Defining Duterte’s Impact in the Philippines

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has stood as a highly controversial figure. Some people see him as the savior, and others the destruction of the Republic of the Philippines. Former mayor of Davao and now in the Southeast Asian nation’s most powerful position, Duterte has received extreme scrutiny from other world leaders as well as the global public for not just his policy, but his language as well. A man of controversy and of much debated exultation and criticism, His infamous policy of Extra Judicial Killings (EJK), which are essentially killings without proper justice proceedings and usually in response to the belief of undesirable relationships with corrupted officials or individuals. In the case of the Philippines, the victims are often people believed to have had affiliations with drug dealers, regardless of whether or not those accusations were true. However, the controversy of Duterte’s presidency is more than just a question of policy, but also a symbol of what the people of the Philippines have been frustrated with for decades. Scoring a 35 on the Corruption Perception Index (CPI), corruption is not of the past for the Philippines. Despite all that he is discriminated for, Duterte has an agenda in the Philippines, and many Filipinos believe he is exactly who deserves to be at the head of Filipino politics.

The revival of extrajudicial killings has led to polarized reactions. While this is not necessarily a new development on the global stage or in the Philippines, the resulting protests call for the end of unfair killings and for the return of due process. The policy was reinstated by the now president in an attempt to incite a war on drugs, as Duterte had even promised to kill his own children if they were commit the same crime he was punishing petty criminals and drug pushes for. Duterte has been compared to being “The Trump of the East”, both being known for their unruly and undiplomatic behavior. The former Davao mayor has been now associated with reformation and more popularly known for his populist course of action for the nation.

However, others have said that the two are entirely different. “The Philippines knows what it is getting. With Trump, America is looking at the unknown,” claims Charlie Campbell from Time. Amongst all the narratives surrounding Duterte, as a malicious dictator or a benevolent despot, in the shadows of colonial history an origin story of Philippines that goes unnoticed behind the curtains of modernity. With approximately a 78.4% voter turnout, Duterte won the majority vote with 16.6 million votes, 96.14% of the votes being processed. While not an overwhelming win, how does a man such as Duterte, who so outwardly made clear his unapologetic attitude towards sexual assault and his avowed hatred towards the drug dealers ravaging Philippine society win the vote of over 15 million people? Are the people of the Philippines the same way? He did not hide his agenda during his candidacy; he made it very clear that his intention was to eradicate drugs from the Philippines. And the people voted for him.

The path to independence for the Philippine islands is one wrought with blood and tribulation. Originally a territory of the Spanish empire, the United States took the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba in 1898. In a show of rebellion, anti-colonial Filipino nationalists fought back against United States’ imperial occupation in a bloody struggle that would come to be known as the Philippine-American War. During this time, the Americans ran a pacification campaign that led to the destruction of property and the torture and slaughter of Filipino civilians. Only after a bloody war between Filipino nationalists and American imperialists was the Philippines subjugated, eventually leading to the movement of Filipino labor abroad. During the course of this brief but brutal war lasting from 1899 to 1902, 4,200 American and 20,000 Filipino combatants died during the battles, while 200,000 Filipinos perished from famine, disease, and the ensuing violence.

Since the United States permitted Philippine independence in 1946, the Philippine still suffers from great poverty, and has yet to make significant progress economically and in terms of human rights. Despite having been a territory of the United State and, having their government modeled after American constitutional law, the islands are ravaged by poverty. The economy especially suffered during the time of President Ferdinand Marcos, and since has not recovered from his policies. According to the Asia Development Bank, 21.1% of the Philippines lives below the poverty line. Some people are unable to afford food to eat. Entire villages and cities are often poor, especially in the city of Manilla, so poor that they rely on food from the trash of the middle class for sustenance. In consequence to debilitating poverty comes the rampant crime. In the Philippines in Figures 2017 report from the Philippines Statistics Authority, the instances of known drug or substance only in rehabilitation figures is on the rise since 2012, starting at 2,744 cases in 2012 and rising to 4,392 in 2014. The crime in the Philippines gives rise to general discontent in Filipino citizens.

This historical deficiency, perpetuated by unstable oligarchies and frequent practice of cronyism was especially emphasized on September 22, 1972, when then President Ferdinand Marcos announced that the Philippines would be under martial law, which some viewed as a deviation from the American ideals and values that were taught so avidly by American colonizers. The reason for this sudden change is that the instances of crime in the city Manila had risen so high that it required military intervention to mitigate. The result however, was more abuses of human rights. Marcos used this power to suppress freedom of speech and expression. Military often abused their authority, and participated in bribery, unjust killing, and the like. President Duterte received extreme criticism when he allowed for Marco’s body to be honored as a war hero, some viewing it as a betrayal to all the sufferings their families suffered as a result of Marcos’ martial law. Even later, some even began to think that Duterte would become much like Marcos himself, in that he would respond with martial law with the rising unrest in southern Philippines, concerning the people of Mindanao and the Moro Islamist Liberation Front (MILF). Fears became reality when Duterte finally declared that the entire island of Mindanao would fall under martial law, in the hopes of capturing the Islamist terrorist leader Isnilon Hapilon.

However, the conflict reached its climax when, during the fighting in Marawi city, Hapilon and the main leaders of MILF were killed, and Duterte released Marawi city from martial law. While the fighting within the Philippines is not yet over, it is suffice to say that Duterte’s actions played a part in this culmination of events, regardless of whether one views the results of Duterte’s actions as a good or bad occurrence. Duterte represents the anger of the Philippines as a nation if not for his “war on drugs,” then for change in the Philippines. The narrative of the Philippines that stands so long forgotten is that the history of the Philippines is wrought with violence and inequality, resulting in frustrated population looking for change. Whether Duterte is, at the core, a good president or not is debatable. History may have the last word on that debate. But Duterte may not be the cause of the Philippine’s problems, but rather the answer of the people to a history of struggle and poverty.

Protectionist Policies Threaten Newfound Stability of Global Airline Industry

The international airline business has always been known by economists and business experts to be an unpredictable and volatile industry. Its success depends on accurately forecasting major world events, bracing for changes in consumer preferences, and careful management of capital stock during extreme weather and natural disasters. Governments in the 1980s would routinely fund airline companies at a loss in order to ensure the availability of transportation, due to the airlines’ razor-thin profit margins. As a result, profit margins have historically been razor-thin, so much that until the 1980s, governments would routinely fund airlines companies so that air travel could endure. In recent years, however, airlines have found stability. Profit margins have bounced back from the recession and have exceeded pre-recession levels. Any yet, despite this, the airline industry is far from being safe from calamity in the near future. The recent shift of countries favoring nationalistic and protectionist policies, most notably Great Britain and the United States, threaten the newfound stability of the airline industry. Policymakers must actively work to sustain this stability, to encourage free market competition, and to refute the recent compulsion to uptake protectionist trade policies.

Starting an airline requires enormous sums of up-front investment. Moreover, the financial components of this process entails building capital stock, which can vary from the facilities where airplanes are held to the airplanes themselves. To put that in perspective, the cheapest passenger airplane that Boeing makes in the 737 model, at an estimated cost of $51 million. These purchases occur in tandem with hiring an army of employees ranging from pilots, flight attendants, and gate workers, to facilities maintenance and management. The airline, moreover, must lease gates at airports, which are enormously costly; control over airport gates is typically determined through a bidding process. The cost is much higher for a newly-formed airline to buy a gate at an airport and fly planes out of it. Should that route be unprofitable, it can mean the failure of the airline. However, bigger airlines can afford to take losses at times for they can afford to fly half-full airplanes, repair their jets with considerable profit loss, and most of the time, remain functioning even after a severe supply shock. After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, the U.S. Federal Government closed airports for over 2 full days, and global demand for airline travel shot down. As a result, Swissair, Sabena, and Ansett airlines shut down, while others like United, US Airways, and Delta all filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter, despite still being in operation today.  In addition to a drastic change in the industry as airlines faltered, airport security in the United States was revamped, with the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), or the scapegoat many travellers blame for delaying travel. Less noticeably but perhaps just as importantly, the U.S. Congress created the Air Transportation Stabilization Board, which allocated $10 Billion to help failing airlines in the aftermath of 9/11. From the industry breakdown and structure to the aftermath of 9/11, it is clear that airline companies face considerable risk, and as a result, operate under an economy of scale, meaning that they become more efficient as they acquire more resources and market power. It is therefore up to our policy makers and global decision makers to work diligently to ensure the stability of the airline industry so that it can remain competitive and profitable.

Recently, however, airlines have been more stable than any other time in their history. One possible reason for this overall strengthening of the airline industry in the global economy post Great-Recession. During the recession, airlines around the world felt the burden of a decline in consumer spending. Global giants like KLM and Lufthansa put a hold on ordering new planes – leading to a serious shock for Airbus and Boeing. Between 2008 and 2009, United and American airlines cut over 10,000 jobs. More recently, however, economic conditions have been better for airlines. According to the International Air Transportation Association (IATA), in each year since 2009, when the recession began its downswing, annual profit margins have exceeded 3%.

Another explanation is the increase in mergers that allow airlines to experience economies of scale and increase their profits. The increase in airline company mergers is another contributing factor to airline industry stabilization. Prior to 2005, there were nine major airline companies that dominated the United States domestic airline market. However, since 2005, the number of ‘major’ US airlines has shrunk to four, the most recent being Alaska Airlines’ purchase of Virgin America. These 4 major companies now currently represent over 70% of the total airline industry marketplace. When the Alaska Airlines/Virgin America merger was announced, it worried legislators that a small concentration of airlines with considerable market power had the potential to stifle free market competition with low-fare airlines and other companies. This scenario had the potential to lead to an increase in fares and a lower quality of airline travel overall. As a result, the U.S. Department of Justice blocked the merger but eventually agreed to concessions, which included divesting from gate slots, or take-off and landing authorizations, at major airports. The results have thus far been satisfying of all parties involved, as the increased profits of airlines have coincided with decrease in cost of flying.

The stabilization of airlines has lead to new sources of investment in the industry.  In February, 2017, famed billionaire investor Warren Buffett made headlines by taking a $10 billion stake in American, Southwest, United, and Continental Airlines. Just a few years earlier he had vocally warned of the risk associated with investing with investing in airlines. Yet, despite great progress towards a stronger and more stable global market for airlines, various parties who have benefited from this change must worry about political factors that could upend this recent phenomenon. In particular, the policies of the United Kingdom and the United States have worried airline executives.  According to The Guardian, the trade organization Trade for America has been actively lobbying members of British Parliament to carefully consider Brexit negotiations impact on airline travel – specifically between Heathrow Airport in London and carriers from the United States. The organization argues that even a day’s delay in implementing a policy change could deeply impact carriers. It is estimatedthat 140 passenger flights and just under 50 cargo flights travel between the United States and London each day. Grounding these planes for 24 hours or more could have a monumental impact on global trade. Even with recent improvements in profitability, not all airlines could successfully absorb the shock of losing business within a full 24-hour cycle, which would imply for many millions in losses, and other residual effects on commerce.

It should be noted that airlines flourish under current rules that allow for the free-flow of people and goods between the United States and Europe, otherwise known as the “Open Skies” agreement. Since the likelihood of Brexit talks would place the United Kingdom outside of the European Union, which is under the jurisdiction of the agreement, this privilege would no longer be offered to carriers travelling between the UK and the US. Losing this privilege, or even adjusting to some slightly different system, would take a heavy toll on a handful of international airlines.

Many feel that President Trump’s ban on electronic usage on flights from certain airports threaten the stability of global air travel as well. This March, both the United States and the United Kingdom banned electronic usage on flights, which precludes the use of laptops and tablets, from specific airports that pose as likely targets for terrorists.  However, the US conspicuously included more airports on this list than the UK. Political scientists Abraham Newman and Henry Farrell, accredited experts on global and international affairs, suggest that this could be retaliation against specific Middle East-based airlines. Etihad and Emirates, whose hubs are included on this list of US airports, receive more government funding from their home countries to operate. In the past, many US companies have complained that this creates an unfair advantage, as they can operate at a loss but receive government subsidies that allow them to remain operating and competitive. Regardless, retaliatory actions from governments in the name of security threaten the overall freedom and stability of the global marketplace and airlines specifically.

Airline travel will continue to be a crucial part of the global marketplace. Its efficiency and stability will determine the success of transporting information and knowledge across borders for the foreseeable future. Actions that attempt to draw arbitrary boundaries around trade, for protectionist sake or otherwise, only threaten the stability of an industry with an already tumultuous history. In the future, policy leaders must be steadfast in addressing these issues, for the progress of global markets depend on it.

Washington, Tehran, Pyongyang, and…Munich? —Trump’s Dangerous Iteration of the Warped Legacy of ‘Appeasement’ in U.S. Foreign Policy

It will be 80 years next year since the Munich Agreement was signed by the leaders of France, Great Britain, Italy, and Germany. When the agreement’s stipulation of allowing Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland proved to be ineffective in achieving its intended purpose of acquiescing to one of Hitler’s demands in the short-term in the name of curtailing Nazi expansionism and preventing war, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was accused by the world of appeasement. In 2017, the term appeasement is still being leveraged in foreign policy debates in the United States. From arguments on the right against the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, to Republican Senators critiquing the Obama administration’s food aid to North Korea, to President Trump criticizing South Korea’s attempt to organize military talks with Pyongyang, invoking appeasement has become a widely popular strategy for critiquing any kind of engagement with historically unfriendly regimes.

However ubiquitous, the accusation of appeasement carries serious weight. To make sense of these modern allegations of appeasement, it is necessary to unpack what the term actually meant in the context of Munich and how its distorted legacy came to shape U.S. foreign policy toward belligerent regimes. Situating current uses of appeasement in this historical context will demonstrate that President Trump’s conception of appeasement—particularly in the Iranian and North Korean contexts—constitutes a dangerous iteration of the infamous lessons of Munich.

What did appeasement mean in 1938?

It is important to recognize that the terms of the Munich Agreement were a consequence of the specific goals and circumstances of Great Britain in 1938. Chamberlain knew that Great Britain was facing the possibility of single-handedly fighting a war with an increasingly expansionist Nazi regime in its own backyard. Chamberlain was also unconvinced that in the event of such a war, though Great Britain’s allies were rhetorically committed to preserving peace, he would receive enough military assistance to successfully resist Nazi expansion. As Thomas E. Ricks writes in Foreign Policy, “Appeasement is a position of negotiating with a strong state from a position of weakness.” While Great Britain was certainly not weak in the sense of lacking military or economic resources, its proximity to an aggressive Germany and uncertainty about the level of military commitment it would have from its allies put the country in a uniquely vulnerable geostrategic position in 1938.

Furthermore, Chamberlain’s bottom-line was avoiding the outbreak of war; he famously claimed that the Munich Agreement meant that there would be “peace for our time.” He weighed the risks of allowing German occupation of the Sudetenland against the daunting possibility of total war and determined that acquiescence was more likely to lead to peace. In this context, appeasement meant sacrificing some principles in the name of preserving a more fundamental objective; it was abandoning a short-term interest for a long-term goal. Ultimately, appeasement at Munich was embedded in these unique circumstances of 1938 and the validity of the Munich Pact was assessed based on a specific set of geostrategic and structural considerations.

The Legacy of Munich in U.S. Foreign Policy

While appeasement in the Munich context ultimately meant that a vulnerable Britain decided to make concessions to Hitler in the name of preserving its goal of peace, when war broke out a few years later, the consequences of the Munich Agreement took on a new meaning. The Allies learned that Chamberlain miscalculated the extent of Hitler’s territorial ambitions. As Germany continued to invade countries across the European continent, they realized that the assumption that Hitler would be satisfied with controlling the Sudetenland was wrong. The Allies consequently feared that acquiescing to Hitler’s territorial concessions is what led to war, and regretted not responding to German expansion with a strong show of force. Winston Churchill, for example, retroactively critiqued Chamberlain’s policy by likening it to “one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” As Lipson and Levy write in International Security, as the war progressed, appeasement “…came to symbolize naïveté, failed diplomacy, and the politics of cowardice.” The lessons of Munich, then, were twofold: never negotiate with a belligerent regime, and always respond to aggression with a stronger show of force.

