Propaganda and Conflict: Theory and Evidence from the Rwandan Genocide’, Harvard University, Accessed 15 February 2021, https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/cid/files/publicati ons/faculty-working-papers/257_Drott_Rwanda.pdf Youngs, R, 11 September 2014, ‘Digital Media Is a Double-Edged Sword’, Deutsche Welle, Global Media Forum, Accessed 16 February 2021, https:// carnegieeurope.eu/2014/09/11/digital-media-is-double-edged-sword-pub56606

PART III

Structural Inequalities

CHAPTER 10

Acknowledging and Addressing the Inequalities in the International System Kate Seaman

The underlying structure of the international system directly influences the ways in which we respond to insecurity, and how we build peace. The current system, created in the 1940s, was designed for a very different world than we inhabit today. When the United Nations was created, only 74 sovereign countries were recognised, today there are 195. The process of decolonization altered the international landscape, but the lasting consequences and continuing inequalities have not been addressed. As Bell (2013, 2) argues “The collapse of formal empires and the purging (if not complete elimination) of explicitly racist language in social scientific writing about world order coincided. But just as decolonization did not result in the end of the age of imperialism, so too the switch in terminology did not signal the end of racialized notions of global order.” Without addressing the underlying inequalities within the system, there is

K. Seaman (B) Bahá’í Chair for World Peace, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_10

203

204

K. SEAMAN

no way to create a more just and equitable way of responding to global challenges. As Phillips (2017) argues “Inequality in all its forms is the defining global problem and increasingly the defining political problem of our age.” When examining inequalities on a global scale there is a tendency to focus on economic inequalities such as wealth and income, this focus is not surprising when we recognize that 50% of the world’s wealth is going to the richest 1%, or that the 80 richest individuals own wealth equal to that of the poorest 50%, around 3.7 billion people (Hardoon 2015). However, inequalities also impact other areas including health, and can be identified in uneven access to opportunities for social, economic and political participation along the lines of socially defined categories, such as gender, age, ethnicity, religion, ability or class (social inequalities) (Markkanen and Anger-Kraavi 2019, 828) In most cases these inequalities overlap, compounding their effects. This presents us with what Bowleg (2020, 917) argues is “A moral imperative to center and equitably address the health, economic, and social needs of those who bear the intersectional brunt of structural inequality.” Addressing this inequality will require a radical shift in how we tackle large-scale global challenges such as climate change, poverty, pandemics, and conflict. It will require a clear shift from a focus on equality to one of inequity. As Markkanen and Anger-Kraavi (2019, 829) highlight “While ‘equal’ distribution would imply allocating the same resources to all, ‘equitable’ distribution involves allocating resources according to the level of need, prioritizing those whose level of need is perceived to be greater.” This ties into the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015), which focuses on the dual objectives of ensuring everyone has access to the resources they need (food, shelter, water, health care, energy etc.) to meet their human rights while also making sure that the cumulative use of natural resources does not place additional stress on already limited natural resources. The Sustainable Development Agenda was established in the same year as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Paris Agreement) under which signatories agreed “…to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, including by holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels in the long term” (UNFCCC 2015). Global commitment and cooperation to the agreement has wavered in recent years, but

10

ACKNOWLEDGING AND ADDRESSING THE INEQUALITIES …

205

as King and Harrington (2018, 5031) outline “It is clear that under conceivable scenarios for socioeconomic development over the next few decades the poorest parts of the world will experience greater levels of perceptible climate change than the wealthiest areas. The difference is significant and substantial and will result in inequality in climate change impacts.” The brunt of this inequality will be borne by the poorest and most marginalized populations, and those who are the “least responsible for past greenhouse gas emissions (benefits), most vulnerable to climate change (costs), and possess least resources to adapt to extreme climate events and rising temperatures” (Markkanen and Anger-Kraavi 2019, 829). As Reckien et al. (2018) argue membership of specific social categories can increase the risk of discrimination, inequalities in terms of wealth, health, and opportunities, and reduce people’s capacity to adapt to rapidly shifting circumstances. More needs to be done to identify communities most vulnerable to climate change and other global challenges, however as Mikulewicz (2018, 24) argues “asking why vulnerability exists rather than merely demonstrating how it manifests itself is a key analytical shift that should occur not just in social climate science but any research concerned with social justice and inequality.” We need to dig deeper into the underlying structural inequalities which exacerbate these risks and vulnerabilities. We need to recognize and respond to the fact that “structural racism and systemic inequities put people of colour and the economically vulnerable at heightened risk in the face of both climate change and pandemics, a situation that we are already seeing unfold.” (Phillips et al. 2020, 587). This response will require “attention to how power is exercised between local communities and outside actors, as well as within these communities” (Mikulewicz 2018, 29). This includes an increased focus on the role and treatment of women, who carry an outsized share of the burden of climate change and other transnational problems. In her contribution Professor Valentine Moghadam explores the connections between women, peace and security. Her chapter places women at the center by emphasizing the gendered nature of social relations, institutions and power and highlights the relationship between patriarchy, gender inequality, the risk of conflict and women’s insecurity. Moghadam highlights the ways in which inequalities intersect to impact on the experience of women, especially women in conflict zones. Moghadam also works to highlight how women have worked to create

206

K. SEAMAN

solidarity across borders, and how the recognition of the interconnected nature of the challenges women face, from poverty, to violence, to lack of opportunities, can be reduced with increased focus on how women and girls can be elevated from poverty, educated, provide healthcare, recognised as equal participants in society with all of the legal and political protections that entails. Intersectionality forms the basis of the contribution by Professor Elizabeth Hoover, and her work on Environmental Reproductive Justice. This chapter provides insight into the realities of indigenous communities impacted by environmental contamination. With specific reference to the Akwesasne, a Mohawk American Indian community in upstate New York, who are located downstream from industrial sites on the New York/Canada border. Hoover emphasizes that the environmental issues faced by the Akwesasne also need to be considered in conjunction with the colonial history, relationship that tribes have with the United States, and the complexity that tribal sovereignty adds to the political and legal circumstances. The arguments Hoover outlines are critical for understanding the collective impact that current global challenges have on specific populations, and how our understanding and approaches need to be expanded to better identify the interconnected nature of threats. Hoover, in her chapter, is pushing for an expansion of both environmental justice and reproductive justice, to more clearly demonstrate the impact of environmental contamination on both physical and cultural reproduction. The question of environmental challenges continues in the contribution from Professor Simon Dalby. Dalby focuses on the interaction of globalization and environmental change and the potential for these to exacerbate human conflict if rapid decarbonization of the global economy does not occur. Throughout the chapter Dalby emphasizes the uneven impact of climate change, detailing the structural inequality present today which is not purely economic but instead needs to be addressed on both a geophysical and geopolitical scale. Dalby also highlights the inter-generational dimension of climate change and the importance of geographical justice issues, where the high vulnerability of some states to climate change is made more unjust because of their low carbon emissions. These disparities have the potential to increase the risk of conflict but, Dalby argues, this risk can be mitigated by the introduction of “intelligent policies.” Adapting and responding to climate change will also require resilience, transformation, and development and this all depends on the decisions being made today.

10

ACKNOWLEDGING AND ADDRESSING THE INEQUALITIES …

207

The focus of this section is on the structural inequalities underlying the current international system, and how these compound the negative impacts felt by specific populations. Each contribution examines existing unequal structures and hegemonic discourses, but has also offers insights on ways in which alternatives to them might be conceived and implemented. As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to demonstrate, “These compound risks will exacerbate and be exacerbated by the unfolding economic crisis and long-standing socioeconomic and racial disparities, both within countries and across regions, in ways that will put specific populations at heightened risk and compromise recovery.” (Phillips et al. 2020, 586). The impacts of the global challenges we face are visible today, and they require a rapid, transformative, and equitable response. When working your way through these chapters we encourage you to use the questions below to delve deeper into the issues raised, and to think about how new approaches might provide solutions to the challenges we face. 1. How does the current structure of the international system influence how we respond to insecurity? 2. In what ways does inequality limit our ability to respond to largescale global challenges? 3. What can be done to reorient our approaches to be more inclusive of previously marginalized groups? 4. How can we reconfigure the international system to be more relevant to the realities of world society today? 5. What role does the recognition of the interconnected nature of global challenges play in enabling the pursuit of alternative approaches and solutions? 6. How can we ensure that any changes to the current system do not replicate the problems of the past?

References Bell, D., 2013. Race and international relations: Introduction. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 26(1), pp. 1–4. Bowleg, L., 2020. We’re not all in this together: On COVID-19, intersectionality, and structural inequality.

208

K. SEAMAN

Burke, M., Hsiang, S. M., & Miguel, E., 2015. Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production. Nature, 527(7577), pp. 235–239. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15725. Hardoon, D., 2015. Wealth: Having it all and wanting more. Oxfam Wealth, Oxford. Hubacek, K., Baiocchi, G., Feng, K., Castillo, R. M., Sun, L., & Xue, J., 2017. Global carbon inequality. Energy, Ecology and Environment, 2(6), pp. 361– 369. Kerner, I., 2017. Relations of difference: Power and inequality in intersectional and postcolonial feminist theories. Current Sociology, 65(6), pp. 846–866. King, A. D., & Harrington, L. J., 2018. The inequality of climate change from 1.5 to 2 °C of global warming. Geophysical Research Letters, 45, pp. 5030– 5033. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL078430. Lynch, C., 2019. The moral aporia of race in international relations. International Relations, 33(2), pp. 267–285. Markkanen, S., & Anger-Kraavi, A., 2019. Social impacts of climate change mitigation policies and their implications for inequality, Climate Policy, 19(7), pp. 827–844. https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2019.1596873. Mikulewicz, M. 2018. Politicizing vulnerability and adaptation: on the need to democratize local responses to climate impacts in developing countries, Climate and Development, 10(1), pp. 18–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/175 65529.2017.1304887. Phillips, C. A., Caldas, A., Cleetus, R., Dahl, K. A., Declet-Barreto, J., Licker, R., Merner, L. D., Ortiz-Partida, J. P., Phelan, A. L., Spanger-Siegfried, E., & Talati, S., 2020. Compound climate risks in the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature Climate Change, 10(7), pp. 586–588. Phillips, N., 2017. Power and inequality in the global political economy. International Affairs, 93(2), pp. 429–444. Rao, N. D., van Ruijven, B. J., Riahi, K., & Bosetti, V., 2017. Improving poverty and inequality modelling in climate research. Nature Climate Change, 7(12), pp. 857–862. Reckien, D., Salvia, M., Heidrich, O., Church, J. M., Pietrapertosa, F., de Gregorio-Hurtado, S., d’Alonzo, V., Foley, A., Simoes, S.G., Lorencová, E.K., & Orru, H., 2018. How are cities planning to respond to climate change? Assessment of local climate plans from 885 cities in the EU-28. Journal of Cleaner Production, 191, pp. 207–219. Shilliam, R., 2020. Race and racism in international relations: Retrieving a scholarly inheritance. International Politics Reviews, pp. 1–44. United Nations / Framework Convention on Climate Change. 2015. Adoption of the Paris agreement, 21st conference of the parties. Paris: United Nations.

CHAPTER 11

Women, Peace, and Security: What Are the Connections? What Are the Limitations? Valentine M. Moghadam

Introduction Conflict situations significantly impact women’s lives, especially the lives of women living in impoverished or patriarchal settings. We have heard far too many heart-rending stories about displacement, family separation, kidnappings, rapes, sexual slavery, death, and destruction. At the same time, women play important roles in peace movements, peace initiatives, and post-conflict reconstruction, a reality recognized in Security Council Resolution 1325 (SCR 1325),1 although in many situations 1 SCR 1325 on women, peace, and security was adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council on October 31, 2000. It was the products of years of advocacy by women scholar-activists in collaboration with the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and with the support of the Minister of Women’s Affairs of Namibia. The resolution called for the prevention of sexual and gender-based violence in armed conflict;

V. M. Moghadam (B) Sociology and International Affairs, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_11

209

210

V. M. MOGHADAM

women’s roles in peacebuilding and reconstruction are defined by others and their voices are tokenized if not marginalized. The end of the Cold War was supposed to have brought about a “peace dividend” but in fact conflicts and wars spread across the globe, from the Balkan wars, African civil conflicts, and Islamist uprisings of the 1990s to the 2003 U.S./UK invasion and occupation of Iraq and the wreckage after international interventions in Libya, Syria, and Yemen following the 2011 Arab Spring protests. Those conflicts have left behind poverty, corrupt governance, and fractured societies. In this connection, it is worth posing questions about militarism, masculinity, and gender inequality, which I will proceed to address through a focus on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA): • What is the relationship between “peacetime” arms sales and military spending on the one hand, and masculinist politics and gendered conflicts on the other? • How does the existing interstate system—with its features of inequalities, hierarchies, and rivalries across and within states—encourage conflict? • What are the mechanisms by which patriarchy or gender inequality generates conflict and war? • What would a feminist peace look like? This chapter is organized as follows. I begin by providing a conceptual context, referring to some key contributions of feminist scholars and activists to our understanding of women, war, peace, and security (Feminist Peace and Security approach, or FPS). I draw on contributions by those within the field of Feminist International Relations (IR), insights from women-led peace and anti-war groups,2 and my own research protection of women and girls in refugee situations; a gender perspective on issues of peace and security, and the participation of women in peace negotiations and peacekeeping operations. SCR 1325 was followed by several related resolutions, including SCR 1889 (2009), calling on the UN Secretary-General to develop a set of indicators to track implementation. Since its formation, UN Women has coordinated the National Action Plans that member-states develop as a tool demonstrating realization of the resolution’s objectives. SCR 1325 was invoked during preparations for Colombia’s peace agreement between the rebel FARC and the government, but it has been weakly implemented in other conflict mediation efforts. See further discussion below. 2 Such groups include Code Pink, Marche Mondiale des Femmes (MMF), Israel’s Machsom Watch, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF),

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

211

and perspectives. I then examine military spending and the arms flow to the MENA region and their implications for women’s security and peace. Finally, I describe notable feminist contributions to international peacemaking and continued mobilizations and initiatives for peace and anti-militarism. Source material includes data from the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Conceptual Context and Key Studies The Feminist Peace and Security approach has evolved through sophisticated studies conducted over the years by scholars who examine the international system through a feminist lens; it puts women at the center and recognizes the gendered nature of social relations, institutions, and power. It is also the product of the accumulated wisdom of women peacemakers, from Jane Addams and others who recognized the folly of the run-up to what was then called the Great War, to the anti-nuclear women of Greenham Common, and to those who inspired and pushed for Security Council Resolution 1325. In what follows I summarize some key aspects of FPS. First, feminist IR scholars have questioned the supposed nonexistence and irrelevance of women and gender in international security studies, uncovering or exposing the workings of gender and power in international relations. Studies by Cynthia Cockburn, Carol Cohn, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Cynthia Enloe, Charlotte Hooper, Janie Leatherman, Spike Peterson, Ann Tickner, Jacqui True, and others entail the recovery of women’s experiences, the implications of women’s exclusion from decision-making roles, and the harms of militarized masculinities. As a result of sociological analyses of gender as a structural feature of inequality and of the construction and function of masculinities and femininities (by, e.g., Joan Acker, R. W. Connell, Cynthia Epstein, Judith Lorber, Sylvia Walby), and in light of the feminist IR literature, we now accept that gender cuts through world politics and state institutions. Second, the FPS approach questions the extent to which women are secured by state “protection” in times of war and peace. There are two aspects to this point that I underscore. First is the (false) idea that MADRE, Women Crossing DMZ, and the new Feminist Foreign Policy Project. For details see Moghadam (2020, ch. 5).

212

V. M. MOGHADAM

women are always safe during times of peace. In fact, various forms of violence against women remain pervasive—in the home, on the streets, and at workplaces. Cynthia Cockburn (2004, 2010) has referred to “the continuum of violence” from the domestic sphere to sites of war, resulting from the interplay of militarism and gender inequality. The second is that war is an aberration rather than “politics by other means,” or more precisely, hegemonic politics by other means, given the hierarchical nature of the contemporary world-system. When states are destabilized and countries invaded or bombed, women are most certainly not protected. On the home front, when the state expends large amounts of financial and human resources on weapons manufacturing, exports, or purchases, there is a cost to be paid in terms of social spending. Those costs include limited funding of programs for women’s physical security, welfare, and empowerment. In the U.S., for example, excessive military spending diverts resources away from the provision of universal and quality health care, pre-school facilities, and statutory paid maternity leave of a decent duration.3 Third, the FPS approach contests discourses wherein women are linked unreflectively with peace. It posits instead that the identification of women with peace should be balanced by recognition of the participation, support, and inspiration that women have given to war-making, whether defensive wars or offensive wars. This is an important point to remember, especially in connection with the second point regarding hegemonic war-making. Although it is true that most violence, conflict, and war are planned and conducted by men—a reality that is reflective of hegemonic or hyper-masculinity—it is also true that in many countries, including liberal democratic ones, women in senior political positions may be complicit in the decision to destabilize states or wage war—thus

3 In the wake of (a) climate justice movements against the detrimental environmental and health effects of climate change caused by excessive CO2 emissions and (b) the COVID-19 pandemic that spread across the globe in 2020, it is more urgent than ever to interrogate massive military spending at the cost of the well-being of people and the planet. In the U.S., for example, despite its wealth, there is a large population of citizens living below or just above the poverty line, including the many African-American and Hispanic men and women who succumbed to COVID-19 in 2020. The U.S. has no socialized healthcare and no statutory paid maternity leave. Following a series of incidents of brutality against African-American citizens, protesters in summer 2020 demanded a reallocation of resources toward better funding of public services.

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

213

harming women and their children in other countries.4 It may be true, as Joshua Goldstein (2001) has argued, that across history and in many societies, gender relations and war-making alike have been constructed around “militarized masculinity.” But for women in senior positions to push for war also may be tied to their class interests, political aspirations, or ideological stances.5 The point just made is different from the historical fact of women’s participation in legitimate armed movements, self-defense militia, revolutions, and so on. From the Soviet female fighter pilots of World War II and the women of the Viet Cong, to the women fighters of revolutions in Central America and most recently Rojava in northern Syria—women as well as men have taken part in armed struggles and the defense or liberation of homeland. Fourth, gendered security practices must address both women and men, be cognizant of unbalanced power relations at home and abroad, and acknowledge the interrelated nature of gendered security. That is, (a) men as well as women may be opposed to conflict and war as well as be damaged by militarism, and (b) security for women and men at home should not be achieved by means of the insecurity of women and men elsewhere. Although women’s involvement in and leadership of peace movements has been arguably greater than men’s, the history of pacifism and conscientious objection on the part of men, their antiwar activism, their involvement in peace movements and organizations, and their insistence on diplomacy and international cooperation must be acknowledged.6

4 Among them would be Israel’s Golda Meier, India’s Indira Gandhi, the UK’s Margaret Thatcher, and the U.S. secretaries of state Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton. Under Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan developed its nuclear arsenal in contravention of international law. In a separate category, but also pernicious, are the women supporters and propagandists of ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh during its “caliphate” heyday in Syria and Iraq. 5 For every Madeleine Albright or Hillary Clinton who pushed for military intervention or supported a coup, there are women in governance structures who strive for diplomacy, international cooperation, and peace. An example is the group of women who helped secure the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, or Iran nuclear agreement): Catherine Ashton (UK), Federica Mogherini (EU), Helga Schmid (Germany), Wendy Sherman (U.S.). 6 A notable example is the U.S. organization Peace Action, and its large affiliate Massachusetts Peace Action. Details may be found at peaceaction.org and masspeaceact ion.org.

214

V. M. MOGHADAM

Fifth, as a complement to Johan Galtung’s (1971) thesis on how structural violence and cultural violence can lead to conflict; on Ted Gurr’s (1970) work on relative deprivation, discrimination, and intrastate violence; and on Paul Collier’s (2000) work on economic factors and “greed” as generating civil conflict, feminist scholars such as Mary Caprioli, Valerie Hudson, and others around the WomanStats Project have empirically examined the relationship between patriarchy and gender inequality on the one hand, and the propensity for civil conflict and interstate conflict, on the other. They are cognizant that women’s subordination historically through male control of reproduction (or as Frederik Engels famously put it in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, “the world-historical defeat of the female sex”) has driven conflict and violence generally and women’s physical insecurity more specifically. Higher levels of gender inequality correlate with civil conflict, and thus gender equality is necessary both for women’s physical security and for world peace. In what follows, I elaborate on this point. Patriarchy, Gender Inequality, and Hyper-Masculinity The WomanStats Project is a group of researchers and a database. It is arguably the largest global database on the status of women, enabling comparisons of the security and level of conflict within 175 countries to the overall security of women in those countries. Deploying indicators such as sexual violence, sex trafficking and prostitution, family law, polygamy, bride-price, genital mutilation, sex-selective abortion, and female infanticide, along with many other indicators, and distinguishing between law and practice, the database provides scales on women’s physical security that researchers have found to correlate with intra-state and interstate violence. On the basis of a large number of well-cited publications conducted by its researchers, including several notable books, the WomanStats project finds that the degree of equality of women within countries is the best predictor—better than degree of democracy and better than level of wealth, income inequality, or ethno-religious identity—of how peaceful or conflict-ridden their countries are. Further, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are less stable and more likely to choose force rather than diplomacy to resolve conflict. The central message is that violence against women—or what Alison Brysk (2018) calls “gender regimes of insecurity”—is a menace underlying local, national, and international politics and security, with a causal

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

215

impact on intra- and interstate conflict. Conversely, increasing gender equality is expected to have cascading effects on security, stability, and resilience within a country and internationally. (For details and the database, see http://www.womanstats.org/; see also Caprioli 2005; Hudson et al. 2008/2009, 2012, 2020; Nagel 2020.) What I would add to those insights—from a feminist-inflected worldsystems perspective—is that among the non-core countries, gender inequality, and violence certainly correlate; among core countries where gender equality is more advanced in both law and practice, those countries with lower scores on gender equality measures are likely to have both higher levels of domestic violence and a greater propensity to engage in warfare internationally.7 The U.S. exemplifies this proposition, as it compares unfavorably to such peers as Sweden, Finland, Canada, or Spain. The U.S. has the highest levels of military spending in the world (in absolute dollar terms and as a percentage of both GDP and especially discretionary government spending); it is the most income-unequal country among all the rich industrialized nations; and its female political representation in parliament is among the lowest.8 Other countries with high military expenditures and low female political (and economic) participation are found in the MENA region. Jacqui True’s (2012) political economy approach to the violence that women face—from domestic violence to sexualized violence in war— highlights the interplay of poverty, masculinities, and neoliberal economic globalization. She emphasizes the gendered social and economic inequalities and conditions that generate violence against women, notably women’s relative poverty, lower labor force participation, and less political voice and representation. This is a view shared by many activist groups. For example, at the 2017 meetings of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), in a side event organized jointly by ActionAid, the 7 Research also finds a positive relationship between high military spending and income inequality (see Tongur and Elveren 2013). 8 According to the UNDP’s 2018 Gender Development Index, which measures wealth, mean, and expected years of schooling, and life expectancy, the U.S. ranked 13th (see UNDP 2018). According to the Interparliamentary Union (www.ipu.org), the U.S. has among the smallest percentages of women in parliament, at just under 24%. The UN recommends a female share of at least 30%. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020 (p. 13), of the 152 countries measured for women’s political empowerment, the U.S. ranked 86—lower than Tunisia (ranked 67), and others, including Korea, Belarus, and Kenya, and just above Greece (ranked 87).

216

V. M. MOGHADAM

African Women’s Development and Communication Network, and the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, speakers focused on key strategies and opportunities for ending violence against women and girls and transforming economies “by tackling dominant macroeconomic structures that exploit and perpetuate women’s economic inequality and increase women’s exposure to violence.”9 Women’s security, therefore, requires the absence of economic, sexual, and military forms of violence (Tickner 1992). In short, the household division of labor, gendered institutions, the global macro-economy, and constructions of masculinities and femininities associated with power, war, and militarism all underpin the persistence of violence against women. For the MENA region, those factors, as well as continued external intervention, lie at the heart of women’s insecurity.

Conflicts in the Middle East and the Arms Flow To state that the MENA region is an unstable region is to state the obvious. The establishment of Israel in 1948 and subsequent Arab–Israeli wars; the 1953 U.S./UK-supported coup d’état against the government of Premier Mossadegh of Iran; the 1956 Suez crisis and attack on Egypt by the U.K., France, and Israel; the 15-year Lebanese civil war; the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq war; the 1990–1991 war against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait—all are examples of the region’s long history of conflicts involving both regional and Western actors. The 1990s saw the bloody battle between the Algerian state and armed Islamists, along with tough international sanctions against Iraq and then Iran. Peace plans between Israel and the Palestinians failed to achieve the goal of justice with peace, and in the new century, Palestinian unity fell apart, with rival factions governing the West Bank and Gaza, respectively. Especially consequential was the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq by the U.S. and U.K., which not only destroyed the country’s physical infrastructure and political institutions but also opened the way for years of chaos followed by a reign of terror by the so-called Islamic State. In the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, there was even more international intervention, notably the NATO bombing of Libya, which 9 Notes by the author, taken at the event, held during the 61st session of the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women—Women’s Economic Empowerment in the Changing World of Work—which convened in New York 13–24 March 2017.

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

217

rendered the country a failed and fractured state, which it remained a decade later. The decision to try to topple the Syrian regime was undertaken by the U.S., France, the UK, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar, and it opened the way for the incursion of jihadists from some 82 countries. The massive outflow of Iraqi and especially Syrian citizens, the ISIS murders of Christians in Iraq and Syria, the attempted destruction of Iraq’s Yazidi community and the enslavement of its women by ISIS, and the descent of Libya into a conduit for human trafficking and illicit migration—these are but a few of the consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2011 decision to destabilize Libya and Syria. The steady stream of Western weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE enabled those countries to intervene in Yemen’s civil conflict in 2015 and create what the UN called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis10 made worse in 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic. New alliances around the region’s conflicts have formed, such as the alliance of the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE in contention with Iran, Syria, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Whatever one thinks of the Iranian regime (and that regime cannot be worse than the Saudi regime), the Trump administration’s 2017 withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, or the 2015 nuclear agreement involving the U.S., the European Union, the UN, and Russia) was a move away from dialogue and diplomacy to contention and possibly war. In 2019, the U.S., Turkey, and Israel audaciously launched military attacks on Syria. In early January 2020, the U.S. assassinated the top ranking general of a sovereign state, Iran, in another sovereign state, Iraq. Later that year, Israel assassinated an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran. Those developments—with the examples of breathtaking violations of state sovereignty—highlight the nature of the contemporary worldsystem: unequal, hierarchical, unjust, almost lawless, and certainly violent. It is rather an understatement to note that the long history of U.S. and European intervention in Middle Eastern affairs has been entirely for raison d’état rather than for the well-being of citizens, prosperity of nations, or peace and stability. There are other ongoing conflicts in the world, some the legacy of colonialism, others the result of poverty or income inequality generating the misery of people who have then turned 10 See UN News, “Humanitarian crisis in Yemen remains the worst in the world, warns UN”, available at. https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/02/1032811. For details, see Mako and Moghadam (2021).

218

V. M. MOGHADAM

Fig. 11.1 Military spending, MENA countries, 2010–2018 (Source World Bank, World Development Indicators [accessed March 2020])

to rebel groups. All such conflicts are fueled by the global arms trade that is led by the U.S., which has the world’s largest military, spends more on weapons production than any other country in the world, and has bases throughout the globe, including some 17 bases in countries that surround Iran. The U.S. exports sophisticated weaponry to its allies in the MENA region; in turn, high levels of military spending in the Gulf sheikhdoms can defy logic or rationality.11 Figure 11.1 illustrates trends in MENA military spending as a percentage of GDP from 2010 to 2018. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which provides data and analysis on military spending, arms production, export, and import, shows that since 1991, average regional military spending has been higher for MENA than other developing regions; only Western Europe, East Asia (which would include China), and North America (largely the U.S.) have exceeded

11 Military spending includes military infrastructure (bases, etc.), salaries and benefits as well as weapons production or purchases. Note that some countries, notably the UAE, do not provide figures on arms purchases as part of their data on military expenditures. For details on international interventions in and military aid to Arab countries, see Mako and Moghadam (2021), especially Ch. 6.

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

219

MENA spending.12 Figure 11.1 reveals the exceptionally high levels of military spending in Saudi Arabia and Oman, but also high levels for Kuwait, Bahrain, and Algeria. The lowest levels of military spending as a percentage of GDP are in Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and Tunisia. Data were not available for the UAE for all years, but in 2010, according to the World Bank, military spending consumed fully 6% of GDP, two to three times more than the UAE spent on health or education (see Fig. 11.1). According to the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2011, between 2006 and 2009, the UAE spent 2.8% of its GDP on health and another 2.8% on education—compared with 6% on its military (UNDP 2011: Table 10). As noted in the first part of this chapter, a feminist perspective on militarism would posit that high military expenditure is indicative of the masculinist nature of the state and its propensity for violence. Between 1988 and 2003, according to SIPRI data, the largest proportions of GDP allocated to the military were found in Israel, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, and the GCC countries. Elsewhere, I have argued (Moghadam 2017) that those Arab countries with higher levels of military spending experienced more violence during and after the Arab Spring uprisings (notably Syria and Yemen), or they inflicted violence elsewhere (Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Bahrain in 2011 and its attack, along with UAE, on Yemen since 2015). Libya is somewhat anomalous, as military spending was quite low after the 1990s; the Gadhafi regime also had abandoned its nuclear ambitions to improve its relations with the West. Nonetheless, protests and the government response turned violent early on, and as stated above, Libya was punished by NATO and the Western alliance’s Arab allies. World Bank data show that military spending in 2010—the eve of the Arab Spring protests across the region—was higher than health spending in Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen. Only Tunisia and Bahrain (the latter with much greater per capita wealth) had relatively high spending on health. (Spending on health and education subsequently increased, as governments responded to protests or sought to prevent further ones.) In the years before the Arab Spring protests, Yemen’s figures were especially problematical, given that it was the poorest country in the region. Under President Saleh, Yemen had become an ally of the U.S. “war on terror,” and thus its military spending, as a percentage of GDP, 12 See Stockholm Institute of Peace Research (SIPRI): https://www.sipri.org/databa ses/milex.

220

V. M. MOGHADAM

was almost 7% in 2002 and 2003, falling to 5% in 2004 and remaining steady at about 4% in 2013–2014.13 But Yemen’s spending on healthcare consumed just 1.3% of GDP in 2010. As noted, there often is a trade-off between military spending and social spending, with diversion of funds that could be allocated toward citizen welfare and the advancement of women and girls. For Yemen, the trade-off was a costly one. Yemen’s maternal mortality rate per 100,000 live births was 210 (twice as high as Morocco’s 110, the next highest in the region), and just 36% of births were attended by skilled health personnel. Yemen’s mean years of schooling were just 2.5 (UNDP 2011: Table 4). Heavy veiling and child marriage were widespread. To put the MENA region’s 2010–2011 figures on military spending in a global and comparative perspective, countries deemed to be at medium and low human development—as defined by the UNDP and as characteristic of most Arab countries—had an average military expenditure of 2.0% of GDP. The Arab region spent 5.5% of their GDP on the military, compared with 1.4% in Latin America and the Caribbean. (The U.S.’s own military spending consumed 4.9% of GDP.) On the eve of the Arab Spring protests, therefore, Tunisia was on a par with Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as such countries as the Czech Republic (1.4%) and Spain (1.0%). Small wonder that its protests were peaceful and that its outcome was a democratic tradition, characterized by women’s political participation and expanded legal rights (Moghadam 2017). The major arms suppliers to MENA countries are the U.S., U.K., and France. The U.S. has long provided military weapons to various countries in the region, and in recent years Saudi Arabia and the UAE have purchased huge amounts. Israel benefits from exceptional U.S. generosity; the figures on Israeli military spending do not include the military assistance agreement, signed at the end of the Obama Administration in 2016, for a transfer of $38 billion in weaponry from the U.S. to Israel over a 10year period.14 Most governments in 2015 and 2016 had relatively high expenditures on health and education, but out-of-pocket health expenditures in MENA are among the highest in the world. According to World Bank data, at an average of 34.3%, out-of-pocket health spending is much

13 SIPRI (op cit.), see also http://militarybudget.org/yemen/, accessed 9 June 2020. 14 “Obama will leave office having out-pledged all of his predecessors in military support

to the country Netanyahu now runs” (Green 2016).

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

221

higher than the world average (18.2%), East Asia and the Pacific (26.1%), Europe and Central Asia (18%).15 There is consensus that the quality of schooling has declined in many MENA countries. For such countries, therefore, government revenue that ought to have gone toward programs to improve the quality of schooling and citizen health, to expand the social infrastructure and employ more women, or to generate more jobs for young people is misallocated toward the purchase of weapons from the U.S., UK, and France. In turn, countries like the U.S. heavily subsidize weapons manufacturers, at the cost of domestic policies to make university attendance more affordable or to ensure universal healthcare access. Indeed, the U.S. remains by far the world’s largest arms supplier, with domestic manufacturers selling more than $23.7 billion in weapons in 2014 to nearly 100 different countries (and of course to the Pentagon itself). During the Obama administration, weapons sales surged to record levels, in large part due to huge shipments to the Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia. The weapons sales to Saudi Arabia have included cluster bombs and other munitions used to hit densely populated areas, schools, and even a camp for displaced people in Yemen. Many of the U.S. arms sales, especially to Israel and Egypt, are heavily subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer. Congress has approved all of this, perhaps because of the approximately $150 million a year that the defense industry spends on lobbying and direct campaign contributions.16 Although the largest arms supplier to Saudi Arabia is the U.S., with $8.4bn worth of sales since 2014, the next largest arms suppliers are the UK ($2.6bn) and France ($475m).17 According to SIPRI, “from 2014–18, the kingdom received 56 combat aircraft from the United States and 38 from the United Kingdom, with aircraft in both cases equipped with cruise missiles and other guided weapons” (cited in Jareer 2019). The figures on military spending in MENA and the massive flow of weapons out of the U.S. recall Pope Francis’s admonition to the U.S. Congress during his visit in 2015:

15 The highest out-of-pocket health expenses in the world are in South Asia (62.5%). See http://wdi.worldbank.org/table/2.12. Accessed 9 June 2020. 16 https://theintercept.com/2015/09/24/pope-decries-shameful-culpable-silencearms-sales-drenched-innocent-blood/. 17 https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2018/09/07/why-more-and-morecountries-are-blocking-arms-sales-to-saudi-arabia-and-the-uae/#5f759d18580a.

222

V. M. MOGHADAM

Here we have to ask ourselves: Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.18

In late 2017, members of the European Parliament (EP) renewed their call for an EU arms embargo against Saudi Arabia, following allegations that the country is breaching international humanitarian law in Yemen.19 This may have to do with the fact that the EP has a relatively large proportion of women (37% in 2014), many of whom represent left-wing parties. In early 2018, Germany, Norway, and the Walloon region of Belgium halted the arms flow to Saudi Arabia and was joined later that year by Finland and Denmark.20 In September 2018, the Spanish government decided to halt its sale of so-called precision bombs to Saudi Arabia— the result of activist demands as well as knowledge of the scale of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen.21 The male-dominated European Commission issued humanitarian appeals and allocated humanitarian aid funds for Yemen but did not call on member states to stop the arms flow.22 According to SIPRI, Saudi Arabia was in 2019 the world’s third largest military spender. The internationalization of Syria’s civil conflict included the flow of arms and jihadists from the border with Turkey, along with assaults on Syria by Israel, Turkey, and the U.S. This only exacerbated and prolonged the civil conflict, the outflow of Syrian refugees to neighboring countries and to Europe, and the fragmentation of the country. The plight of Iraq’s Yazidi women who experienced unspeakable crimes by ISIS occurred because of Syria’s destabilization and more directly because of 18 The Pope’s full message is reprinted here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/ social-issues/transcript-pope-franciss-speech-to-congress/2015/09/24/6d7d7ac8-62bf11e5-8e9e-dce8a2a2a679_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c6c559dc2414. 19 https://www.euronews.com/2017/11/30/which-eu-countries-sell-arms-to-saudiarabia-. 20 https://controlarms.org/blog/three-countries-stop-arms-sales-to-warring-parties-inyemen/; see also https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/11/24/jamalkhashoggi-finland-denmark-germany-arms-sales/2101874002/, accessed August 2020. 21 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/spain-arms-saudi-arabia-dealsale-cancel-yemen-war-bombing-a8523916.html. 22 http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-5146_en.htm, accessed October 2018.

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

223

the continued instability in Iraq years after the U.S./UK invasion of 2003. The humanitarian crisis in Yemen—the deaths of so many children by bombardments or cholera—resulted from bombing assaults by Saudi and UAE fighter planes, with weapons supplied largely by the U.S., UK, and France. World-systems and Marxist theorists offer differing but complementary perspectives on the larger causes, implications, and consequences of those interventions, conflicts, and wars; some emphasize a new kind of imperialism (Harvey 2005) while others point to the historic decline of U.S. global hegemony (Chase-Dunn 1996; Wallerstein 2003, 2014); the consequences are intensified rivalry and competition among core and some newly empowered semi-peripheral countries over resources and trade, as well the emergence of deadly new non-state actors. Feminist scholars might draw attention to “manly states” and hypermasculinity in international relations (e.g., Hooper 2001). In summary, ours is a chaotic world characterized by a “continuum of violence” from micro-level gender relations to macro-politics. Whither Security Council Resolution 1325? At this point, it is worth asking how Security Council Resolution 1325 of October 2000 on women, peace, and security has been faring in the Middle East. The good news is that UNSCR 1325 is the product of years of global feminist advocacy on violence against women. Earlier, the final Vienna Declaration of the 1993 Conference on Human Rights saw the assertion that violence against women was an abuse of human rights and an emphasis on the harmful effects of certain traditional or customary practices, cultural prejudice, and religious extremism. The declaration also stated that human rights abuses of women in situations of armed conflict—including systematic rape, sexual slavery, and forced pregnancy—were violations of the fundamental principles of international human rights and humanitarian law. Gender experts within the former UN agency UNIFEM, working with several transnational feminist networks (TFNs), held informal meetings with members of the UN’s Security Council to advocate for a resolution on women, peace, and security (Hill et al. 2003). This paved the way for SCR 1325, calling on governments, as well as the UN Security Council itself, to include women in negotiations and settlements with respect to conflict resolution and peace building. At the same time, the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC), was influenced by the lobbying

224

V. M. MOGHADAM

efforts of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice (Cohn 2008). The statute governs administration of the ICC, including the gender-balanced recruitment of judges, and mandates appointment of gender specialists, including those with expertise on violence against women and children. The U.S. has chosen not to join the ICC, no doubt because it would have to be held accountable for actions in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere. UN member states are asked to provide national action plans (NAPs), and in the Middle East, five have done so, with the League of Arab States producing a regional plan. Iraq has produced two NAPs, one in 2014 and an emergency contingency plan in 2015; Jordan in 2018; Palestine in 2017; and Tunisia in 2018. According to a recent study (UN Women 2019: v), “UNSCR 1325 has also been leveraged by civil society actors … to influence constitutional drafting processes (including in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya) and to hold Member States to account on issues such as military occupation (Palestine).” Iraq, in fact, began with the Alliance for the Implementation of the National Action for 1325 (established in 2008) and the Iraqi Network for UNSCR 1325 (established in 2010). In Palestine, the 1325 Network was established in 2010 by the General Union of Palestinian Women. In Libya, the 1325 Network consists of CSOs and independent activists (UN Women 2019: 7). But the study goes on to point out that those and other targeted efforts—such as the Yemen Women’s Pact for Peace and Security, and the (Syrian) Women’s Advisory Board and the Women’s Advisory Committee—have had limited influence (ibid.). The UN Women study does not concede this, but the lack of progress may be because SCR 1325 has no enforcement provisions, and in any event the various NAPs and civil society initiatives could not override the interests of internal and external forces that are bent on the continuation of conflict and exploitation. The conflicts caused by the hierarchies and injustices of the contemporary capitalist world-system and by domestic social orders characterized by male dominance and female subordination have wide-reaching effects, not least of which is displacement and migration. Women in refugee populations are known to be especially vulnerable to traffickers but also to forced underage marriage or domestic violence. Research on Sudanese and Syrian communities in Egypt reveals migrant deprivations in the country, especially given the lack of access to rights and formal employment. In the case of women who travel alone or with their children, limited options may lead them compel them to turn to prostitution. In Libya, migrant communities of African workers existed for decades, but the 2011 NATO

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

225

intervention and civil war deeply affected the lives of those communities. The violence in Libya uprooted migrant lives and compelled many to travel elsewhere within Africa, mostly but not exclusively to their countries of origin (Fargues and Fandrich 2012). Those who stayed or arrived after the crisis in what had become a lawless country faced instead hardship and exploitation, which left women particularly vulnerable. Numerous reports by journalists as well as humanitarian organizations highlight the plight of African women constantly subjected to sexual exploitation.23 Many try to make the perilous journey to Europe and often fail. Increased rates of intimate partner violence are connected to the disruption of social roles resulting from conflict and refugee status. The physical insecurity of women and girls, therefore, is a product both of patriarchal relations and international relations, fueled by militarism. Research also points to resilience and opportunities for social mobility, along with the reshaping of gender norms and women’s empowerment, as women negotiate their role within the migrant community (Ayoub and Khallaf 2014; Jacobsen et al. 2014). Many women who travel with their husbands find themselves having to leave the home to work to support the family with an additional income in a new, more economically challenging environment. This process can come with hardship but sometimes leads to increased independence and freedom of choice. Women can find empowerment through participation in women’s civil society associations or similar networks (Jacobsen et al. 2014). Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco host many migrants, largely from West Africa. Although solidarity with local women’s organizations has been sporadic, migrant women can build social capital and empowerment by becoming fuller members of civil society. This sometimes starts with creating networks of mothers or young women learning a new skill or language to sustain themselves and their children. Other times it takes more structured forms as in the cases of women’s branches of migrant associations in Morocco, for example the Plateforme nationale protection

23 See, for example, https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2015/05/ dangers-facing-female-migrants-libya-150511170708195.html and https://www.washin gtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/07/06/to-escape-sexual-violence-at-homefemale-migrants-must-risk-sexual-violence-on-the-way-to-europe/?noredirect=on&utm_ term=.560f501a3daa.

226

V. M. MOGHADAM

migrants.24 Such programs, however salutary, have limited capacity and scope. The cultural, structural, and institutional obstacles that the world’s women face in advancing collective empowerment and security are formidable, given the realities of the contemporary world-system. Many actors have a stake in the reproduction of the current international system and its capitalist economy, even as it appears to be experiencing a period of turmoil, chaos, and transition. The COVID-19 crisis revealed only too well the world order’s inability to address problems collectively, the morbid effects of social and income inequalities, and the impact of government cutbacks in essential social sectors (notably healthcare) amid continued investments in arms production and purchases. Four decades of international and unilateral U.S. sanctions on Iran may explain the dreadful cost to healthcare workers and other citizens at the height of Iran’s coronavirus ordeal in Spring 2020, but what explains the extraordinarily high rates of infections and deaths in the U.S., UK, and France? Could the explanation lie in their misguided domestic and international policies and priorities over the past decades?

Toward a Feminist Peace and a World of Gendered Security At the 2017 CSW meetings in New York, it was gratifying to hear, from the Moroccan representative, that the arms trade to MENA should stop, if peace as well as financing for women’s economic empowerment were to become genuine priorities. An Iraqi woman delegate spoke of the “exceptional circumstances” in her country that included widespread violence, including violence against women, internal displacement, and outmigration. Statements submitted by the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, Nazra for Feminist Studies, and the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights noted the violence faced by women human rights defenders: harassment and prosecution in Egypt, smear campaigns in Yemen, imprisonment in Bahrain, and abductions by armed groups in Syria; the persistence of discriminatory family and labor laws; increasing informalization of women’s work and lack of social protection; and “the 24 For an account of the challenges facing migrant women in Morocco and the role of civil society, see https://www.libe.ma/Femmes-migrantes-ou-femme-migrante-Un-reg rettable-amalgame-qu-il-importe-d-eviter_a97355.html.

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

227

social impact of the rising tide of political Islam” along with “socially conservative groups that totally deny the right of women to work.”25 The obstacles to peace and women’s security are formidable—patriarchal states and institutions, an unjust interstate and global economic system, the arms flow, hyper-masculinity. If we cannot yet change the worldsystem, can we begin to address war, security, and peace by enhancing the status of women? Can steps to achieve gender equality help end men’s propensity for violence and states’ propensity for war? (See Fig. 11.1.) The answer would be “Yes” if we agreed that war, peace, and security have very much to do with women’s legal status and their social positions; that strong laws, norms, and enforcement regarding violence against women and girls could attenuate men’s violence as well as the state’s repressive apparatus; that women’s visibility, influence, presence, and leadership in the public sphere and public space—across all occupations and professions, and levels of decision-making—could deepen and expand women’s security while also helping to shape the state’s domestic and foreign policies. To achieve the above requires reduced military spending and larger allocations for pro-women policies and programs in state agencies and in civil society. These are the prerequisites for a feminist peace. As the WomanStats project insists, women’s subordination and gender inequality are stronger predictors of conflict and war than is democracy or national wealth. Indeed, democracy is not a panacea. It may be true that democracies do not wage war on each other (the “democratic peace thesis”26 ), but they wage war on other countries, or they engage in deliberate state destabilization, or overtly or covertly arm rebels, with the effect that they do in fact engage in war-making. If democracy, then, is not a sufficient condition for a peaceful world, we need to think of other alternatives. We might, for example, examine countries in the world where military spending is low, women’s status is relatively high, and the state does not engage in war-making. For that, we might look at countries such as Costa Rica, Finland, Sweden, and Tunisia as models. In my previous work on divergent outcomes of the Arab Spring, I asked why Tunisia was the only country that avoided violence, civil

25 Author notes and observations. See also UN (2017) and various documents submitted to the Commission, available at https://www.unwomen.org/en/csw/previoussessions/csw61-2017/official-documents. 26 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory.

228

V. M. MOGHADAM

conflict, or authoritarian reversal and instead embarked upon a democratic transition. I compared Tunisia with Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen and found that Tunisia had two advantages over the other countries: a more gender-egalitarian society and strong women’s rights organizations, along with the absence of foreign intervention. In turn, those factors were associated with modern political institutions, a robust civil society, and low military spending. Such conditions were not present in the other countries (Moghadam 2017; see also Mako and Moghadam 2021). Tunisia has experienced difficult economic conditions in the years since its political revolution, with protests continuing over persistent unemployment and other ills, and a controverisal presidential decree in July 2021. Yet it remains a peaceful country with a strong civil society, including well-established feminist organizations and intellectuals who make their voices heard on an array of governmental, civic, and regional matters. At the global level, we have seen the steady presence of women in peace movements, as critics of militarism and war, and as advocates for peace and human security. One of the world’s oldest peace organizations is the WILPF, founded in 1915 by 1,300 women activists from Europe and North America opposed to what became known as World War I. In midcentury, Women Strike for Peace was active in the U.S., and the Women’s International Democratic Federation was present in the socialist countries and beyond. Along with WILPF, the women’s organizations called for the easing of tensions between the superpowers, an end to the nuclear arms race, and peaceful coexistence. In 1981, British feminist peace activists formed the Women of Greenham Common Peace Camp to oppose the presence of cruise missiles; they stayed until 2000.27 In the latter part of the twentieth century, and in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, a new wave of conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Central Africa involved serious human rights violations against women. In response, new networks emerged such as Women in Black, Medica Mondiale, Women Waging Peace, and Women for Women International. They underscored the specific vulnerability of women and girls during wartime, the pervasive nature of sexual abuse, and the need to include women’s voices in peace negotiations. They also produced research to show that women’s groups 27 For details on the British women’s peace movement, see https://www.bl.uk/sister hood/articles/patriarchy-militarism-and-the-peace-movement#; British Library, Sisterhood and After Research Team, “Patriarchy, militarism and the peace movement” (2013).

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

229

had been effective in peace building in Northern Ireland as well as in Bosnia and Central Africa, notably Liberia. Such research and advocacy led to SCR 1325. In the new century, U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq galvanized women across the globe to support existing peace organizations and build new ones. The Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace consists of a transnational network of women’s groups and leaders in some 20 countries in the Global South; among its priorities is the advancement of women and girls in Muslim-majority countries through legal and policy reform and an end to conflicts. In 2002, a new group was the U.S.-based Code Pink: Women for Peace, whose mission statement identifies it as “a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end the war in Iraq, stop new wars, and redirect our resources into healthcare, education and other life-affirming activities.” Code Pink is famous for its creative but non-violent use of direct action to raise public awareness and put pressure on officials to enact change. These actions include sit-ins, street theater, marches, blockades, and other forms of political protest. A recent campaign focus is to block weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, advocate for Palestinian human rights, and divest from the war economy to re-invest in local peace economies. To those ends, Code Pink works with the major peace organizations in the U.S., such as Peace Action and Massachusetts Peace Action, and with women’s groups across the globe. In 2018–2019 it helped establish a new initiative, the Feminist Foreign Policy Project (see Annex), bringing together a large and diverse group of feminist scholars and activists around a program for peace, diplomacy, international solidarity and cooperation, the lifting of sanctions, and the reallocation of spending away from the military toward societal needs and rights. Code Pink also was a signatory to an April 2020 letter urging the so-called Women20 initiative (formed in 2015 to expand women’s participation in G20 countries) to end its silence on Saudi Arabia’s human rights violations, given that Saudi Arabia was to host the G20 that year.28 In 2007, six women Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Iran’s Shirin Ebadi, formed the Nobel Women’s Initiative, with a view toward ending militarism and conflicts and bringing about peace and stability in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. In Israel, the women-led Machsom

28 See https://freedomforward.org/2020/04/18/letter-w20-g20/.

230

V. M. MOGHADAM

Watch, whose main activity is to monitor checkpoints, continues to oppose the Israeli occupation over Palestinians and call for negotiations and peace. Marche Mondiale des Femmes was launched in 2000 by the Fédération des femmes du Québec, a feminist organization based in Quebec, Canada. The group sprang from the Women’s March Against Poverty in 1995 in Québec, which involved some 2,500 women in three groups marching for ten days before presenting nine demands to the authorities relating to economic justice. Planning for the Marche Mondiale des Femmes began in 1997, and in October 1998, a meeting was held in Montréal, Canada, in which 140 women representing 65 countries took part. They agreed on the two main themes for the march: the elimination of world poverty and the cessation of violence toward women. Marche Mondiale takes the strong position that the combination of poverty, patriarchy, militarism, and violence against women generates both economic injustice and armed conflicts.29 In August 2018, WILPF held its congress in Accra, Ghana, with statements issued about the state of the world, its conflicts, and the conditions of women. Solidarities across borders were forged, and commitments were made to fight poverty, violence against women, and war. We can look to such women’s peace organizations for inspiration and leadership, while also recognizing that the violent, militarist actions of states can be diminished through the steady march of women’s progress toward equality, inclusion, and empowerment. Although—as noted—some women in political leadership positions have been complicit in waging war, there is also research suggesting that expanding women’s presence in politics increases the amount of attention given to social welfare, legal protection, and transparency in government and business. It is important to recognize, however, that political empowerment is just the end of a longer process of ensuring that girls and women are elevated from poverty, given quality schooling and healthcare, guaranteed full and legal equality, provided with the means to earn and control income and assets, guaranteed bodily integrity and dignity, and allowed their rightful place in leadership roles. As the physical security of women and girls improves across countries, their overall empowerment may indeed lead to the 29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marche_mondiale_des_Femmes; http://www.marche mondiale.org/qui_nous_sommes/objectifs/en (2006); http://www.marchemondiale.org/ index_html/en (8 mars 2017—Communiqué international de la MMF), accessed September 2018.

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

231

profound cultural, economic, and political changes necessary to end the world’s conflicts and bring about a world of peace and security for all.

Conclusions Drawing on the feminist IR literature and the legacy of feminist peace activism, this chapter has addressed questions about the relationship between the arms trade and conflict, the ways in which patriarchy and gender inequality undergird militarism, and the connection between the persistence of conflict and wars and the nature of the international system. In a world where climate change and coronaviruses threaten the health, lives, and livelihoods of people everywhere, and where violence against women in domestic settings, public places, and conflict situations persist, does continued high levels of military spending make any logical or ethical sense? Given the long history of women’s subordinate status in Saudi Arabia and the continued Saudi assaults on Yemen that destroy the lives of numerous women and girls, is there any good reason why that country should continue to receive massive arms flows from the world’s “democracies”? Why was impoverished Yemen encouraged to spend so much on weapons in the first decade of the new century, when its social infrastructure was so deficient? The high rate of military spending may be associated with rivalries and competition among MENA countries, but it is also a function of alliances with the U.S., Britain, and France, from where arms are largely purchased. As such, military spending is associated with the contemporary world-system and its feature of hegemonic power and interests. Solutions, however, are not in short supply, and neither are alternatives that have been proposed over time. These are summarized in Table 11.1, in this chapter’s discussion of a Feminist Peace, and in the Annex on the new Feminist Foreign Policy Project. Feminist IR scholars have contributed critical analyses of masculinized discourses of security and state-centered rivalries, and they also have argued for multilevel and multidimensional definitions of security that include “the absence of violence whether it be military, economic, or sexual” (Tickner 1992: 66). Women’s peace groups and other women-led organizations and movements dedicated to the well-being of people and the planet have made notable interventions in international public policy discussions; despite formidable structural and institutional obstacles, they have helped forge new standards and norms. A world organized around values of peace, diplomacy,

232

V. M. MOGHADAM

Table 11.1 Structural and Institutional Constraints to Women’s Empowerment and Security, and Some Alternatives Actors/agents

Impact on women’s empowerment and security

Alternatives and solutions

Patriarchy/gender inequality

States; male kin; various institutions

Ties women exclusively to family roles; prevents equal access to employment and political power; underpins violence against women in the home and public spaces

Neoliberal capitalism

States; international financial institutions; corporations

Undermines decent work; prevents work-family balance; prevents inclusive development; puts profit and markets above welfare and people

Increasing female educational attainment; women’s organizing and coalition-building and identifying allies; harmonization of local laws and policies with the global women’s rights agenda and its effective implementation Women’s organizing and coalition-building for economic and political change; making the case for women’s rights in development; adopting ILO decent work agenda; identifying needed resources for social protection and inclusive development; taxing the rich, corporations, and large financial institutions; creating an alternative solidarity economy

(continued)

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

233

Table 11.1 (continued)

Conflicts and wars

Actors/agents

Impact on women’s empowerment and security

Alternatives and solutions

States; non-state actors (armed rebels); military-industrial complex

Encourages militarism and arms proliferation; sets back or impedes women’s advancement and security; is accompanied by sexual violence; reinforces hyper-masculinity, patriarchy, gender inequality; destroys development gains: infrastructure, livelihood, sustainability

Women’s organizing and coalition-building to end militarism and reallocate resources toward inclusive development, social protection, and women’s rights; full implementation of SCR 1325 and subsequent resolutions; a reformed and more empowered UN for effective multilateralism

Source V. M. Moghadam

and multilateralism for people’s well-being would look very different from our contemporary world order.