These lessons are at the core of how the United States treated totalitarian regimes in the decades following World War II. In 1950, NSC-68, the document that shaped American Cold War foreign policy, painted the Soviet Union as regime with a “hostile design” and concluded that Stalin must be met by a show of overwhelming force by the West. Underscoring this assessment is the assumption that a hostile and aggressive regime will only respond to hostile and aggressive opposition tactics. And as Douglas McCollam writes in Foreign Policy, this assumption and the fear of “another Munich” has influenced U.S. foreign policy toward unfriendly regimes in nearly every presidential administration since the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War. From Eisenhower’s decision to get involved with the French fight against Communism in Indochina, to Johnson sending troops to Vietnam (and then consistently escalating the scope of U.S. operations there), to George H.W. Bush’s war in the Gulf, the fear of repeating the mistakes of 1938 made it bad policy to negotiate with totalitarian regimes and perpetuated U.S. involvement in a series of deadly protracted conflicts across the globe.

Obama’s Shifting Approach

The Obama administration’s foreign policy constituted a significant departure from this tradition. From the first day of his tenure he signaled a willingness to compromise with historically unfriendly regimes, as demonstrated by the oft-quoted statement in his inaugural address that “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Since then, he has repeatedly engaged in negotiations with the United States’ alleged worst enemies everywhere from Pyongyang to Tehran to Havana. In 2012, Obama negotiated a deal with Pyongyang to send food aid to North Korea in exchange for International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to its facilities. White House Asia adviser Victor Cha claimed that despite criticism that Pyongyang may not be trusted to properly utilize the aid, the deal is worthwhile because “it means getting a handle on what has been a runaway nuclear program that’s continued unabated for more than three years.” Perhaps most notably, President Obama worked with Tehran to implement the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015. The JCPOA outlines a framework to curtail Iran’s nuclear capabilities for non-peaceful purposes and increases IAEA access to inspect facilities in exchange for lifting international sanctions.

These policies suggest that the Obama administration understood negotiations with these regimes to be a useful tool for promoting U.S. interests. In the face of nuclear threats from regimes who have been historically unfriendly toward the United States, he did not follow the tradition of threatening the use of force or entering the country into a protracted conflict. Instead, President Obama made the assessment that negotiations presented a better opportunity to achieve his national security goals. In other words, he defied the long-standing notion in U.S. foreign policy that engagement with an aggressor is inherently dangerous.

The Danger of Regression Under Trump

 In his first year of office, President Trump has repeatedly suggested that he does not plan to continue Obama’s strategy of negotiating with Pyongyang and Tehran. In September of this year, Trump accused Seoul of appeasing the North. Glenn Thrush and Mark Landler write in The New York Times: “In invoking South Korean “appeasement,” he criticized Seoul’s proposal to hold military talks with the North, saying of Pyongyang, “they only understand one thing” — meaning the “threat of military force.” Similarly, a number of Trump’s supporters on the right, including Florida Senator Marco Rubio, have argued that the President’s promise to eventually dismantle the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signals the end of a U.S. policy of “appeasement” toward Iran. Rubio even directly invokes 1938, writing in a tweet that “As currently structured, the deal is 21st century equivalent of the Munich Agreement.”

 There are a few logical issues with equating negotiating with Pyongyang and Tehran to appeasement in the Munich context. First, again, the Munich Agreement was a consequence of the geostrategic vulnerability of Great Britain in 1938 and Chamberlain’s uncertainty about levels of international support in the event of a full-scale war. The United States in 2017 is not in this position. There is absolutely no threat of Pyongyang and Tehran pursuing territorial expansion in the United States’ backyard. While there are concerns about Iran funding terrorist organizations like Hezbollah that threaten the stability of areas of geostrategic importance to the United States in the Middle East, it is simply not the same kind of direct and immediate threat to national security that Great Britain faced from Nazi Germany. Additionally, when the United States negotiates with Iran and North Korea, it is doing so from a position of strength.The military capacity, economic strength, and international political influennce of the United States vis-a-vis both of these countries is astronomical, and cannot be compared to the position of Great Britain in relation to Hitler’s Germany in 1938.

 Ultimately, these modern allegations of appeasement signal that the United States is reverting back to the pre-Obama conceptions of appeasement. Underlying Trump and Rubio’s comments are both of the assumptions that have defined U.S. interpretations of the lessons of Munich since World War II—that any engagement is dangerous and that hostile regimes will only respond to strong force. This regression is extremely dangerous. By equating any kind of engagement with appeasement, Trump is abandoning the Obama-era strategy of engaging in negotiations with historically unfriendly regimes as a tool for achieving U.S. interests. Finally, by adapting this conception of appeasement, President Trump is framing the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs as problems that can only be solved through the use of escalating threats and eventually force. As Senator Bob Corker warned in October, these kinds of threats—coupled with a President with a propensity for recklessness—could put the United States “on the path to World War III.”

The Struggle to Accommodate Refugees in the Global South

The nations accommodating the unprecedented number of refugees in the world do not possess the resources required to adequately meet the challenge before them. The host countries of refugees face a monumental task, no matter their circumstances. Migrant networks share information about modes of transportation and border-permeability. This allows ethnic and religious communities to reunite, even after forceful displacement from their countries of origin. Once refugee communities begin to coalesce in new cities, those cities are ethically obligated to attend to the needs of the displaced population that they are now accommodating. Federal governments may develop systems to distribute these communities to different cities throughout a nation in the face of a substantial influx, but this tests cities’ public infrastructure in cases of unprecedented numbers or extended duration. Destination cities for refugees are obligated to provide vocational training, labor market integration, social housing, security for such housing, language courses, health services, and supplemental programming such as athletic and cultural events. The strain that accommodating these needs puts a government under depends on the capabilities of that government.

Meeting these needs constitutes an enormous task for any city, but this challenge is especially pronounced for governments in the Global South. While Western nations are entangled in policy debates concerning how many refugees they should allow across their borders and how to properly integrate refugee communities into society, nations of the Global South struggle to muster the financial means to materially support refugees already within their borders. Nations in the Global North have the luxury to debate their moral imperative to support refugees. Nations of the Global South are not afforded such a choice. Countries of the subaltern, meaning those pushed to the social, economic, and political periphery in postcolonial theory, already spurned by global economic systems, presently support a disproportionate portion of the global refugee population. The number of refugees in the world has increased exponentially during the 21st century, rising from 21.2 million in 2000 to 40.8 million in 2015. The weight of this substantial increase in refugees rests squarely upon the back of the already strained governments of the Global South, with the Database for Institutional Comparisons in Europe reporting that the Global South currently hosts “86 percent of all the refugees registered worldwide and 99 percent of all internally displaced persons.” The approximately 35,000,000 refugees currently accommodated by nations in the Global South mark a stark contrast to the 50,000 refugees that Donald Trump mandated be allowed to enter the United States, the lowest number since 1986. The restricted resources commanded by governments of the Global South result in initiatives that often focus solely on the immediate needs of refugees, ignoring factors that are key to fostering long term stability. It is important to explore and understand the struggles that governments of the Global South face when accommodating refugees in order formulate the policy options available to them.

Context: Refugee Support in the Global North

The intense fiscal challenge of supporting refugees is best illustrated by an examination of the systems used by Western nations, such as Germany, to properly support their refugee population. The German model of refugee accommodation is highly bureaucratic, which, although providing some of the most comprehensive care for refugees, also comes with high administrative costs. This intense institutional support relies on Germany’s economic strength and rigorous tax structure, thus inhibiting nations of the Global South from replicating the system. Germany became an ersatz-haven for Syrian refugees in 2015 after invoking the “sovereignty clause” of the European Union’s 2013 Dublin Regulation (Regulation No. 604/2013, Dublin III Regulation) to opt out of relocating asylum seekers to their country of first entry into the EU. This was enacted to ease the challenges that accommodating the influx of Syrian refugees placed on EU border nations such as Greece and Italy.

Germany’s economic strength allows it to finance multiple levels of government agencies responsible for supporting its refugee population. Upon arrival, Germany’s Federal Office of Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge) allots refugees to different states, and then municipalities, depending on the local tax revenue and population. State governments cover the costs of schooling, initial registration, and the creation of reception centers. Municipal governments provide for long-term housing, health care, and integration measures. This spurred some municipalities to create their own further municipal offices to attend to such needs, such as Freiburg’s “Office of Migration and Integration” (Amt für Migration und Integration), which handles issues such as social welfare, volunteer coordination, and labor market integration. Immediately after applying for asylum in Germany, refugees are issued identification paperwork (Aufenhaltsgestattung), and receive social housing, government welfare, and employment assistance while their application are processed. During their first months after arrival, refugees live in a reception center where food and clothing is provided for, and they receive an additional roughly €150 per month for living expenses. Soon after, refugees move into social housing (Wohnnheime) with social workers on site, and can receive roughly €350 per month to cover all of their living expenses. If their application for asylum is accepted, Germany issues refugees a residence permit (Aufenhaltserlaubnis), allowing refugees to continue to receive government welfare funds for more than a year. Even if a refugee’s application for asylum is rejected, Germany does not deport them from the country. Instead, refugees receive toleration papers (Duldung) that allow them to remain in the country, still residing in social housing and receiving welfare funds, but for a more limited amount of time. This highly bureaucratic system adeptly attends to the needs of refugees arriving in Germany, yet it relies on strong federal and local governments supported by an impressive economy. This model of refugee accommodation cannot be replicated by countries of the Global South that do not have the same immense resources at their disposal, and thus a different approach is necessary.

The number of Asylum-Seeker welfare recipients per 1,000 inhabitants, demonstrating the strength of the German government support system. From the Brookings Institution.

Iraq: Supporting Internally Displaced Persons while in Conflict

The challenges that Iraq’s government faces diverge sharply from those supported by the well-funded German system, with the colossal challenge of supporting an internally displaced population resulting from decades of conflict and exacerbated by the emergence of Daesh in recent years.  Iraq’s history with internally displaced persons (IDPs) can be divided into three separate phases. Phase One encompasses the roughly 1.2 million people displaced by nearly four decades of Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq. Beginning as early as 1974, Hussein engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and intentional displacement that was primarily enacted against the Kurdish population in the country’s north and the Marsh Arabs in the country’s south, in an attempt to homogenize and Arabize the nation. Phase Two of Iraq’s IDP struggle coincides with the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Hussein’s departure from power. During this time, the American invasion displaced 200,000 new Iraqis, while another 500,000 simultaneously returned to their former homes following the end of Hussein’s rule. The majority of new IDPs created during this phase resulted from the sectarian violence between 2006 and 2008, ignited by the bombing of the sacred Shi’a Two Askari Imams in Samara. Retributive violence against Sunni Muslims increased the number of new Iraqis displaced during the second phase to 1.6 million people by the middle of 2008. After this new swath of sectarian-provoked displacements, the International Organization for Migration estimated that the total number of IDPs in Iraq reached 2.8 million. Finally, Phase Three of displacement in Iraq began with the fall of Fallujah to Daesh in 2014 that displaced more than half a million people in Iraq’s Anbar province, after which the number of IDPs skyrocketed due to the prolonged conflict with the terrorist organization. That same year, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that Iraq suffered the greatest number of new displacements in the world, with at least 2.2 million new displaced persons. The crisis has not relented in recent years, with the current IDPs numbering 3.2 million Iraqis, roughly one in ten people in the nation. The number of IDPs in Iraq reached an all-time high around June 30th, 2017, as the military effort to retake the city of Mosul in the Ninewa province concluded. More than one million people were displaced in the Ninewa province in total, and the same number of people in the Mosul area were estimated to be inaccessible to humanitarian aid. The Iraqi government is ill-equipped to support such a large internally displaced population while simultaneously fighting Daesh.

During the summer of 2017, an amalgamated 7.3 million people in Iraq were vulnerable and in need of required assistance across the country. Currently, in the Salahuddin province, municipal authorities have evicted nearly 600 families of Daesh militants from their homes. Despite condemnations from Iraqi politicians across the country, the policies of the Salahuddin province only exacerbate the problem of IDPS within their own country. Children comprise half of the recently expanded displaced population, with more than half a million forced to miss more than a year of education as a result of their displacement. In refugee camps, a scant 50 percent of children are attending school, and that number drops to 30 percent outside of refugee camps. Missing crucial education and at risk of physical harm, sexual violence, and radicalization, the situation of these children creates yet another challenge for the success of an Iraqi state in the future. In 2015, only 9 percent of Iraqi IDPs lived in refugee camps in Iraq, with between 60 and 90 percent living in private accommodations such as rented rooms and host families, and the rest in critical shelter arrangements such as former schools and hospitals. The large population of IDPs in Iraq living in private accommodations is characteristic of the distinctly different struggle of refugees in the Global South, for this population faces eviction if they are unable to pay for their accommodations. The Iraqi government attempts to mitigate the costs of such accommodations, providing an initial cash payment of 1 million Iraqi dinars (approximately $850) for each displaced family. However, this amount can only cover the cost of a meager few weeks of food and shelter, and this hardship is intensified by the fact that 40 percent of the new IDPs in Iraq have not received this payment. A large amount of the IDPs moved to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, due to the region’s more stable economy and a history of accepting religious minorities, causing the population of the region to swell by 30 percent. This unprecedented increase in population puts host families under intense strain, leading to negative coping mechanisms such as child labor and early marriages. The tenuous status of IDPs in Iraq and the lack of reliable infrastructure to support the displaced community resulted in a paucity of necessary health care resources, culminating in a cholera outbreak that pervaded 15 of the 18 governorates in 2015. The protracted nature of conflict in Iraq destroyed local infrastructure and created successive waves of IDPs that the state government is unable to adequately support.

The displaced persons of Iraq who fled the country overwhelmingly reside in other nations of the Global South that have similarly scarce means of supporting them. In 2008, there were roughly 1.5 million Iraqi refugees living in Syria, 500,000 in Jordan, and 250,000 more in other countries. Syria was the primary destination for Iraqi refugees due to its close geographic proximity, which allowed Shi’a Iraqis to avoid the majority-Sunni Anbar province when fleeing sectarian violence after 2006. Furthermore, the Syrian government allowed Arab nationals, including Iraqis, three months’ stay without documentation, during which time they could apply for residence permits. Syria, as a whole, had a history of accepting the Shi’a population and had a more established health and education infrastructure. Syria also possessed a larger informal economy than other destinations, which afforded greater work opportunities to displaced Iraqis. But as civil conflict flared in Syria, the Iraqi refugee population was displaced once again, with the UNHCR reporting only 44,000 Iraqi refugees still in Syria as of 2013.

In Jordan, the 500,000 Iraqi refugees face an even more difficult struggle to achieve legally recognized residency. The two most common ways of attaining stable status in Jordan are to either receive a residency permit (iqama) or a work contract. Yet to receive a residency permit in 2003, Iraqi refugees were required to deposit $150,000 into a Jordanian bank account. Although this amount was later lowered to $20,000, only 25,000 Iraqi refugees acquired a residency permit by 2011. Attaining a work contract is an even more arduous process, as it requires mobilizing significant social capital (wasta) such as familial and political connections, such that only 2,000 Iraqis have received work contracts. These struggles resulted in 80 percent of the wealthiest bracket of Iraqis receiving residency permits, as opposed to 22 percent of the poorest bracket, further stratifying an already divided community. Between the conflict in Syria and a regressive residency system in Jordan, the governments of the Global South are ill-equipped to accommodate the refugee populations that they are forced to support.

The government of Iraq is unable to support the vast internally displaced population within its borders due to the ramifications of decades of conflict, such as eroded public infrastructure, significant brain-drain, and inadequate documentation. The capacity of the state in Iraq has been under assault since the time of Saddam Hussein, who expelled all non-Ba’athist government officials. This problem was further aggravated by the de-Ba’athification enacted by the American government after its ouster of Hussein that removed most remaining experienced government officials from power, compounded by American efforts undertaken to decentralize the Iraqi government. During this time, opportunistic militias emerged and seized the assets of institutions and extorted the local population. As these militias looted both hospitals and universities, the system of rentierism that had prevailed under Hussein collapsed, leaving the government unable to repair the devastated public infrastructure. What remains of the oil industry that previously supported the government is wrought with rampant corruption, further hampering state capabilities. The middle class of Iraq is disappearing, resulting from hyperinflation and targeted attacks. In 2007, a New York Times report expounded that 26 out of 30 students surveyed at the University of Baghdad intended to leave the country to start their careers. The militias took advantage of the state’s weakness and specifically targeted the middle class for kidnappings, believing that they would be more able to pay a ransom. In 2006, there were more than 30 kidnappings a day in Baghdad, and the majority of those targeted were academics, lawyers, and media professionals. The shrinking intellectual community and middle class in Iraq poses a direct threat to state capabilities in the future, for it is this population’s skills and tax dollars that are key to rebuilding a stable state. The health infrastructure in the country is similarly eviscerated, with many hospitals ransacked indiscriminately. The Iraqi Red Crescent reported that more than half of the nation’s doctors fled the country between 2003 and 2007. Daesh’s rise both contributed to the further destruction of state infrastructure, and prevented the repair of infrastructure previously damaged in sectarian violence. What remains of the state operates on a basis of innate discrimination, with the occupying Kurdish forces in Ninewa and Diyala preventing Sunni Arabs from returning to their homes. In Baghdad, security forces are equally suspicious of Sunni Muslims and even ignore crimes perpetrated against them. According to victims’ reports, Sunni homes have been burned, and eight Sunni men were blindfolded and executed behind a school in 2015 without any official investigation. Even when operating as intended, the government faces the obstacle of a dearth of documentation among IDPs, which prevents IDPs from utilizing what services do exist. The Iraqi legislation (Resolution No. 36, 1994) guarantees and protects citizens’ right to their property, yet without any documentation verifying their right to their property, IDPs may be unable to reclaim their homes. Government policies that diverge from the priorities of IDPs exacerbate this problem. While the International Organization for Migration reports that 87 percent of IDPs experiencing extended displacement hope to integrate in the communities that they were displaced to, government policy offers better financial support for IDPs returning to their homes and de-registering as IDPs. Thus, due to its lack of financial means, collapsing social infrastructure, and improper policy priorities and implementation, the Iraqi government requires new policy options to adequately support its internally displaced population.

Internally Displaced Persons in Iraq, as of June 2015, demonstrating the scale of the internally displaced population Iraq is supporting while still in conflict. From the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center.

Syria: Unprecedented Scale

Governments accommodating the Syrian refugee population face a struggle that similarly diverges from those faced by Western governments, due to the enormity of the displaced population in need of assistance. Currently, more than half of Syrians are displaced. The displaced population consists of 6,300,000 IDPs within Syria and 5,500,000 refugees who fled the country. Of the refugee population, one million have applied for asylum in Europe, with the two largest host nations, Germany and Sweden, respectively receiving 300,000 and 100,000 applications for asylum. Yet, the number of refugees in Germany and Sweden combined is still less than the number of refugees hosted individually by Turkey, Lebanon, or Jordan.

Displacement in Syria began with a drought that lasted from 2006 to 2010. According to Francesca de Chatel in Middle Eastern Studies, “the government’s failure to respond to the ensuing humanitarian crisis…formed one of the triggers of the uprising, feeding a discontent that had long been simmering in rural areas.” Fifty years of poor water management combined with aggressive agricultural development efforts plunged the northeast region into poverty as groundwater reserves emptied. Syria suffered drought during almost half of those fifty years. This drought caused 800,000 people to lose their jobs, sparking widespread displacement. The drought also heightened the pressure on the central government and exacerbated pre-existing tensions. In 2011, civil war broke out after the Syrian public learned of the government’s torture of peaceful protesters and Syrian government forces responded to massive protests by laying siege to Dara’a. As opposition forces dissolved into hundreds of groups, the constantly shifting frontlines of battle displaced constantly growing segments of the local population. The civil conflict lengthened and was complicated by the emergence of Daesh and the fracturing of opposition forces. As a result, repeated displacements became commonplace, with some refugees forcefully displaced up to 25 times before they could finally find refuge. Due to the devastated social services and quickly depleted personal resources, displaced persons entered into a destructive pattern of cyclical displacement, forcing refugees to rely entirely on scarce international aid. Refugees are sheltered in woefully inadequate camps, where the International Displacement Monitoring Center reports that “fifty-seven per cent of collective centres do not have sufficient water, 50 per cent lack sufficient sanitation facilities, and 54 per cent are overcrowded.” Early in the conflict, restrictions prevented external humanitarian access. Even now, it is difficult to obtain reliable data due to intentional inaccuracies from Syrian authorities, contrasting figures from independent sources, and vast areas controlled by violent insurgents where data collection is impossible. This lack of reliable information is especially pronounced for the population of ar Raqqa, where military operations to liberate the city from Daesh control have recently concluded. The population of ar Raqqa, however, is in critical need of help. More than half of the city’s population was displaced and the majority of the city was destroyed by the relentless shelling of American and Syrian forces. The size and extent of conflict in Syria has created the largest humanitarian crisis of our time, with governments of the Global South supporting the majority of the refugees created by the conflict.

The Syrian refugee population in other countries of the region has tested government institutions within the Global South. An examination of these governments’ successes and failures to provide services is essential to recommending the best policy options for the future. In Jordan, official numbers report around 650,000 Syrian refugees reside. This number is likely incomplete, for King Abdullah II declared at the Plenary Session of the United Nations’ 70th General Assembly that Syrian refugees compose 20 percent of Jordan’s population. Syrian refugees in Jordan utilize health services at a high rate and, when combined with the number of refugees in the country, Jordan’s public health infrastructure is under dangerous duress. A survey by UNHCR found that 86.6 percent of families who needed health care in the month prior to their survey sought care. The high cost of these health services, however, inhibits some refugees from utilizing them. Further refugees are precluded from receiving the care they need after the government of Jordan responded to the heightened pressure on their health infrastructure by terminating free access to health services for refugees in 2014. The switch to subsidized health services in Jordan has contributed to the deterioration of the economic status of refugees in Jordan. This results from inadequate international support for the Jordanian government, for while supporting a refugee population that accounts for 20 percent of their population, the Jordanian government has footed the $53 million bill for refugee care, while only $5 million in support was provided by UN agencies. The congestion of health facilities became a source of social tension in Jordan, with 60 percent of Jordanians and 39 percent of Syrians reporting it as the main source of tensions between the groups. This overcrowding is exemplified by the situation in the Mafaq Government Hospital in close proximity to the Za’atari refugee camp, wherein of the 16 neonatal incubators, 12 are used by Syrian refugees, two are used by Jordanians, and the final two are used other foreign nationals. Such struggles make it clear that Jordan’s current policies are inadequate to support the large number of Syrian refugees within the nation.

In Lebanon, the situation of Syrian refugees is similarly fragile. Official numbers report 1 million Syrian refugees in the country, yet the number could be as high as 1.5 million. The small nation is struggling to support the refugee population it now hosts. The nation suffers from a marked decline in trade and tourism due to the Syrian conflict, with its national debt totaling 141 percent of GDP in 2013, and annual GDP growth plummeting from 10 percent in 2010 to 1 percent in 2014. Rent in the country skyrocketed due to limited supply and increased demand from the refugee population, causing a 44 percent increase in rent between 2012 and 2013. This increase in rent has proven catastrophic for both Syrian refugees and poor Lebanese. Within the refugee population, roughly one third do not have the proper documentation to stay in the country, and 92 percent are working on the black market, subject to exploitative underpay and devoid of state regulated labor protections. The Lebanese government uses the financial support it does receive “to directly provide immediate needs to the affected populations, contributing to their dependency and not using their inherent capacities,” according to scholars in the Risk Management and Health care Policy journal. This further prolongs the damaging circumstances for refugees by offering no mode of exit. By failing to offer opportunities for refugees to secure upward mobility, Lebanon’s policies fail to adequately address the problems refugees face.

In Turkey, close proximity and positive border policies have contributed to the formation of the largest Syrian refugee population, numbering approximately 3,250,000. The undocumented incorporation of Syrian laborers into the Turkish economy has forced refugees into chronic poverty, putting them in an acutely precarious position with ever decreasing means of returning home. Despite collaborative efforts by the Turkish government and the European Commission, Syrian refugees living in Turkey are not offered the capability to support themselves. The support provided by the European Neighborhood Policy intends to assuage migration into the European Union, but this results in international support operating on skewed priorities. There are efforts to house Syrian refugees within Turkey, yet there is a paucity of adequate efforts to legitimately integrate these refugees into the Turkish economy.

Information insecurity is widespread throughout the Syrian refugee populations in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. The International Red Crescent administers a phone calling program in refugee camps that it operates in, allowing refugees a three minute call home every two weeks, but these services are underutilized due to the necessity of NGO supervision and the limitations imposed on topic of conversation. Refugees thus resort to alternative practices to mitigate their informational insecurity, such as calling home on private cellphones to verify any information from news sources. Problematically, practices such as this incur new costs for refugees, such as the need for a SIM card from the country they are residing in as well as one from Syria, and payments to marketplace vendors to charge their phone or download an app. The lack of reliable sources of information for refugees forces them to expend limited financial resource.

In summation, the Syrian refugee community demonstrates concerning signs of chronic poverty due to their protracted displacement. Endemic indebtedness and asset selling signifies decreasing welfare and inhibits long-term self-reliance. Given the overtaxed governments of the Global South’s dearth of fiscal means, policies priorities must be developed to enable limited government resources to better support the Syrian refugee community, so that refugees are not compelled to engage in activities such as under the table labor to offset medical and housing expenses.

Statistics demonstrating the immense scale of the Syrian refugee population. From the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The Rohingya: Little Hope to Return Home

The government of Bangladesh faces a unique challenge as it struggles to support the displaced Rohingya population of Myanmar, given this population’s diminished possibility of ever returning to their homes in Myanmar. Myanmar is 90 percent Buddhist, with small Muslim and Christian minority populations numbering roughly 4 percent each. The majority of the Muslim Rohingya minority community resides in the northern Rakhine State of Myanmar, yet they are the subjects of a targeted, intentional displacement campaign by Burmese authorities. This state is one of the poorest and least literate in the country, with the Rohingya Muslim community therein facing institutionalized discrimination such as restricted movement and limited access to education.

The state justifies its discrimination against the Rohingya community by propagating the false narrative that the Rohingya are illegal immigrants from the Myanmar’s majority Muslim neighbor, Bangladesh. Since the 1990s, extremist and ultra-nationalists Buddhist organizations, such as the Organization for the Protection of Race (MaBaTha), have spread hateful propaganda against the Rohingya and the Muslim community in Myanmar as a whole. These groups portray the Rohingya as a “threat to race and religion” who threaten to destroy the Burmese “Buddhist state.” Even politicians in Myanmar have mobilized hate against the Rohingya population to garner support, with one politician in 2015 calling for his cheering crowd to “kill and bury” all Rohingya.

The greatest threat to the Rohingya population of Myanmar is the government enacted displacement campaign that UN Human Rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein has called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” Government forces, primarily the military (known as the Tatmadaw) and the Border Guard Police Force of Myanmar (BGP), have undertaken extensive “area clearing operations,” which became especially egregious following attacks perpetrated by Rohingya militants’ on security forces on August 25, 2017, which killed 12 members of the security forces. These forced displacements are undertaken on the premise that the Rohingya villagers are hiding or supporting members of the Rohingya Solidarity Organization, a small rebel group that has fought for Rohingya rights since the 1980s. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reports that local Buddhist villagers have been given military uniforms and armaments to assist in the brutal forceful displacement of Rohingya Villagers. It is also common place for local Buddhist Rakhine villagers to participate in the looting of villages, as well as the beating and sexual assault of Rohingya villagers. It is hypothesized that these civilians are a part of the Burmese “969 movement” which opposes the expansion of Islam into Myanmar. As a result of such forced displacement efforts, more than 1,200,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh, paying smugglers and boatmen exorbitant fees, or holding on to plastic gasoline containers and attempting to float across the border if they cannot afford the price of a boat. These refugees have been subjected to some of the most heinous violations of human rights and dignity of our time at the hands policies officially sanctioned by the Government of Myanmar.

The actions taken by the Tatmadaw and BGP to forcefully displace the Rohingya population make it clear that the Rohingya population’s return to Myanmar is impossible without total regime change. The Tatmadaw locks down villages prior to clearing them, preventing villagers from leaving for up to ten days, thus closing off all access to food and forcing the local population into starvation. Once the actual clearing is underway, the atrocities escalate. Men are killed indiscriminately, beaten, and shot at close range. Grenades and random gunfire are used to torment the local population, and helicopters are often used to drop grenades and fire on civilians. Rohingya refugees report the military using long butchering knives to cut the throats of elderly relatives attempting to flee. Widespread reports tell of houses set on fire with families still inside of them, villagers pushed back into burning houses, and grass set alight around Rohingya villagers who have been beaten.  Rocket propelled grenade launchers are widely used to set homes on fire. Social and religious leaders have been the targets of forced disappearances, and are suspected to have been killed. Children are similarly attacked, with reports of babies being stabbed to death with knives and newborn children being stomped to death with heavy military boots. One woman recounts how her baby was torn from her arms and thrown into a fire, after which she and her two sisters were raped, with her two sisters murdered and her mother and 10-year-old brother shot. The majority of women interviewed in an OHCHR report experienced sexual violence, with instances of gang rape being reported by the majority of the victims. The women and girls who are the victims of such sexual violence do not have access to medical services in the northern Rakhine State, due to a dearth of doctors, high health care costs, and the social stigma tied to the sexual violence they have experienced. The material situation of the Rohingya population is being intentionally, irreparably eroded by government forces. Elderly members of the population report being beaten and then forced to give their personal belongings to Buddhist Rakhine villagers. In locked-down areas, schools and mosques are occupied by security forces. Food and cooking utensils such as pots and pans are destroyed, and livestock is killed to destroy potential food sources for any surviving villagers. Religious violence, such as the forced shaving and burning of the beards of religious leaders, is prevalent. Holy Qurans have been desecrated and burnt in public spaces. Women and girls have been deliberately raped inside of mosques. The intentionality of the government of Myanmar is clear, given that humanitarian aid is banned inside the Rakhine state. These atrocities are perpetrated before the Rohingya population leaves their own borders, which is exceedingly difficult to do as the journey to Bangladesh costs roughly $120 and a significant portion of the local population lives on less than $1 per day. These numerous atrocities leave the Rohingya population a nearly stateless people, compounding the difficulties for the large Rohingya refugee community living in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh faces a challenge that differs from those faced by most Western nations, for the refugee population it is accommodating is unlikely to ever return home. Thus, in addition to supporting the refugee population, Bangladesh must develop a plan for the Rohingya population’s future in the nation. The Burmese Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement Minister cited the nation’s Natural Disaster Management Law to argue that any burnt land becomes the government’s land, thus robbing Rohingya refugees whose homes were burned by the Tatmadaw and BGP of their property in Myanmar. Official figures from the government of Myanmar report that of the nation’s 471 Muslim villages, 176 have been entirely vacated, with more than 7,000 homes burned down. The Rohingya forcefully displaced by these actions walk up to 14 days to reach Bangladesh, and the sanctuary they find there is piecemeal. The government of Bangladesh relies heavily on the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to support the Rohingya refugee population, with the Bangladeshi Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commission providing derisory support such as basic first aid and water stations for new arrivals. The Rohingya refugees fleeing to Bangladesh arrive in Cox’s Bazar, which is one of Bangladesh’s poorest districts, with 33 percent of the population living beneath the poverty line. The refugees fleeing violence following the August 25th incident often bring few possessions with them, and exhaust what savings they do have to travel to Bangladesh and construct rudimentary shelters made of bamboo and thin plastic once they arrive. This forces Rohingya refugees that have recently arrived in Bangladesh to rely exclusively on government and humanitarian aid for subsistence. Already strained prior to August 25th, institutional support in Bangladesh fails to keep pace with the rapidly growing Rohingya refugee population following the Tatmadaw’s intensified village clearing operations. The majority of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh live in makeshift settlements and spontaneous settlements, such as sprawling tent cities. This lack of adequate accommodations is a self-perpetuating problems, for the vast makeshift communities are not conducive to developing infrastructure, such as clean water and food distribution sites. While new refugee sites are constantly being planned to accommodate the influx, refugees arrive to new sites before any humanitarian support infrastructure is established, and a critical lack of roads within these new sites inhibits the construction of such infrastructure.  Refugees react to the lack of clean water and sanitation facilities by resorting to drinking stagnant water from nearby paddy fields. Humanitarian interventions primarily target refugee camps and makeshift communities, yet the United Nations Development Programme reports that before August 25th, 76 percent of refugees in camps and makeshift communities had no access to clean drinking water. This number rises to 92 percent in host communities, due to the lack of humanitarian assistance. Such precarious conditions leave the population severely vulnerable to a diarrheal epidemic. A lack of space for health and sanitation facilities in makeshift settlements is an acute problem. Women and girls among the Rohingya refugees, who constitute 65 percent of all new arrivals following August 25th, are especially vulnerable. The lack of sanitation facilities forces many refugees to bathe and defecate in the open. This causes women and girls to combat the lack of proper sanitation facilities by limiting the amount they eat and drink, and by rarely leaving shelters during their menstrual cycles in order to preserve their privacy. Children represent a large portion of the refugee population, and more than 400,000 Rohingya children do not have access to education. Child labor is becoming more prevalent due to the dire conditions refugees face. Such insufficient accommodations clearly demonstrates that the Rohingya population in Bangladesh requires more proficient aid efforts.