Annex Feminist Foreign Policy Project: Mission Statement (2019) We are a collective of activists, academics, and practitioners informed by feminist values of equality, peace, justice, and environmental stewardship. Through this new Feminist Foreign Policy Project, we seek to contribute to a world without war and violence, where militarism is replaced by cooperation and diplomacy; where poverty is eradicated by replacing capitalist structures of exploitation with sharing, compassionate economies that take care of all people; where the goals of environmental protection, racial equity, and gender equality govern our policy decisions; and where international solidarity is the guiding principle of our foreign policy.

234

V. M. MOGHADAM

We ground our vision in a long tradition of anti-imperialist feminist praxis. In the 1920s, feminists sought to end the carving up of colonial territories across the world. In 1945, the Women’s International Democratic Federation was founded to support anti-colonial struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In 1985, at the UN Conference on Women in Nairobi, feminists sought to link the destructive effects of structural adjustment (today called neoliberalism) to the fight against apartheid in South Africa and the occupation of Palestine. We see ourselves as moving along the paths forged by these bold, anti-imperialist efforts. We are at a time in history where the outrageous levels of environmental destruction and militarism put all lives at stake and have long-lasting consequences for future generations and the planet: • The global arms race triggers international tensions, exacerbates social inequities, and intensifies racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence. • Conflicts and wars, often exacerbated or caused by external interference, displace vulnerable populations at a massive scale and lead to forced migration. They normalize patriarchal violence against vulnerable women, men, and children, and often intensify attacks on ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. • Ever-increasing military spending, along with military recruitment, squanders human and financial resources needed for social development and other people- and environment-oriented sectors, policies, and activities. • Neoliberal economic policies, including damaging extractive projects, have brought great harm to our environment and communities throughout the Global South—and in the North, too. They have also brought shameful levels of inequality that cannot be allowed to persist. Women, girls, and other oppressed groups suffer the physical, economic, and social consequences of these policies. The U.S. and other imperial powers have a history of male-dominated military, trade, and aid policies. They use their foreign policies as a means to further the interests of their corporations. They bribe the willing, trick the gullible, use technology to lure the hopeful, and resort to overwhelming military force to punish those who resist. “Humanitarian

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

235

intervention” is often a mask for foreign control of another country’s resources. We imagine a future without foreign coercion and without the exploitation of working people and natural resources. An anti-capitalist critique is at the heart of our feminist agenda for global justice. Although our aim is to help build a worldwide movement for foreign policies of peace and cooperation, we are cognizant of the overwhelming role of the U.S. state—its military-industrial complex, its hundreds of military bases, and its history of instigating or exacerbating conflicts and wars. For this reason, our primary focus will be U.S. foreign policy. The Feminist Foreign Policy Project will create thematic and regional working groups; forge and strengthen ties with progressive movements, organizations, institutes, networks, and individuals; build a web presence; produce educational materials; issue policy briefs; organize and support rallies; support legislative initiatives; and lift the voices/actions of inspiring feminists working on creative foreign policy initiatives. The Feminist Foreign Policy Project has a radical vision of hope for the future. We stand firm in our belief that the future will be peaceful and feminist when feminists of all backgrounds and experiences come together to build the base. We will take guidance from the most marginalized women, women who have consistently put their bodies and lives on the frontlines of struggles to ensure a future for their children that is free of oppression and that turns the tide on the environmental catastrophe plaguing our planet. We take guidance from the global social movements that make the linkages between capitalism, militarism, colonial expansion, and environmental destruction. We invite and welcome like-minded groups and individuals to join us in developing and nurturing interconnected feminist movements that will pressure elected officials and other decision-makers to pursue genuinely feminist foreign policies. We strongly believe in a future where we care for one another and for the planet and invite you to join our table.

References Ayoub, M. and S. Khallaf. 2014. Syrian Refugees in Egypt: Challenges of a Politically Changing Environment. Center for Migration and Refugee Studies (CMRS). Cairo: American University in Cairo. Blanchard, Eric M. 2003. “Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory.” Signs 28 (4, Summer): 1289–1312.

236

V. M. MOGHADAM

Brysk, Alison. 2018. The Struggle for Freedom from Fear: Contesting Violence Against Women at the Frontiers of Globalization. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Caprioli, Mary. 2005. “Primed for Violence: The Role of Gender Inequality in Predicting Internal Conflict.” International Studies Quarterly 49: 161–178. Chase-Dunn, Christopher. 1996. “Conflict Among Core States: World-System Cycles and Trends.” Available at https://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/papers/cd&hall/warprop.htm. Cockburn, Cynthia. 2004. “The Continuum of Violence: A Gender Perspective on War and Peace.” In Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman (eds.), Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones. Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 24–44. ———. 2010. Anti-militarism: Political and Gender Dynamics of Peace Movements. London: Pluto Press. Cohn, Carol. 2008. “Mainstreaming Gender in UN Security Policy: A Path to Political Transformation?” In Shirin Rai and Georgina Waylen (eds.), Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 185–206. Collier, Paul and Anke Hoeffler. 2000. “Greed and Grievance in Civil War.” Policy Research Working Paper 2355. Washington DC: The World Bank (May). Connell, R. W. 2002. Gender. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1987. Women and War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 1989. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fargues, Philippe and Christine Fandrich. 2012. “Migration After the Arab Spring. RSCAS Research Project Reports.” Available at https://emnbelgium. be/sites/default/files/publications/fargues_fandrich_arab_springmigration_ mpc_2012_09.pdf. Galtung, Johan. 1971. “A Structural Theory of Imperialism.” Journal of Peace Research 8 (2): 81–117. ———. 1990. Cultural Violence. Journal of Peace Research 27 (3): 291–305. Goldstein, Joshua S. 2001. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also http:// www.warandgender.com/wgch1.htm. Green, Emma. 2016. “Why Does the United States Give so Much Money to Israel?” The Atlantic (September 15). Available at https://www.theatlantic. com/international/archive/2016/09/united-states-israel-memorandum-ofunderstanding-military-aid/500192/ Last accessed 9 June 2020. Gurr, Ted R. 1970. Why Men Rebel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

11

WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY …

237

———. 1993. Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. Harvey, David. 2005. The New Imperialism. NY: Oxford University Press. Hill, Felicity, Mikele Aboitiz, and Sara Poehlman-Doumbouya. 2003. “Nongovernmental Organizations’ Role in the Buildup and Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (4): 1255–1269. Hooper, Charlotte. 2001. Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. Hudson, Valerie, Mary Caprioli, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Rose McDermott, and Chad Emmett. 2008/2009. “The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States.” International Security 33 (3): 7–45. Hudson, Valerie M., Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett. 2012. Sex and World Peace. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Hudson, Valerie M., Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen. 2020. The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Jacobsen, K., M. Ayoub, and A. Johnson. 2014. “Sudanese Refugees in Cairo: Remittances and Livelihoods.” Journal of Refugee Studies 27 (1): 145–159. Jareer, Elass. 2019. “Saudi Arabia Ups Defence Spending in Face of Iranian Threats.” Available at https://thearabweekly.com/saudi-arabia-ups-defencespending-face-iranian-threats. Leatherman, Janie. 2011. Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict. London: Polity Press. Mako, Shamiran and Valentine M. Moghadam. 2021. After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa. New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2015. “Transnational Feminism and MovementBuilding.” In Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, Ch. 2, pp. 53–81. ———. 2017. “Explaining Divergent Outcomes of the Arab Spring: The Significance of Gender and Women’s Mobilizations.” Politics, Groups, and Identities (online 31 January). Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2016. 1256824. ———. 2020. Globalization and Social Movements: The Populist Challenge and Democratic Alternatives. Lanham, MD and London: Rowman & Littlefield. Nagel, Robert. 2020. “Gendered Preferences: How Women’s Inclusion in Society Shapes Negotiation Occurrence in Intrastate Conflicts.” Journal of Peace Research. Peterson, V. Spike, ed. 1992. Gendered States: Feminist (Re)visions of International Relations Theory. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

238

V. M. MOGHADAM

Reardon, Betty. 1985. Sexism and the War System. New York: Teachers College. Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. New York: Ballantine. Tickner, Ann. 1992. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving International Security. New York: Columbia University Press. Tongur, Unal and Adem Elveren. 2013. “Military Expenditures, Income Inequality, Welfare and Political Regimes: A Dynamic Panel Data Analysis.” Defense and Peace Economics (October). True, Jacqui. 2012. The Political Economy of Violence Against Women. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. UN. 2017. “Commission on the State of Women: Report on the Sixty-First Session (24 March 2016 and 13–24 March 2017).” New York: Economic and Social Council (UN). Available at https://undocs.org/E/2017/27-E/ CN.6/2017/21. UNDP. 2011. Human Development Report: Statistical Annex. New York, NY: UNDP. ———. 2018. Human Development Indices and Indicators: 2018 Statistical Update. New York, NY: United Nations Development Programme. UN Women. 2019. “Eighteen Years On: Assessing the Implementation of the UNSCR 1325 Women, Peace, and Security Agenda in the Arab States Region.” Cairo: UN Women Regional Office for Arab States (January). Walby, Sylvia. 2009. Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities. London: Sage. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2003. The Decline of American Power. New York: New Press. ———. 2014. U.S. Standing in the Middle East. Commentary, No. 390 (December 1). Available at https://www.iwallerstein.com/u-s-standing-inthe-middle-east/.

CHAPTER 12

Environmental Reproductive Justice: Intersections in an American Indian Community Impacted by Environmental Contamination Elizabeth Hoover

As I sat with an Akwesasne Mohawk woman at her kitchen table over cups of coffee, she stared past me out her kitchen window that overlooks the Saint Lawrence River, and the General Motors Superfund Site. A few years prior she stood in her front yard and watched men in ‘moon suits’ work to clean up the industrial site. ‘They’d come in here in their space suits and take your water, a sample of it. If that’s not alarming, then I don’t know what is.’ She described how ‘we used to play in that dump. We used to go play in it. We would just scavenge in the junk and go sort

E. Hoover (B) Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_12

239

240

E. HOOVER

through it, pick aluminum and stuff like that, play with paint.’ She cut back on the family’s fish consumption after the St. Regis Mohawk Tribal government issued advisories against eating locally caught fish, and after her husband started noticing changes in the fish. But she wasn’t sure these changes came in time to protect their health. She had always wanted a big family, but several miscarriages made that impossible. I had a similar conversation with a couple overlooking the same river, this time about a mile downstream. Even though it has been 20 years since they stopped trying to conceive and he gave up fishing, they were both on the verge of tears as the wife described how in their matrilineal culture, ‘my clan can’t continue from my part; I have no daughters.’ Her husband chimed in, ‘the teachings, belief, culture from her mother is not passed on.’ In this way, the PCBs that leached from the GM plant threatened not only their desire to have a large family—‘we wanted five daughters and five sons’—but was also seen as a broader attack on their tribal nation—‘our genetics are limited and under attack,’ as the wife described. In addition, cultural and social practices linked to catching, trading, and consuming fish were limited by the threat of exposure to the contamination that these community members linked to their reproductive troubles and other health issues. Akwesasne has been described as an environmental justice community—a population and a space disproportionately impacted by environmental contamination leaching from an industrial plant that did not benefit them, powered by a hydroelectric dam built on land taken unscrupulously from the tribe, and for which they were never compensated. But to fully understand the impact of contamination on this community, and other Indigenous communities, this paper explores how intersectionality has been integral to the development of environmental justice (EJ) and reproductive justice (RJ), and how considering the ways in which these two frameworks then intersect with each other is necessary to more fully explicate how toxicants have threatened the reproduction of human beings and tribal culture.

Intersectionality Intersectionality is a theoretical framework for understanding how multiple social identities such as race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and disability intersect at the micro level of individual experience to reflect interlocking systems of privilege and oppression

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

241

(i.e., racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism) at the macro social structural level (Bowleg 2012: 1267). At this macro level, intersectionality as an analytic tool examines how power relations are intertwined and mutually constructing (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016: 7). As Hill Collins and Bilge (2016) explore in their recent book, the core ideas of intersectional frameworks focus on: (1) social inequality; (2) the organization of power relations; (3) relationality—in the context of the development of coalitions or relationships across social divisions, as well as through utilizing relational thinking that rejects either/or binary thinking in favor of a both/and frame; (4) the need to examine power relations in their social context; (5) the importance of analyzing the complexity in the world; and (6) the understanding that solutions to any social problem need to be complex in order to foster social justice. Using intersectionality as an analytic lens helps us to understand how individuals are differently affected by outside forces based on the varying combinations of their identities—race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship to name a few (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016). Intersectional frameworks like environmental justice and reproductive justice, which will be explored in depth below, demonstrate how these identities can contribute to one’s environmental exposures and the level of control one has over their reproductive life. Taking this a step further, this paper explores the ways that these frameworks intersect further in what we are calling Environmental Reproductive Justice, to describe how what constitutes EJ and RJ have been defined in Indigenous communities, and explore how environmental contamination has interfered with the ability of American Indians to reproduce physically and culturally.

Environmental Justice Environmental justice (EJ) is the principle that all people and communities are entitled to equal protection of environmental and public health laws and regulations. The EJ movement expanded definitions of ‘the environment’ to include where people live, work, play, and pray and has fought to institutionalize the ‘fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies’ in agencies like the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA 2004). Reports issued beginning in 1987 have confirmed that this is often not the case—people

242

E. HOOVER

of color are disproportionately impacted by environmental contamination, and race is the most important factor in predicting where toxic waste sites are located (Mohai et al. 2009; Bullard 2000). The framework of EJ is intersectional because of its emphasis on the interdependence of human health, ecological integrity, and social justice (Di Chiro 2006). Giovanna Di Chiro (2006: 99) notes that the politics of intersectionality are ‘reflected in the connections made by activists in the EJ movement; the alliances being forged between movements for human rights and environmental protection clearly demonstrate that the survival of humans and the survival of the environment are interlinked objectives.’ She notes that EJ activists, many of whom are low-income women and women of color, bring to light how intersections of specific economic, social, and environmental conditions contribute to a community’s ability to live in a clean healthy environment and actively participate in civic life. ‘By joining together these diverse social, economic, and ecological concerns, environmental justice activists, much like feminists of color who challenged the single-mindedness of mainstream US feminism, engage in a politics of intersectionality, forging connections between issues that have not been recognized as properly ‘environmental’ by the mainstream movement’ (Di Chiro 2006: 99). Because of a diverse political history and unique relationship to the federal government relative to other minority communities, Indigenous communities in the US are impacted by environmental contamination in ways similar to, and unique from, these other communities. Tribal communities in the US live in close proximity to approximately 600 Superfund sites, and environmental mitigation for these communities is significantly behind non-tribal communities (USEPA 2004). Sites ranging from industry to mines to military bases, as well as places impacted by the release of pesticides and other agricultural by-products, negatively affect not only the surrounding environment, but also the health, culture, and reproductive capabilities of the Indigenous communities they border (Hoover et al. 2012; LaDuke 1999; Gedicks 1994). As Mascarenhas (2012) has described in his work with First Nations communities, neoliberal governance policies, especially concerning water (as we will also see in the case study of Akwesasne below) have contributed to Indigenous people having an increasingly difficult time securing access to clean water. But what sets the study and consideration of EJ in tribal communities apart are the unique historical, political, and legal circumstances (Ranco et al. 2011). As geographer Ryan Holifield (2012) notes, ‘environmental

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

243

justice in Indian country is intimately bound up in the complex matter of tribal sovereignty,’—differentiating EJ cases in these communities from other racial or ethnic communities. As Mohawk midwife and reproductive health advocate Katsi Cook (2015) highlighted in a keynote speech to environmental health researchers: It’s important to understand that North American Indigenous are not a racial or ethnic minority, but are one of three sovereignties in the United States. These are the federal, state and tribal levels of government. And so our traditional cultural property is protected by whole body of case law and Supreme Court decisions, treaty rights, and has significance for the work that’s being done to recover our community from this historic moment of the post-WWII economic boom and the development of the St Lawrence Seaway.

With this in mind, environmental issues in Indian Country need to be considered through the unique colonial history and relationship that tribes have with the United States. Because of the unique history and political relationships between Native communities and the settler government, Native American Studies scholars have argued that achieving environmental justice for tribes necessitates going beyond ‘equal protection.’ As Akwesasne Mohawk scholars Arquette et al. (2002: 262) assert, ‘Environmental justice encompasses more than equal protection under environmental laws (environmental equity). It upholds those cultural norms, values, rules, regulations and policies or decisions to support sustainable communities,’ which might look different for Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. Cultural as well as biological diversity has to be respected. In order to achieve this, different standards may need to be applied to the clean up of industrial sites, or the prevention of the locating of new sites, adjacent to Indigenous communities.

Reproductive Justice In addressing issues of women’s reproductive rights, the liberal feminist movement has focused largely on reproductive choice, through ensuring sufficient access to birth control and abortion. But definitions of reproductive choice might diverge for ‘communities where people undergo nonconsensual sterilization, where toxic chemical concentrations produce

244

E. HOOVER

infertility, or in which children are taken to be raised in boarding schools’ (Shotwell 2013: 106). In these communities, women’s ability to control what happens to their bodies is challenged by poverty, racism, environmental degradation, sexism, homophobia, and injustice (Loretta Ross quoted in Chrisler 2014: 205). SisterSong, a women-of-color- centered organization focused on reproductive justice, was founded in 1997 in an effort to address issues that they felt had been left out of the white feminist agenda. As founding member Loretta Ross (2007: 4) describes, For Indigenous women and women of color it is important to fight equally for (1) the right to have a child; (2) the right not to have a child; and (3) the right to parent the children we have, as well as to control our birthing options, such as midwifery. We also fight for the necessary enabling conditions to realize these rights. This is in contrast to the singular focus on abortion by the prochoice movement that excludes other social justice movements. The Reproductive Justice framework analyzes how the ability of any woman to determine her own reproductive destiny is linked directly to the conditions in her community—and these conditions are not just a matter of individual choice and access. Reproductive Justice addresses the social reality of inequality, specifically, the inequality of opportunities that we have to control our reproductive destiny.

She notes that providing the social supports necessary for women’s individual decisions to be optimally realized includes government obligations to protect women’s human rights and ensure that options for making choices are safe, affordable, and accessible. In the past thirty years alone, American Indian women’s ability to conceive and raise children has been impacted by forced sterilization in Indian Health Services facilities (Lawrence 2000), and rampant adoption out of American Indian children into non-Indian homes (O’Sullivan 2015), following on centuries of outright genocide and forced attendance in boarding schools. The reproductive justice framework, as ‘a theoretical paradigm and an activist model’ (Gurr 2014: 33) has been used to bring together social movements, as an intersectional approach seeking interventions into arenas of state violence, including policies related to child welfare, environmental regulation, health, immigration, and education, using an intersectional approach (Zavella 2016: 37). Specifically, the use of the term reproductive justice situates activism for reproductive rights within a broader social justice movement ‘which is concerned with such issues as human rights, labor practices and conditions, peace, prejudice and

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

245

discrimination, educational equity, poverty, and health and health-care disparities, all of which are fundamental to the achievement of reproductive justice’ (Chrisler 2014: 206). Like EJ, RJ seeks to move away from a discourse on individual rights to a more expansive set of concerns for the conditions under which rights can be exercised, which include ecologies, prison systems, food systems, criminalization of drug use, and more (Shotwell 2013: 105).

Environmental Reproductive Justice In addition to taking similar intersectional approaches to better understand the root causes and impacts of social justice issues, the work of environmental justice and reproductive justice activists frequently coalesce around the impact of environmental contamination on women’s health. As medical sociologist Barbara Gurr (2011: 724) notes, ‘reproductive justice activists and scholars specifically locate the bodies of women as one lynchpin between environmental pollution and community wellness, arguing that the impacts of pollution on women’s bodies differs in important ways from the impacts on men’s bodies, and further that the impacts of pollution on women’s bodies has particular consequences for the community at large.’ Environmental sociologist Michael Bell (2009) argues that to understand the social and physical impacts of environmental contamination on communities, the perpetual dialog between body and the environment, which he labels as the ‘invironment,’ can be examined through the lens of health. It is at the intersections of environmental justice and reproductive justice, or what I am exploring here as environmental reproductive justice, where we will best understand the scope of environmental impact on American Indian communities as not just a collection of individual bodies, but as social bodies. Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook (2007), who originated the term environmental reproductive justice, described that ‘I see that reproductive justice and environmental justice intersect at the nexus of woman’s blood and voice. Environmental justice and reproductive justice intersect at the very center of woman’s role in the processes and patterns of continuous creation.’ In examining the World Health Organization’s definition of health as a ‘state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,’ as well as the ability to lead a ‘socially and economically productive life,’ Katsi describes that she would ‘add cultural well-being to this definition since ecologists

246

E. HOOVER

have pointed out that biological diversity and cultural diversity go hand in hand’ (Cook 2007). She notes that in her community of Akwesasne, which will be described below, the struggles for environmental justice and reproductive justice coevolved and included understanding the impact of environmental contaminants on women’s health as well as on language and culture issues (Cook 2007). The concept of environmental reproductive justice involves expanding reproductive justice to include a deeper focus on the environment, and to include the reproduction of language and culture as concerns, in addition to the reproduction of human beings. ERJ also aims to expand the framework of environmental justice to more closely consider the impact of environmental contaminants on physical and cultural reproduction. Di Chiro (2008: 278) describes the position held by many ecofeminists that ‘all environmental issues are reproductive issues,’ since efforts to protect the integrity of natural systems are struggles to maintain the ecosystems that make all life possible. But what is considered ‘reproduction’ is often narrowly defined by the EJ and RJ literature, confined to the physical reproduction of humans. Marxists and feminist sociologists have most frequently used the term ‘social reproduction’ to describe unpaid or undervalued care work (e.g., domestic labor in households, teaching, nursing; see, e.g., Katz 2001; Braedley and Luxton 2015). Expanding beyond this, Di Chiro (2008) and Mascarenhas (2012) focus on the aspect of social reproduction outside of the formal market exchanges involved in maintaining a household’s condition. Di Chiro (2008: 281) defines social reproduction as ‘the intersecting complex of political-economic, sociocultural, and material- environmental processes required to maintain everyday life and to sustain human cultures and communities on a daily basis and intergenerationally.’ This encompasses conditions that both enable and disable biological reproduction as well as social practices, and relations of power, that are connected to socialization and the fulfillment of human needs. Mascarenhas (2012) defines social reproduction as the direct costs associated with the activities that maintain an individual’s, household’s, or group’s condition. This cost could include direct monetary costs associated with child care, health care, etc., but could also include human resources and services that do not enter formal market exchanges, like ‘the passing on of languages, knowledges, histories, and cultural practices from one generation to another, or training in specific subsistence practices such as the procuring of food, clothing, and shelter. Other nonmarket factors of social reproduction may

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

247

also include the maintenance of particular social norms and customs, and the continuance of social networks’ (Mascarenhas 2012: 7). ERJ seeks to take up the work that scholars like Di Chiro and Mascarenhas have done in expanding social reproduction beyond undervalued gendered labor practices to include the social and cultural practices of women especially, but also men and other-than-human communities, and the role they all play in maintenance of relationships necessary for the reproduction of indigenous culture. In this article, I will explicate the concept of ERJ through the experience of Akwesasne Mohawks, whose food systems, culture, ability to physically reproduce, and ability to maintain relationships with other-than-human communities were interrupted as a result of living downstream from industrial sites.

Methods The bulk of the first-hand data in this chapter comes from interviews that I conducted with 64 Akwesasro:non (people of Akwesasne) in 2008, 2009, and 2014 as part of a broader project on community-based environmental health research in Akwesasne. That project was developed in conjunction with and approved by the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment, in addition to being approved by the Brown University IRB.1 The interview protocol asked about participants’ participation in environmental health research, perceptions of change in the health and environment of the community, and their suggestions for how to improve the health of the community. These interviews are supplemented with presentations given by Akwesasro:non at community meetings, and publications by Akwesasne Mohawk authors (primarily Mary Arquette and Alice Tarbell). Selection of this particular topic of ERJ came out of conversations with, and presentations by, Akwesasne Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook, including her written work on the topic (Cook 2007), interviews conducted with her, conference presentations delivered by her on the topic (Cook 2015), and the group authored publication that came out of the symposium she hosted in Hot Springs, South Dakota (see Hoover et al. 2012). The purpose of this article is to further explore the concept of ERJ that was discussed at this symposium, by discussing how the concept 1 For a full exploration of how research has impacted Indigenous communities, and the importance of CBPR in this and other research; as well as the broader methods employed in this research, see Hoover (2016, 2017).

248

E. HOOVER

has been articulated and developed in Akwesasne, and how it can similarly be used in the context of other Indigenous communities seeking to qualify damages incurred from exposure to environmental contamination.

Environmental Reproductive Health Symposium In July of 2011, the First Environment Collaborative, headed by Katsi Cook, hosted the Environmental Reproductive Health Symposium and Retreat in Hot Springs SD, near the homeland of the Lakota Sioux. The purpose of the meeting was to explore common issues of exposure to environmental contaminants across a wide variety of Indigenous communities, and to facilitate partnerships among Indigenous community organizations, researchers, scientists, and health-care providers. Among those present included representatives from several Indigenous communities who were attracted to the term ERJ because of the way they felt it encapsulated concerns around the impact of environmental contamination on their communities’ abilities to reproduce both physically and culturally. Present, in addition to Katsi Cook from Akwesasne who facilitated the meeting, was a representative from Aamjiwnaang, an Anishnaabe First Nations community surrounded by 62 major industrial facilities that experienced a decline in the ratio of male births (Mackenzie et al. 2005), as well as other health impacts connected to contaminant exposure (MacDonald and Rang 2007), but also faced concerns about carrying out ceremonies and engaging in traditional food harvesting, both types of activities which entailed gathering materials from the local environment that were found to be contaminated by industry. Women from the Yupik community on St. Lawrence Island in Alaska and the Alaska Coalition on Toxics (ACAT) described how bioaccumulated persistent organic pollutants in traditional food sources have contributed to contaminant body burdens (Miller et al. 2013), leaving residents to decide if they should maintain traditional food practices, and all of the ensuing cultural activities surrounding them. A representative from Tewa Women United described how her community had been impacted by mining effluents as well as radioactive waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the establishment of which also disrupted the local landscape and the ceremonies that had taken place there (see also Masco 2006). Women of All Red Nations (WARN), representatives from which also attended the meeting, have been organizing since the late 1970’s around suspected

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

249

links between Lakota health issues—especially the high rates of miscarriage and reproductive cancers among Lakota women—and the region’s history of uranium mining (see Jarding 2011). For each of these cases of environmental injustices affecting these diverse Indigenous communities—spanning from New Mexico to Alaska, impacted by sources ranging from the military to industry, emitting contamination like radiation, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, and persistent organic pollutants— what attracted these diverse representatives to the term environmental reproductive justice, and to this meeting, was the opportunity to highlight how they were not only disproportionally exposed to environmental contamination relative to the general public (environmental justice), and not only was this contamination impacting their ability to have children and raise them in a safe environment (reproductive justice), but also that, on top of these issues, their exposure to environmental contamination was impacting their communities’ abilities to reproduce cultural and social practices and relationships through the maintenance of traditions that necessitated close interactions with the environment. Below, I will detail specifically how ERJ played out on multiple levels for the Mohawk community of Akwesasne.