International aid works to offset the duress that the government of Bangladesh is subjected to, yet such efforts are not entirely successful. Aid is constrained by the lengthy process that obtaining approval for humanitarian projects entails. The government of Bangladesh is inundated with project approval (FD-7) requests, and does not have the capacity to respond to them quickly enough. More than 80,000 refugees did not receive their full food rations due to this lengthy and time-consuming application process. In October, 2017, twice as many government counterparts applying to provide water, sanitation, and hygiene resources awaited clearance paperwork than received it. The United Nation’s priorities include the installation of shelter, water, and sanitation facilities, such as well and latrines. The United Nations also hopes to strengthen the capacities of local communities, but aiding local communities in accommodating refugees is not synonymous with providing refugees the means to succeed within such communities. Both the United Nations and the government of Bangladesh foresee the repatriation of Rohingya refugees as the solution to the crisis. Yet while the United Nations Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, Mr. Volker Türk, discussed facilitating the voluntary and sustainable repatriation of refugees with state officials in Myanmar, the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network reports that there is “a growing realization that repatriation is unlikely in the short-term.” The government of Bangladesh and international nongovernmental organizations must recognize that the Rohingya population’s stay in Bangladesh is unlikely to be brief, and develop policy options that respond accordingly.

Bangladesh’s infrastructure is subjected to such strain because Rohingya refugees have few options but to relocate to Bangladesh. Other neighboring nations in the Global South, such as Thailand, have enacted policies mandating that the boats of Rohingya refugees be pushed back away from their shores, fearing that they could not handle an influx of refugees. Thai efforts to eliminate people-smuggling have also created further problems for Rohingya refugees, for smugglers now abandon boatloads of people at sea. Even if the Rohingya in Bangladesh desired to return to Myanmar, security forces have laid landmines along the border to Bangladesh, inhibiting the return of refugees. Within Myanmar, the displaced population is not supported, but instead imprisoned. The official government spokesperson Zaw Htay expounds that the camps where the displaced Rohingya reside are actually “for Bengalis,” thus supporting the government narrative that all Rohingya in Myanmar are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. The camps in the Rakhine State are far from adequate refugee camps, likened to “open-air prisons” by commentators as they are little more than areas surrounded by barbed wire and security forces to confine the detainees. The government of Myanmar’s rejection of aid agencies prevents any support that might allow the refugee population to regain self-sufficiency, demonstrating that it has no intention of ever allowing a Rohingya population in the country again. While refugees’ stays in Western nations are often confined to the duration of conflicts in their nations of origin, the Rohingya population’s eventual withdrawal from states in the Global South such as Bangladesh is unlikely. Efforts that allow Rohingya to succeed in their new communities must be planned in response.

A small sample of the total number of Rohingya villages destroyed by government forces in Myanmar, demonstrating the implausibility of Rohingya repatriation. From the Myanmar Information Management Unit.

Policy Discussion

There are clear disparities in the challenges faced by governments in the Global North and Global South when supporting refugee populations, thus necessitating the advancement of new policy priorities for governments of the Global South. Raphi Rechitsky of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies elucidates that governments of the Global North often invoke policies that deter refugees from reaching their borders and therefore confine refugees to the Global South. This puts governments of the Global South under increased strain when attempting to accommodate the refugee populations they host with already limited resources. The divide is most prominent when comparing the singular $850 initial cash payment that the Iraqi government gives to each internally displaced family to the more than €5,000 euros that refugees can receive in Germany over the course of 15 months. While refugees living in Jordan combat information insecurity by paying market vendors to charge their mobile phones, the ‘taschengeld’ given to refugees in Germany can be used to pay for mobile phone services. Feasible policy options must be developed for governments of the Global South such as Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Bangladesh that currently support significant refugee populations. If these governments solely focus on providing for the immediate needs of refugees without providing means of status improvement, the cycle of poverty is perpetuated. Successful refugee support in the Global South requires identifying clearly delineated and achievable policy goals so that governments can focus their limited capabilities where they will be most impactful.

One of these crucial policy goals for supporting refugees in the Global South is providing opportunities for upward mobility. This is attainable through a commitment to education, labor market integration, and cash assistance programs.

Education is crucial to giving refugees opportunities to find employment in the local economy of their host country, as well as providing better opportunities for voluntary repatriation in the future. Education also can help mitigate the effects of displacement on refugee children, providing an increased likelihood of stability in their countries of origin after repatriation. The Sri Lankan refugee population living in India has found exceptional success after they lobbied the Indian government to allow them to attend public schooling even without documentation from their schools at home. The Sri Lankan refugees also organized their own higher education and vocational schooling programs. The upwards mobility that this schooling provides helps to allow refugees to overcome the psychological ramification of their protracted displacement. One key component of such upward mobility is offering education in the local language of refugees’ host nations. Proficiency in the local language drastically improves refugees’ labor market access, allowing them to better provide for themselves in the long term. Education also alleviates the burden on local governments by enabling upward mobility, combatting both the material and psychological ramifications of forced displacement.

Another key component of upwards mobility is local labor market integration. Compensating for the situation of refugees by providing work permits at a low cost and with a decreased amount of required documentation allows refugees to begin to work and provide for themselves, further reducing the strain on government support institutions. Relaxed regulations on refugees entering the labor market has positive effects for refugees by providing a source of income and workplace protections, and for the local economies by taking advantage of the proficiencies that refugees bring with them.

Prioritizing cash assistance programs enable an increased concentration on the needs of each individual refugee. In Lebanon, each dollar of cash assistance spent by Syrian refugees resulted in $2.13 created in the local economy. When combined with access to bank accounts, cash assistance provides greatly increased stability in the lives of refugees. Paul Spiegel of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees writes that “cash assistance has the potential to transform aid effectiveness, support local economies, improve relations between refugee and host communities, and provide more choice and dignity.” In isolation, cash assistance programs only succeed in reducing the risk of poverty for refugees, but do not eliminate the risk of poverty in the future. When combined with other enablers of upward mobility, however, cash assistance can make a difference. Education, labor market integration, and cash assistance programs are all components of a broader prioritization of enabling refugees’ upward mobility that should be a focus of governments in the Global South.

Creating sustainable health care systems is the second policy goal necessary for governments of the Global South supporting refugee populations. The eroding capabilities of states’ health infrastructures poses an acute risk to human security. A widespread respect for refugees’ right to health is critical to protecting human security, which includes actively removing barriers to refugees’ health care access, such as cost. Instead of adhering to a single parallel program of health services, nations of the Global South must prioritize developing migrant sensitive health services. Migrant sensitive health services entail accounting for the unique health needs of the disparate refugee populations that nations accommodate. Even in areas still embroiled in conflict, where state governments have little capacity to support their internally displaced populations, humanitarian and government efforts are best served by identifying populations’ precise needs. This allows the resources mobilized to create the largest impact possible. Adequately adapting existing health services to the needs of specific populations necessitates broader public health assessments. Thereby, services offered align with the needs of the populations that they are serving. Health care can also provide a form of cursory documentation that can be key to allowing refugees to utilize greater segments of the services available. While Syrian refugees utilize health services at high rates, it must be destigmatized for the victims of sexual violence within the Rohingya refugee population. If differences in health seeking are identified by public health assessments, services that specifically accounting for such differences can be offered. Such services may include offering intercultural mediation and building health literacy. Initial health screenings are often lauded as essential to refugee health, yet the epidemiological vulnerability of populations must first be accounted for. If populations are sufficiently vaccinated and at low risk of communicable disease, resources used for health screenings are better spent improving living conditions. While Jordan’s initial health screenings of Syrian refugees diagnosed Tuberculosis at an incredibly high success rate before the disease could spread to larger segments of the population, health services must not be limited to health assessments. Such health screenings are key to reducing the strain on local health institutions in populations at specific risk of communicable diseases, yet health care must go beyond initial screenings by offer treatment for diseases and injuries identified in such screenings. The emphasis on initial health screenings dominates discussions of refugee health, problematically enabling governments to lackadaisically attend to refugee health needs by singularly providing such screenings. Wider public health assessments allowing for the more educated coordination of humanitarian actors, preventing oversights that result from an ad hoc approach to refugee health care. When screenings are necessary, they must holistically address the needs of refugee communities, including providing psychosocial services and care for noncommunicable diseases. Expending resources to improve refugees’ living conditions can dramatically reduce the strain on health care systems in the Global South, for a lack of clean drinking water and adequate shelter in refugee accommodations are notable sources of refugees’ health instability. Creating health care systems that can endure the strain of large refugee populations and protracted displacements must be a specific policy goal for governments of the Global South, and is achievable by assessing the unique needs of refugee communities and preventing the causes of health insecurity.

Finally, government leaders in the Global South must create sufficient institutional support for refugees in the key areas of combatting human trafficking, providing reliable information systems and forms of documentation, and providing support for voluntary repatriation.

One key areas of institutional support is the fight against human smuggling, although policy responses must be carefully designed so that they do not exacerbate problems for refugees. Often, victims of human trafficking who have been forced into sex-work are deported back to their countries of origin. As previously discussed, current initiatives fail to protect the refugee populations exploited by trafficking networks. Instead of focusing on the results of human trafficking such as sex work, law enforcement agencies must focus on preventing the networks that force refugees into this situation in the first place. Furthermore, corruption must be combatted, for reports of police warning community leaders before raids and traffickers bribing police illustrate the threat that corruption poses to anti-trafficking efforts. Within legal structures, policies that stratify the victims of human trafficking into separate categories can result in institutions only focusing on the victims whose situation they deem more egregious, resulting in institutions overlooking victims of labor trafficking in favor of aiding the victims of sex trafficking. The rights of all victims must be prioritized, including efforts to protect victims’ identities, and the provision of additional support to victims post liberation. One major component of preventing human trafficking is educating refugees and government agents alike on the rights that are endowed to refugees.

The institutional support of refugees also entails maintaining reliable information systems. Refugees in poverty should not be forced to expend what little financial resources they have to obtain reliable information through expensive phone calls home or hard-to-find internet access. In addition, the majority of refugees lack official documentation verifying their identity, education level, employment history, and even country of origin. Governments of the Global South must prioritize providing such documentation to refugees so that they are not precluded from accessing the services available to them. Such documentation is also key to enabling entrance to the local labor market, which promotes self-sufficiency within refugee populations. Where possible, governments of the Global South must also mobilize legal aid to give refugees adequate asylum support. Without achieving the administrative classification of "refugee status," refugees are left open to deportation, prevented from working, and may even be inhibited from accessing health care services.

Once conflicts pacify in refugees’ countries of origin, repatriation support must be offered for refugees who choose voluntary repatriation. While refugees’ intent to repatriate is debated, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees reports that “Voluntary repatriation…is the solution of choice for a vast majority of refugees.” Indeed, between 19998 and 2008 fourteen times as many refugees chose repatriation over permanent resettlement in their host countries. The United Nations designates four key areas of focus necessary to ensuring repatriation success, including physical safety, legal safety, material safety, and reconciliation. The word “voluntary” is crucial to successful repatriation, and to make a fully informed and uncoerced choice, refugees require information on their home countries, legal aid, and peace and reconciliation efforts in their home countries. The choice to repatriate must be fully agentive. In the past, Bangladesh has avoided accusations of refoulment, or forcefully returning refugees to their countries of origin, by withdrawing food rations from refugees, thereby replacing their agency to choose to repatriate with necessity.  Successful repatriation support further entails ensuring a source of livelihood through labor market access in refugees’ country of return, as often their home governments provide little support. Governments must also ensure that refugees can attain equal citizenship status in their home countries, with respect to the differences between their culture and the predominant culture in their home nations. The protection of refugee rights, provision of reliable information systems and adequate documentation, and attention given to asylum and repatriation support can all work to minimize the strain on governments of the Global South.

Conclusion

As has been argued, the governments of the Global South face challenges that can confound even Western governments. These challenges are exacerbated by the fact that 86 percent of refugees and 99 percent of internally displaced persons remain within the Global South. This dichotomy between challenge and resources necessitates the creation of policy goals that appropriately respond to the struggles that governments of the Global South face in supporting their refugee populations. Iraq is supporting a vast internally displaced population while simultaneously rebuilding state institutions and combatting active conflict. The governments of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey are supporting the largest refugee population in the world, with a Syrian refugee population numbering upwards of five million. Bangladesh must prepare to accommodate the Rohingya refugee population that is unlikely to ever return to Myanmar. To successfully support these and other refugee populations in the Global South, local governments must focus their efforts on providing means of upward mobility, sustainable health care services, and institutional support in critical areas. By adopting these clear policy goals, governments in the Global South will be able to utilize their limited resources where they will be most effective, thereby creating the greatest positive effect for the refugee populations that they support.

Kyrgyzstan’s Electoral Dilemma

Between Kyrgyzstan declaring its independence in 1991 and 2016, the Central Asian republic has had three presidents. However, only one was elected into office. The following two were installed as part of a transition government following the First and Second Tulip Revolution in 2005 and 2010, respectively. The First Tulip Revolution was over fixed, disputed election results. It resulted in a transition government led by the opposition party’s leader Kurmanbek Bakiyev. Yet just five years later, the Kyrgyz people became fed up with Bakiyev’s complacency with government corruption, nepotism, and stagnation with opposition parties. He was continuing many of the same practices as that of his predecessor, causing discontent among the Kyrgyz public. Protesters stormed government buildings throughout southern Kyrgyzstan and a few days later, the Presidential Palace in the country’s capital Bishkek. The First Tulip Revolution was bloodless, while the Second left between 40 and 100 dead. It set a precedent for the former Soviet republic that only revolution could create change. Democracy was a dream that had yet to be realized.

The democratic dream gained some breath this past October in Kyrgyzstan’s first competitive elections since its independence. Almazbek Atambayev was succeeded by Sooronbay Jeenbekov in the country’s first peaceful transition of power. Jeenbekov is the former prime minister of Kyrgyzstan, having served from April 2016 to August 2017, when he was nominated by the ruling Social Democrat Party to run as their presidential candidate. His main rival was Omurek Babanov, a millionaire businessman-turned-politician who leads the Respublika opposition party who also served as prime minister from December 2011 to September 2012. They were joined on the campaign trail by nine other candidates – including one woman. Jeenbekov relied on his close relations with Atambayev, who personally endorsed him. The president-elect vowed on the trail to continue the policies pursued by Atambayev. Babanov, meanwhile, promised “a crackdown on corruption, constitutional reform to reintroduce presidential rule, and more effective foreign policy.” In a turnout of 56%, Jeenbekov received 54% of the casted votes, thereby making a runoff election with Babanov unnecessary. However, not all are completely satisfied with the election results. The October elections were a success in that they created a peaceful transition of power from one president to another, although Kyrgyzstan has much to work on to become a full-fledged, liberal democracy.

In the run-up to the election, the campaign trails encountered several snags that worried voters and international observers over the legitimacy and peacefulness of the elections. Yet international observers including the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) noted instances of abuse of public resources, pressure on voters, and vote buying in the weeks and months leading up to the election. The OSCE also wrote in the same report how registration laws to run for president “provide overly broad grounds for candidate deregistration, despite previous OSCE/ODIHR recommendations.” The OSCE additionally concurred with “concerns, noting that while technical aspects were ‘well-administered,’ and that candidates could campaign freely, public resources were misused in the run-up to the election.” In other words, while all candidates were able to freely advertise their campaign without censorship, teachers and government officials were forced to support Jeenbekov. Lastly, Kyrgyz citizens living abroad were denied the right to vote – omitting thousands of voters. Thus, while Kyrgyzstan has set itself apart from its more authoritarian neighbors, the country’s electoral system has many flaws that need to be improved.