Akwesasne Akwesasne is a Mohawk community of about 15,000 people that shares a border with New York, Ontario, and Quebec. The community is bisected by the St. Lawrence River, which was developed into the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1954. The project appropriated Mohawk land and included the construction of hydroelectric dams, which brought industry to the area; General Motors (GM), Alcoa, and Reynolds are all just upstream of Akwesasne. The creation of the seaway itself brought social, cultural, and economic changes to Akwesasne; as Salli Benedict, who lived on Cornwall Island, described to me, ‘People were more connected before. Before the seaway people went fishing together and you pass on that stuff…Before the seaway people were more dependent on the land and the environment than grocery stores.’ Mohawk scholars Mary Arquette and Maxine Cole (2004: 338–339) similarly described social changes precipitated by the coming of the seaway that fundamentally altered Mohawk families—a large number of men from the community worked on the seaway project, but ‘when it altered the land and the river, these men were not able to return to their traditional land and water- based practices. Consequently,

250

E. HOOVER

they maintained non-traditional jobs, which eventually led them to leave the community.’ This led to social and cultural disruption, and the loss of a traditional economy. The transformation of the river into a seaway also had a dramatic effect on wildlife. Akwesasne elder Ernie Benedict, a resident of Cornwall Island, described to me how efforts to deepen the river destroyed the fish habitat: [The blasting of rocks] affected the spawning grounds of fish, not only by the blasting but also because of when the blasting was done, they had to clean out all the broken bottom soil and then deposit it somewhere. And of course the easiest place to do it were the inlets and the bays, where there were spawning areas, and so for a long time fish couldn’t make a living out there and so a lot of their work was not done. The fish, as you know, have sort of a cleaning action there in swimming—absorbing the water and taking in contaminants, depositing it down in the bottom of the river, so getting it out of the way. And so now we had to do without the fish for years.

His description of fish unable to ‘make a living out there’ in the same way they always had, similar to Mohawk people, highlights the connections among the multiple communities affected by this development. The development of the Moses-Saunders Power Dam as part of the seaway project drew industry to the shores of the St. Lawrence with the promise of cheap hydroelectricity, including Reynolds Metals and General Motors. The first large-scale environmental impacts from the industrial plants neighboring Akwesasne became apparent when the trees downwind from Reynolds began to brown, and cattle became crippled and died. Researchers from Cornell University confirmed that while local industries were emitting fluoride in compliance with NY state and federal standards, these standards were not based on sufficient research. As a result, the local farming industry collapsed, and residents were concerned about the potential long-term impact to their own health (Krook and Maylin 1979), even after scrubbers had been added to the factory’s smoke stacks and the problem was considered ameliorated. In 1981, two dormant sludge pits filled with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were discovered behind the GM plant, the industrial site directly adjacent to Akwesasne. Until they were banned in 1978, GM utilized PCB-laced hydraulic fluids that were periodically flushed from the plant and disposed of in reclamation lagoons, which were periodically drained and the sludge buried onsite. The lagoons were found to have flooded

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

251

several times, contaminating the riverbeds of the St Lawrence River, Raquette River, and Turtle Creek, as well as groundwater (Grinde and Johansen 1995). The entire 270-acre site was placed on the National Priorities List as a Superfund site in 1984. That same year, a Mohawk midwife from Akwesasne, Katsi Cook, invited New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) Wildlife Epidemiologist Ward Stone to Akwesasne to test fish and wildlife—Mohawk food—that lived in the vicinity of the GM plant, which he found to be above acceptable standards for consumption. Cook then began to set the stage for scientific studies to demonstrate whether the PCB contamination found in their food source was impacting the health of mothers and their infants. One of Cook’s main concerns was whether she should encourage mothers to breast feed their babies, as milk concentrates lipophilic pollutants. Mothers had contacted her asking, ‘Gee, Katsi, these scientists are coming to my home taking samples of everything but me. Is it safe to breastfeed?’ And I said, ‘You know what? I don’t really know. I wish I did’(Cook 2005). In the first large-scale CBPR project in the Nation with a Native community, Akwesasne Mohawks partnered with SUNY Albany to determine the health impacts of exposure to PCBs. Studies conducted through a Superfund Basic Research Project (SBRP) grant connected levels of PCBs in participants’ breast milk and blood to fish consumption (Fitzgerald et al. 1998), which decreased as community members began heeding fish advisories published by the Tribal government (Tarbell and Arquette 2000; Hoover 2013). This decrease in fish consumption proved a complex trade-off, as community members and scientists would later cite how the substitution of affordable foods for fish has contributed to other health problems (Schell, Gallo and Cook 2012), as well as culture loss. As a midwife, Katsi’s first concern had been for community members at the top of the food chain—breast-feeding infants. She named her research group the First Environment Research Project, in acknowledgement that the womb is the first environment that we are exposed to, and that the contamination of this environment is a significant human transgression, impacting the sacred relationship between mother and child, and the ability for a Nation to properly reproduce itself. SUNY Albany and Akwesasne acquired a second SBRP grant (1996– 2000), which enabled them to conduct studies that began to document health impacts in community members with higher PCB body burdens. These impacts include a greater propensity for diabetes (Codru et al. 2007); higher levels of total serum lipids, which contribute to heart

252

E. HOOVER

disease (Goncharov et al. 2008); abnormal thyroid functioning in adolescents (Schell et al. 2004; Schell and Gallo 2010); affected cognitive function in adolescents (Newman et al. 2006); and affected cognitive function in older adults (Haase et al. 2009). There were also studies that eventually corroborated local concerns that the PCB contamination could be impacting reproductive abilities, through impacts to sex hormones for both adolescents and adults. Among adult men, testosterone concentrations were found to be inversely correlated with total PCB concentrations, but especially with the types of PCB congeners found in fish (Goncharov et al. 2009). Similarly, among adolescent boys, researchers found that exposure to the more highly persistent congeners of PCBs in particular were associated with lower testosterone levels (Schell et al. 2014). During a community presentation, SBRP principal investigator David Carpenter joked with the audience that if the men had to take Viagra, they should blame PCBs, although he quickly followed, ‘Is this significant enough change to really be a disease? No! But it’s a way that PCBs interfere with our normal bodily functions’ (Carpenter 2014). Researchers also found that higher levels of certain estrogenic PCB congeners found in Mohawk girls led to earlier menarche among those girls by about half a year (Denham et al. 2005). In addition, preliminary results of a more recent study examining the impact of PCBs on reproductive hormones in adult women have found that higher levels of PCBs decrease the likelihood that a woman will have the type of regular cycle necessary to conceive and maintain a pregnancy (Gallo et al. 2016). During interviews I conducted with Akwesasne community members, when I asked people what they saw as some of the health impacts of environmental contamination, several mentioned what they saw as a disproportionate number of miscarriages and other reproductive issues in the community. Women reported not being able to have as many children as they would have preferred and saw this as an extension of the era of forced sterilization. Katsi initially became concerned about the potential impacts of the site when she began hearing about more and more about reproductive difficulties in the community. She notes, ‘I don’t have an environmental engineering degree, I don’t have anything like that, but what I do have as a midwife and as a Mohawk woman moving through the small world webs of the community, I would hear this one had a miscarriage, that one over here is sick with this’ (Cook 2008). This ‘situated knowledge’ as Haraway (1988) calls it, which draws on ‘epistemologies

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

253

of location, positioning, and situating’ to make knowledge claims, gave Katsi insight into a portion of the community who felt as though they had been overlooked by previous studies and by health professionals. What the research determined was that traditional food practices— which entail a web of language, culture, family, and interspecies relations in addition to the nutrition provided—were delivering contamination from the industrial site to the bodies of Akwesasro:non. PCBs leached from the GM site into the river, where then were taken up by fish that were then eaten by Mohawk people. From dinner plates, these PCBs made their way into Mohawk bodies, into their fat, into women’s breast milk, which was then passed on to the most sensitive members of the community. In her book Tainted Milk, Maia Boswell-Penc (2006: 12) notes that breast milk is ‘symbolic of the most essential human connection,’ and when breast milk is contaminated, that ‘should be a wake-up call.’ Boswell-Penc (2006: 169) demonstrates ‘how child sustenance becomes a figure for the oppressive frameworks at work in any historical juncture,’ and this is seen in Akwesasne, where Indigenous women have been instructed to abandon their traditional food practices in order to prevent accumulating more PCBs that would then be transferred to their children. In this case, an Indigenous community suffering from environmental injustice was instructed to abandon their traditional food practices in order to prevent accumulating more PCBs that would then be transferred to their children. In communities impacted by environmental contamination, residents are often encouraged to avoid the source of contamination—to practice risk avoidance to make up for the regulatory agency’s and industry’s lack of risk reduction—in lieu of cleaning up the source (Hoover 2013).

Reproduction in a Mohawk Context In Mohawk culture, women’s reproductive capabilities are closely connected to those of the land. In the Mohawk creation story Sky Woman (also known as Otsitsisohn, ‘Mature Flowers’) fell through a hole in the sky caused by the uprooted celestial tree. She plummeted to the watery world below, her fall broken by a flock of geese that laid her on the back of a giant turtle. The muskrat brought up mud from below the water to make the surface softer for her, which Sky Woman then used to create the earth we now rest on. Seeds that she had grabbed from the sky world on her descent dropped from under her fingernails onto the turtle’s back

254

E. HOOVER

and started to grow. Sky Woman gave birth to a daughter, who matured and became pregnant, but then died in the process of giving birth to twin boys. Sky Woman buried her body, and from it sprang corn, beans, and squash—the staples of the Mohawk diet. The broader creation story demonstrates the importance of women’s bodies not only as the basis of all human life, but also as the source of original foods. The story also highlights the close reliance of humans on non-human communities—the birds, turtle, muskrat, and food plants that contributed to the survival of Sky Woman, and all humans who would follow her. Ceremonies recognizing these relationships are practiced in Haudenosaunee longhouses, many of which are based on the horticultural cycle, celebrating events around maple sugaring, seed planting, strawberries, string beans, green corn, and the fall harvest. Environmental contamination, especially the fluoride emitted from Reynolds Metals in the 1970s and 80s, as well as concerns about how the PCBs leaching and volatilizing from the GM plant, discouraged some Akwesro:non from planting gardens, because of the uncertainty they felt about whether the food they grew would be safe. As respected community leader Jake Swamp described: People are now afraid to go and plant crops anymore and also to make a living off of the land because you don’t know what’s there. That’s the hard part about it, is not being sure, not being certain anymore, what you’re eating or what you’re coming in contact with The whole community just came to a complete stop, especially during the early seventies, because the information that they were getting is that the whole area is contaminated. So these guys would think, well if I plant crops, will I be eating contaminated food? So it was the fear that was driving us.

Even in areas that might be safe, the concern remains when people consider planting. As Henry Lickers noted, ‘There’s that inkling in the mind—is it good stuff? Is it good food?’ This uncertainty has not only disrupted the food system in Akwesasne, but also the relationship that people have with traditional food crops, and those they develop with each other while planting, tending, and harvesting gardens. In addition to demonstrating the interconnection between humans and other communities necessary for the reproduction of Mohawk culture, the creation story has also been utilized as a metaphor for the female human reproductive cycle. Beverly Cook is a nurse practitioner (now elected chief) who uses this story to explain fertility to Mohawk girls

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

255

as part of the Ohero:kon rites of passage ceremony, a four-year process that brings adolescent cohorts together to develop a health understanding about what it means to become a Mohawk adult. One January afternoon, Bev stood in front of a group of girls who were in the second year of the Ohero:kon ceremony who had gathered at the longhouse for her presentation. As they sat on the wooden benches facing her, she described to them, ‘this is why women are the land, women made that land, women made that initial life that grew here on this earth. Her knowledge translated into every single woman descended from her.’ Bev used the creation story to explain the process of ovulation to the young women, describing how the journey that the egg makes from the fallopian tube to the uterus is that same journey that Sky Woman made from the sky world carrying seeds. Each month the uterus develops a soft lining, similar to the way the muskrat brought mud to Sky Woman to create a soft layer on the turtle’s back. Bev described to each of the girls how similar to the way that Sky Woman brought her seeds with her, when a woman is pregnant with a little girl that female fetus carries all of her eggs with her, and hence, each mother carries not only her daughter but her grandchildren as well. ‘These little girls inside womb already contain ovaries with the little eggs that she will use her entire life. Women who carry daughters are already making pathway for their own grandchildren. That transmission of those seeds that Sky Woman brought here, every woman brings those here.’ For this reason, she described to the girls the importance of taking care of their bodies, and creating a safe and protective environment for themselves and each other. In describing her midwifery work, Katsi (2015) notes, ‘Human health, language and culture begins in the prenatal environment. Therefore health systems revision and revitalization of culture and language must focus on puberty, pre-conception and prenatal critical windows of development…. the natural development from the recovery of midwifery practice in Iroquois communities necessarily tells us that prenatal care is too late. That we need to begin at puberty.’ For these reasons, the Ohero:kon rites of passage ceremonies have been developing in Akwesasne, as a means of providing a safe space for adolescents that promotes Mohawk culture. These ceremonies will contribute to a healthier community seven generations down the road, as youth come to better understand their reproductive powers and the parallels between their health and that of the environment.

256

E. HOOVER

Cultural Reproduction Concerns about interrupted reproductive capabilities in Akwesasne extended beyond the ability to physically reproduce to also include concerns about the ways in which cultural reproduction had come under attack through the promotion of risk avoidance vs. risk reduction strategies to prevent contaminant exposure. The promotion of fish advisories as a means of preventing PCBs from entering Mohawk bodies led to concerns from community members that the cultural and social relationships around catching, cooking, and eating fish would be disrupted. Henry Lickers, the long-time director of the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne’s environment program detailed how fish advisories have helped to prevent continued exposure to PCBs, but have also prevented the sharing and inter-generational transmission of culture. He described how the language and culture around tying knots in nets, as well as the social interactions that occurred around the process of creating these nets are all lost when there is no longer a use for those nets. Similarly, the language around the names and descriptions of certain fish is lost. As Henry describes, No one will eat it or buy it. And I’m not going to feed it to my kids or my wife, because she says no, that might be poisonous to me. So suddenly, the fisherman cuts his nets down, and they fall on the ground, and there’s no fishing. What implication does that have? Well, it has an implication, in that over the years, people forget, in their own culture, what you call the knot that you tie in a net to make a net. And so, a whole section of your language and culture is lost because no one is tying those nets any more. The interrelation between men and women, when they tied nets, the relationship between adults or elders and young people, as they tied nets together, the stories that-- tying nets is awful boring. And so, the stories were always there to keep you amused, and people talking, and so on and so forth. So that whole social infrastructure that was around the fabrication of that net disappeared. And you get to a point, in history where, if you go out probably today and ask a person “What is the name of that knot,” no one can tell you, because nobody needs it anymore.

As another older man described to me, ‘A lot of that has been forgotten, and the fish names in our language. Because a lot of the fishermen, when they go fishing, they talk about their Indian names to them, there is no English part of it, but that has been sort of forgotten now.’ An article

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

257

written by members of the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment highlighted that, ‘Everyone in the community must engage in culturally important activities, not just talk about them. Pollution discourages young people from spending time on the river and engaging in subsistence activities so important to the culture’ (ATFE 1997: 283). Avoiding the culturally important act of fishing in order to protect themselves and their families from exposure to contamination then led to a diminishment of fishing culture, and the reproduction of family roles and connections. In addition, the alternative diets that people adopted when they were instructed not to eat local fish consisted mainly of affordable foods high in carbohydrates, which contributed to rising rates of diabetes and other metabolic disorders (Arquette et al. 2002; Schell et al. 2004). In this way, collateral damage was caused by the contamination: even when residents avoided contaminated food to prevent exposure to PCBs, their physical and cultural health was still impacted.

Reproductive Justice for Mother Earth With these intersections in mind—between the health of women’s bodies and that of the land—environmental reproductive justice was also a concept that was extended beyond just human relatives to the land itself, personified as Mother Earth. On June 26, 1991, the EPA hosted a public meeting in Hogansburg NY, in the Akwesasne Mohawk community, to discuss cleanup plans for the GM site. In response to GM’s plan to leave the largest mass of PCB contaminated waste because it would be too expensive to remove, Jim Ransom, who at the time was on the staff of the Tribe’s environment division, and a member of the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment, beseeched the EPA and GM staff to think of the land as a human relative suffering from cancer: I ask at this time to think of your mother, how she gave birth to you, nourished you and provided for you. She fulfilled the responsibility and duty given to her by the Creator. Now, think of our mother earth. She is the giver of all life. She continues to perform her duties as she was instructed. We the people, the animals and the plants are for the children, we have a responsibility and a duty to live in harmony with one another and other living things. One day your mother comes to you and tells you that she has discovered lumps in her breasts. You arrange to have tests done and find that both lumps are cancerous. What do you do in this situation?

258

E. HOOVER

One lump is smaller than the other, so do you just have the smaller lump removed because it was less expensive? The other lump is much larger, it will cost more to remove. So do you decide to leave it and cover it with a Band-Aid and hope the cancer won’t spread any further or do you have both lumps removed so that your mother may be healthy again? Now, it is our mother earth that has cancerous lumps in her breasts. The GM dump and East Disposal Area at the General Motors Central Foundry Superfund Site are the larger lump and the rest of the GM site is the smaller lump. The cancer in the form of PCBs and other chemicals have spread into— into our mother earth’s blood, the waters of the earth, and that’s spread to her children; the fish, wildlife, plant life, and people. EPA has decided to remove the smaller lump from our mother earth so that she may be healthy again. However, for the larger lump, the Industrial Landfill and East Disposal Area, General Motors thinks that we should place a Band-Aid over the cancerous lump because it is too expensive to remove the cancer. EPA says well, you should remove part of this lump and place a big BandAid on the rest so we keep our children away from its contamination… So, from a traditional Mohawk viewpoint, you are asking us to leave a cancer in our mother earth and to trust you that it will not spread. This is unacceptable to us’. (pp. 60–62 of public meeting transcript)

Mother Earth and her other-than-human children that Jim describes were not included in the agency’s health risk assessment—most conventional risk assessment processes do not consider this extended system of non-human relatives. For this reason, the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment (ATFE) has been critical of these processes, expressing that ‘all peoples, including plants, animals and the earth herself must be included in defining environmental justice’ (ATFE 1997: 268; Tarbell and Arquette 2000: 95). This connects back to the core ideas of intersectional frameworks laid out by Hill Collins and Bilge (2016) at the beginning o of this article; the importance of considering relationality—in the sense of considering different types of relationships, as well as utilizing relational thinking that rejects either/or binary thinking. Health risk assessments conducted in Akwesasne noted that with the decrease in fish consumption, body burdens of PCBs also decreased. From the perspectives of toxicologists, this defined a success, but from the perspective of Mohawks, they were being forced to make necessary concessions to protect their own health while their environment and other communities—namely the fish—were still suffering. As two ATFE members describe, ‘In classical

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

259

models of toxicology, there is no risk if there is no exposure. Conventional risk assessments are severely limited in their application to Native peoples because they fail to adequately value cultural, social, subsistence, economic, and spiritual factors’ (Tarbell and Arquette 2000: 102). As Whyte’s (2013) work in Indigenous communities highlights, this includes the way in which the relational responsibilities between these communities that are not valued or taken into consideration when conducting these conventional assessments. These authors demonstrate how Mohawk philosophy espouses a precautionary approach, which is more protective of a wider range of ‘community members.’ Overall, ATFE suggests a new paradigm of holistic risk-based decision-making: bringing together community health, risk assessment, and environmental restoration and including communityspecific, culturally informed definitions of health, risk, and restoration. This more inclusive model would contribute to the development of more protective environmental policy, designed to better prevent contamination, ensure more thorough site cleanups that would be more protective of a wider definition of ‘community.’

Reproductive Justice and Seven Generations Ensuring that a wider definition of community is considered, and that Indigenous concerns about environmental reproductive justice are taken into account entails more than just employing terms and rhetoric familiar to Native people. In exploring clean up options for the Superfund site, part of ensuring ERJ for community members was working to make the region safe for ‘next seven generations’ of Mohawk people. This concept is employed in making decisions about the future that are understood to have impacts beyond the lives of current decision-makers. In the cleanup of Superfund contamination on tribal lands, tribal ARARs or ‘Applicable or Relevant and Appropriate Requirements,’ can be developed by tribal environment divisions and are treated consistently with state requirements. In 1989, the SRMT Environment Division developed ARARs for PCBs of 1 ppm for soil and 0.01 for sediment, which was ten times more stringent than the state and federal standards that were applied on land outside of the Tribe’s jurisdiction (10 ppm for soil and 1 ppm for sediment). In reflecting on the process by which the Tribe chose the standard, Jim Ransom described,

260

E. HOOVER

We decided on the numbers based on our community’s reliance on the natural world to support subsistence life styles. Our hope was that by setting on reserve cleanup standards that were more stringent than state or federal, it would help lead us back to the natural world. It fits in with our seven generations philosophy that states we have to have confidence that the people seven generations from now can look back and say we made the right decision in evaluating the decisions we make today.2

Because of Akwesasne’s status as a federally recognized tribe, and thereby a sovereign entity, EPA was bound by law to follow the stricter standards for cleanup that occurred on Mohawk land. But land outside of the Tribe’s jurisdiction was still cleaned up to state and federal standards, standards which regulators worked to try to convince tribal members were safe. In an effort to alleviate fears of Akwesasro:non, and hence, their resistance to clean up plans, General Motors attempted to co-opt the language of the seven generations framework in order to convince the Mohawk people they had their interests in mind. At a community meeting hosted by the EPA in Akwesasne in June of 1991, Doug Primo, Environmental Coordinator of the General Motors Central Foundry site at Massena, was pushing for a clean up plan that required less excavating and more capping in place of contaminated media at the site, and utilizing recovery wells instead of a slurry wall to prevent the migration of contaminated water. He stated, ‘General Motors believes the plan they have proposed for the entire site is a permanent remedy for the tribal lands and will be protective beyond seven generations’ (USEPA 1991: 42). The Mohawks in the audience were quick to censure him for attempting to co-opt their ideology in defense of a clean up plan that would leave behind more contamination. For example, as one woman, Kim Hathaway Carr, contended, ‘The representative from GM can get up there and implicate that he is concerned about seven generations of my family. Well, they were not concerned about my Mohawk family in 1959 and the years that followed it. They poisoned the lands, they poisoned the water and they poisoned us. So I’m sorry to the representative from GM, I cannot believe that you are concerned about our safety and our health, of my Mohawk family for seven generations to come’ (USEPA 1991: 92–93). Ensuring ERJ for communities impacted by

2 Jim Ransom, email communication, June 9, 2015.

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

261

environmental contamination takes more than borrowing language associated with philosophies designed to protect future generation, it requires collaborating with those communities to develop and adopt standards and policies that ensure social reproduction over economic gain.

Conclusion In fully understanding the impact of environmental contamination in an Indigenous community like Akwesasne, issues of environmental justice have to be considered alongside issues relating to the physical reproduction of Indigenous people, as well as the reproduction of culture. In reflecting on the process by which her community began to tackle this issue, Katsi Cook (2007) describes, Our story and unique context as a designated environmental justice community coevolved our struggle for reproductive justice. The restoration of culture-sustaining practitioners such as midwives and doulas (who provide woman-centered, continuous childbearing and child birthing support) were always included with strategies for the restoration of the holism of our environment in the protection of women’s health over the life span. We understood that many other aspects of women’s health were at risk from exposure to industrial chemicals in our environment.

Environmental Reproductive Justice (ERJ), developed through work by Katsi and others in Akwesasne and increasingly in other Indigenous communities, brings together the concept of reproductive justice and environmental justice and includes ensuring that a community’s reproductive capabilities are not inhibited by environmental contamination. This includes considering the impact of environmental contamination on the reproduction of humans, as well as the reproduction of knowledge and culturally informed tribal citizens. As noted above in critiques about conventional risk assessments, this also includes extending protections to, and considering the reproduction of non-human relatives. Community and tribal government leaders in Akwesasne fought for a seat at the regulatory table, to develop their own policies and regulations, to have a voice in the research and clean up processes. But what some are calling for is a step beyond achieving equal inclusion in the political process. They are calling for what Whyte (2011 refers to as recognition justice—which requires that policies and programs fairly

262

E. HOOVER

represent the culture and values of affected parties. Akwesasne Mohawks are calling for the recognition of how features of their community intersect—as a matrilineal Indigenous community fighting against industry, settler governments, and economic concerns—to make them a distinct and sensitive group that does not want to receive the same treatment as, for example, white middle-class suburbanites. Because of subsistence lifestyles, spiritual practices, and other cultural behaviors, Indigenous people often suffer multiple exposures from resource use that result in environmental health impacts disproportionate to the general population (Hoover et al. 2012). ‘Exposure scenario designed for suburban activities and life-styles are not suitable for tribal communities,’ and for this reason, Stuart Harris and Barber Harper (1997), in their extensive work around developing Native American exposure scenarios and risk assessment tools, argue that risk needs to be calculated differently in Indigenous communities. Potawatomi environmental philosopher Kyle Whyte (2013) asserts that the maintenance of ‘relational responsibilities,’ necessary for tribal ‘collective continuance’ includes relationships between family and community members, and across human communities, but also relationships across species and with features of the land (like rivers or mountains) and ecosystems. Members of the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment have published multiple articles demanding that their community be recognized as a distinct tribal community and culture, with a relationship to the natural world, and culturally based lifestyle that is different from other Americans. In Mohawk communities, good health for humans exists at the intersections of a thriving culture and a clean environment. As Mohawk scholars Arquette et al. (2002: 262) note, Health, then, has many definitions for the Mohawk people of Akwesasne. Health is spiritual. Health is rooted in the heart of the culture. Health is based on peaceful, sustainable relationships with other peoples including family, community, Nation, the natural world, and spiritual beings. Health is supported by the solid foundation of a healthy natural world.

They go on to describe how protecting future generations is central to ensuring a healthy community, and this requires not only protecting their physical health and ability to come into this world, but also through passing on of Indigenous language. ‘Language is also critical for good health, as it maintains our connection to community and to the natural

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

263

world. Language is a living part of one’s being, and as such is inseparable from culture. Within the Mohawk language, for example, we clearly find a cultural philosophy that is relational, integrated, holistic, and female focused’ (Arquuette et al. 2000: 262). For these reasons, it is important to integrate Indigenous beliefs and practices into definitions of environmental and reproductive justice and health, and ensure that policy and programming reflect these definitions. In her work with environmental justice and reproductive justice, activist Di Chiro (2008: 280) describes how these women reframe environmental and reproductive rights issues in terms of the necessities for sustaining everyday life, what she has referred to as social reproduction. Di Chiro (2008: 294) calls for a coalition of intersectional movements, to generate ‘dynamic, living environmentalisms that may well compel people to join together and take stronger action to curb problems.’ Environmental reproductive justice (ERJ) is the framework under which this coalition of intersectional movements could be housed, in an effort to recognize and address the impact of environmental contamination on physical, social, and cultural reproduction in affected communities.

Bibliography Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment Research Advisory Committee (ATFE RAC). 1997. “Superfund Clean-Up at Akwesasne: A Case Study in Environmental Justice.” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 34(2): 267–290. Arquette, Mary, Maxine Cole, Katsi Cook, Brenda LaFrance, Margaret Peters, James Ransom, Elvera Sargent, Vivian Smoke, and Arlene Stairs. 2002. “Holistic Risk-Based Environmental Decision Making: A Native Perspective.” Environmental Health Perspectives 110(S2): 259–264. Arquette, Mary, Maxine Cole, and the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment. 2004. “Restoring Our Relationships for the Future.” In The Way of Development, edited by M. Blaser, H. A. Feit, and G. McRae, 332–350. London: Zed Books. Bell, Michael Mayerfeld. 2009. An Invitation to Environmental Sociology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Boswell-Penc, Maia. 2006. Tainted Milk: Breastmilk, Feminisms, and the Politics of Environmental Degradation. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Bowleg, Lisa. 2012. “The Problem with the Phrase Women and Minorities: Intersectionality—An Important Theoretical Framework for Public Health.” American Journal of Public Health 102(7): 1267–1273.

264

E. HOOVER

Braedley, Susan and Meg Luxton. 2015. “Foreword.” In Precarious Worlds; Contested Geographies of Social Reprodcution. University of Georgia Press, pp. vii–xv. Bullard, Robert D. 2000. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Carpenter, David. 2014. “Speaking at a Community Presentation at the Akwesasne Senior Center,” December 11. Chrisler, Joan C. 2014. “A Reproductive Justice Approach to Women’s Health.” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 14(1): 205–209. Codru, Neculai, Maria Schymura, Serban Negoita, Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment, Robert Rej, and David Carpenter. 2007. “Diabetes in Relation to Serum Levels of Polychlorinated Biphenyls and Chlorinated Pesticides in Adult Native Americans.” Environmental Health Perspectives 115(10): 1442– 1447. Cook, Katsi. 2005. Interview by Joyce Follet. Transcript of Video Recording, October 26 and 27. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. http://www.smith.edu/library/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/ Cook.pdf. ———. 2007. “Environmental Justice: Woman is the First Environment.” In Reproductive Justice Briefing Book; A Primer on Reproductive Justice and Social Change. Edited by SisterSong, pp. 62–63. Found at https://www.law. berkeley.edu/php-programs/courses/fileDL.php?fID=4051. ———. 2008. Interview with Elizabeth Hoover, Syracuse, NY, March 17. ———. 2015. “Critical Contexts: Research to Support Community Environmental Reproductive Health.” Keynote Speech by Katsi Cook at the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute conference at Northeastern University, Boston MA, May 21. Denham, Melinda, Lawrence M. Schell, Glenn Deane, Mia V. Gallo, Julia Ravenscroft, Anthony P. DeCaprio, and Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment. 2005. “Relationship of Lead, Mercury, Mirex, Dichlorodphenyldichloroethylene, Hexachlorobenzene and Polychlorinated Biphenyls to Timing of Menarche Among Akwesasne Mohawk Girls.” Pediatrics 115 (2005): e127–e134. Di Chiro, Giovanna. 2006. “Teaching Urban Ecology: Environmental Studies and the Pedagogy of Intersectionality.” Feminist Teacher 16(2): 98–109. ———. 2008. “Living Environmentalisms: Coalition Politics, Social Reproduction, and Environmental Justice.” Environmental Politics 17(2): 276–298. Fitzgerald, E., Syni-An Hwang, Brian Bush, Katsi Cook, and Priscilla Worswick. 1998. “Fish Consumption and Breast Milk PCB Concentrations among Mohawk Women at Akwesasne.” American Journal of Epidemiology 148(2): 164–172.

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

265

Gallo, Mia V., Julia Ravenscroft, David O. Carpenter, C. Frye, Akwesasne Task Force On The Environment, B. Cook, and Lawrence M. Schell. 2016. “Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals and Ovulation: Is There a Relationship?” Environmental Research 17(151): 410–418. Gedicks, Al. 1994. The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporations. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Goncharov, Alexey, Richard Haase, Azara Santiago-Rivera, Gayle Morse, Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment, Robert J. McCaffrey, Robert Rej, and David O. Carpenter. 2008. “High Serum PCBs Are Associates with Elevation of Serum Lipids and Cardiovascular Disease in a Native American Population.” Environmental Research 106(2008) 226–239. Goncharov, Alexey, Robert Rej, Serban Negoita, Maria Schymura, Azara Santiago-Rivera, Gayle Morse, the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment, and David O. Carpenter. 2009. “Lower Serum Testosterone Associated with Elevated Polychlorinated Biphenyl Concentrations in Native American Men.” Environmental Health Perspectives 117(9): 1454–1460. Grinde, Donald and Bruce Johansen. 1995. Ecocide of Native America. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers. Gurr, Barbara. 2011. “Complex Intersections: Reproductive Justice and Native American Women.” Sociology Compass 5/8: 721–735. ———. 2014. Reproductive Justice: The Politics of Health Care for Native American Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Haase, Rf, R. J. McCaffrey; A. L. Santiago-Rivera, G. S. Morse, and A. Tarbell. 2009. “Evidence of an Age-Related Threshold Effect of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) on Neuropsychological Functioning in a Native American Population.” Environmental Research 109(1): 73–85. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 1(3): 575–599. Harris, Stuart G., and Barbara L. Harper. 1997. “A Native American Exposure Scenario.” Risk Analysis 17(6): 789–795. Hill Collins, Patricia and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Holifield, Ryan. 2012. “Environmental Justice as Recognition and Participation in Risk Assessment: Negotiating and Translating Health Risk at a Superfund Site in Indian Country.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102(3): 591–613. Hoover, Elizabeth. 2013. “Cultural and Health Implications of Fish Advisories in a Native American Community.” Ecological Processes 2(4). https://doi.org/ 10.1186/2192-1709-2-4. ———. 2016 “We’re Not Going to be Guinea Pigs;” Citizen Science and Environmental Health in a Native American Community.” Journal of Science Communication 15(1). Published online January 21. Available at http:// jcom.sissa.it/archive/15/01/JCOM_1501_2016_A05.

266

E. HOOVER

———. 2017. The River Is in Us; Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hoover, Elizabeth, Katsi Cook, Ron Plain, Kathy Sanchez, Vi Waghiyi, Pamela Miller, Renee Dufault, Caitlin Sislin, and David O. Carpenter. 2012. “Indigenous Peoples of North America: Environmental Exposures and Reproductive Justice.” Environmental Health Perspectives 120(12): 1645–1649. Jarding, Lillian Jones. 2011. “Uranium Activities’ Impacts on Lakota Territory.” Indigenous Policy Journal XII. http://www.indigenouspolicy.org/index.php/ ipj/article/view/48. Katz, Cindi. 2001. “Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction.” Antipode 33: 709–728. Krook, Lennart and George A. Maylin. 1979. “Industrial Fluoride Pollution: Chronic Fluoride Poisoning in Cornwall Island Cattle.” Cornell Veterinarian 69(S8). LaDuke, Winona. 1999. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Cambridge: South End Press. Lawrence, Jennifer. 2000. “The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women.” American Indian Quarterly 24(3): 400–419. MacDonald E., and S. Rang. 2007. “Expsoing Canada’s Chemical Valley: An Investigation of Cumulative Air Pollution Emissions in the Sarnia, Ontario Area.” An Ecojustice Report. Available at http://www.environmentalhealt hnews.org/ehs/news/2012/2007-study.pdf. Mackenzie, C. A., A. Lockridge, and M. Keith. 2005. “Declining Sex Ratio in a First Nation Community.” Environmental Health Perspective 113: 1295– 1298. Mascarenhas, Michael. 2012. Where the Waters Divide; Neoliberalism, White Privilege, and Environmental Racism in Canada. Lexington Books. Masco, J. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Miller, Pamela K., Viola Waghiyi, Gretchen Welfinger-Smith, Samuel Carter Byrne, Jane Kava, Jesse Gologergen, Lorraine Eckstein, Ronald Scrudato, Jeff Chiarenzelli, David O. Carpenter, and Samarys Seguinot-Medina. 2013. “Community-Based Participatory Research Projects and Policy Engagement to Protect Environmental Health on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska.” International Journal of Circumpolar Health 72(1). https://doi.org/10.3402/ijch. v72i0.21656. Mohai, Paul, David Pellow, and J. Timmons Roberts. 2009. “Environmental Justice.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 34: 405–430. Newman, Joan, Amy Aucompaugh, M. Lawrence Schell, Melinda Denham, Anthony P. DeCaprio, Mia V. Gallo, Julia Ravenscroft, Chin-Cheng Kao, MaryEllen Rougas Hanover, Dawn David, Agnes Jacobs, Alice Tarbell, Priscilla Worswick, and The Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment. 2006.

12

ENVIRONMENTAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS …

267

“PCBs and Cognitive Functioning of Mohawk Adolescents.” Neurotoxicology and Teratology 28: 429–445. O’Sullivan, Meg Devlin. 2015. “‘More Destruction To These Family Ties’: Native American Women, Child Welfare, and the Solution of Sovereignty.” Journal of Family History 41(1): 19–38. Ranco, Darren J., Catherine A. O’Neill, Jamie Donatuto, and Barbara L. Harper. 2011. “Environmental Justice, American Indians and the Cultural Dilemma: Developing Environmental Management for Tribal Health and Well-Being.” Environmental Justice 4: 221–230. Ross, Loretta. 2007. “What Is Reproductive Justice.” In Reproductive Justice Briefing Book; A Primer on Reproductive Justice and Social Change, pp. 4–5. Found at https://www.law.berkeley.edu/php-programs/courses/fileDL.php? fID=4051. Schell, Lawrence M., and Mia V. Gallo. 2010. “Relationships of Putative Endocrine Disruptors to Human Sexual Maturation and Thyroid Activity in Youth.” Physiology and Behavior 99: 246–253. Schell, Lawrence M., Mia V. Gallo, and Katsi Cook. 2012. “What’s NOT to Eat—Food Adulteration in the Context of Human Biology.” American Journal of Human Biology 24(2): 139–148. Schell, Lawrence M., Mia V. Gallo, Anthony P. DeCaprio, Lech A. Hubicki, Melinda Denham, Julia Ravenscroft, and The Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment. 2004. “Thyroid Function in Relation to Burden of PCBs, p,p’- DDE, HCB, Mirex and Lead Among Akwesasne Mohawk Youth: A Preliminary Study.” Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology 18: 91–99. Schell, Lawrence M., Mia V. Gallo, G. Deane, K. Nelder, A. Jacobs, and The Akewasasne Task Force on the Environment. 2014. “Relationship of Polychlorinated Biphenyls, Dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene (p,p’-DDE) with Testosterone Levels in Adolescent Males.” Environmental Health Perspectives 122(3): 304–309. Shotwell, Alexis. 2013. “Aspirational Solidarity as Bioethical Norm: The Case of Reproductive Justice.” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 6(1): 103–120. Tarbell, Alice and Mary Arquette. 2000. “Akwesasne: A Native American Community’s Resistance to Cultural and Environmental Damage.” In Reclaiming the Environmental Debate: The Politics of Health in a Toxic Culture, edited by Richard Hofrichter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA). 2004. “Tribal Superfund Program Needs Clear Direction and Actions to Improve Effectiveness.” Report No. 2004-P-00035. United States Environmental Protection Agency. 1991. “Superfund Proposed Plan General Motors Corporation Central Foundry Division.” Meeting transcript. Hogansburg, New York, June 26.

268

E. HOOVER

Voyles, Traci Brynne. 2015. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2011. “The Recognition Dimensions of Environmental Justice in Indian Country.” Environmental Justice 4(4): 199–205. ———. 2013. “Justice Forward: Tribes, Climate Adaptation and Responsibility.” Climatic Change 120(3): 517–530. ———. 2016. “Indigenous Experience, Environmental Justice and Settler Colonialism.” In Nature and Experience: Phenomenology and the Environment, edited by Bryan Bannon, 157–174. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Wolfe, Patrick. 1999. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. London: Cassell. Zavella, Patricia. 2016. “Contesting Structural Vulnerability Through Reproductive Justice Activism with Latina Immigrants in California.” North American Dialogue 19(1): 36–45.

CHAPTER 13

Peace, Violence and Inequality in a Climate-Disrupted World Simon Dalby

Trajectories for Planet Earth As the Northern Hemisphere endured another abnormally hot summer in 2018, Will Steffen and Johan Rockstrom’s team of earth system researchers once again published a key paper on the state of the world, climate change and what needs to be done. Our analysis suggests that the Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions—Hothouse Earth. This pathway would be propelled by strong, intrinsic, biogeophysical feedbacks difficult to influence by human actions, a pathway that could not be reversed, steered, or substantially slowed. … The impacts of a Hothouse Earth pathway on human societies

S. Dalby (B) Geography and Environmental Studies, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_13

269

270

S. DALBY

would likely be massive, sometimes abrupt, and undoubtedly disruptive. (Steffen et al. 2018, p 6.)

While much of the quite considerable media commentary on the article suggested that this fate for the planet was inevitable, it is important to note that the paper is phrased in terms of a cautionary tale, suggesting that prompt action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions still can prevent the most extreme climate disruptions that underlie the worst dystopias that are popular in media accounts of what is coming (Wallace-Wells 2019). Delaying dealing with these issues makes everything more difficult later this century; given the lag times involved, and the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Time is short, and rapid decarbonization of the global economy is essential if the worst disruptions are to be avoided (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018). The point about Steffen et al.’s (2018) analysis, that is frequently missed in conventional reportage, is that the scale of human activities now means that collectively these are shaping the future configuration of key parts of the earth system. The assumptions of environmental stability, of fluctuations around a stable mean, or stationarity in the planning jargon used by hydrologists (Milly et al. 2008), can no longer be taken for granted in either infrastructure planning or political relationships. Earth system scientists are now using the term Anthropocene to refer to the current phase in planetary history, the term designed to emphasize the human role in shaping the future (Lewis and Maslin 2018). It is no longer the case that humanity is at the mercy of natural phenomena that dwarf our efforts; the Anthropocene is, in Clive Hamilton’s (2017) terms, a rupture from modern notions of the human place in the cosmos. The rich and powerful parts of humanity are operating on such a scale that they are remaking how the earth system functions. Substantial changes are already underway. The implications of contemporary earth system science suggest that the future isn’t determined, that human institutions can make a difference in what the future brings. While climate change is now raising sea levels, making wildfires worse and causing more intense floods and heatwaves, decisions about whether to build more coal power stations, or solar farms, gas-guzzling automobiles or mass transit, parking lots or efficient buildings, concrete canals or biodiverse ecosystems, matter in terms of the consequences, not just for local conditions, but at the scale of the whole planet. Humanity faces

13

PEACE, VIOLENCE AND INEQUALITY ...

271

a series of decisions about production, because the earth system analysis makes clear that, quite literally, the decisions made by the rich and powerful are shaping the future of the planetary biosphere. The poor and marginal in many places, those who have done little to cause the problem, are most vulnerable. Structural inequality in the global system is now very much about geophysics and geopolitics, not just economics.

Climate Inequality While some of these discussions have been going on for a long time, the urgency of thinking about economic decisions in their ecological context has become much greater, now crystalized by the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018) report on what needs to be done to keep warming to 1.50 C. Delaying has consequences in ways that are different from other political and social decisions. A delay of a decade or two with introducing social policy measures means that current generations may have to forgo some benefits. Delaying dealing with climate change means that all future generations will have to deal with the consequences (Dalby 2019). Because carbon dioxide emissions in particular last for a very long time in the atmosphere, and there are few plausible ways in which we can quickly reduce greenhouse gases once they are in the atmosphere, not producing them now matters in the future. There is a profound inter-generational dimension to climate change justice that requires action now to prevent entirely predictable harm in the future. This point was clearly recognized by Greta Thunberg (2019) and her “climate striking” school children peers around the world prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are also geographical justice issues, highlighted by the high vulnerability of some states that have low carbon emissions, India being a prominent case in point in the G-20 states (Ricke et al. 2018). Bangladesh among other developing states is particularly vulnerable to storms and sea-level rise. The Small Island States in the Pacific and Indian oceans are facing complete elimination. Crucially, it matters that the states and corporations that have caused the problem through history by profligate combustion, are in many cases, not the most vulnerable in at least the next few decades. Appeals to a general humanity and a global problem frequently mask both the responsibilities for causing the problem, and the specific vulnerabilities to the worst impacts of climate change, many of which are in the Global South in states that have had little to do with

272

S. DALBY

generating climate change, but now face the immediate consequences very directly (Chaturvedi and Doyle 2015). Climate change is already a big problem for many vulnerable people. Likewise, there are justice issues now in terms of who suffers the consequences of extreme weather within states. Mostly the poor, the sick, the very young and the old suffer the worst in floods, heatwaves, storms and other disruptions. Now, as heatwaves become enhanced by climate disruptions, the poor, which in many places means those without access to air conditioning, are most vulnerable precisely because they cannot cool themselves. Heat stroke and other illnesses are the result as the casualty figures from heatwaves are making clear in recent episodes (Fleming 2018). Assumptions that poor and rich suffer alike from heatwaves are turning out to be wrong; cities are constructed in ways that aggravate inequalities, in part because of local heat island effects and the lack of trees, parks and green spaces in poor neighborhoods. As climate change accelerates, these inequities are getting worse, built-in quite literally, to the construction of many urban habitats (Graham 2016). This crucial point is starting to get recognition by municipal governments, anxious to move climate-change responses ahead given their increasing vulnerabilities, and despite the rivalries of international politics (Bernstein and Hoffman 2018). This is frequently not made easy by the patterns of government and disaster insurance that, premised on the assumption of a stable earth in which floods, storms, heatwaves and droughts are understood to be anomalies in what is otherwise a fairly predictable long-term climate, emphasize rebuilding after disasters, rather than careful anticipation of future dangers. Conventional modes of economic development, and engineering solutions that disregard local changing ecological conditions are not helpful, but changing these approaches requires a rethinking of the geographical assumptions of a stable world (Sovacool and Linner 2016). Climate adaptation requires building back better in many cases, but this in turn requires thinking about geographical locations and opting not to build in places that are especially vulnerable to increasingly frequent storm damage and inundation. All of these issues are intimately interconnected with the global economy, with what it produces, how and where. Security for most people is in practice, about their place in the global circuits of economy (Stiglitz and Kaldor 2013). Massive production complexes, the rapid transformation of landscapes for agriculture, huge mining operations, industrial-scale

13

PEACE, VIOLENCE AND INEQUALITY ...

273

fishing on the high seas and the fossil-powered transportation and infrastructure to move all the commodities this system produces, are now a key element in the earth system; a technosphere in the language of earth system scientists (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017). The power of the fossil fuel industry, epitomized by the policies of the Trump Administration to try to stymie efforts to promote renewable energy sources and convert vehicle fleets, is a major obstacle to public policies in many states trying to tackle the climate crisis.

Climate Change and War Twentieth-century geopolitical assumptions portrayed earth as a zone of contention, a stable arrangement of real estate that is to be struggled over in the search for security and power in a supposedly dangerous context of endless rivalries (Dalby 2020a). What the earth system analyzes, and the case of climate change in particular is making clear, is that these assumptions of a stable context for the human drama are not valid. Our geopolitical thinking, and analyses of conflicts, peace and justice need an update in the face of this new awareness. That said, current economic and political thinking is frequently antithetical to actions based on this new contextualization of the human condition (Gopel 2016). Much work needs to be done to update thinking about the current situation, not least the articulation of a series of arguments that challenge apocalyptic framings of climate change. In parallel with this effort, fears of inevitable war as climate difficulties multiply also have to be confronted, and here too the future isn’t determined. Much depends on intelligent policies. The arguments about war and climate reprise both long-term concerns about the fate of humanity, highlighted by the environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the more recent focus on environment as a cause of conflict (Welzer 2012; Klare 2019). While philosophers, geographers and intellectuals have long pondered the role of environments shaping societies and the human role in changing environments, the environmentalist discussion of the 1960s was strengthened by fears of radioactive fallout, pesticide poisonings and the consequences of numerous forms of industrial pollution (Ward and Dubos 1972). The nuclear test ban treaty, numerous technical fixes to industrial emissions and government environment departments dealt with some of the angst of the times. Resource shortages were the other side of the coin, and green revolution innovations in particular alleviated fears of global famine, while the OPEC

274

S. DALBY

oil crisis in 1974 stoked fears of running out of petroleum in particular. This fed into concerns that military intervention in the Middle East might be necessary to ensure oil supplies, something that came in the 1980s with American military arrangements and the reflagging of tankers escorted by the American navy well before the full-scale intervention in 1990 to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait. As the Cold War wound down, questions were raised about environmental difficulties being the major new security issue for Western societies. The World Commission on Environment and Development report on Our Common Future (1987) posed environmental security as the necessary prerequisite for sustainable development. The assumption in this report, as in much contemporaneous literature, was that environmental scarcities were a cause of conflict and would likely be so increasingly in the future, unless development strategies took sustainability seriously. This common wisdom generated research efforts in the 1990s that, with some exceptions, concluded that pathways from environmental change to conflict were complicated, and some of the key fears about war caused by environmental scarcities were misplaced (Baechler 1998; Homer-Dixon 1999). None of this challenged the larger concerns about geopolitical rivalries as a cause of potential violence, but the arguments that rural resource shortages would generate large-scale violence were mostly disproven. Much of this was revisited the following decade as climate change emerged as a potential international security issue causing concern, particularly in Washington. While there was strong opposition to considering these things in the Bush administration, in 2007, a number of reports appeared that suggested climate change would be a threat multiplier (CNA 2007, Campbell et al. 2007). Set against the backdrop of the war on terror, links were made between the disruptions caused by climate and various forms of insecurity, state failure and the potential for insurgencies and terrorist organizations to profit from disruptions. In so far as the US military might be called upon to tackle the consequences, this clearly was an important matter for long-term security thinking. More recent efforts have suggested that climate is already a catalyst for conflict (CNA 2014). Subsequently, this theme has become institutionalized in the military and in related think-tank organizations, with the Center for Climate Security being only the most high profile. These concerns have been buttressed by innovative historical research in recent years, both into the larger environmental transformations of

13

PEACE, VIOLENCE AND INEQUALITY ...

275

the world system in the last half millennium and in reconstructions of earlier periods. New research on the paleoclimate of the Roman Empire has led to conclusions that crop yield fluctuations in the period at the end of the Western empire may have had socially destabilizing consequences that were an important factor in the demise of the imperial system. Disease too, and the plague in particular, had major consequences for the rapid decline of population, with all the military consequences this had in the failure of Justinian to re-establish the empire permanently. The interconnections between disease and climate add a fascinating series of insights to this history (Harper 2017), a theme that the COVID-19 pandemic has raised once again, although in reverse this time, as the initial economic shut-downs to slow the virus transmission, reduced the emission of greenhouse gases in early 2020. Recent analyses of the "little ice age" of the seventeenth century suggest that climate had global effects on human societies around the world. Famines in Japan and China paralleled disruptions in Europe where historical records chart crop failures and the impoverishment of many communities across the continent. The widespread warfare in Europe, not least the thirty years war on the continent and the civil war in Britain, which gave rise to some of the key institutions of modern states, is set against the backdrop of food shortages and dramatic social tensions related to severe weather (Parker 2013). From this, it is possible to draw some general implications concerning the vulnerability of agricultural societies to climate disruption. Cautionary tales abound in this history, not least concerning the failure of rulers to prepare for future difficulties, and their callous disregard for the suffering of people supposedly in their charge. Taking welfare, not just warfare, seriously in the aftermath of the calamities of the seventeenth century, seems to be part and parcel of the subsequent rise of the modern system. But these lessons seem to be lost to many contemporary policymakers and authoritarian politicians determined to try to impose violent forms of control on rapidly changing circumstances.

Globalization and Environmental Change More recent earth system science research, propelled in part by the discussion of when the Anthropocene might be said to have started, has added an interesting twist to this discussion; one that has implications for how

276

S. DALBY

we might now look at the question of climate change and its likely consequences. Given the massive-scale death of many millions of humans in the Americas as a result of the European conquest and the spread of diseases, perhaps only most obviously smallpox, agriculture collapsed across much of the Americas. Trees grew back in places where fields were abandoned, and the resulting decline in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere may have been related to the coldest part of the little ice age. Given that this is a globally significant change, visible in geological phenomena around the world, it has been argued that this "Orbis" spike in carbon dioxide be considered as the starting point for the Anthropocene (Lewis and Maslin 2018.) Thus, linking this with Parker’s (2013) analysis of the rise of modern states out of the conflicts of the seventeenth century, the argument is that climate is part of the key emergence of modernity, humanity and nature being much more obviously interconnected than modern narratives have suggested. Environmental history, now increasingly integrated with the discussions of climate, colonization and change, suggests that the human story needs to be contextualized in terms of the rest of the earth system. The global economy, and its specifically capitalist dynamics emphasizing growth and expansion of production, and the spread of agriculture, plantation farming, fishing and whaling, has changed much of the biosphere (Angus 2016). This was set in motion by early European trading and conquest, and rapidly expanded in the nineteenth century when steam engines transformed the productive capabilities of industry and the movement of its raw materials and products. Since the Second World War, there has been a “great acceleration” in this process (McNeill and Engelke 2016). The spread of mass consumption societies, and the production of gasoline and diesel-powered transportation have expanded the process of environmental change, both directly by the change in land uses for forestry and farming, and indirectly by adding increasingly large amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. This is the new context within which climate change, insecurity, war and peace have to be considered. Unlike earlier periods of history, we now know the connections between events in distant parts of the world and the relationships between rural transformation and violence. Clearly, climate change is a major stressor on agricultural systems and on water supplies in particular places. Now the extreme heatwaves, floods and droughts are, if not caused by human actions in changing the atmosphere, clearly enhanced by the growth of greenhouse gases. How extreme events play

13

PEACE, VIOLENCE AND INEQUALITY ...

277

out depends on the particular circumstances in the regions where they happen, and the preparation, or failure to prepare on the part of states. In many parts of the Global South, states simply don’t have the abilities to anticipate and plan for major disasters. Unlike earlier historical periods, however, there are at least nascent international organizations to implement food aid, medical assistance and cope with refugees. The other side of the coin in terms of global interconnectedness is that market mechanisms and decisions in one part of the world have consequences elsewhere. In 2008 and 2010, spikes in global food prices were partly the cause of widespread protests. The Arab Spring phenomenon was triggered by food price protests and the criticism of the inequity and injustice of governments incapable or unwilling to deal with the social consequences of food price hikes for impoverished people. The interconnections between Russian export bans, speculative purchases and retail prices in distant cities, suggest a complicated geography of linked events that analyses of climate change and conflict have to consider (HomerDixon et al. 2015). The possibilities of policy intervention in the global food system point to a global dimension to the climate and scarcity issue, another issue highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Diversifying supply sources is a sensible strategy to ensure food security, one used by global corporations. This has obvious international consequences as corporations and states buy land and build infrastructure abroad, and in the process, change land markets and production systems in foreign states. Much of this has been driven by commercial expansion in global commodities; but in so far as it is a climate adaptation strategy, climate and potential conflicts, as a result of what is now widely known as land grabbing, are part of the policy picture (Buxton and Hayes 2016). While plantation agriculture and the dispossession of local inhabitants are an old part of colonization, these practices are now enhanced both for agricultural production and in the carbon offset markets where forests in the Global South enter into market arrangements too, whether under the REDD + schemes or other commercialized ecosystem services arrangements. Resistance to such developments is also far from a new phenomenon. Opposition to expropriations has a long history, perhaps most famously in terms of the historical resistance to the enclosure movements in Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, and the resistance of indigenous peoples in numerous places to the colonization efforts of Europeans (Marzek 2015). The legal doctrines of terra nullius explicitly deny indigenous peoples’

278

S. DALBY

rights to the lands they have inhabited, making “improvement” and particular modes of use the criteria for legal occupancy. The lack of formal legal title to land remains a contentious issue in many places, and the “slow violence” used to enforce titles and evict prior occupants is part of the struggles that landless movements mount (Nixon 2011). This has now been tragically supplemented by an all too “fast violence”, as those who resist these processes are targeted for assassination in many places (Middledorp and Le Billon 2019). Failure to understand the frequently violent context of what Saskia Sassen (2014) terms these "expulsions" and deal with the politics of elite impositions on extant societies in crises, leads to a misdiagnosis of the problems and once again, a matter of blaming the victims who supposedly stand in irrational opposition to progress, development and economic expansion. Modernization is a profoundly disruptive process. While most people may now desire the living conditions it promises, to forget the wrenching changes involved, is to misunderstand the politics of contemporary change, and the important role of social movements in resisting some of the worst consequences of the transformation (Routledge 2017). Activists frequently establish camps and occupy contested spaces in protest actions, attempting to prevent mines, pipelines and plantations from changing landscapes and endangering environments and modes of living. This is such a frequent part of contemporary struggles that Naomi Klein (2014) has invented a whole geographic category of "blockadia" to label these activities. The violence of expropriations is also complicated now when states invoke sovereignty as a mode of blaming foreigners and criminalizing opposition to the expansion of mines, agricultural plantations and other extractivist projects (Matejova et al. 2018). It is clear that conventional environmentalisms have failed to effectively grapple with either the scale and pace of change, or the legacy of dispossession and conquest suffered by indigenous peoples in numerous places (Dauvergne 2016). Focusing on protecting specific locales, regulating pollution in specific industries, and using existing national institutions is now not close to enough in facing the dramatic transformations of the Anthropocene.