The situation became even tenser after Babanov, who once resided in Kazakhstan, met in September with Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev. During the meeting, Babanov mentioned that the Kyrgyz people “appreciate and support the peacemaking efforts” of President Nazarbayev. By painting Nazarbayev as the hero, Babanov simultaneously showed himself as the representative of Kyrgyzstan and outmaneuvered the sitting president Almazbek Atambayev. In other words, Babanov began acting as president before being elected. President Atambayev railed against him and “publicly deplored the alleged Kazakh meddling in Kyrgyz internal affairs, pointing to the Kazakh government’s control.” The blunder dealt a political deathblow to Babanov’s campaign and sparked a standoff between the two Central Asian states. After Atambayev’s remarks, Kazakhstan on October 10 reintroduced border controls and customs checks to Kyrgyzstan and partially suspended the import of dairy products, which was then followed by the Kyrgyz parliament voting “to rescind an agreement to receive $100 million from Kazakhstan…. It is an ‘own goal’ of epic proportions.” The move is likely only going to hurt Kyrgyzstan more than Kazakhstan. The former desperately needs to grow its domestic industry and economy, which would have been aided by Kazakhstan’s aid. Currently Kyrgyzstan is one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world (30% of the GDP in 2016, estimated at 37.1% for 2017). Bishkek joined the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) in 2015 as a way to integrate its economy with those of its more developed neighbors. However, this standoff with Kazakhstan has raised questions over Kyrgyzstan’s future with the EEU. That being said, since its citizens are so dependent on foreign income, the chances of Bishkek leaving is minimal. Nonetheless, Radio Free Europe writes how this dispute highlights “the weakness of the Russian- and Kazakh-led [EEU].”

        On October 15, Election Day finally arrived. Polls opened and closed with few problems reported across the country. The Diplomat reports, “The election itself proceeded peacefully in most localities except Osh, the second-largest city in the country, and Jeenbekov’s home region. Here, it was marred by allegations of ballot destruction, intimidation, and violence towards reporters.” Jeenbekov began his political career in Osh, which raises question if there is any significance in this correlation. However, there is no information as to why only Osh experienced these issues. Nonetheless, they were not enough to warrant the elections invalid. Babanov accepted the results at a press conference where he said, “The people have made their choice,” but also adding, “State television channels were used to pour dirt on us. There was a black PR [campaign] against us. Our campaign activists were abused; they did not know whom to turn to as law enforcement was also one-sided.” While Babanov’s backhanded concession speech was just a small part of a brutal election campaign, the Kyrgyz election has its merits. Of the five Central Asian states that were once part of the Soviet Union, this marks the first peaceful transition of power from one president to another through the form of an election. Artur Gerasymov, Head of the OSCE delegation observing the elections, called the election “an important benchmark for the Kyrgyz Republic…. I hope that the positive developments we have seen will serve as the basis for a consolidation of democracy in this country and in the region.” That being said, Jeenbakov has his work cut out for him. His country’s GDP has shrunk by 12% in the past three years and is now in a diplomatic spat with neighboring Kazakhstan. Furthermore, with a turnout of 56%, only about three in ten Kyrgyz voted for Jeenbekov. Considering that Babanov was backed by a third of the electorate, Jeenbekov is walking a tightrope.

The October elections were a success in that they created a peaceful transition of power from one president to another. However, Kyrgyzstan has much to work on to become a full-fledged, liberal democracy. The elections were fraught with misuse of public resources, reports of voter intimidation, vote buying, and alleged media bias towards Jeenbekov. However, this election marks the first peaceful transition of power in Central Asia among the five former Soviet republics. The run-up to the election caused tensions to spark between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan over presidential candidate Babanov’s meeting with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, triggering a string of events that have entrenched the two republics in a diplomatic spat. President Jeenbekov has a wide range of issues to fix with high expectations set on him by the electorate. Only time will tell if the democratic dream in Central Asia will remain an idea or manifest itself into a free, fair, sustainable form of governance.

Under Pressure: Resource Scarcity and The Specter of Radicalization in Central Asia

The issue of Islamist terrorism in Central Asia has gained international attention recently, with the news that the main suspect in the October 31st terrorist attack in New York City, Sayfullo Saipov, was originally from Uzbekistan. Many accounts of why and how Central Asians have become radicalized by the Islamic State focus on repressive governments and a lack of religious freedom throughout the region. Dissatisfaction with social and political conditions is a motivating factor with regards to extremism, but extremism is not as rampant in Central Asia, and Uzbekistan specifically, as recent coverage would suggest. In fact, most Central Asian perpetrators of terrorist acts were radicalized after they left the region. Saipov himself was radicalized in the United States. The few attacks committed by Uzbeks over the past few years have more “lone wolf” characteristics than indications of a greater hotbed of terrorist activity. An issue that is often left unexamined can explain more about why some Central Asians who leave the region turn to extremism. Resource scarcity, especially scarcity of already limited water resources, has the potential to exacerbate existing identity-based conflicts and overburden the capacity of Central Asian governments to effectively deal with those conflicts. A significant problem in its own right, scarcity also creates conditions that can lead to radicalization.

The best place to examine this phenomenon is in the Fergana Valley. Fergana has been a flashpoint for ethnic conflict since the area was divided between Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan under the Soviet Union. Although the twisted borders that trisect the valley seem senseless, they were carefully designed to prevent the rise of a viable political challenger to Moscow in Central Asia. Because borders between Soviet republics under centralized administrative control did not hinder freedom of movement, the consequences of this decision would not be fully realized until the fall of the Soviet Union.

After the five former Central Asian Soviet Socialist Republics gained independence in 1991, the rambling Fergana borders took on a new and troublesome significance. Reinforced by nascent nationalism, travel between countries was restricted and arbitrary demarcations were rigidly enforced. The Fergana Valley holds some of Uzbekistan’s most fertile agricultural land as well as a disproportionate percentage of its population— 26.9 percent to 4.3 percent of the country’s total land area. Uzbekistan relies heavily on its Fergana-based cotton industry and is one of the top cotton-producing countries globally. During the Soviet era, the limited water sources that irrigated the valley and its fields were managed under a large-scale resource sharing system.

Water-sharing under the Soviet Union was essentially a barter system. Central Asia’s two largest rivers, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, originate in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and then flow parallel to each other across the steppe. Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan are located downstream and rely on the upstream countries to store water in dams for release in the spring and summer months. In exchange for the ability to irrigate their crops, the downstream countries provided Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan with electricity, coal, and other thermal resources. With Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan lacking surplus electricity midway through the 1990s, the arrangement collapsed a few short years after the end of Soviet rule.

Now, absent a unified water management system, even one geared towards maximizing water-intensive cotton production, tensions between upstream and downstream countries have grown. Uzbekistan has opposed Tajikistan’s construction of the Rogun Dam on a major tributary of the Amu Darya since the plan’s inception. The late Uzbek President Islam Karimov declared on multiple occasions that Rogun, as well as Kyrgyzstan’s proposed Kambarata-I Dam on the Naryn River, could lead to war in Central Asia. Turkmenistan’s fancifully named “Golden Age Lake” project has drawn further ire as the immense amount of water needed to complete the artificial lake may require Turkmenistan to siphon water from the Syr Darya. There are also fears that Golden Age Lake will evaporate soon after being filled, recalling the predicament of the Aral Sea which has shrunk by 90 percent in the past half-century. The Kerkidan reservoir, once shared by Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, is little more than a puddle. In Central Asia, as in the rest of the world, control of water means greater economic prosperity and security. Uzbekistan finds itself in the precarious position of supporting a vast and costly cotton industry while neighboring states pull from its already strained water supply.

Compounding this budding crisis are astounding population projections for Central Asia. Although most post-Soviet states are facing dismal population declines, all five Central Asian countries will see varying degrees of growth. Between 2015 and 2100, the United Nations predicts that Tajikistan will have a population growth of 119 percent, followed by Kyrgyzstan with a projected growth of 52 percent. Uzbekistan is the only Fergana Valley state that will not see growth in the double digits, but the overall population boom slated for the valley is significant enough to cause concern. A declining population creates challenges, but an enormous population increase in an already fraught region comes with its own set of problems, including placing a further burden on the availability of land and water.

Migrant labor has always been a safety valve for the pressures of overpopulation and unemployment. Congruent with this fact, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan all receive the equivalent of billions of dollars in remittances from migrant workers. As of 2016, some 20 percent of the labor force of Uzbekistan works in Russia, Kazakhstan, or a Western country. However, in the last few years, Russia has mandated that workers from non-member nations of the Eurasian Economic Union, including Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, are no longer allowed to enter Russia without an international passport. This is part of a Russian effort to put pressure on states that have not yet joined the Union. Since Russia is a primary destination for migrant workers, the new visa regime delivered a hard blow to economies and unemployment rates in Central Asia. In his testimony during a 2015 Helsinki Commission hearing on “The Escalating Threat of ISIL in Central Asia,” Daniel Rosenblum, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Central Asia at the U.S. State Department, clarified the link between migrant labor and radicalization. Lacking the supportive family and community structures of home and facing discrimination and isolation in Russia, Central Asian laborers are extremely susceptible to the tactics of extremist recruiters.

As Thomas Homer-Dixon emphasizes in his book Environment, Scarcity, and Violence, environmental scarcity is not a sufficient motivator of violence on its own, but it can be powerful when combined with specific social and political factors. In the Fergana Valley, existing ethnic tensions cause disputes over land and water to escalate into violent conflict. The 1990 Osh Riots erupted over a plot of farmland in the Fergana Valley claimed by both the Kyrgyz majority and Uzbek minority. Almost exactly twenty years later, the 2010 South Kyrgyzstan Riots saw violence explode after the ousting of former Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev. Many Uzbeks living in Kyrgyz regions of the valley have since turned to migrant labor in Russia to escape discrimination from Kyrgyz authorities. Osh is now one of the largest sources of Uzbek Islamic State fighters in Central Asia.

There’s an unwise tendency in the aftermath of a terrorist attack to generalize about the perpetrator or perpetrators. However, this reaction should not come at the expense of an entire group of people, or an entire region of the world. U.S.-Uzbekistan relations are currently stronger and more open than they have been in decades as a result of the efforts of new President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. Another hopeful development has been the new Uzbek administration’s position on the Rogun Dam issue. As Tajikistan restarted construction in the wake of former President Karimov’s death, Uzbekistan remained silent on what was once a possible path to war. This symbolic inaction may pave the way for future water-sharing agreements, or possibly a reworking of the old Soviet system to suit a more modern economy. A stable economy and more employment for a growing population can reduce the need for migrant labor and in turn reduce the opportunity for radicalization. But more importantly, eliminating the economic instability and resource insecurity that is an ever-present danger in Central Asia will create opportunities for the region to be known for more than the actions of a few individuals. Uzbekistan faces many issues, but the Islamic State is not chief among them.

Russia and Euro-Atlantic Security: Twenty-Six Years at the Doorstep of the European Order

The convoluted forces behind any country’s foreign policy are often hard to speculate about. However, some states and their international endeavors, are more perplexing than others. For many years, Russia has been an especially puzzling case both for theorists and practitioners of international relations, especially in the West. Forewarning the complications anyone inquiring about Russia’s intents will face, Winston Churchill famously remarked back in 1939 that this country is a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” More than seventy years later, the European Union and the United States are still forced to busy itself with trying to discover the key to the Russian foreign policy riddle. The existing consensus among scholars, analysts, and policymakers in this guessing game is that Vladimir Putin’s aggressive land-grabbing and zero-sum politics are the sole reasons behind hostility between Russia and the West. However, scant attention has been paid to the role of the West itself in engendering this animosity. The U.S. and EU have been contributing — whether unwittingly, recklessly, or deliberately — to the debilitation of Russia’s ability to trust and therefore cooperate with them. While analysts are bemoaning their hopes that Moscow will eventually accommodate itself to be a partner in upholding the European and Euro-Atlantic security, they avoid discussing the lack of honest efforts to assist Russia in becoming a part of the post-Cold War regional and transatlantic arrangements.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia found itself at the periphery of a bloc created by its adversaries. Despite proclaiming their intentions to include Moscow in the emerging European order, Western powers deliberately left it outside of European institutions. The norms that began governing the region after the end of the Cold War were mere extensions of the rules devised during the Cold War era by and for the countries who were historical rivals with Russia. In her 2009 book, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, Mary Elise Sarotte reveals that U.S. and European diplomats were very conscious in their choice to adopt the institutions inherited from the Cold War and to reject or ignore other options in the process. By denying Russia the opportunity to contribute to designing the rules it was nevertheless obliged to abide by, Western leaders made the first step on the long road to alienating Moscow and creating an environment susceptible to uncertainty, hostility, and insecurity that now characterize its relationship with the West and fuel Russian great-power revisionism. In the early 1990s, Russia was pushing to transform the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe — the first truly pan-European institution with a comprehensive membership — into the central pillar of the new European order. Americans and Europeans, however, refused to give the OSCE more importance out of the fear that it might start competing with NATO and the EU and weaken U.S. domination of the regional security arrangements. Moreover, even though Russia was able to join the Council on Europe, G7, and WTO, none of them was as essential to the new security order as NATO and EU. Western leaders were so preoccupied with preserving their newly acquired hegemony on the global arena that they failed ensure Russia is effectively bound to the emerging institutions and has an interest in the success of regional security arrangements. More than two decades later, the costly consequences of these mistakes are one of the important ingredients that make up what some call a “state of Hobbesian anarchy and fear” of the Euro-Atlantic security system. Russia is now uninterested not only in being European but in playing by the European rules, the disregard for which it has clearly demonstrated in Crimea. Furthermore, security relations between the two biggest nuclear powers are increasingly, and dangerously, turbulent. The mutual accusations by the U.S. and Russia of violating arms control treaties have been around for quite some time, but only recently was the collapse of a key pillar of transatlantic nonproliferation regime seriously mooted. 

When the West did attempt to help the post-Soviet Russia restore its internal stability and become a part of the European peace, these attempts looked at best misguided, and at worst insincere in the eyes of the Russian public. Although American and European interference in Russian domestic affairs was in no way an attempt to isolate Russia from the rest of the region, its disastrous consequences nevertheless contributed to Russia’s growing mistrust towards its Cold War adversaries. The common sentiment of the public, voiced by Mikhail Gorbachev in his recent interview, is that the West very deliberately kicked Russia when it was down. As baffling as this view may seem to a Western observer, the catastrophic state Russia found itself in after following the Western recipe for democratic transition provides a solid justification for Russia’s current indignation and suspicion. The experience of the 1990s gave birth to a principle axiom of Russia’s current foreign policy: neither the U.S. nor Europe should be trusted, and everything should be done to draw a clear line between Russia and the West. 

It started with Boris Yeltsin’s instituting the shock therapy, a set of radical economic reforms prescribed by the IMF and designed by Harvard University economist Jeffrey Sachs, which was quickly characterized as “all shock and no therapy.” The implemented deregulations reversed 60 years of price controls, raising the prices by as much as 500 per cent. To attack this state-created inflation, the Central Bank simply stopped printing money. Additionally, the government massively cut the budget, which, in the absence of functioning economic infrastructure, led to predictable chaos. Living standards and life expectancy were rapidly falling, and the debt of state firms to one another and the Central Bank increased by 8,000 per cent in six months. The IMF and G-7, however, were holding a reward of $24 billion in credit in front of Yeltsin’s face for following the prescribed market liberalization policy, so the chaos continued unleashing. After the economic damage had reached a degree that the public was not willing to tolerate anymore, widespread opposition to Yeltsin promptedthe constitutional crisis during which the West actively voiced support for Yeltsin’s undemocratic course of actions that included the dissolution of the country’s legislature, encirclement of the White House with tanks, and the consequent storming of the building with special troops (spetsnaz). Fast forward to the presidential election of 1996, when the Russian economy was still on the verge of collapse and social protections were being stripped away — all the results of Sachs’ shock therapy — the IMF approved yet another loan to Russia. The timing was critical: the loan was expected to help Boris Yeltsin win the election. It did its job, but the consequences of Western meddling into the Russian political process reached far beyond one presidential term: less than four years later, Yeltsin would appoint Vladimir Putin the Acting President. 

The policies pursued by the U.S. and the EU toward Russia shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union resembled an agreement between the winners and the loser, where the former dictate the rules and the latter is forced to accept them. Russia, however, perceived itself as neither defeated nor conquered. It has been, after all, the largest polity on earth for most of the last 400 years, and was, by some measures, the most successful imperial enterprise in history. Even weakened and wounded, Moscow strove to be accepted as an equal by the great powers of the West. The actions of both the European Union and the U.S. have significantly debilitated Russia’s trust and willingness to cooperate, by both excluding the country from important security arrangements and intervening in its domestic politics. It should be therefore of no surprise to anyone on either side of the Atlantic that more than two decades after its struggle for a place in the existing European system, Moscow still finds itself at the doorstep of the European order but never inside — this time, however, by choice.