Resilience, Transformation and Development The international policy responses to the current predicament come mostly in terms of sustainable development, and now specifically, the

13

PEACE, VIOLENCE AND INEQUALITY ...

279

seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) (UN 2015). The SDGs explicitly talk in terms of transformation, recognizing, although rarely actually saying it bluntly, that the fossil-fueled corporate model of development over the last few decades is unsustainable. This agenda runs headlong into the aspirations of many to perpetuate the current political economic order and use fossil fuels to power both consumption economies and the military power to secure them. The use of such “firepower” quite literally (Dalby 2018), to dominate both human antagonists as well as change environments into economically useful entities, continues in many places, even if it comes at the costs of the poor and marginal in current generations, and the future for most of humanity that is likely to be subject to severe weather, heat and flooding hazards. Indirectly, water shortages, as in La Paz in 2017, or in Cape Town in 2018, are now a major challenge for many urban dwellers. Only a relatively small portion of humanity can escape to the isolated air-conditioned enclaves of extreme wealth where such hazards are evaded (Graham 2016). The rest of us are frequently told that we need to be resilient to cope with the many vicissitudes of life (Grove 2018). Stuff happens! The best that can be done is to prepare to cope when it does. This politics of resilience, of the abilities to adapt and to cope with adversity and recover after disaster and disruption, frequently doesn’t effectively challenge the larger political order. Activists are struggling in many places to find more effective ways to act that either avoid or subvert the dominant state-led modes of climate adaptation and development strategies that extend the remit of modernity, regardless of the collateral damage that results (Chandler 2018). Major engineering works to hold back coastal inundations may work in some places, but in the poorer parts of the world, these adaptations are not possible. Ecological adaptation is much more appropriate, but that too is not easy in complex political economies of property and territory where short-term economic considerations frequently run counter to longer-term sustainability (Sovacool and Linner 2016). This point is epitomized where either shrimp farms or beach resorts win out over coastal mangroves, and hence increase vulnerabilities to storm surges. Outright denial of climate change is part of the ideological campaign to protect petroleum industry profits and assert the dominance of cultures of “firepower” in the face of international efforts to tackle climate change and reinvent energy systems (Dalby 2018). The economies of desire tied into this are a key part of the politics of climate change (Gough 2017). The insistence on control, on assumptions of autonomy in terms of national politics and sovereignty, feeds into the reactionary politics of our

280

S. DALBY

times. Fear and violent containment are the preferred modes of response to matters that increasingly cross boundaries (Derber and Magrass 2019). Climate disruption, extreme events and the lack of predictability require very different responses to be effective. The fortress mentality in conservation discourse, fencing and protecting areas from external threats and the invocation of territorial sovereignty in the face of global interconnections simply makes everything more difficult (White 2014). In a climate-disrupted world where rural political ecologies are being transformed both by the extension of global commodity markets and by climate adaptation processes, voluntary or forced, thinking about conflict resolution and the key theme of preventing the recurrence of conflict once ceasefires have been implemented, is made more complicated. There are some worrying situations at present where powerful states control the headwaters of important rivers, and dams and irrigation systems may deny water to downstream riparians. The case of Turkish water diversions adding to the difficulties of rebuilding Iraq has long been a matter of headlines. The Chinese dam building in the headwaters of the Mekong system raise concerns that downstream states will suffer there too. That said, the detailed research on water management issues in cross boundary situations gives considerable cause for optimism. Despite the endless media headlines about water wars, they are not a matter of historical record (Dinar and Dinar 2017). Cooperation over shared water resources is the norm, and in so far these practices can be built on to address increasingly variable hydrological conditions, they are key to peaceful adaptation to climate change.

Peacebuilding, Fragility and Risk The major concern is that this will not remain the case if climate change upsets rainfall patterns and challenges technical agreements based on historical records of river volumes. If “non-stationarity” is the new norm as hydrologists are increasingly coming to understand (Milly et al. 2008), then agreements across these frontiers in anticipation of increased variation of flows are needed, to “climate proof” such arrangements in advance (Cooley and Gleick 2011). Scholarly research suggests that the potential for peacebuilding efforts around water resources is considerable. In terms of climate proofing, the habits of cooperation that come from working on resource-sharing agreements are a valuable contribution. Peacebuilding in

13

PEACE, VIOLENCE AND INEQUALITY ...

281

these terms is about more than the absence of violent conflict. In circumstances with a history of conflict, environmental peacebuilding in terms of sustainable local resource use arrangements, might yet be extended to encompass Wallenstein’s (2015) notions of quality peace which include anticipatory actions to preempt the reversion to conflict in the future. Scholarly efforts on water-related disputes make clear that the context and the institutions in place to deal with water stress are key to how they play out, and where conflicts are preempted by cooperative actions (Zografos et al. 2014). However, to get to these situations, a considerable about of trust is needed, but this is not easy where state policymakers misunderstand the objectives of their colleagues across international frontiers. In terms of climate, rivers, dams and irrigation are tied into demands for non-fossil-fueled electricity that can be generated by hydro installations. But water flows regulated for one use may not be good for the other. Clarifying the priorities is a key part of resolving misunderstandings. Climate-driven unpredictability makes all this more difficult. It also now adds to the incentives for peacebuilding approaches that involve a wider participation by civil society, as well as facilitations by international organizations. These may include development banks and challenge the formulations of sovereignty frequently invoked by politicians in such cases (Huda and Ali 2018). A major report in 2015 by the G7 posed all these issues in terms of “A New Climate for Peace” (https://www.newclimateforpeace.org/). Focusing on climate fragility and the risks of conflict, the effort has tried to extend peacemaking ideas to tackle the connected risks that climate change highlights. More specifically, the report identifies what it calls “compound climate-fragility risks” that threaten state and societal stability in coming decades. These are local resource competition, which can lead to conflict without the presence of effective dispute resolution mechanisms; livelihood insecurity and migration, where people dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods are displaced; extreme weather and disasters which exacerbate people’s vulnerabilities; volatile food prices with all the potential this has for protests, rioting and political instability; trans-boundary water management that increases pressure on governance mechanisms; coastal sea-level rise and inundation leading to displacements; and finally, a crucial addition to the conventional list of these things, the unintended consequences of climate policies themselves. Further empirical assessments of climate fragility point to heightened dangers in countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia,

282

S. DALBY

where scenarios for increased disasters as well as slow onset changes will likely exceed the social capacity of societies to adapt and cope (Moran et al. 2018). The new climate of peace discussion has extended into a planetary security initiative dedicated to linking climate issues into the security discussion. Such concerns have driven the recent planetary security initiative of the G7, led by the Netherlands. Its annual conferences have become a venue for discussing these climate risks, and for policy initiatives to tackle climate-induced difficulties (https://www.planetary securityinitiative.org/). Clearly, greater resilience is needed in many social and economic arrangements (Mobjork et al. 2016). The Climate and Security think-tank in Washington followed up with a report on “epicenters of climate and security” in 2018 (https://climateandsecurity. org/epicenters/). It identified both specific places of concern, including the melting Arctic, such things as disruptions to coffee production, and migration difficulties in many places. To reiterate a key point: what is frequently neglected in all this, is that climate change is predominantly caused by metropolitan consumption by the rich and powerful (Taylor et al. 2020). Dealing with climate change requires focusing on urban industrial consumption, even though the symptoms of climate change and the instability risks frequently fall on rural and poor populations. Misconstruing these as the security challenge is to mistake symptoms for causes (Hardt 2018). While focusing on rural disruptions makes good policy sense for many reasons, it fails to deal with the root causes of contemporary dislocations which lie in the fossil-fueled mode of economy that causes climate change. This key point needs to be kept clearly in mind, especially when thinking through the relationships between climate change and potential future conflicts.

Conflict in a Disrupted World? Failure to tackle the drivers of climate change will lead to an increasingly disrupted world of conflict, and ever more drastic attempts to engineer conditions for political elites to dominate other humans and the planet itself (Dalby 2020a). The nightmare scenarios point to attempts to adjust the temperature of the planet by solar radiation management, whether by injecting sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere or by other means, and wars starting over claims that these measures taken by one state were causing weather chaos in other countries. The potential for such unilateral

13

PEACE, VIOLENCE AND INEQUALITY ...

283

geo-engineering actions grows as weather extremes make conditions more difficult for state governments and major corporations to function. Such scenarios are about elite actions, not a matter of violence caused by poor and marginal populations facing environmental problems. As with wars in the past, the frequent cause is miscalculation or attempts by political elites to use force to gain access to resources (Le Billon 2013). There are few scenarios in which the poor and marginal who face the worst impacts of climate change could mount warlike campaigns against the consumer societies that have caused the problem. Likewise, as Thomas Homer-Dixon (1994) pointed out long ago, there is no obvious coalition of poor countries that might use war as an attempt to deal with climate change: state groupings simply don’t form in ways that might lead to alliances and military action. The rich and powerful, those that use most fossil fuels, have military capabilities; those who suffer the consequences of storms, rising sea levels and droughts, mostly don’t. With the rise of nationalist politics in the West particularly recently, and the invocation of threats, security discourse and rivalries as the themes of international politics, questions of future wars inevitably emerge. Graham Allison’s (2017) Harvard project on the Thucydides trap and the possibilities of war between a rising China and a declining United States hegemon have made it onto the bestseller lists. While he mentions climate change, it is a very minor concern in a volume that looks back to historical analogies to present circumstances, to warn of the need to understand potential antagonists across the great power divide. But in light of earth system science, the larger issues of climate change and Anthropocene transformation suggest that the most important priorities for great power national security are now matters of environmental change, and the construction of both national infrastructure resilience and an international system that can facilitate adaptations to new circumstances. Especially worrisome is the assumption, noteworthy in the Trump administration’s refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions on the grounds that this is too technologically and economically disruptive, that a hothouse future is inevitable. This isn’t the usual form of climate denial, so frequent in the political rhetoric of Trump administration supporters. It is an additional argument that suggests that there isn’t anything that can effectively be done, even if the costs will be very high for Americans (Ricke et al. 2018). Or at least, nothing can be done without fairly dramatic social change, and that is implicitly, and frequently explicitly, rejected as an option. After all, the “conservative” stream in American

284

S. DALBY

political discourse has long been about minimizing the intervention of states and policy in the functioning of the economy. Apparently, the current inequitable social order is what is to be secured, even at the expense of a functional biosphere in the long run. The corollary that implicitly follows from this is that all security strategies can do, is figure out how particular affluent parts of humanity can ensure their short-term survival at the cost of yet further death and destruction for the rest of humanity and the planet. This key geopolitical assumption, that a chaotic, conflictual and competitive future is our fate, underlies the logic of firepower as the key to American national security (Dalby 2018). But if the complex interconnections in the earth system are taken into consideration, it can only be a highly dubious security for the few, not a sustainable future for most of humanity or most other life forms on the planet. Avoiding such a planetary fate is precisely what serious discussions of global security need to address, and the sooner the better. But this is, as numerous non-state actors are beginning to understand and act upon, not something that can be left to state elites preoccupied with narrow geopolitical rivalry views of what constitutes national security (Bernstein and Hoffman 2018).

The Human Future Steffen, Rockstrom and their colleagues make clear that getting away from the hothouse earth pathway and moving toward a stabilized earth will require very considerable change in societal practices and attitudes. The Stabilized Earth trajectory requires deliberate management of humanity’s relationship with the rest of the Earth System if the world is to avoid crossing a planetary threshold. We suggest that a deep transformation based on a fundamental reorientation of human values, equity, behavior, institutions, economies, and technologies is required. Even so, the pathway toward Stabilized Earth will involve considerable changes to the structure and functioning of the Earth System, suggesting that resilience-building strategies be given much higher priority than at present in decision making. (Steffen et al. 2018 p. 6.)

Resilience here means more than just coping with disasters and reconstructing afterwards. It requires thinking about humanity as part of the earth system, and acting accordingly (Dalby 2020b). This isn’t a matter

13

PEACE, VIOLENCE AND INEQUALITY ...

285

of some central governing body making definitive decisions about how hot the planet should get (although the consensus in the Paris Agreement is no more than 2 degrees Celsius more than pre-industrial levels, with hopes of 1.5 degrees) but that ecological considerations need to be factored into all major decisions about land use, energy systems building codes and investments. Dramatic reductions in energy use on the scale necessary to get us to a “Stabilized Earth” this century require rethinking much of how contemporary societies work, given the lack of plausible modes of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on the scale necessary to keep global warming on average under 1.5 degrees (Grubler et al. 2018). Huge inequalities in human systems already show up as highly variable death rates in storms, heatwaves and pandemics. Access to air conditioning, safe ground above floodwaters and well-constructed buildings are key to immediate survival in disasters. Longer-term access to nutritious food, medical care and education are key to human welfare, as the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized. Insofar as climate change disrupts these things, poverty and inequality are aggravated. But while the poor and marginal may protest their fate, and in some cases provide militants who turn to violence to do so, rarely are poor people the source of serious military conflict. That comes from political elites, state rulers and those with access to weapons and the resources needed to literally “go to war”. Much of the violence in recent history has been about metropolitan states involved in wars in peripheral places. Geopolitics is about resource wars, but these are mostly about contested access rather than rural insurrections from the very poor. The nightmare scenarios for future wars arise from elites’ trying to maintain their privileges in the face of dramatic disruptions. The scenarios in fictional representations of the future, in such movies as Elysium, or even parts of The Black Panther, or novels such as Paulo Bacigalupi’s (2015) The Water Knife, are about elites appropriating resources and the poor struggling to survive. These scenarios extend the Pentagon’s view of the world as one of instability in the fringes of the world system that threatens metropolitan prosperity. The private security systems of the rich and powerful, keeping resources flowing despite scarcities and disruptions, suggest a dystopian future for much of humanity in a climatedisrupted world. In contrast, Kim Stanley Robinson’s (2017) New York 2140 is a hopeful suggestion that eventually political leaders may get some of this right—eventually! Even if they do, it’s quite possible that hold-out

286

S. DALBY

fossil fuel producers may risk war to maintain their destructive modes of living based on firepower; a scenario encapsulated in Omar El Akkad’s (2017) American War. The alternative to the continued embrace of firepower, promised by such things as ubiquitous solar panels and distributed energy grids, permacultures and ecological production, require redirecting the wealth in the present economic system to build sustainably for the future, and a sense of participating in a common future rather than trying to dominate a profoundly unequal one. At the heart of such contemporary struggles are divestment movements trying to move financial resources away from fossil fuels and weapons production, and toward more benign technologies and hopefully more peaceful futures (Mangat et al. 2018). National fee and dividend schemes to speed the phase out of fossil fuels and facilitate adaptation on the part of those in harm’s way are a very different future from the further imposition of centralized fossil fuel extraction schemes. The future is literally being made by such decisions. This is the context in which the fate of humanity has to be considered. The earth system is in the hands of the rich and powerful. Yet, as of 2020, there is little to suggest that the current elites are up to the task of making a stable earth system, rather than a hothouse earth, in which they struggle to keep their privileges in the face of disruptions for which they are mostly responsible. The great challenge for global governance, the aspirations of sustainable development and those who work for peaceful transitions are to shape the global economy in ways that simultaneously provide basic necessities for all while buffering societies from the worst extremes of climate-induced disruptions. This is the task for all those who think seriously about global peace and security rather than only about a precarious survival for the rich and powerful in a climate-disrupted world.

References Allison, G. (2017). Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? New York: Houghton Mifflin. Angus, I. (2016). Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. New York: Monthly Review Press. Bacigalupi, P. (2015). The Water Knife. New York: Knopf. Baechler, G. (1998). Why Environmental Transformation Causes Violence: A Synthesis. Environmental Change and Security Project Report. 4. pp. 24–44.

13

PEACE, VIOLENCE AND INEQUALITY ...

287

Bernstein, S. and Hoffman, M. (2018). The politics of decarbonization and the catalytic impact of subnational climate experiments. Policy Sciences 51(2). pp. 189-211. Buxton, N., and Hayes, B. (Eds). (2016). The secure and the dispossessed. London: Pluto. Campbell, K. M., Gulledge, J., McNeill, J. R., Podesta, J., Ogden, P., Fuerth, L., et al. (2007). The age of consequences: The foreign policy and national security implications of global climate change. Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies. Chandler, D. (2018) Ontopolitics, London: Routledge. Chaturvedi, S., & Doyle, T. (2015). Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. CNA Corporation. (2007). National security and the threat of climate change. Alexandria, VA: CNA Corporation. CNA Military Advisory Board. (2014). National security and the accelerating risks of climate change. Alexandria, VA: CNA Corporation. Cooley, H. and Gleick, P. H. (2011). Climate proofing transboundary water agreements Hydrological Sciences Journal 56(4). pp. 711-718. Dalby, S. (2018). “Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene” Geopolitics. 23(3). pp. 718-742. Dalby, S. (2019). Climate Change, Security and Sustainability, in S. Horton, R. Mahon and S. Dalby eds Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: Global Governance Challenges, London: Routledge. pp. 117-131. Dalby, S. (2020a). Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Dalby, S. (2020b). Resilient Earth: Gaia, Geopolitics and the Anthropocene, in D. Chandler, K. Grove, and S. Wakefield, Eds: Resilience in the Anthropocene: Governance, and Politics at the End of the World. New York: Routledge, pp. 22-36. Dauvergne, P. (2016). Environmentalism of the Rich, Cambridge MA, MIT Press. Derber, C. and Magrass, Y.R. (2019). Moving Beyond Fear: Upending the Security Tales in Capitalism, Fascism, and Democracy, New York: Routledge. Dinar, S and Dinar A. (2017). International Water Scarcity and Variability: Managing Resource Use Across Political Boundaries. Berkeley: University of California Press. El Akkad, O. (2017). American War. New York: Knopf. Fleming, A. (2018). Heat: The next big inequality issue. The Guardian 13 August. Gopel, M. (2016). The Great Mindshift: How a New Economic Paradigm and Sustainability Transformations go Hand in Hand. Berlin: Springer. Gough, I. (2017). Heat, Greed and Human Need: Climate Change, Capitalism and Sustainable Wellbeing. London: Edward Elgar.

288

S. DALBY

Graham, S. (2016). Vertical. London: Verso. Grove, K. (2018). Resilience. New York: Routledge. Grubler, A. et.al. (2018). “A low energy demand scenario for meeting the 1.5°C target and sustainable development goals without negative emission technologies” Nature Energy 3, pp. 515–527. Hamilton, C. (2017). Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene, Cambridge: Polity. Hardt, J.N. (2018). Environmental Security in the Anthropocene: Assessing Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Harper, K. (2017). The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease & the End of an Empire. Prinecton: Princeton University Press. Homer-Dixon, T. (1994). Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases International Security 19(1). pp. 5-40. Homer-Dixon, T. (1999). Environment, scarcity, and violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Homer-Dixon, T., et.al (2015). Synchronous failure: The emerging causal architecture of global crisis. Ecology and Society, 20(3): 6. Huda, M.S. and Ali S.H. (2018). Environmental Peacebuilding in South Asia: Establishing consensus on hydroelectric projects in the Ganges-BramaputraMegna (GBM) Basin. Geoforum 96. 160-171. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018). Global Warming of 1.5 0 C http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ Klare, M. (2019). All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change. New York: Metropolitan. Klein, N. (2014). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, Toronto: Knopf. LeBillon, P. (2013). Wars of Plunder: Conflicts, Profits and the Politics of Resources. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, S. and Maslin, M. (2018). The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, London: Pelican. Mangat, R., Dalby, S. and Paterson, M. (2018) “Divestment Discourse: War, Justice, Morality and Money” Environmental Politics 27(2). pp. 187-208. Marzek, R. P. (2015). Militarizing the Environment: Climate Change and the Security State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Matejova, M, Parker, S. and Dauvergne, P. (2018). The Politics of Repressing Environmentalists as Agents of Foreign Influence Australian Journal of International Affairs 72(2), pp. 145-162. McNeill, J. R., and Engelke, P. (2016). The great acceleration: An environmental history of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

13

PEACE, VIOLENCE AND INEQUALITY ...

289

Middledorp, M. and LeBillon, P. (2019). “Deadly Environmental Governance: Authoritarianism, Ecopopulism, and the Repression of Environmental and Land Defenders” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(2) 324-337. Milly, P. C. D., Betancourt, J., Falkenmark, M., Hirsch, R. M., Kundzewicz, Z. W., Lettenmaier, D. P., & Stouffer, R. J. (2008). Stationarity is dead: Whither water management? Science, 319(5863): pp. 573–574. Mobjork, M., Smith, D., and Ruttinger, L. (2016). Towards a Global Resilience Agenda: Action on Climate Fragility Risks. The Hague: Clingendael–the Netherlands Institute for International Relations. Moran, A. et al. (2018). The Intersection of Global Fragility and Climate Risks. Washington, DC: USAID. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parker, G. (2013). Global Crisis: War, Climate & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ricke, K., Drouet, L., Caldeira, K., & Tavoni, M. (2018) Country-level social cost of carbon Nature Climate Change 8(10), pp. 895–900. Robinson, K.S. (2017). New York 2140, New York: Orbit. Routledge, P. (2017). Space Invaders: Radical Geographies of Protest, London: Pluto. Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sovacool, B. K. and B-O. Linner (2016). The Political Economy of Climate Change Adaptation, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Steffen, W, Rockstrom, J.; et.al (2018) Trajectories of the Earth system in the anthropocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810141115 Stiglitz J. E and Kaldor M. eds (2013). The Quest for Security: Protection without Protectionism and the Challenge of Global Governance, New York: Columbia University Press. Taylor, P., O’Brien, G., and O’Keefe, P. (2020). Cities Demanding the Earth: A New Understanding of the Climate Emergency. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Thunberg, G. (2019). No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, London: Penguin. United Nations (2015). Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (A/RES/70/1) https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/ post2015/transformingourworld/publication Wallace-Wells, D. (2019). The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, New York: Duggan.

290

S. DALBY

Wallensteen, P. (2015). Quality Peace: Peace Building, Victory and World Order Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ward, B. and Dubos R. (1972). Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Welzer, H. (2012). Climate Wars: Why People Will be Killed in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Polity. White, R. (2014). Environmental insecurity and fortress mentality. International Affairs, 90, pp. 835–851. Zalasiewicz, J. et al. (2017) Scale and Diversity of the Physical Technosphere: A Geological Perspective. The Anthropocene Review 4(1). 9-22. Zografos, C., Goulden, M. C., & Kallis, G. (2014). Sources of human insecurity in the face of hydro-climatic change. Global Environmental Change, 29, 327– 336.

PART IV

Coda

CHAPTER 14

Coda Introduction: Pushing Toward the Future Michael H. Allen, Kate Seaman, and Hoda Mahmoudi

Complexity can be overwhelming. We have considered intersecting threats and crises from the past, and on into the present and future of humanity; from the survival of fetuses in the wombs of Indigenous women, to the survival of ecosystems in the womb of Planet Earth herself. Contributing scholars have outlined elements of the changing forms and scales of human organization of production and governance. We recognize that societies are made up of “a complex amalgamation of carried

M. H. Allen Harvey Wexler Chair of Political Science, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. Seaman (B) · H. Mahmoudi Bahá’í Chair for World Peace, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] H. Mahmoudi e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_14

293

294

M. H. ALLEN ET AL.

actors and interest groups with overlapping and contradictory aims” (Miklian and Hoeschler, 2018; 192). We have seen that changing technologies of energy, architecture, production, transportation, computing, and communications have usually amplified the dynamics of inequality in wealth, power, and voice in discourses. We have opened a conversation on specific ways to reduce the inequalities made worse by elitist approaches to engineering and design, and by hegemonic configurations of social media. It is natural to wonder how we might attain and maintain a coherent vision of so many intersecting systems and confluences of images and data. The first step in promoting understanding is recognizing the commonalities between these systems, and the underlying socio-economic disparities that cut across them that are “now playing out in seismic and traumatic ways” (Phillips, 2017 with reference to Pieterse, 2002; 1024). Without recognizing these disparities, challenging the systems which perpetuate them, and understanding how our social constructions influence how we respond to them, the same cycles will continue to be repeated. As Steinberg (2008; 2092) argues, we need to clearly identify “the cultural and political environment in which certain interventions are deemed desirable and others deemed unattainable.” This requires examining the political questions and clashes around the worth of different "universal" values, since “Political actors constantly clash over the worth of different universal principles, in terms of both their alternatives as well as their precise meaning and implications.” (Pouliout and Therien, 2018) As Pouliout and Therien (2018) go on to explain, examining these clashes and their ideological foundations provides a more detailed understanding of why it is so difficult to reach agreement across constituencies. Understanding this complexity can then allow for the development of more inclusive and equitable global regimes whose work helps enable a more peaceful global society. The reality of globalization calls for a more comprehensive global framework that is capable of addressing the interconnected challenges that threaten world peace, security, and prosperity. As Scholte puts it, “Without adequate transplanetary regimes, positive potentials of contemporary globalization can go unrealized and negative prospects can go unchecked.” (Scholte, 2011; 110) Only global cooperation can fix global problems. Ecological challenges, territorial conflicts, interwoven economic crises, and other problems faced by world society demand an interconnecting framework. Intra-national cooperation and reciprocity are

14

CODA INTRODUCTION: PUSHING TOWARD THE FUTURE

295

needed to resolve humanity’s problems. Devoid of such cooperation, today’s global challenges will not be solved. As trustees of humanity, nations bear the obligation to help secure a more peaceful, just, and habitable world for all. If you are reading this volume, you are probably a leader in education, media, civic action, religious community, business, or government. If you are stirred by the urgency of the threats to peace, you are likely raising questions such as: where to begin? Who needs my help most immediately? Whom should I support with my time, skills, and resources? Who will listen? Is there hope, or are my actions futile? When do I do triage, and when do I commit to the long and exhausting dread of one particular surgery? Much like surgeons find it useful to have x-rays or high-resolution scans of the layered and intersecting systems of the human body, leaders and attentive citizens of countries and global systems might find it useful to have a layered map of living, moving, social systems, and their patterned movements. Moving forward “we need something more than technology-driven solutions. Such a step forward requires, on the one hand, contextual knowledge of the causes, the agents, the cultural practices, and the issues at stake…. On the other hand, we need to bring into the picture the theoretical approaches, models, and strategies to deal with conflicts” (Poblet, 2011) from across a range of disciplines creating opportunities for cross-fertilization and innovation. It is argued that all human systems or institutions are networks of relationships that are repeatedly performed in daily, weekly, monthly, and annual rhythms. Systems and institutions include households, villages, modes of production, trade and governance, nations, and global industries and markets. All of these performances are gendered and stratified by power, rights, privileges, and degrees of reward from encounter or collaboration. Power is usually both material and notional, or communicative. As Scholte (2011) notes, “The global polity….encompasses large variation across age, caste, class, (dis)ability, faith, gender, nationality, race, region and sexuality. Considerable diversity of this kind reigns within individual countries as well, of course, but it is all the more pronounced on a global scale. Fostering legitimacy in transplanetary governance therefore tends to be less about forging consensus around a unifying global interest and more about accommodating plural interests within global spaces.”

296

M. H. ALLEN ET AL.

The international order is changing rapidly. Since the late twentieth century, the world has witnessed both the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War. But rather than bringing an end to longstanding ideological battles, the Soviet Union’s downfall kindled the flames of nationalism, nativism, sectarianism, and ethnic rivalry. Sadly, conflicts between nations and people groups have continued throughout the world. Whether in Europe, the Americas, Africa, or Asia, the world has witnessed mass killings, genocide, and brutal acts of violence. Yet despite this history, most nations have not considered a fundamentally different governance model. Rather than acting on the reality that no individual nation can claim to be a fully autonomous entity, nations continue to claim sole right and responsibility for their own affairs. The outcome of this unfortunate state of global affairs is growing political instability, disorder, and chaos. The solutions will require more creativity and innovation than ever before. Creativity is more abstract than power, but is no less crucial to the outcomes of routine relationships, or to turning points in the history of institutions. Motives are most important among historical factors, because they inform how and why power and creativity are deployed in relationships and institutions. Motives are what bring people together. They include survival, security, greed, lust, ambition, pride, esteem, and creative fulfillment. These provide the energy of history, and when they meet in relationships, can either explode in violence, or generate new humane experiences. The combined dynamics of material and notional power produce stable repetition in some configurations, and rapid metamorphosis in others. Confluences of patterns are unique in time and place, but their constituent elements are comparable across time and place. When we can detect patterns that produce either violence or peace, exploitation or equitable collaboration, when we become aware of the forms and styles of collaboration and conflict, then we can be leaders in resisting exploitation and the violence that it spawns. By our choices of means, we can avoid replicating the evils we claim to be removing. We do not want to meet the enemy and find that they are us. In the concluding chapter, Michael H. Allen suggests a way to find recurring themes or motifs in complex human relationships, so that we might keep our sanity, and make more informed triage and surgical decisions. Maps of causal chains can inform what we prioritize and can help us push the research agenda forward and provide more opportunities for creativity and innovation in our response.

14

CODA INTRODUCTION: PUSHING TOWARD THE FUTURE

297

References Miklian, J. and Hoelscher, K., 2018. A new research approach for Peace Innovation. Innovation and Development, 8(2), 189–207. Phillips, N., 2017. Power and inequality in the global political economy. International Affairs, 93(2), 429–444. Poblet, M., 2011. Introduction to mobile technologies, conflict management, and ODR: Exploring common grounds. In Mobile technologies for conflict management (pp. 1–12). Dordrecht: Springer. Pouliot, V. and Thérien, J.P., 2018. Global governance: A struggle over universal values. International Studies Review, 20(1), 55–73. Scholte, J.A., 2011. Towards greater legitimacy in global governance. Review of International Political Economy, 18(1), 110–120. Steinberg PE. 2008. It’s so easy being green: overuse, underexposure, and the marine environmental consensus. Geogra. Compass 2, 2080–96

CHAPTER 15

Peace in Pieces: Limits to Progress in Economy, Ethics, and World Order Michael H. Allen

Introduction The conflicts between the social forces around the world who contend over territory, markets, shares of wealth, institutional roles and authority, ethical norms, and popular loyalties, change in quality over time, and vary in intensity from place to place. Thus, the evolution of the world economy changes the contexts for the emergence and exercise of institutionalized authority and the acceptance and deployment of contending worldviews and ethical discourses, particularly as these pertain to order, justice, and peace. This chapter offers a model for mapping the main patterns of conflict in past and present configurations of the world economy and for locating the structural standpoints from which emanate contending analyses of the causes of conflict, and prescriptions for managing or ending violence.

M. H. Allen (B) Harvey Wexler Chair of Political Science, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_15

299

300

M. H. ALLEN

Hence, two kinds of conflict will be discussed: those in the real world of political economy, institutions, and discourses, and those in the reflective world of peace thinking and prescription. I will show that the dominant prescriptions for peace do not combine into coherent peace action because they come from contradictory interests, ontologies, and ethical paradigms.

Violence as an Old Problem Even the earliest writings such as by Moses the Hebrew prophet, record stories of bloodshed, and grapple with the ethical challenge of how to respond to violence. Moses’ origin story in the book of Genesis speaks of the first murder. It was between brothers, not over economic resources, or competition for a woman, but over conflicting understandings of God’s favor.1 Even so, most of the ancient stories of violence indicate that conflicts were within and between settled agricultural communities and nomadic tribes over land and water resources, slaves, cattle, finished products, and strategic locations for trade and defense. Thus, violence was present in early cultures in a range of social formations, from families, to subsistence economies, to nomadic traders, to regional trading networks. Violence predated and pervaded all the successive modes of production. So, the dynamics of the mode of production point to issues over which, and patterns in which people have used violence. Violence is one technique of conflict in changing modes of production, but the associated structural economics only partially explains violence itself. The assumption—shared in all modern paradigms of Realism, Liberalism, and Marxism—that humans are rational and self-interested helps us anticipate where and why conflicts arise, and structural analysis helps us understand the kinds of power that might be available in conflict.2

1 Genesis 4. Holy Bible. 2 Useful parallel critiques of the assumptions and implications of structured analysis

in Realism, Liberalism and Marxism can be found in several places. For example; Susan Strange, States and Markets. London: Bloomsburg, 1988; Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” in Robert Keohane (ed) Neorealism and Its Critics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986; and Robert

15

PEACE IN PIECES: LIMITS TO PROGRESS IN ECONOMY ...

301

Similarly, political analysis done in these modern paradigms can tell us how authority is organized in particular contexts, and how well or poorly its norms, rules, and procedures (institutions) manage conflict. But we would still need more elements of analysis beyond conventional Economics and Politics to explain how and why particular forms of authority and ethical discourse in their respective contexts have been able or unable to channel conflict into peaceful forms of management, resolution, and change. Thus, we may also need literary, philosophical, psychological, and theological analyses to give insights into the stories, myths, and ethical frames that particular societies narrate and prescribe, in order to understand how they think about sensibilities like obligation, loyalty, deference, honor, shame, revenge, mercy, forgiveness, kindness, and generosity, and how these sensibilities affect their conduct in conflict. This leads to the question of whether or not there are primal passions that inspire the narratives of cultures and the clusters of sensibilities or virtues that they prize, and that even shape the boundaries of the theories that they generate to explain their own and other cultures’ histories. Are there deep worldview-shaping instincts that in turn shape our epistemologies, our ethics and our aesthetics? How do the dynamics of political economy generate conflict? How are the conflicts interpreted in the discourses of the day? How effective are the peace strategies that result from the interpretations?

Worldviews and Peace Theory Most texts in the social sciences organize theory into the three modern paradigms of Realism, Liberalism, and Marxism, with additional Critical approaches of Feminism, Constructivism, Post-Modernism, and PostColonialism, even when they come from a stance that prefers one above the others. Their disagreements are usually about how the economic, social, and political world is organized (ontology), how its dynamics are to be explained (causal theory), whether or not humans are universally rational and self-interested (political philosophy), and what should be the main values of an organized polity (ethics).

O’Brien and Marc Williams, Global Political Economy: Evolution and Dynamics, New York and Houndmills: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004.

302

M. H. ALLEN

These all have implications for their understandings of conflict and their prescriptions for peace. They view the human condition in very different ways. Thus, the realist outlook takes a dim view of human nature. People can be aggressive as they seek to survive and thrive, so, in order to have organized communities they must be deterred and restrained. The primary ethical value is order. This worldview leads to Realist theory in seeking to account for interstate relations. It presents an ontology of world society as organized into territorial units where states will keep order within their borders and deter aggression in their relations with each other. Its prescription for peace is that states display a credible capacity to defend themselves on their own or in alliances. It predicts that states will cooperate to deter the most powerful among them and will shift patterns of cooperation as powers rise and fall. It is agnostic about forms of economy, presuming that states will behave similarly, regardless of their modes of production. Realism prioritizes the problem of interstate violence above concerns about civil and ethnic conflict, or social unrest from oppressive conditions, except insofar as these have implications for interference or intervention by other states. Human rights and social justice are secondary ethical questions in Realism. Peace is the absence of war among states, not the presence of social harmony and wellbeing within them. Conceptions of happiness and the pursuit of it are the exclusive prerogatives of sovereign peoples.3 Liberalism takes a more hopeful view of human nature. While people can be aggressive, and may need to be restrained, they are mainly concerned with satisfying wants. This has led to theories of utilitymaximization that postulate that a division of labor into specialties, and the free exchange of goods and services in markets, will lead to wealth and contentment. Social peace will be a by-product, as modernized production and scientific advances result from, and reproduce the interdependence of reciprocal interests. States are necessary as guarantors of

3 One of the best expositors of the Realist outlook, as both political philosophy and structural politics, was Kenneth Waltz, founder of Neorealism. See Man, the State, and War, New York: Columbia University Press, 1959, and Theory of International Politics, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2010. A spirited defense of the continued relevance of Realist thinking in the age of globalization is found in Stephen D. Krasner, “Sovereignty,” Chapter 1, in Richard Mansbach and Edward Rhodes (eds.) Global Politics in a Changing World, New York and Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

15

PEACE IN PIECES: LIMITS TO PROGRESS IN ECONOMY ...

303

property rights, enforcers of contracts, issuers of currency, and protectors of populations and their resources, trading relationships, and foreign investments. Liberal states should ideally be democratic as well, since the costs of government need to be shared, and those who are to be taxed are most likely to give willing cooperation if they have voice in public policy. Liberal theory anticipates that states will compete over markets and strategic assets, that rivalry can become violent, but for the most part should remain peaceful since the gains from interdependence are mutual. Its prescription for peace in the early twentieth century was to extend the logic of free markets and accountable government to the inter-state arena. That which keeps peace at home—property rights, civil rights, free inquiry and speech, free markets, accountable authority—would also foster peace among nations. A global division of labor would lead to growth and modernization everywhere, and reduce conflict as well, since war would be irrational.4 Marxist theory agrees that economic relations are at the root of social change and conflict. Change is driven by human cooperation and innovation to make a living from nature. But Marxism departs from Liberalism on the question of the causes of conflict. Marxists see conflict as being caused by inequitable rewards from shared work. Those who own and control productive assets like land and factories, gain disproportionately from the division of labor, and increase their power over the long run as wealth and privilege accumulate. Liberal states serve the interests of propertied classes more than other citizens, even in democracies. The foreign policies of such states are extensions of this project, as they compete over market shares, strategic assets, and foreign investments. Thus, growth and modernization do not necessarily lead to peace, and may actively generate conflict, because they actively generate inequality within countries and between states. Therefore, from this perspective, to make peace, societies must democratize the relations of production by sharing control of the means of production. Nations must protect each other’s right to do so, and use the prerogatives of sovereignty, compromised though they are,

4 Broadly speaking, this is what came to be called Democratic Peace Theory. It has

been advanced by Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century and by such later Western scholars as Bruce Russett, Michael Doyle, and Francis Fukuyama. See, for example: Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free Press, 1992.

304

M. H. ALLEN

to protect and advance new experiments in social and economic reform and revolution, against the market, ideological, and military hegemony of global capitalism.5 Several schools of Critical Theory share the insight that human beings are more complex than seekers after security, utility, and economic fairness. They see humans as having many different views of what is beautiful, legitimate, authentic, and sacred. Different hierarchies of values shape people’s identities, even as they participate simultaneously in several realms of activity and communication. Thus, in Critical Theory broadly, it is not so much your role in society and economy that shape your identity and political behavior, but your worldview (including gendered and colonial/post-colonial lenses) and values that tell you what and who are most important in your life, and what is worth fighting for, versus what is secondary and expendable. In this kind of analysis, change is driven by the interplay of identities and ways of seeing the world. Conflict arises at the boundaries of conflicting narratives and value-systems and is most pronounced when counter-narratives resist hegemonic ones. From this diagnosis, the prescription for peace is first, authenticity, then dialogue toward inter-subjective understanding and new common bases of enlarged identity and humanity.6 Religions are major shapers of identity, and major world religions have their takes on the driving forces of change in the world, and on the causes of conflict. Each embraces a range of views on hierarchies of values like

5 Marxist theories of peace have evolved over the decades since the mid-nineteenth century. The classic analysis was that since the main conflicts in society are caused by exploitative modes of production, such conflicts would be removed if a cooperative mode of production was introduced. The introduction of nuclear weapons and the strategic confrontation between states created the need for theories of inter-state peaceful relations or “Peaceful Co-existence” that would allow and protect the progress of national liberation and transformation of the means and modes of production. See Karel Kára, “On the Marxist Theory of War and Peace: A Study,” Journal of Peace Research Volume 5 No. 1, March 1968. Armed conflict between socialist states complicated these assumptions, however, see Anton Bebler, “Conflicts Between Socialist States,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 24 No. 1, March 1987. 6 Marxist thinkers like Antonio Gramsci recognized this early on. See Steve Jones,

Antonio Gramsci, London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Other approaches to intersubjective conflict analysis include J.R. Searle (1995) The Construction of Social Reality, New York: The Free Press; and John G. Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructionist Challenge,” International Organization, Vol, 52. No. 4, 1998.

15

PEACE IN PIECES: LIMITS TO PROGRESS IN ECONOMY ...

305

non-violence or Just War, or the boundaries of the sacred. Such views, wedded to power in institutions of economy or government, can themselves become hegemonic and even coercive. Thus, a major source of conflict in world politics is not only of the structural kind, as recognized in the Modernist paradigms, but also over highly charged symbolic and sacred issues. A broadly held insight in the major world religions is that change is driven by the human quest for meaning and fulfillment. Conflict arises when these strivings are frustrated by human tendencies toward greed, deceit, lust, pride, and revenge. Therefore, the path to peace should begin from within the human person, and not from institutional engineering. By whatever spiritual disciplines of study, meditation, or ritual, people must strive for self-control, generosity, and reconciliation, in order to achieve peace.7 So, there is an initial case for combining material and structural analysis of conflict, with criticism of inter-subjective narratives of ideology, aesthetics, and religion, if we are to locate the sources of conflict, and/or appreciate the prescriptions for peace emanating from these very different kinds of theorizing.

Material and Inter-Subjective Networks World society is shaped by geography, inherited political boundaries, modes of production and trade, and constellations of identity and difference. These are four basic ways of visualizing the world of social reality, or four ontologies. If the primal source, or first cause of the creation and change of social relations is the human need to survive, thrive, reproduce, and experience respect, acceptance, esteem and creative fulfillment, then geography, state boundaries, modes, and identities are the formal causes of the structure and flow of those relations. Thus, a disagreement about the formal causes of world society (ontologies) may or may not coincide with disagreements among the explanatory paradigms about efficient causes. Efficient causes of social change include state rivalry, market competition and technological/organizational innovation, class

7 A useful survey of the ways in which the major world religions address the large questions of meaning, humanity, and peace remains: Huston Smith, The Religions of Man reprinted by Ishi Press, Tokyo, 1958, 2012.

306

M. H. ALLEN

conflict, normative and textual hegemony/resistance. Likewise, disagreements across ontologies and paradigms may not coincide with philosophical/ethical disagreements about value priorities such as order, wealth, freedom, equitable justice, ecological sustainability, beauty, and truth. In any case, as people collaborate in encounters of production, nurture, governance, and legitimizing notions, they also conflict over roles, methods, statuses, and rewards. These conflicts take different forms such as deception, manipulation, arguments, bargaining, and fighting. As large structures of relationships meet each other, they generate problems of terms of encounter. Do they fight, trade, establish strict boundaries of roles and place, persuade and erase, merge, or assimilate? It is here that we face the challenge of explaining the choice of means of encounter: when do people typically choose verbal or violent means of conflict? This is the molecular dynamic that informs the chemistry of efficient causes of human collaboration, and the creativity for navigating the structural constraints of geography, political and cultural boundaries, and production/trade patterns. Thus, the concept of the relationship is a useful way to harness the analysis of all the complex factors already mentioned. Relationships are performed temporarily and may be repeated. They assemble into networks that are typically called structures. Relationships are driven by motivations, power, and creativity and shaped by habits of thinking and communication.8 Some relationships (and networks) are highly unequal, others are more balanced. Some unequal relationships (or networks) are calm and seen as legitimate by both (most) parties, while other relationships where power is more balanced are hotly contested. Structure does not always predict dynamics. Needs, wants, and ambitions motivate collaboration and conflict. People’s values, or conceptions of justice, shape whether, or not, they use power and creativity to deceive, crush, or diminish others in encounters, or to achieve parity, or even mutual advantage. Power comes from their material resources of strength, wealth, technology, mobility, organizational roles, and social connections. Modernist social theories emphasize this kind of power. However, power also comes from subjective ability to frame and normalize stories about 8 See Manfred Halpern and David Abalos. Transforming the Personal, Political, Historical and Sacred in Theory and Practice. Scranton: The University of Scranton Press, 2009. Also, Michael H. Allen Democracy and Modernity in Southern Africa: Development or Deformity? Ithaca, NY: Institute for African Development, Cornell University, 2018.

15

PEACE IN PIECES: LIMITS TO PROGRESS IN ECONOMY ...

307

the past, as well as conceptions of justice and truth. Power also lies in the ability to accept, interrogate, or reject and replace those conceptions. Conceptions of justice come from shared worldviews, inherited stories, and contemporary socialization. Post-Modern and Post-Colonial social theories emphasize these subjective and communicative kinds of power (Habermas 1981; Said 1978; Mudimbe 1988; Thiongo 1986). The concept of capacities in relationship leads us to deploy simultaneously, both modern and post-modern conceptions of power. People’s preferred styles of encounter (mystification and deception, coercion, exacting bargains and reasoned debates, sloppy quarrels, mutual guardedness, mediated communication, and mutual benefit or understanding) are more elusive of explanation. Jungian psychology suggests that the potential for expressing any cluster of the ways of encounter are natural, instinctive, and sub-conscious, but that reflection, education, and learned behaviors can encourage some styles and suppress others (Jung 1933). Thus, humans have agency over how they collaborate and conflict, and this agency is always simultaneously dependent on physical contexts, power structures, discourses of values and narratives, and socialized and idiosyncratic habits of thinking and speech. These are always at stake in every encounter of the myriads that constitute world society and economy. It therefore makes no sense to reduce or isolate any one aspect of capacity as the primary driver, or main efficient cause of social change in general, or specifically, of violence. This helps us further in sorting and synthesizing ontologies, explanations, and ethics. In whichever ontology we picture the world, the relationships-within-fluid networks approach requires the simultaneous analysis of motivations, power, creativity, and forms of thinking/speech. It is both material and inter-subjective: terrains and texts, modes of production, and modes of thought. It is about the dialectics of both/and rather than either/or. We can now model the intersection of the ontologies: to illustrate what the main explanations highlight and ignore; where violence typically occurs when structures meet; and evaluate the efficacy of peace prescriptions emanating from respective parts of the evolving world structure.

308

M. H. ALLEN

Model of Intersecting Networks The dominant mode of production today is the neoliberal iteration of global capitalism. It is illustrated in Fig. 15.1 as the expanding blue spiral. The black dotted lines represent territorial jurisdictions of states. Capital flows around the world as credit, portfolio investment, and direct investment in fixed assets. Components and finished goods are traded within and between transnational firms in global commodity chains. Investors look for the cheapest labor, raw materials, energy costs, and tax rates, in conditions of predictable regulations, currency values, and interest rates. In the past forty years, neoliberal capitalism has displaced Keynesian (or embedded) liberalism in the Global North and attempts at nationalist capitalisms in the Global South. The state in most countries (represented by the red triangles in Fig. 15.1) is enfolded within the projects of global capitalism. A few straddle the line in attempting to respond to the demands of social forces outside of the global mode of

Fig. 15.1 Countries, Modes of Production and States

15

PEACE IN PIECES: LIMITS TO PROGRESS IN ECONOMY ...

309

modernization. Both Keynesian and neoliberal capitalism have continued the displacement of prior modes of feudal, subsistence, nomadic, and hunter-gatherer production that had begun since the Industrial Age, by both rapid, genocidal violence and slow displacement, marginalization and erasure. Even so, pockets of these, especially among indigenous peoples, remain in most regions of the world (including the Global North), bearing witness of ancient patterns of settlement when people moved across the earth according to a geographical logic of climate, topography, fertile soil, and available water. Subsistence and huntergatherer modes of production, mostly among indigenous peoples are represented by the small green semi-circles in Fig. 15.1. The circular pattern suggests a production-consumption cycle that is within their own control. Figure 15.2 expands on the idea of the blue spiral. It alludes to the idea that the exchange of goods has always taken place trans-regionally between elites in trading towns and port cities (represented by the blue dots). The elites have typically drawn resources like minerals, timber,

Fig. 15.2 Archetypes of Capitalism and Intercultural Contact

310

M. H. ALLEN

crops, and animal products from hinterlands within their spheres of influence or control, processed them in some way, and traded them locally and transnationally (Rodney 1972; Abu-Lughod 1989; Halperin 2013). Thus, the red lines leading to the blue dots in Fig. 15.2 are lines of pillage and extraction in earlier centuries, or lines of unequal exchange with rural populations of small farmers, plantation workers, and miners of today. They are also lines of rural to urban migration of displaced and underemployed people who crowd the blue dot cities in concentrations of labor and gendered exploitation. The cloud-like color patches in Fig. 15.2 refer to the idea that the economic patterns traverse epistemic communities of religions, values, and ways of life. This archetype of transnational elite dominance and rivalry to control hinterland peoples and resources gets re-enacted, even as the technologies and ideologies of modernity change the modes of production. The Mercantile version of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries gave way to the industrial and Imperial in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Williams 1944). The Imperial gave way over two inter-imperial wars to the post-war Keynesian version, and this too gave way to the neoliberal, under the stimuli of Cold-War aerospace, satellite, computing and communications technologies, the commodification of currencies, and the reproduction of markets through the issuing of credit (Strange 1988). Up until the 1930s, territorial boundaries tended to form and change in ways that reflected the rise and wane of the spheres of influence of rival elites and the states that they formed, or that supported them at home. The system generated not only the vertical violence of pillage and extraction, but also the horizontal violence of divide-and-rule at the base, and balance of power fights and games at the center. After the decolonization of the post-war period, the norms of interstate order that were created for the imperial elites were now applied to the new territorial states. Borders could not now legitimately be changed by aggression. Thus, while the borders were reified in law, the modes of production continued to evolve, and the archetype of global capitalism continued to be re-enacted against a background of hope that the new territorial states could “develop” in ways like the former colonizers had done. Figure 15.3 combines the ideas from Figs. 15.1 and 15.2 to illustrate the gestalt or overlap of patterns of world society. It brings into relief the images that the contending ontologies use to organize analysis of political-economy and conflict.

15

PEACE IN PIECES: LIMITS TO PROGRESS IN ECONOMY ...

311

Fig. 15.3 Layered Ontologies

As global flows of capital and goods have become much greater than internal flows in each country, the classic Westphalian problem of sovereign authority over civic order and markets has shifted from defined territorial boundaries to a large fluid and spatially undefined global arena. Conflicts over investments, trade, payments balances, property rights, labor disputes, taxation, trans-border labor flows, rights of foreigners, ethnic minorities, and refugees are simultaneously domestic and global. These have given rise to new but inadequate constitutional innovations in regional and global governance, such as the European Union, North American Free-Trade Agreement, and the World Trade Organization. As people move, they bring their cultures with them. Frontiers of intercultural contact also become more fluid as they become more transnational and less identical with territorial boundaries. Conflicts of identity have challenged the established bases of inter-subjective consensus or

312

M. H. ALLEN

“imagined communities” within territorial boundaries.9 The Westphalian assumption of internal cultural homogeneity and external difference no longer holds true in several places of the Global North, even as it held true in very few places in the decolonized territories everywhere. Conflicts of identity also challenge the ethical and ideological paradigms that have informed law-making within both the new neoliberal, and older multilateral institutions of global governance.

Locating Violence and Peace Strategies The model just outlined is useful for mapping the patterns of conflict, the occurrences of major violence, and the peace strategies that have arisen in response. In the heyday of modern imperialism (about 1850–1919), most of the violence occurred in the penetration of the deep interior of colonized lands, and in the suppression of the inevitable resistance from indigenous peoples. This violence was justified in the discourses of civilizing mission and racial superiority (DuBois 1915) and celebrated in the literature of the day by writers like Kipling.10 In Europe itself, the smaller nations or ethnic groups on the fringes of the territories of the major powers like Britain, France, Prussia, Austro-Hungary, and Russia experienced similar violence of occupation, repossession, and forced border changes. In terms of the model, this violence was along the red lines from metropoles to hinterlands. The dynamics of rivalry among the great powers of the day (the bigger blue dots) alternated between mutual recognition of imperial boundaries, and wars over strategic assets. The scholarship and statecraft of that period recognized the need for interstate order and peace, but only within a broader acceptance of the structural and direct violence of the imperial system of world economy. This Realist scholarship and diplomacy refined Balance of Power theory and produced agreements such as the second iteration of the Concert of Europe, for collective great power

9 This is an allusion to Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983, 2006. 10 Rudyard Kipling was a luminary of the British Empire, among contemporaries like Cecil Rhodes. His stories and poems like “The White Man’s Burden” and “Recessional” celebrate, but warn, of the obligations of the civilizing mission of Britain and other western powers.

15

PEACE IN PIECES: LIMITS TO PROGRESS IN ECONOMY ...

313

control of the uses of force.11 Despite this, the imperatives of competitive expansion, and the miscues of a complex diplomatic game led to war among the powers in 1914 (Hobsbawm 1994). Meanwhile, the aspirations of the people of Russia for greater equity at home led to revolution in 1917, and the aspirations of the peoples of the Middle East for self-determination led to political independence for several of those states between the 1920s and 1940s. These were accompanied by considerable violence of uprising and repression. Contemporary doctrines of peace through new versions of collective great power rule, as in the League Council of the League of Nations, gave no guidance on the management of revolutionary violence, or on the process of orderly secession from empires. Discourses of colonization and empire did not sit well with those of social justice and national self-determination, even where one alliance in the second bout of the inter-imperial war (1939– 1945) couched its project in the language of the rights of freedom and self-determination for the peoples dominated by the opposing alliance.12 Thus, the main feature of the violence of the Post-War period (1945– 1975) was that of wars of decolonization and national liberation in Asia and Africa, made more deadly by the competing supply of weapons and training by competing great powers in the Cold War. The doctrines and diplomacy of Liberal Internationalism (United Nations Security Council and Preventative Diplomacy of the Secretary General) proved inadequate to prevent most of this violence.13 Meanwhile, the modernization strategies adopted by independent states were not overcoming the dynamics of unequal exchange and exploitation of labor. This structural violence generated steady streams of direct violence in every country, in the form of protests, riots, and local crimes of competition for scarce resources. Rival modern ideologies of capitalism and socialism dominated the conversation about how to interpret social patterns and advance development. Development itself was regarded as an approach to peace in the

11 On Realist foreign policies during the Concert of Europe, see Matthew Rendall, “Defensive Realism and the Concert of Europe,” Review of International Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2006. 12 Hobsbawn captures the contradiction between defense of democracy and freedom in Europe during the Second World War, and the simultaneous reluctance to divest of empire, as a vast multinational civil war. See Eric Hobsbawn, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991, London: Michael Joseph, 1994. 13 Hobsbawn, 1994, cited above.