Donald Trump Could Drive a Wedge Between Mormon Voters and the GOP

In most presidential elections, predicting the winner of the heavily-Mormon state of Utah is a non-exercise. Democrats have won the state exactly once since 1952, in Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide re-election; Republicans, meanwhile, have averaged 61 per cent of the popular voteand a 29-point margin of victory over the Democratic candidate. The 2016 election, however, seemed to be a departure from usual order. The Republican candidate, Donald Trump, faced historically steep disapproval ratings in Utah and polled so poorly that the state briefly appeared to be a toss-up on the eve of the election. Some commentators warily proposed that Utah, one of the most reliably Republican states in the union, could throw its vote to the Democratic Hillary Clinton or even to the last minute independent candidate and Utah native Evan McMullin. These predictions were ultimately dashed on election day, as Trump won Utah by a comfortable though historically small 17-point margin. Trump’s poor performance in Utah relative to past Republicans nevertheless demands greater attention to the political beliefs of Mormon Americans. The disapproval many Mormons express towards President Trump over issues of character and immigration policy could bring these voters to drift away from the Republican Party in favor of alternatives that are more consistent with their own faith.

Why Mormons Resisted Trump

Mormons, or adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), generally receive little attention from researchers of elections and public opinion. Mormons are currently estimated to be slightly less than two per cent of the American population, with the vast majority being concentrated in rural Western states such as Utah (51%), Idaho (20%), and Wyoming (10%). Mormons consistently rank as one of the most reliably Republican religious groups in the United States next to white evangelical Christians, with 70 per cent of Mormons considering themselves Republican or Republican-leaning according to Pew Research Center. Analysis of the religious right often focuses primarily on evangelical and fundamentalist Christians that have historically dominated the movement, resulting in the nuances of Mormon politics and culture to be overlooked due to their position as a minority among even conservative voters.

In spite of their reliable and staunch conservatism, Mormons were also one of the resistant segments of the Republican base to Donald Trump’s primary campaign in 2016. Many of Trump’s worst primary states were in the rural West, pulling just 14 per cent of the vote in the Utah caucuses and performing similarly poorly in Wyoming and Idaho. Later in the campaign, polls showed a dire 61 per cent of Utahns disapproving of the Republican candidate. Many notable Mormon politicians also delayed endorsing Trump for President until late in his campaign or outright refused. Most notably, former Republican presidential nominee and Utah political icon Mitt Romney refused to endorse Donald Trump for President, publicly feuding with the 2016 nominee and stating that he was “dismayed” with the state of the party. The LDS-owned Deseret News, one of the biggest newspapers in the state of Utah, publicly called for Trump to resign his candidacy in October of 2016.

A significant portion of Mormon voters, clearly, were not happy with the Republican Party’s nominee in 2016. There are several reasons that could explain why Donald Trump has been so unpopular among Mormon voters, one of which being his personal character (or perceived lack thereof). Mormons are one of the most religiously devout and involved denominations in the United States, Pew Research Center, measuring importance of religion, frequency of prayer, and frequency of church attendance, found that 69 per cent of Mormons ranked high in religious commitment in contrast with just 30 per cent of the American public. As a result, Mormons’ religious faith is disproportionately influential on their political stances and their view towards integrity in public figures relative to other faiths. Donald Trump, well known for multiple divorces, infidelity, and vulgarity, stood in stark contrast to Mormon voters’ ideal vision of character and Christianity. The Access Hollywood tape, which depicted Donald Trump gloating about sexual assaulting female contestants on his various reality television shows, was particularly problematic among Mormons and prompted several high-profile Mormon politicians to call for Trump to step down as nominee. Utah governor Gary Herbert described Donald Trump’s comments as “beyond offensive [and] despicable” and announced that he would not vote for either Trump or Clinton for President shortly after the taped was released.

The history of persecution faced by the Church of Latter-Day Saints also appears deeply influential on its adherents’ views towards religious minorities, particularly Muslim-Americans. David Campbell, political scientist and author of Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics, says that“Mormons as a group has [sic] deeply ingrained within their psyche that they are a religious minority that has experienced persecution in the not-distant past,” most notably the mass violence and attempted extermination the church faced in Missouri in the 1830s. A Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) study found that 37 per cent of Mormons believe that Islam is at odds with American values, in contrast with 67 per cent of white evangelicals. Mormons were also 21 per cent less likely than white evangelicals to agree that the American way of life needs to be “protected from foreign influence.” Following Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim travel into the US during his 2016 campaign and again after his State Department’s announcement of its travel ban list in January of 2017, the Church of Latter-Day Saints issued pointed statements advocating religious freedom and calling for compassion towards all those “fleeing physical violence, war and religious persecution.” Trump’s antagonism towards Muslim-Americans during his campaign likely resonated with Mormons’ own history of religious persecution, leaving them discouraged about the Republican nominee’s apparent embrace of religious intolerance.

The Church of Latter-Day Saints’ moderate line on immigration is also a probable factor in explaining Mormon voters’ antipathy towards Donald Trump. David Campbell, Christopher Karpowitz, and J. Quin Monson, authors of the upcoming book Mormonism and American Politics, have found that Mormons are one of the most welcoming religious groups in the nation towards immigrants, second only to Jewish-Americans. The authors theorize that Mormons are especially sympathetic towards illegal immigrants because of the number of Mormons that participate in mission trips to other countries, particularly the developing Latin American nations that many illegal immigrants come from in the United States. Mormons’ experience with overseas missions as well as their deeply-held religious faith, which emphasizes compassion towards the poor and suffering, makes them more sympathetic to the plight of many Hispanic immigrants in America. The western states where most Mormons live are also home to large Hispanic populations, and a PRRI study found that Mormons were more likely than other white Christians to say they live in a community with many new immigrants or that they had a close friend who was born outside of the United States. It appears that because of their experiences and compassion towards Hispanic immigrants in America, Mormons were much more likely to be resistant to Donald Trump’s anti-immigration and anti-Mexican rhetoric compared to the rest of the Republican base.

The Future of Mormon Politics

It’s unclear how the Mormon community’s disapproval of President Trump will influence Mormon politics in the long-term. A migration of Mormon voters to the Democratic Party, as some predicted during the 2016 campaign, appears unlikely. Hillary Clinton only modestly improved her share of the popular vote in Utah over Barack Obama’s 2012 performance. Her 27 per cent share of the vote is still far from enough for a Democratic presidential candidate to have a serious shot at winning the state in future election, and only 11 per cent of Utahns are registered Democrats as of 2017. The collapse in the Republican margin between 2012 and 2016 seems instead to owe mainly to former Romney supporters opting to vote Evan McMullin, the former Republican, independent Mormon, and Utah native who made a name for himself by running as a third party against Donald Trump in various, mostly rural western states. If Mormons do start to drift away from the Republican Party due to opposition to Donald Trump, they are unlikely to make peace with Democrats over divisive social issues like abortion and gay rights. Indeed, despite there being multiple open and contentious post-2016 elections in Utah, including the Senate seat currently held by Orrin Hatch and the special election to replace Congressman Jason Chaffetz, little attention has been given to potential Democratic challengers. If anything, Democrats are more likely to benefit from Mormon voters staying home on election day in states like Arizona and Idaho due to disillusionment with Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Third parties and independent candidates, on the other hand, may have greater prospects for growth in states with considerable Mormon populations, particularly Utah. There is already precedent for third parties to be taken seriously in the state at the presidential level. Evan McMullin managed to pull in 21 per cent of the popular vote despite declaring his campaign in August of 2016 and having little in the way of campaign infrastructure, and billionaire independent Ross Perot managed to place second in Utah in 1992, beating out the Democratic Bill Clinton. The Libertarian Party has been floated as a possible alternative in Utah, but Mormon voters are unlikely to embrace the party as a whole due to its liberal positions on social issues such as gay marriage and marijuana. Instead, a third party in Utah may look more like the United Utah Party, which launched in 2017 as a centrist alternative to the major two parties by Brigham Young University political science professor Richard Davis. The party’s platform emphasizes government ethics reform in addition to combining a moderate stance on immigration with traditionally conservative positions on issues including abortion, the Second Amendment, and government regulations. Such a party could appeal to former Republican Mormons put off by the president’s personal indiscretions and hostility to immigrants as well as to more moderate voters in the state. Further, a UtahPolicy.com poll found that 63 per cent of Utahns consider themselves “not very loyal” to either party and would be open to voting for a third party like the United Utah Party. Though voters often describe themselves as being less partisan than they really are in public opinion polls, there is clearly some room for an alternative to both the Democratic Party and Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

Nonetheless, the best way to see if Mormon voters are actually willing to leave the Republican Party is to watch upcoming elections in Utah and other heavily-Mormon states. Recent polls have found lackluster approval ratings for Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who is up for re-election in 2018, prompting speculation over whether he could be beaten by an independent Mitt Romney or by his likely Democratic challenger, Jenny Wilson. Similarly, Salt Lake County mayor and Democrat Ben McAdams has announced that he will challenge Congresswoman Mia Love in Utah’s 4th congressional district next year, where he may have a better-than-usual shot at victory as Salt Lake County makes up 85 per cent of the district. These races, and others in the region, could be a portent of things to come if non-Republicans are able to emerge victorious among Utah voters. In addition, Evan McMullin may run again as an independent in 2020 should Trump seek re-election, and would have considerably more preparation and infrastructure in a second campaign. Analysts of public opinion and elections would do well to keep an eye on these and related races in upcoming years to see whether there is serious movement away from the Republican Party among Mormon Americans. If other candidates – whether they be Democrats, United Utah, independent, or something else entirely – see electoral success with Mormon voters, the U.S. could witness the development of an even more distinct Mormon political identity unique from the rest of the religious right. This would be a historic political development and yet another splinter in the Republican Party’s polarized and conflicted base.

Self-Interest Well-Understood: A Doctrine in Need of Revival

“The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance of each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes …” – Thucydides, Pericles’ funeral oration, 431 BCE

If one were to take a step back and observe the progression of American culture from its beginnings to modern day, a consistent trend of materialism, or more particularly individualism, would be evident. Certainly, there has always been a compulsion for Americans to become secluded into one’s own, focusing on their own interests, whether it be their careers, family, or wealth. Indeed, this phenomenon is not absent from American culture today. However, the recent rise of polarization across economic, political, and social spectrums in the United States, in tandem with this habitual individualism, is cause for alarm; turning inward and pursuing one’s own interests is now accompanied with perceptions of growing maliciousness towards those who remain outside of an immediate inner circle, like family or close friends. These outgroups could be distant and faceless individuals or even neighbors within a given community. With this growing tension between the private individual and their respective communities, it is essential to reexamine the value of individual and communal self-interests in order to find what is truly facilitating America’s divisive climate.

Before assessing American individualism with the contemporary trend of polarization, the social atmosphere of the United States at its founding should be examined; the population’s ancestral diversity and lack of roots formed communities that were particularly telling of the society’s unique sociological behavior. Through this behavior, Americans were an interesting breed to the rest of the world at the turn of the Nineteenth century. American citizens at this time wholly rejected the status quo of centralized rule and established their own colonies, social orders, and man-made institutions with the assistance of geographic isolation. Social assimilation was a spontaneous and organic process which was fueled by the diverse social climate. This contributed to the creation of a democracy that not only emphatically empowered the individual as the Framers envisioned but, also, attributed outstanding importance to communal associations. Moreover, there was a reluctance to willingly cede responsibility beyond these associations to governing authorities, due to the oppressive shadow that the British empire had left on the colonies as well as other driving factors like religious work ethic. These factors, among other influences such as the equal access to socioeconomic mobility, primed materialism to become imbued into the mores of American culture. It is here that materialism reveals itself as a motivating influence within American society; however, the sentiment of individualism has the potential to quickly follow and remains a looming threat to shared communal responsibilities.

There is perhaps no other thinker that has elaborated more on this topic than social and political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville. It was Tocqueville –  a Frenchman – who came to the United States in 1831 and marveled at America’s unique culture. His work, Democracy in America, although parsing many aspects of American democracy, observed the average township’s rejection of centralized authority as well as the culture’s emphasis on the individual, his interests, and the ability to accord it well with others. Tocqueville’s ideas are especially critical of the potential ill-effects of individualism, namely that of utter neglect for those outside of one’s immediate associations. He, more importantly, observed how Americans combatted these ill-effects with the idea of “la doctrine de l’intérêt bien entendu,” or the doctrine of self-interest well understood. This doctrine held that virtue – one of happiness and usefulness – need not be found entirely in one’s pursuit of their own interests, but rather finding where it overlaps with their neighbors in their own pursuits. It awakens elements of discipline and moderation while still pursuing one’s own personal interests.

Although Tocqueville remains rather abstract in describing this phenomenon, the doctrine of self-interest well understood has very practical applications. For instance, imagine a suburban neighborhood during a snowy winter. As snow begins to fall one morning, the members of a neighborhood put their shovels to good use. At first they prioritize their porches and driveways and gradually work toward the public sidewalks and streets. Each neighbor understands, and is obliged to uphold, their responsibility to the community, despite the sidewalks and streets being public domain. In turn, they commit their share of shoveling accordingly along with their fellow neighbors. Alternatively, each neighbor could shovel their own respective property, as one consumed with individualism would be inclined to do, and relinquish the shared responsibility of shoveling public sidewalks and streets to a governing authority – a dangerous potentiality that Tocqueville’s refers to as “soft despotism.” Although this example is exaggerated and in some sense romanticized, it captures the essence of what Tocqueville articulates in his writing. The shared responsibilities of neighbors, despite implying sacrifice, are useful to the individual and the community when faced with certain everyday obstacles, like unplowed rows. The result, in this case, is cleared sidewalks and streets for every community member to use. Yet, the threat of individualism continuously compels neighbors to delegate these shared responsibilities to government authorities, which has the potential to expand and even exploit these communal responsibilities – which is where one can understand American culture today.

The notion that contemporary American culture has succumbed to soft despotism is unsurprising, as Tocqueville understood this trend as characteristically organic to democracies. As time passed, Americans began to prefer having increasingly less public responsibilities, and consequently began to focus their efforts inward. Today, American society accepts that the government retains a sizable amount of responsibilities, such as public welfare and infrastructure. Despite this, the attributes of American society that Tocqueville notes in his travels are still relevant and impactful. His observations describe his understanding of American “social theory” extensively, isolating the qualities that establish America as “a society possessing no roots, no memories, no prejudices, no routine, no common ideas, no national character, yet with a happiness a hundred times greater than ours [France’s] … How are they welded into one people? By a community of interests.” It is not outlandish to think this of America’s current culture, for it continues to embody a diversity of race, ethnicity, language, and opinion. The divergence from this social theory, however, is revealed as soft despotism overtakes communities. What Tocqueville failed to speculate was the potential influence that negative externalities can have within a modern democracy, most notably mass media and social media, each having the ability to penetrate the individual’s inner circle and warp their perception of his or her surroundings. These externalities typically enforce hollow stereotypes and heuristics that emphasize economic, political, and social differences for ratings, social agency, or even electoral backing.

In 2017 the reality of both mass media and social media’s influence cannot be dismissed, especially because it has the capability of altering individual’s social and political dispositions. This influence is more potent as the American sociopolitical climate continues to become polarized. According to the Pew Research Center’s polling, there is a growing division between left and right-leaning ideologies and their trust of specific media outlets. Outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post have come to be more trusted by individuals who self-identify as left-leaning, while outlets like Fox News and The Sean Hannity Show have come to be trusted by individuals who self-identify as right-leaning. As the majority of individuals continue to receive their news via television and cable, ideological and partisan skews in positions reinforce platforms that emphasize the differences of out-groups. As a result, individuals are less inclined to see the similarities of their neighbors in order to find common interests, as they are portrayed as irredeemably different on account of their perceived affiliations. On social media platforms, the autonomy of associating with others of like ideologies and dispositions eliminates the effort to find common interests with other community members. In a way, individuals form their own digital communities based on an understanding of common interests, like senses of humor, recreational activities, careers, and political ideas. Sorting associations by like political ideas, in particular, is especially noticeable on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, as Pew Research notes that many conservative individuals friend only those with similar dispositions, while more liberal individuals unfriend those with differing political opinions. Social media, in this sense, can be understood as an incredibly powerful tool when utilized by political organizations and social causes, such as national and state parties and social causes. Subjugation to mass media and social media outlets implies that individuals are able to form perceptions of communities, demographics, and factions without ever physically interacting with them, which proves to be costly, as it only feeds the growing trend of polarization and divisive sentiment.

It is important to note that Tocqueville does acknowledge that it is within American mores to recognize the differences of our neighbors, a behavior he attributes to the “equality of conditions,” or the facility of socioeconomic mobility in early American society. Indeed, it was once an integral aspect of American culture for individuals recognize the differences of others, particularly in relation to wealth and affluence, as it was relatively easy to work towards this type of success. However, this is purely in an economic capacity; today, warped dispositions of individuals are primarily based on emphasizing political, ideological, or social differences. Unfortunately, as the responsibilities of governing institutions become consolidated and expanded upon as a result of the despotic nature of democracy, so too is the relevance of the elected officials, which creates an incentive for campaigns to use divisive rhetoric to garner a following. A recent example of this was during the 2016 election cycle, as Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton sought to isolate her opponents’ following as “deplorable,” while Republican candidate Donald Trump contrasted elite Americans from “forgotten” Americans. As each candidates’ respective followings received this news through their preferred mass media or social media outlets, their perceptions of opposing were reinforced with malicious overtones, creating starker in-groups and out-groups.

Ideally, community members would understand each others’ fundamental differences and would focus on similarities and common interests – like being snowed in. Further, they would do this without forming preconceptions and make efforts to find some common ground even with knowledge of held differences. Although this simply is not the case today, Tocqueville’s proposed doctrine of self-interest well understood, while being a useful method of repudiating soft despotism, is also useful in nullifying the negative externalities that emphasize hollow and trivial differences. Tocqueville attributes great value to this doctrine in its modest achievability and its accommodation “to the weaknesses of man … [for] it personal interest against itself, and to direct the passions, it makes use of the spur that excites them.” In this context, the “weaknesses of man ” can be understood as the human impulse that drives individuals inward; the doctrine, however, makes use of motivation surrounding self-interests and projects it towards to community. Overcoming the negative influences of mass media and social media, which many mindlessly depend on as aspects of modern society, is essential to rediscover the unique aspects of early American society.

To clarify, Tocqueville’s message is not politically charged. He continuously mulls over the relationship between equality and liberty, believing that the former should not be pursued at the expense of the latter. Throughout Democracy in America, he warns of the possible sleepless complacency to soft despotism, tyranny of the majority, and communitarianism. He proposes ideas that, instead, are not “lofty,” but taken up with a certain willingness and gumption. As American society continues to stray further from Tocqueville’s observations of early American culture, his illustration of American society falling victim to individualism should be considered:

like a stranger to the destiny of all others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone.

This dark picture describes what is occurring in today’s social climate in an imperfect fashion, for it does not acknowledge the negative dispositions that individuals hold today over others with differences.   Individuals may essentially be strangers to all others, but they also hold contempt for those who are believed to hold differences in ideas, opinions, and in some cases language and race. The common neighbor, in this sense, does not only lack value to an individual’s self-interested pursuits, but now embodies everything that challenges those pursuits if a particularly skewed outlet isolates their differences as such.

If American society wishes to do away with its entrenching, divisive sentiment, Tocqueville’s doctrine of self-interest well understood is a critical starting point. It is not an incredibly high-minded feat to pursue and achieve, but it is rather one of humility that boasts the potential for a “regulated, temperate, moderate, [and] farsighted” society. Certainly, it is open for debate as to whether centralized governments should return much of the responsibilities that it has stripped, but the doctrine can indisputably bring the polar ends of the spectrum closer together, so as to realize their common similarities before their differences. Moving forward, Americans should be conscious of how media outlets portray those within perceived out-groups, and make a reasonable effort to understand not only their fellow neighbor’s common interests but how neglecting their position in the community on the basis of their differences serves only to divide further.

The Rocinha Power Struggle

Home to some 100,000 people, Rocinha is one of the most famous and largest favela or slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Homicidal violence is increasing in the favela with a vengeance of gun battles out in the streets between gangs and the Brazilian military. The military has now taken siege of the favela, in hopes to bringing the turf wars between gangs under control. Ongoing violence on the streets has brought some troubling concern to heads of state and impactful international organizations, who have worked over the years to decrease corruption, murder rates, and create an economically stable country. These concurring events and power struggle between drug related gangs could foreshadow a dangerous downfall of Rio which could be sinking back into its quagmire of violence, and instability as it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. The war on drugs continues to play a powerful driving factor in the violent struggle between Rio’s most powerful drug gangs, the Comando Vermelho (CV) or the Red command and Brazil’s largest organized crime syndicate, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) or the First Capital Command, and the Amigos dos Amigos (ADA) or Friends of Friends.

Each faction controls a specific part within the favelas as well in middle- class areas, with graffiti of gang symbols drawn in the cities to identify which faction is in control at the moment. In 2011, the ringleader of the ADA–Antônio Francisco Bonfim Lopes, known by the alias “Nem”–was jailed but continued to operate the largest cocaine trade by proxy, leading to conflict between the top figures within this gang, and the rise of challenging rival factions, who questioned Nem’s leadership and how long he would be able to maintain a stronghold over the cocaine trade. Nem’s second-in-command Rogério 157, as known within the favelas has moved to pledge his allegiance to the CV, while the CV gang has also indicated that Rogério supporters within the ADA would be more than welcomed to join their faction. Some are calling it a coup against Nem, since the CV is aiming to grow their influence in the favela, ever since the winter of 2015 when the FARC, a Colombian cartel, began dealing less cocaine throughout South America. But this is not without phasing challenges from ascending, up-and-coming gangs such as the PCC, who are rapidly seizing influence in the region.

Prisons holding both PCC and CV supporters have led to a stark rise in violence and mortality in the local and federal criminal justice systems. Until this point the PCC had remained neutral into who would take control of Rocinha, since they already control most of the drug trade within the five states of Brazil. But now the PCC is aiming to take control of the main cocaine supply to Rio by diminishing the control of the CV: this is a proper low-level war that is currently taking place inside Brazil with tactical and strategic aims aplenty, with the PCC attempting to draw in new partners to solidify its own power base while simultaneously weakening its rival.

The appointment of the new Brazilian Secretary of State for Security in 2016, brought the Pacification Police Units (UPP) to a new low, because although the objective of the administration was to flush out the drug gangs from the favelas and deploy a significant police presence to these territories; the reality is that the gangs have seized greater territorial control and widespread influence, and that local police often escape confrontation or practice corruption. The gangs are aware that making relationships with the local law enforcement through bribes, although costly, correlates to a lessened chance of prosecution and retribution.

Before corruption scandals by the police units began to break, units were imprisoning anyone and anything related to drugs, increasing the amount of prisoners in the system by 160 percent since the year 2000. Historically, violence in the prisons followed demands for improved prison conditions, but now the rupture of the longstanding truce between the PCC and the CV over ADA territory and increasing influence in region has left hundreds of prisoners dead over the years. This could be primarily due to the fact that Brazil’s state prisons are under indirect purview of drugs gangs and organized crime. Most prisons are divvied up among competing gangs, while the government has only minimal control. “Experts describe drug factions as a parallel state. Gangs have long recruited their rank and file from prisons and organize trafficking and racketeering” from the walls of the prisons, such as in the case of Nem, although he denies connection to any outside crime through proxies. There is a reflection of what is seen on the inside of prison walls, and what is seen on the streets. Brazil has a concerning criminal justice conundrum that fails to eradicate gang violence. Brutal conditions prisoners face are barely liveable; penitentiaries are mostly always filled to capacity, due to police crackdowns, only increasing gang recruitment from within the prison. According to the Justice Department, Brazil houses about 650,00 prisoners in just about 300,000 spaces, with the population continuing steady growth.

Gun downs on the streets of the favela between gangs has recently worsened, with the Brazilian military having set curfew and increased pat downs for its residents aiming to imprison most drug related criminals, in hopes of decreasing all criminal activity. Most officers monitoring the favelas favor heavy-handed sentences over rehabilitation and other lessened arrangements. The leading cause of imprisonment are minor drug offenses, although there are laws that recommend non-violent crimes should not lead people into the prison system. The war on drugs in Rio is not the answer. Research has found that 70 percent of inmates who are released find their way back into the system because of the duties they carried out under their gang, the gang that had once recruited themin prison. It is imperative that in order to stabilize the conflict, the military work and strategize to rehabilitate minor drug offenders back into society, and put less minor offenders in prison.

Gangs would soon have few inmates to recruit in the prisons. Through positive reform, criminals would then be put to work in the favelas where they’d be redirecting their energy to building better infrastructure for their community. Favelas’ workforce has proven to become most creative, resourceful, and hardworking people,many of whom have often fallen into drug trade only because of the lack of government benefits they now receive and little opportunities open to them that would allow them to make just as much money as their gang related jobs.

From the cities to the prisons of Brazil, the country’s ongoing corruption has stemmed from top government officials, who make it apparent that the lack of oversight by government agencies has allowed criminal organizations to grow. The Brazilian Presidential election of 2018 will prove critical to the future stability of the country and justice system, with the President possessing the ability to appoint officials to confront with corruption, prison reform, government benefits, and the gang crisis. Currently, the lack of public investment, and a hands-off tradition in criminal justice driven by governmental policy has led the favelas to produce a culture of creative survival.

Oil and Opium: Exploitation of Natural Resources by the Taliban and the So-Called Islamic State

From Al-Shabaab’s exploitation of the charcoal market in Somalia to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia’s levies on mining activity in Columbia, extremist groups all over the world exploit natural resources as part of their funding strategies. This report will examine the natural resources harvested by the so-called Islamic State (IS) and the Afghan Taliban.

On the IS front, the oil fields of Iraq and Syria have turned into a lucrative funding mechanism for the group. The military victories of IS in the oil fields of Iraq and Syria left the group with an important network of oil-rich territory. Two thousand miles to the east, in Afghanistan, the Taliban has reaped significant payouts from their exploitation of the opium poppy industry. Both groups have a certain set of tradeoffs associated with their resource of choice, along with a portfolio of different buyers for their final product. The following sections will contain details regarding the oil and opium poppy production of each respective group, their buyer markets, issues related to each resource, and finally a discussion on how counter-terrorism strategies affect the local populations involved in the exploitation of each resource.

The Islamic State of Oil

IS has three primary revenue sources :  (1) taxes and fees, (2) confiscations, looting, and fines (3) and oil. Figure 1 illustrates how kidnapping ransom fees account for a small percentage of  IS’ revenue as well.

Figure 1: IS Revenue Sources

Oil was a smaller part of the group’s portfolio in 2014, but IS military victories secured a larger share in 2015. These temporary gains were short-lived, only to be set back by coalition airstrikes and military operations in 2016-2017. At the height of their success, the group was able to produce and sell up to $550 million worth of oil per year. After coalition air strikes against IS oil positions became more frequent and successful, revenue streams were reduced from upwards of $50 million a month to a meager $4 million.

In order to convert this oil into cash, weapons, or supplies, IS must find regional buyers for their product. The market for IS oil is muddled and contains some surprising partners.

Most of the oil produced is sold domestically. It is sold to IS fighters in order to power vehicles and homes, but also to civilians in areas under IS control. The group has monopolized the market in some areas, such as in Raqqa. While Raqqa was completely under IS control, the group could control a great deal of the goods being exported out of and imported into the city. This left little choice for consumers in the area, making IS the go-to seller for the purchasing of cheap oil.

Oil that cannot be sold domestically is sold to regional consumers. Senior U.S. Treasury official Adam Szubin describes how “a great deal” of IS oil is sold to the Bashar Al-Assad regime.  The rest of the oil is exported to foreign markets including Turkey, Kurdistan, Iraq and Jordan. The oil sold in these foreign markets is less profitable available than selling domestically. The oil must be smuggled and sold at a discount; meanwhile, much of the remaining profits go to intermediaries within the supply chain. Figure 2 illustrates a few of the various routes used to transport IS oil.

Figure 2: Oil Routes

Using oil as a major source of revenue has its pitfalls for the extremist organization. The fact that IS cannot sell oil openly in foreign markets limits the oil’s profitability. As mentioned before, the oil usually must be sold at a discounted rate, and the act of smuggling is expensive. Even more, coalition airstrikes severely hamper the productivity of the group’s oil industry. Under the airstrikes, the oil fields can only operate at a fraction of their typical capacity. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, IS does not have the technical specialists and manpower required to keep the industry functioning at a sustainable level. Even without the coalition’s airstrikes, productivity would still fall due to maintenance and logistical issues. With oil quickly losing its place among the group’s finances, it is likely that we will see an increase in other areas of funding such as kidnapping, taxes, or increased fines and extortion against populations still under IS control. These funding strategies will likely be more violent in nature since they depend on the abuse of local civilians and foreign kidnapping targets.

Figure 3: Russian Air Strike Destroys IS Oil Trucks, Along with a Civilian Family in Their Car

Opium and the Taliban

The Afghan Taliban benefited from opium poppy production and the opium trade for decades. By the end of the height of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, when the Taliban controlled a significant portion of the country during 1996-2001, opium production decreased significantly due to a ban by the Taliban regime in 2001. 

Figure 4: Opium Production in Afghanistan

Despite these drastic reductions, the Taliban still earned significant sums from the opium production that remained. This was due to soaring prices caused by the supply shock. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, poppy production returned to normal levels.

More recent studies show (although exact figures are elusive) that the Taliban may receive up to a third of their funding from opium poppy production. The UN Office on Drugs and Crimeestimates that the Taliban earned anywhere from $450 million to $800 million during 2005-2009. The extremist organization has developed a sophisticated taxation system on the production, processing, and transportation of opium. This taxation system includes direct levies on opium poppy farmers, tolls on transports, and protection fees for transports moving through Taliban controlled areas. The taxes range from a 10% tithe or ushr (a zakat on agricultural goods) on opium poppy, to a 20% zakat (a form of Islamic alms-giving, one of the five pillars of Islam)  on trucks transporting the harvested good. As previously mentioned, even when production is decreased, the taxes remain. This means that the Taliban still reaps significant sums from the industry due to the corresponding price increases associated with supply shocks.

The poppy plant accounts 13% of Afghanistan’s GDP. Since the plant sells for much more than the cost of the cheap labor required to produce it, it is popular amongst Afghan farmers. Afghan farmers and smugglers sell opium poppy and opiate narcotics all over the world. Figure 5 shows the typical trade routes of the crop.

Figure 5: Afghan Opium Poppy Trade

The destinations for Afghan opium poppy are much more widespread than the market for IS oil. This is likely because even the Afghan Government has a hands-off approach regarding opium poppy production. The Afghan Government taxes production in their territory as well, and these tax revenues are a significant source of income for local governments.

Civilians Caught in the Middle

The fight against IS and the Taliban includes cutting off their revenue streams. The coalition battling IS has been very effective in destroying sources of oil revenue for the extremist group. Destroying revenue from opium poppy production has been less effective, both due to the Afghan Government’s need for opium poppy revenue and the reliance on the crop by local Afghan farmers.

As one of the world’s poorest countries, shifting the Afghan economy from opium poppy production to another revenue source will take much more careful planning and strategy than simply destroying opium poppy fields in the same way that coalition forces have struck IS oil fields. The reliance of farmers on this crop will have to be replaced with a more favorable crop that is not detrimental to consumers around the world and also continues to bring in revenue for local farmers and local governments.

Even the fight against IS oil revenue leaves some civilians stuck in the middle. Since IS cannot maintain the oil fields on their own, many of them are operated by civilians. In fact, civilians are responsible for much of the refinement, transportation, and final sale of the oil leaving IS held territory. The Washington Post has reported that coalition attacks on the small makeshift refineries that Syrian and Iraqi civilians set up in IS held territory has contributed to the poverty in these areas by leaving civilians without any income and raising the price of oil.

Whatever the manner in which these two groups are stopped, it is important to remember that these wars take place in extremely poor areas populated by many more vulnerable civilians than enemy fighters. The same strategies that cut off the revenue streams of these groups may also harm the income of already poor local populations. In Iraq and Syria, returning control of oil fields taken from IS to civilian workers is vital to rebuilding the economy after the fight is over. In Afghanistan, cutting off the flow of funds from opium poppy to the Taliban would be a huge thorn in the side of the group, but equally important is maintaining the welfare of the Afghan farmers who rely on this crop for survival. A slow replacement of opium poppy with a more sustainable and less controversial crop, along with measures to cut the link between the Taliban and their revenue from agriculture in general would leave Afghanistan with a much more stable and prosperous agricultural industry, and in turn decrease the total supply of opiates flooding world markets.

Beware of the Risen People: Public Support as a Crucial Factor in the Outcomes of the FLNC and IRA Insurgencies

The 1970s witnessed a rise of insurgent groups ranging from anarchists to reformists to preservationists. The insurgencies waged by the Irish Republican Army (IRA, including the Provisionals) and the National Liberation Front of Corsica (FLNC) emerged as parallel struggles alike in their secessionist, ethno-national, anti-imperial armed struggles. So it is imperative to ask why – from two insurgencies so similar in context – one reached a renowned peace process with substantial political gains while the other faded into submission. Inability to maintain popular support stymied the FLNC insurgency and precipitated its failure to achieve its long-term goals; through comparison the IRA, it becomes clear that the FLNC eroded public support through mishandling of propaganda and overreliance on terrorism.