314

M. H. ALLEN

modernizing discourses of Keynesian multilateralism. Aid and advice from capitalist states, the World Bank and IMF to governments, were aimed not only at achieving growth and the reproduction of open markets, but at keeping new states within their sphere of influence by reducing poverty and forestalling revolutions.14 The late Cold War period (1975–1991) spanned the end of the liberation wars in Angola and Mozambique, the coup and democratization in Portugal (and Spain), and the subsequent transnational and interstate wars in Southern Africa. That period also saw revolutions in Nicaragua and Grenada, the Iranian Revolution against the Shah, the Iran-Iraq war, terrorist operations by factions of the PLO, the Lebanese civil war and related wars, and interventions from neighboring states and movements. The fateful Soviet intervention in Afghanistan spawned the rise of the Mujaheddin, Taliban, and Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, the Solidarity movement in Poland, and Human Rights movements in Eastern Europe, the anti-nuclear peace movement in Western Europe, the Divestment phase of the long Anti-Apartheid struggle, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union represented challenges to old ways of thinking about modern political-economy. These conflicts were symptomatic of the exhaustion of the Post-war modern paradigms of Keynesianism and Communism, respectively, as ways to continue to build interdependence and wealth in one case, or to create economic sufficiency with social justice, in the other, as avenues to peace. There was a search for new approaches to democracy and development on one hand, and the amplification of the challenge to modernity itself from PostModernism (in Europe) and radical Islam (in Afghanistan and much of the Middle East). The politics of discourses (transnational culture wars) were becoming more visible than the politics of structures (class conflict within modernization strategies).15 The economic growth of the 1990s under the terms of neoliberal open markets, financial liberalization and innovation, and new regional and supranational institutions of interstate governance created new extremes 14 On the French and European Union version of such a project, see Véronique Dimier, The Invention of a European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 15 An insightful take on this period can be found in Morris Dickstein, “After the Cold War: Culture as Politics, Politics as Culture,” Social Research, Vol. 60 No. 3. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

15

PEACE IN PIECES: LIMITS TO PROGRESS IN ECONOMY ...

315

of inequality and deepened the hegemony of Liberal notions of rights, macro-economic theories, legitimate government, and consumer culture. There were new alignments of winners and losers in both Global North and South.16 The resulting social conflicts were articulated in terms of ethnic patterns of inclusion and exclusion, as old lines of difference in privilege seemed more pronounced. Thus, integration into the neoliberal trading and financial order of the countries of the Balkans as well as parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the Post-Cold War period (1991–2001), coincided with several ethnic and irredentist wars. The strategies that should have brought peace in Liberal terms, made conflicts worse in older Realist terms, or newer Post-Modern terms. Moreover, the multilateral institutions of Collective Security were only marginally effective for the wars in the Balkans, and an embarrassing failure in the Somali intervention, and in the Rwandan genocide. Neither market discipline nor collective (or uni-lateral American) great power rule was effective in ending the conflicts of the period.17 This emboldened Al Qaeda, Al Shabbab, the Taliban, and other transnational armed movements, in the notion that the interstate order could be subverted by attritional violence, fear, and uncertainty, or goaded into extreme reactions that undermined the legitimacy of Liberal Human Rights claims. The attacks against American interests in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, and in the US itself in 2001, were the culmination of this line of thinking. Since the attacks on US interests in 2001, the conflict between states in the Global North led by the United States and Britain, and transnational terrorist networks, became more prominent among other dynamics in world political economy. Interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya were the most prominent of many armed responses by western powers. None of these actions has produced a clear political result, despite superior

16 See, for example, Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Inequality: What It Is and Why It Matters?” Economic and Social Affairs UN/DESA Working Papers, United Nations, New York, 2006. 17 On the changed nature and location of conflict in the Post-Cold War period, the extensive cruelty and human rights abuses, and the international response, see Chuka Enuka, “Post-Cold War Conflicts: Imperative for Armed Humanitarian Intervention,” Global Journal of Human Social Science, Interdisciplinary, Vol. 12 No. 9, 2012.

316

M. H. ALLEN

technology and billions of dollars in counterinsurgency and nationbuilding efforts.18 More broadly, the social frustrations resulting from the failure of neoliberal modernization strategies of structural adjustment and openness to foreign capital, weakened the legitimacy of the authoritarian regimes and fragile democracies of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Much of the resistance came to be articulated in anachronistic forms of Islamic ideology that reflected a certain ambivalence about the modernizing discourses of economy and governance that emanated from western sources and history, and a nostalgia for past glories. This incoherent discourse itself became globalized through migration and media. It was also largely effective in appealing to marginalized Islamic minorities in western countries because of the tradition of willing submission to theological authority.19 Consequently, the most violent conflicts of today are between opposing coalitions of transnational armed groups and their sponsoring or enabling states. Such conflicts include those in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, and Congo. Each case represents a mixture of conflicts over economic resources, political institutions, and identity framings. These wars displace many people from their homes as they seek to escape killings, rapes as a weapon of war, disease and starvation. Many victims end up as refugees in Europe and North America.20 In reaction, much of public opinion in western societies has lost faith in the idea of multiethnic democracies, and the presence of migrants and refugees is viewed through different lenses in those societies. Many are frustrated by their own marginalization from the good jobs and incomes of neoliberal capitalism and see ethnic minorities (“foreigners”) as additional irritants, regardless of their statuses as citizens, legal

18 On the frustrations of the US and Allied counter-terrorism efforts in the Middle East and Afghanistan, see Jason Rineheart, “Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency,” Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 4 No. 5, 2010. 19 On incoherence and dissonance in identities and motivations among marginalized Muslims, see Marco Nilsson, “Motivations for Jihad and Cognitive Dissonance-A Qualitative Analysis of Forever Swedish Jihadists,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. https:// doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2019.1626091 18 June 2019. 20 See Sarah Kenyon Lischer “The Global Refugee Crisis: Regional Destabilization & Humanitarian Protection” Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 146 No. 4, Fall 2017.

15

PEACE IN PIECES: LIMITS TO PROGRESS IN ECONOMY ...

317

residents, migrant laborers, or refugees.21 The complexities of global markets, governance, human migration and cultural diversity defy simple frameworks of understanding. Much of the white working and middle classes in Europe and the United States long for simplicity and the old sense of place in an imperial world, and they also willingly submit to the stereotypes and polemics of authoritarian leaders.22 Others in the same societies hold out hope in multicultural democracy within a globalized market economy governed by universal rules of property, human rights, and environmental safety, despite the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2009 and its loss of intellectual credibility for neoliberal economics. Among these, many bargain with ideas of how to reform global capitalism to make it more predictable, governable, and humane. They are more comfortable with change, though of an incremental sort within an accepted hegemonic framework.23 Still others who are committed to radical ideas of social justice and sustainable economy, grapple with what such political economy can look like in the new context. Parties and social movements on the Left are yet to produce viable and credible alternatives to neoliberalism, despite its financial crises, social inequalities, and theoretical incoherence. Their party platforms offer only incoherence in return.24

Peace in Pieces In summary, the model helps us to see that global patterns of capitalist modernization have triggered global patterns of class formation, globalized discourses (both hegemonic and in resistance), globalized episodes of attritional violence, global patterns of migration, microcosms of global ethnic diversity within territorially defined countries, global spectra of

21 See, for example, Steven A Weldon “The Institutional Context of Tolerance for Ethic Minorities: A Comparative Multilevel Analysis of Western Europe” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50 No. 2, Apr. 2006. 22 Daniel Cox, Rachel Lienesch, Robert Jones “Beyond Economies: Fears of Cultural

Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump,” PRRI/The Atlantic Report, PRRI 2017. 23 A useful critique of the elements of neoliberalism is John O’Connor, “Marxism and the Three Movements of Neoliberalism” Critical Sociology, Vol. 36 No. 5, 2010. 24 See, for example, Rafal Soborski, Ideology and the Future of Progressive Social Movements. London and New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2018.

318

M. H. ALLEN

response to both capitalism and diversity, and global patterns in habits of thinking and communicating in networks of political economy and discourse. The model also helps us map the mutations in form and location of conflict, and to solicit new thoughts about strategies of peace. It is apparent that the management of the main forms of violence in the early twenty-first century is transnational rather than purely intra-state or interstate. Today’s wars are fought by coalitions of political parties, insurgent movements, social media audiences, business organizations and states. The Post-War multilateral institutions of collective security are ill-suited to the management of this kind of violence. Liberal modernization is creating interdependence among elites around the world, but this is increasing inequality between those elites and marginalized classes around the world, rather than creating peace through prosperity. Global mobility has increased inter-epistemic contact but has also increased intersubjective conflict. This is because the archetypes of encounter produced by habits of thinking and communication are those of incoherence rather than bargaining among ideas, mediated tensions, or even maintaining polite boundaries. There are more quarrels and fights than bargains and debates.

Conclusion World social structure has evolved beyond territorial nations and embedded markets. Markets and relations of production and class formation are transnational and global. National populations are more multiethnic than they were at the redrawing of boundaries during the European wars and under colonization. The institutions of public authority over markets, class conflict, cross-cultural engagement, rights, public order and peace have not evolved at the same rates. The system of state sovereignty and interstate institutions is attempting rearguard actions to keep peace under the doctrines of a bygone world. The old approaches to peace are in pieces. New theories of peace-making and peace management can arise from a new ontology of a fluid world comprising networks of relationships in constant formation, reproduction, and mutation. It is now more productive to think in terms of flows and terms of encounter, than to think in terms of stable structures governed by fixed rules and multi-century constitutions. New approaches to peace may have to begin from the

15

PEACE IN PIECES: LIMITS TO PROGRESS IN ECONOMY ...

319

chemistry of everyday encounters from the bottom up, rather than from the anatomies of grand structures from the top down. This may mean finding the nuclei of institutions of production, governance, rule-making and cultural framing, and working in them to change from the chemistry of dominance and unequal exchange to that of bargaining and mutual benefit.

References Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250– 1350. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Allen, Michael H. Democracy and Modernity in Southern Africa: Development or Deformity? Ithaca: Institute for African Development, Cornell University, 2018. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983/2006. Bebler, Anton. “Conflicts Between Socialist States.” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 24, no. 1, Mar. 1987. Cox, Daniel, et al. “Beyond Economies: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump.” PRRI/The Atlantic Report, 2017. Cox, Robert W. “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory.” Neorealism and Its Critics, Robert Keohane, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Dickstein, Morris. “After the Cold War: Culture as Politics, Politics as Culture.” Social Research, vol. 60, no. 3, 1993. Dimier Véronique. The Invention of a European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DuBois, W.E.B. “The African Roots of War.” The Atlantic, May 1915. Enuka, Chuka. “Post-Cold War Conflicts: Imperative for Armed Humanitarian Intervention.” Global Journal of Human Social Science, Interdisciplinary, vol. 12, no. 9, 2012. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Habermas, Jurgen. The Theory of Communicative Action: Volume I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1981/1984. Halperin, Sandra. Re-Envisioning Global Development: A Horizontal Perspective. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Halpern, Manfred, and David T. Abalos. Transforming the Personal, Political, Historical and Sacred in Theory and Practice. Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2009.

320

M. H. ALLEN

Hobsbawm, Eric J. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991. London: Michael Joseph, 1994. Jones, Steve. Antonio Gramsci. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Jung, Carl Gustav. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. London: Kegan Paul, 1933. Kára, Karel. “On the Marxist Theory of War and Peace: A Study.” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 5, no. 1, Mar. 1968. Krasner, Stephen D. “Sovereignty.” Global Politics in a Changing World, Richard W. Mansbach and Edward Joseph Rhodes, eds. New York and Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Lischer, Sarah Kenyon. “The Global Refugee Crisis: Regional Destabilization & Humanitarian Protection.” Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 146, no. 4, 2017. Milanovic, Branko. “Global Income Inequality: What It Is and Why It Matters?” Economic and Social Affairs, UN/DESA Working Papers, United Nations, New York, 2006. Mudimbe, Valentin Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University of Press, 1988. Nilsson, Marco. “Motivations for Jihad and Cognitive Dissonance-A Qualitative Analysis of Former Swedish Jihadists.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 8 June 2019, doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2019.1626091. O’Brien, Robert, and Marc Williams. Global Political Economy: Evolution and Dynamics. New York and Houndmills: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004. O’Connor, John. “Marxism and the Three Movements of Neoliberalism.” Critical Sociology, vol. 36, no. 5, 2010. Rendall, Matthew. “Defensive Realism and the Concert of Europe.” Review of International Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, 2006. Rineheart, Jason. “Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency.” Perspectives on Terrorism, vol. 4, no. 5, 2010. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: BogleL’Ouverture, 1972. Ruggie, John G. “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructionist Challenge.” International Organization, vol. 52, no. 4, 1998. Russett, Bruce. Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Searle, John R. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1995. Smith, Huston. The Religions of Man. Tokyo: Ishi Press International, 1958/2012. Soborski, Rafal. Ideology and the Failure of Progressive Social Movements. London and New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2018.

15

PEACE IN PIECES: LIMITS TO PROGRESS IN ECONOMY ...

321

Strange, Susan. States and Markets. London: Bloomsburg, 1988. Thiong’o, Ngugi wa. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann, 1986. Waltz, Kenneth. Man, the State and War. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959. Waltz, Kenneth. Theory of International Politics. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2010. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Weldon, Steven A. “The Institutional Context of Tolerance for Ethnic Minorities: A Comparative, Multilateral Analysis of Western Europe.” American Journal of Political Science, vol. 50, no. 2, Apr. 2006.

Index

A Aamjiwnaang, 248 accountability, 14, 87, 90 accountable authority, 303 active users, 145 activists, 161 administrator, 162 advocacy, 223 aesthetics, 305 affective polarization, 184 Akwesasne, 240 algorithmic profiling, 179 algorithms, 180 Anishnaabe, 248 Anthropocene, 275 anti-fascist, 33 anti-militarism, 211 anti-poverty, 27 apartheid, 85 apocalyptic, 273 Applicable or Relevant and Appropriate Requirements, 259 Arab Spring, 210, 216, 219

arms embargo, 222 arms supplier, 221 arms trade, 26, 29 atmosphere, 21 authority, 78, 79, 159 authorization, 91 B Big Data, 104 bioaccumulated, 248 birth control, 243 block, 155, 161 Brexit, 15 burden, 205 C capitalism/capitalist, 24, 31, 32, 34, 120, 121 carbon, 21 carbon dioxide, 271 carbon emissions, 271 carbon neutral, 22

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Mahmoudi et al. (eds.), Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1

323

324

INDEX

carbon offsets, 22 censorship, 150 centralized, 163, 164 centralized social networks, 152 ceremonies, 255 challenges, 17 citizens, 52 civic engagement, 23 civil conflict, 214, 222 civilian, 50 civilization, 31 climate, 6, 111 climate adaptation, 272 climate change, 1, 204–206, 270 climate crisis, 273 climate disrupted, 280 climate disruptions, 270 climate-driven unpredictability, 281 climate proof, 280 coded language, 175 codes of conduct, 89, 149 Cold War, 28, 33, 47, 49, 210, 274, 296, 314 collective security, 58 colonial/colonialism, 105, 120, 137, 243, 304 colonized, 312 communication, 171, 196 communications, 51 communication technology, 103 community wellness, 245 complexity, 14, 241, 293 Concert of Europe, 57 conflict, 2, 15, 106 conflict drivers, 171, 173, 186, 187, 191, 196 conflict dynamics, 169 construction of identities, 184 Constructivism, 301 content, 152 coordinated campaigns, 192 cosmopolitan democracy, 91

counter-messages, 190 Covid-19, 26, 78, 92–94, 104, 183, 207, 226, 271 creation, 245 creation story, 254 Critical Theory, 304 cultural, 226, 295 cultural activities, 248 cultural reproduction, 206, 256 cultural violence, 214 cyber warfare, 171

D dangerous speech, 144, 145 data management, 172, 173, 178 data processing, 171 decarbonization, 206, 270 decentralization, 158 decentralized network, 148 decolonization, 33, 203 defederate, 154, 162 dehumanising, 175 deliberate targeting, 179 democracy, 17 democratic, 21, 23, 27, 30, 31, 34 democratic institutions, 27 democratization, 6, 33 democratize, 303 depolarization, 194 Design Thinking, 110 developing, 36 development, 33 diaspora, 175 dictators, 29 digital, 169 digital age, 175 digital conflict drivers, 175 digital literacy, 193 digital peacebuilding, 169 digital technology, 169–171, 173 digital tools, 171

INDEX

diplomacy, 217 disinformation, 104, 174, 177 diverse, 148 divisive content, 178 domestic authority, 90 doxxing, 181

E Earth System, 269 echo chambers, 144, 158 eco-feminists, 246 ecological, 272 economic, 301 economic development, 272 economic globalization, 23 economic growth, 27, 314 economic inequalities, 204 ecosystems, 293 emissions, 21, 206, 270 empire(s), 55, 203 empowerment, 225 engagement, 113 engineer, 22, 122 engineering, 118, 272 environmental contamination, 206, 240–242, 245, 248 environmental degradation, 14, 244 environmental injustice, 253 environmental justice, 206, 240 environmental movements, 273 environmental neutrality, 22 environmental pollution, 245 Environmental Protection Agency, 241 Environmental Reproductive Justice, 206, 241 Environmental Return On Investment (EROI), 120 environmental scientists, 22 environmental stability, 270 epidemic, 14, 25

325

equality, 214 ethical, 7, 137 ethics, 119 ethno-religious identity, 214 European Parliament, 222 European Union, 311 experimentation, 104 extremist recruitment, 186 F Fabian, 36, 37 Facebook, 144, 189 fake news, 175 falsehoods, 176 famine, 273 fear of violence, 113 federal government, 242 Fediverse, 106, 144, 147–149 female human reproductive cycle, 254 feminist, 210, 219, 243 Feminist International Relations, 210 finance, 28 financial crises, 27 First Environment Research Project, 251 First Nations, 242, 248 food shortages, 275 forced sterilization, 252 fossil fuel, 273 framework, 169, 294 France, 92 free markets, 303 free speech, 150 G Gab, 148, 162 gaming, 171 gender, 223 gendered security practices, 213 gender inequality, 210 gender norms, 225

326

INDEX

gender regimes, 214 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 32 General Assembly, 80, 85 genocide, 244 geographical justice, 206, 271 geopolitical, 273 girls, 206 global, 3, 25 global capital/global capitalism, 116, 308 global challenges, 2, 112, 203, 206, 295 global economy, 65, 206, 270, 276 global environmental problems, 24 global financial crises, 24 Global Financial Crisis, 317 global governance, 5, 13, 14, 24, 30, 48, 54, 63, 67, 68, 71, 104 global inequalities, 24 globalization, 8, 23, 30, 42, 47, 53, 54, 77, 78, 206, 294 globalized market economy, 317 global manufacturing, 32 global order, 203 global peace and security, 286 global policy, 30 global political economy, 29 global problem, 41, 271 global regimes, 294 global South, 34 global warming, 21, 22 governance, 14, 35, 49, 78, 83, 295, 296, 306 governing, 159 governments, 28 greenhouse gas, 270, 275

H hacked, 191 hate speech, 144–146, 170, 173–175

health, 262 hegemonic, 294 hegemonic war-making, 212 heterarchic, 49, 71 homophobia, 244 Hothouse Earth, 269 household division of labor, 216 human, 13 humanitarian, 29, 223 humanitarian crisis, 217 human nature, 302 human rights, 51, 302 human rights abuses, 223 hyper-masculinity, 212

I identity, 192, 304 identity construction, 186 ideology, 305 imperialism, 203, 312 incitement, 176 inclusive, 111, 123, 125 income, 204 income inequality, 214 Indian Country, 243 Indigenous, 241, 242, 293 individual responsibility, 88 industrial, 239 industrialization, 95 industrialized, 33 industrial pollution, 273 Industrial Revolution, 31 industrial sites, 243 inequality(ies), 3, 25, 105, 116, 203, 204, 285, 294 infodemic, 191 Information and Communications Technologies, 104 infrastructure, 2, 114, 216 injustice, 244 innovation, 296

INDEX

insecurity, 214, 276 institutional, 226 institutions, 5, 32 interconnected/interconnection, 206, 254 interdependence, 2, 242 interdisciplinary, 122, 137 intergovernmental, 58, 62 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 271 intermestic, 16, 48, 50, 104 International Civil Aviation Organization, 32 international civil society, 34 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 79 International Court of Justice (ICJ), 81 International Criminal Court, 223 International Federation of the Red Cross, 90 International Labor Organization, 32 international law, 80 International Law Commission (ILC), 81 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 32 international order, 77, 296 international organizations (IO), 86 international relations, 104, 211 international system, 203 International Telegraph Union (ITU), 61 Internet of Things (IoT), 104 intersectional/intersectionality, 116, 119, 137, 204, 206, 240, 241 interventions, 169 intimate partner violence, 225 investment, 3

327

J justice, 272

K Keynesian, 309

L labor, 2, 302 leadership, 13, 15–17 League of Arab States, 224 League of Nations, 58, 59, 80, 81, 83, 84, 96 legal personality, 86 legitimacy, 14, 16, 78 liability, 87 liberal/liberalism, 243, 300, 302 liberalization, 33 liberation, 314 locus of authority, 94 Los Alamos National Laboratory, 248

M mandate, 84 mandatory, 84 manufactured consensus, 177 market economy, 25 markets, 24, 116 Marxism/Marxist, 246, 300, 303 masculinity, 210 mass consumption, 276 Mastodon, 144, 147 material inequality, 25 maternity, 212 mediator, 170 Mercantile, 310 migrant, 224 migration, 2 militarism, 210, 212 militarized masculinity, 211, 213 military, 29

328

INDEX

military spending, 215 Millennium Development Goals, 36 minorities, 146 misinformation, 174, 176 moderation, 144, 146, 152 moderators, 153 Modernist, 305 modernity, 276 modernization, 3 modes of production, 305 Mohawk, 243 monitoring, 189 morality, 17 Mother Earth, 257 multi-centric, 66 multicultural, 317 multilateral, 34, 48, 77 multilateral institutions, 318 multilateralism, 64, 66, 70, 71, 233 multiplex, 63

N narratives, 304 national, 2 nationalism/nationalist, 15, 283 national security, 29 national sovereignty, 90 nation-states, 13 neoliberal, 15, 242, 308 networking, 172, 173 networks, 4, 9, 147 neurology, 196 new global economy, 33 new world disorder, 70 non-colonial, 109, 110 nonconsensual sterilization, 243 non-governmental organizations, 88 North American Free-Trade Agreement, 311 nuclear, 217, 273

O OHCHR, 61 Ohero:kon, 255 online, 144 ontology, 302, 307 OPEC, 273 open source, 159 organized crime, 26, 28 Otsitsisohn, 253 over-militarization, 26, 29

P pandemic, 2, 13, 26, 78, 93, 94, 104, 205, 207, 271 patriarchal, 209, 225 patriarchy, 210, 214 PCB contamination, 251 peacebuilders, 169 peacebuilding, 170 peacebuilding practice, 170 Peace Capital, 133 Peace Data, 105, 110, 115, 117, 118, 126, 128, 135, 136 peace dividend, 210 Peace Engineering, 105, 110, 114, 117, 118, 124, 136 Peace Finance, 105, 110, 114, 117, 118, 131, 135, 136 peacekeeping, 89 peace-making, 318 peacetech, 170 physical security, 214 planetary biosphere, 271 platforms, 164 polarization, 184 policy responses, 194 political boundaries, 305 political globalization, 23 political imagination, 24 political theorists, 24 politics, 301

INDEX

polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), 250 positive peace, 105, 110, 113, 115, 116 positive social change, 170 Post-Cold War, 15, 47 post-colonial, 304 Post-War, 15 poverty, 205 power, 13, 161 power relations, 241 privacy, 190 private enterprises, 91 production, 2, 295 profiling, 195 prosocial, 110, 112 protocol, 147, 163 Public International Unions (PIU), 30, 31 Q quasi-government, 24 R racism, 149, 244 ransplanetary, 14 realism, 300 recruitment, 184 regulatory, 261 Religions, 304 religious thinkers, 24 representation, 14 reproductive abilities, 252 reproductive choice, 243 reproductive issues, 252 reproductive justice, 206, 240 reproductive rights, 243 resilience, 206, 215, 284 responsibility, 6, 16, 17, 23, 78, 80, 87 responsibility to protect, 79 Return On Investment (ROI), 120

329

Rome Statute, 223

S scientific, 104 sea levels, 270 seaway, 250 Second World War, 33 Secretary-General, 33, 39, 77, 79, 83, 90, 96 security, 215, 272, 304 Security Council, 80, 85, 92 Security Council Resolution 1325, 209 security strategies, 284 sexism, 150, 244 sexual exploitation, 88 shared responsibility, 94 shareholders, 133 signals, 187 silence, 154 situated knowledge, 252 Sky Woman, 253 social forces, 299 social justice, 241, 302 social media, 170, 173, 294 social media companies, 144, 146 social media influencers, 175 social media platforms, 189 social mobility, 225 social networks, 144 social relations, 305 Social Return On Investment (SROI), 120 social spaces, 164 social spending, 220 socioeconomic development, 204 socio-technological, 173, 196 sovereign, 79, 217, 302 sovereign state, 79, 93 sovereignty, 48, 52, 80 sovereignty-bound, 61, 67, 70

330

INDEX

Srebrenica, 87 stability, 215 stagnation, 16 stakeholders, 135 standards, 39 standard setting, 39 state responsibility, 84, 90 state sovereignty, 217 stereotypes, 175 St. Lawrence River, 249 Stockholm Peace Research Institute, 211 strategic communications, 172, 173, 184 structural, 226 structural inequality, 206, 271 structural power, 15 structural racism, 205 structural violence, 214, 313 structures, 306 sub-groupism, 53 summit, 66 Superfund Basic Research Project (SBRP), 251 surveillance, 170, 179 Susan Strange, 24 sustainable development, 204 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 110 systemic inequalities, 105 systemic inequities, 205 systems, 294 systems model, 113

T taxation, 311 technology, 6, 103, 110, 169, 294 technosphere, 273 territorial, 3, 308 territory, 80 terror, 274

terrorism, 26, 28, 49 track and trace, 183 tracking, 184 trade, 2, 305 traditional food practices, 253 transformation, 16 transnational, 310 transnational challenges, 50 transplanetary, 294 transversal, 17 treaty, 22 tribal communities, 242 tribal sovereignty, 243 trolls, 148 Trump, Donald, 15 Twitter, 144

U UN Charter, 60, 80 UN Commission on the Status of Women, 215 underprivileged, 25 UN Development Programme (UNDP), 34, 35, 37, 61, 211 UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 32 UNHCR, 61 UNICEF, 61 United Nations, 24, 30, 33–36, 41, 51, 77, 80, 85, 175, 203 United Nations Charter, 81 United Nations Security Council, 313 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, 278 United States, 27, 41, 92 universal, 15, 294 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 85, 95 universalization, 15 UNODC, 61 UN Peacekeeping, 89

INDEX

UN Security Council, 223 UN Women, 61 utility, 304 V video games, 170 violence, 170 violence against women, 215, 223 violence reduction, 113 violent extremism, 146 virtual, 103 vulnerabilities, 272 W war, 302 warfare, 104 warlords, 26, 29 wealth, 204, 214, 302 weapons manufacturers, 221 weapons manufacturing, 212 Western Intervention, 120 Westfailure system, 24

331

Westphalian, 3, 14, 52, 55, 63, 94, 311 WhatsApp, 176 white supremacists, 148 wildfires, 270 women, 8, 205 Women, Peace, and Security, 8 World Bank, 91, 211 World Commission on Environment and Development, 274 world government, 68 World Health Organization (WHO), 61, 245 world peace, 214 world society, 302 world-system, 215, 226 World Trade Organization, 30, 311 World War II, 48

Y YouTube, 144 Yupik, 248