Members of both the IRA and the FLNC participated in prison hunger strikes during 1981 in order to gain “political prisoner” status that would further legitimize their struggle for independence. While the IRA realized relative and objective success, the FLNC mangled a crucial opportunity to gain public support for their cause. After two months of starvation, 27-year-old Bobby Sands, the charismatic leader of the IRA hunger strike died in prison. Throughout his and his inmates’ suffering, the IRA and its political counterpart, Sinn Féin, capitalized on the opportunity to bolster support. They directed massive media campaigns to appeal to Irish sympathizers, those believing in nonviolence, and international audiences. When Bobby Sands was elected MP from behind bars, Sinn Féin realized it had gained the legitimate power of the vote. Most importantly, the IRA and Sinn Féin harnessed the feelings of the masses – rage and powerlessness, especially regarding the deaths of young IRA volunteers – and transformed passive supporters into active ones: after Bobby’s death, the IRA experienced a momentous surge in recruitment. The propaganda campaign tied to the hunger strike provided the Irish public with a sense of personal self-determination and agency, thereby reinforcing the ideology of the struggle for independence within a critical mass of people.

In contrast with the IRA’s tactical propaganda for public support, FLNC members disaffected the Corsican people by executing a weak hunger strike followed by domestic terrorist attacks. In November 1980, after only a few weeks, FLNC members ended their hunger strike prematurely and thus forfeited their ability to negotiate terms of “political prisoner” status. Even though the strike had been briefly accompanied by a poster campaign and fundraising attempts, the decision to end the hunger strike damaged the FLNC’s credibility and undermined faith in their political endurance. Perhaps this slump in public support prompted the FLNC to overcompensate with large-scale acts of terrorism against police forces to try to regain public confidence in their ability to lead an insurgency. Unfortunately for them, the insecurity generated from their attacks alienated passive supporters who may have been swayed by a more successful, nonviolent hunger strike.

Though terrorism often provides a powerful tool to gain public support for insurgency, its overuse by the FLNC revealed deviation from the ideology of self-determination that once fueled public support for the movement (O’Neill 2005, 103). Over the course of its nearly 40-year armed struggle, the FLCN executed 10,000 violent attacks including bombings, assassinations, and mass shootings. At first, the attacks demonstrated capability to defeat France’s colonial influence; but over time, the connection between local bombings and independence failed to resonate with the people. Much of the public’s grievances were economic, so the bombings of community commercial properties and those “totally unconnected to political consideration” aggravated tensions between FLCN members and the public (Ramsay 1983, 173). Moreover, leaders of the FLCN “did not elaborate on their earlier policy of demanding self-determination and independence” while carrying out these attacks. In summary, the FLCN undervalued public opinion and demonstrated their diminishing commitment to the ideology of independence and therefore to the people. These mistakes cost them a critical mass of support and jeopardized the movement itself.

Unlike the FLNC, the IRA emphasized fierce commitment to their ideology of self-determination for the Irish people in connection with their acts of terrorism. The IRA ‘Green Book,’ emphasizes that each operation “enhances rather alienates [IRA] supporters,” and that “for all our actions… [IRA volunteers] must explain by whatever means… why [they] bomb.” This portrayal of accountability to the people proved an effective method of reinforcing public support. In addition to building solidarity with the people, the IRA paired their terrorism with defensive propaganda designed to preemptively justify the deaths of anyone against the cause (Gross 2015, 221). Through the pairing of ideology and terrorist acts, the IRA insulated their campaign from loss of public support.

Sinn Féin and the IRA succeeded by prioritizing public support and exercising mastery of propaganda. In contrast, the FLNC lost the war of ideology as it lost the critical support of the Corsican people. When the Irish people demanded peace after years of terror, Sinn Féin responded with nonviolent peace talks. While divergent from their original long-term goal of a unified Ireland, Sinn Féin and the IRA achieved political representation in the North: perhaps their most notable achievement was to recognize that self-determination in a globalized world cannot and will not resemble traditional nation-state politics. In contrast, when the Corsican people demanded peace, the FLNC clung to its counterproductive strategy of terrorism at the expense of public support: their struggle faded in the hearts and minds of the people and concluded with a voluntary surrender, a failure to achieve independence.

Infrastructure is Donald Trump’s Most Popular Policy, But The President Can’t Strike a Deal

“The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans. For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; Subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; We’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own; And spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.”

Nearly 31 million Americans were listening in to the new president’s inaugural address on a chilly January morning. The speech they heard was unlike any other given by a U.S. president in living memory, calling out a dying nation whose most basic industry and infrastructure were in ruin. “American carnage,” he called it, pointing to the country’s once-famous highways, airports, and bridges that had fallen into disarray. The president went on to assure the audience that under his leadership, the nation would soon embark on the great mission of rebuilding its crumbling infrastructure “with American hands and American labor.”

This was not the usual promise of newly-elected Republican presidents, but it was a familiar refrain from Donald Trump, who had spent over a year on the campaign trail vowing to invest in American infrastructure. In October of 2016, the Trump campaign unveiled a groundbreaking new infrastructure plan: a spending package that would combine private and public investment, clocking in at over $1 trillion dollars, easily eclipsing Hillary Clinton’s $500 billion plan. Donald Trump’s campaign site on infrastructure included a length list of promises, including a “visionary” new transportation system in the tradition of President Dwight Eisenhower, the establishment of new pipelines and coal export facilities, and the creation of thousands of jobs in construction and manufacturing. Such a massive government spending project was major departure from Republican orthodoxy, which had long been averse to any such public spending increases. Just eight years prior, Republicans had staunchly resisted President Barack Obama’s post-recession stimulus proposal that included, among other things, broad investments in infrastructure and transportation. Donald Trump had never been a typical Republican, however, campaigning on a platform based more in populist nationalism that left little room for the fiscal conservatism that had come to characterize the Republican party. Americans recognized this, with polls showing that voters thought of Trump as less conservative than any other Republican presidential nominee in modern history.
From an electoral perspective, Donald Trump had plenty of reason to embrace the infrastructure investment plan. Increased infrastructure spending is popular among Republicans and Democrats alike, and was one of Trump’s most well-received budget proposals earlier this March with a 79 percent approval rating. At the time of his inauguration, 69 percent of Americans believed that President Trump’s pledge to increase infrastructure spending was “very important,” exceeding every other promise that Trump made on the campaign trail. Infrastructure also handily weds the liberal objective of public investment with the conservative goal of job creation and attracted support spanning the political spectrum from liberal economist Paul Krugman to former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. The proposal also deliberately evoked memories of Dwight Eisenhower’s leadership of the Interstate Highway System, which remains widely celebrated by liberals and conservatives alike decades later (a rare feat). Infrastructure spending would theoretically be an easy sell to both the public and D.C. insiders, with significant amounts of support on the left and the right.

Donald Trump’s advocacy of an infrastructure investment plan also highlighted one of his strongest qualities as a presidential candidate, namely his reputation for deal-making and pragmaticism. Infrastructure has long been a major goal of the Democratic party, pushed repeatedly by President Obama and shot down time and again by congressional Republicans. Trump is no stranger to this fact, and has spoken openly about his goal of cutting an infrastructure deal with Democrats in Congress. Democratic senators representing states that Trump won could be particularly open to the promise of an infrastructure package, aiming to reach out to Trump’s base and bring needed investment to struggling states like Ohio and North Dakota. One New York Times interview showed President Trump beaming at the possibility of an deal, hoping for “tremendous” support from Democrats “desperate” for a win on infrastructure.

Eight months out from his inauguration, however, President Trump has taken little action to begin negotiating an infrastructure investment deal. In May, Trump announced that the White House’s plan was “largely completed” and would be released within two to three weeks if not sooner, but the story was quickly overshadowed as the president moved on to traditional Republican policy goals such as repealing the Affordable Care Act. Trump’s initial appointment of Elaine Chao as Secretary of Transportation was well-received, but other key positions in the department such as the administrators of the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Railroad Administration have been left empty since Trump took office. Now the president seems more concerned with promoting the Republican party’s tax cut plan, even in the wake of destruction unleashed by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma that necessitates large-scale infrastructure rebuilding.

But even if Donald Trump did have his sights set on an infrastructure negotiations, he would likely face several obstacles on the path to a deal. Even though Trump should have an advantage with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, his spending plan would likely be a hard sell with conservatives. Congressional Republicans have already spent the last eight years challenging President Obama’s proposals to increase transportation and infrastructure spending, including Obama’s post-recession stimulus package in 2009. Though Trump’s proposed plan focuses far more on private spending and investment than Obama’s, Republican leaders have still been lukewarm at best about the prospects of an infrastructure deal. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have been largely silent on the issue, while House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has emphasized that he would only a consider an infrastructure plan that did not come with any increases in spending. Congressional Republicans, currently preoccupied with the conservative goal of large-scale tax cuts, are unlikely to provide much help to President Trump on a massive infrastructure spending package.

Trump’s recent negotiations with Democratic leaders on the debt ceiling and DACA point to the possibility that the president could push through infrastructure reform by working on a deal with Democratic leadership. However, this path poses its own difficulties. The president’s current deals could quickly unravel, owing to his impulsiveness and tendency to go back on his word, which raises doubts about the fate of any future negotiations. In addition, Trump’s current infrastructure proposal emphasizes private investment, which would likely face resistance from Democrats who favor a plan based in direct government spending. Though Trump could negotiate a new plan featuring greater public investment, he risks alienating many of the Republicans he would need to cross over and vote with Democrats to pass a bill. Congressional Democrats who were initially optimistic about the possibility of working with the president have also grown more wary in recent months. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, once open to negotiating with President Trump in areas they agree on, has expressed fears that the president’s infrastructure plan would empower Wall Street while sacrificing protections for workers and the environment. Trump would have to win over reluctant Democrats by proving that an infrastructure deal will be to the benefit of their own states and not just the current administration’s allies.

The prospects for Donald Trump’s massive infrastructure rebuilding plan seem great, and would likely be met with broad support from both the American public and the chattering class. However, the path to passing such a massive spending plan is far more rocky than the president’s rhetoric seems to indicate. Though Trump prides himself on his deal-making talent, he has yet to to demonstrate the commitment to careful and difficult policy negotiations that a bipartisan infrastructure spending deal would mandate. Striking an agreement between Republicans and Democrats in Congress would require President Trump to walk a fine line between private and public spending, and party priorities are currently focused more on tax cuts and DACA than on infrastructure. As it stands, Trump’s lack of interest in advancing his most popular policy proposal prevents these negotiations from even getting off the ground.

The Predicament of the Pro-Choice Movement in Ireland

Over the past three decades, more than 205,000 women have left Ireland to procure abortion services. This mass exodus could finally change following the announcement of a referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution set for May or June of 2018. As it stands, the Eighth Amendment equates the life of a fetus to the life of a person and outlaws abortion in all circumstances. Despite pressure from the United Nations and EU Court of Human Rights to amend their restrictive laws, the Irish government refuses to enact meaningful policy change. As a result, its citizens depend on foreign agents and unregulated websites to receive procedural care.

In 2016, the United Kingdom Department of Health recorded 3,265 cases – roughly 10 per day – of women who traveled from Ireland to the UK to receive abortion services. Women who cannot afford to travel have limited options. The miscarriage-inducing medications Mifepristone and Misoprostol are smuggled into the country somewhat successfully. At the same time, online services like womenhelp.org have begun shipping the pills to Northern Ireland addresses for Irish women to collect.

Regardless of how they obtain the pills, an estimated three Irish women self-administer medical abortions every day, facing up to 14 years in prison if they seek help for complications. The high demand for these basic medications has led to the emergence of underground communities of women sharing tactics to circumvent obstructive laws in countries all over the world. The Dutch medical organization, Women on Waves, lists advice for women to procure Mifepristone and Misoprostol in different forms:

“To obtain one of these medicines, one could, for example, say that your grandmother has rheumatoid arthritis so severely she can not go to the pharmacy herself, and that you do not have money to pay for a doctor to get the prescriptions for the tablets.

If there are problems to get the medicines in one pharmacy, try another pharmacy, or a male friend or partner might have fewer problems obtaining them… Usually one can expect more luck at the smaller pharmacies that do not belong to a chain.

Sometimes Cytotec can also be bought on the black market (places where you can also buy Marijuana). However try to make sure that is really is Misoprostol and not fake pills or some other medicine!”

Without protection from their governments or healthcare providers, women place their trust in informal networks and endanger themselves needlessly.

Beyond faceless statistics, these policies have dire consequences for the women themselves. In October 2012, 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar was admitted to University Galway Hospital for back pains. She was 17 weeks pregnant. When it became evident that her back pain was a symptom of preterm labor, Halappanavar asked if it were possible to save her baby, but was told that a miscarriage was “inevitable.” Doctors denied her an emergency medical abortion, and instead kept her hospitalized for three days until she was forced to deliver a stillborn girl. Four days after that, Savita Halappanavar died from advanced septicemia and organ failure.

At the time of writing, no members of Halappanavar’s medical team have been held accountable, despite a jury verdict of “medical misadventure.” After Halappanavar’s death, Irish MP Teachta Dála Clare Daly introduced a bill to clarify cases of legal termination of pregnancy – designed to prevent deaths like Halappanavar’s – but the bill was defeated in the lower house of Parliament by a vote of 101 to 27. Against a backdrop of government inaction, to the credit of the women of Ireland, Halappanavar’s death was met with protest and a wave of activism across the country.

In 2012, pro-choice organizations across Ireland formed the Irish Choice Network, now the Abortion Rights Campaign. Their first and second annualMarch for Choice garnered around 2,500 people, and their numbers have climbed somewhat slowly over the past four years. Then, on International Women’s Day, March 8th, 2017, the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment organized a “Strike For Repeal” demonstration that saw an estimated 10,000 people take to Dublin’s streets to demand a referendum to repeal the Eighth amendment – by far the largest pro-choice demonstration in Irish history. The success of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment culminated with this protest, which led to a Citizens Assembly and ultimately to Prime Minister Leo Varadkar’s decision to hold the referendum.

How did the pro-choice movement grow from a couple thousand to tens of thousands, and how did it inspire such open resistance to some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe?

The answer: the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment generated and leveraged social capital to harness passive rejection of prescribed politics and transform it into active resistance. That is, in a predominantly disaffected youthculture, the Repeal campaign created space for young people to access socio-political ideas and express their support in a way that generated social capital. Specifically, the Coalition’s capacity to mobilize young people in unprecedented numbers relied on three elements.

Photo: @lhj__photography a protestor for the REPEAL campaign shares her story

First, the REPEAL jumper addressed the need for young people to vocalize their beliefs without the constraints of traditional politics and processes.

According to Anna Cosgrave, the creator of the jumpers, her purpose was to enable:

“… people that otherwise felt nervous about the political and academic rhetoric around reproductive rights to be able to wear a jumper and be like I care without having any of the linguistics or technical terms.”

For people of all ages and backgrounds – especially youth – the REPEAL jumper provides access to a growing socio-political discussion. Its first impression is stark. Its black and white contrast conveys severity, simplicity, and power. In an organized demonstration, the jumper becomes a uniform of resistance; in everyday life, one of solidarity. The jumper displays a public statement about a shunned issue, creating new political practices in place of traditionally accepted ones. The REPEAL jumpers attract so many people, perhaps, due to their function an emblem of resistance that allows wearers to determine their own meaning by interpreting the message of REPEAL: resistance to tradition, resistance to a Catholic state, resistance to male-dominated politics. The flexibility allows each person to share deeply personal meanings with others, and thus creates a community for building social capital. Also significant, the quote that accompanies the Repeal campaign’s Instagram photo underscores the importance of accessibility in social movements. The woman in the photo describes the way to “reclaim our bodies from the State.” Here, the notion of REPEAL has transcended simple popularity and become a way for young people to engage highly intellectual ideas about the role of government in people’s lives.

The evidence the jumpers’ popularity speaks for itself: On their first day in stores, they sold out within an hour. The online shop has stocked and restocked, but remains sold out for the foreseeable future. From an economic perspective, the low-level infrastructure of Cosgrave’s microfinance project unintentionally produced an unmet demand that bolstered the social capital of those lucky enough to possess one of the coveted jumpers.

The second element of the Repeal coalition’s ethos emerged in chants used at protests that reiterate a rejection of traditional politics. The first:

Not the Church, not the State

Women must decide their fates

This chant, like the jumper, calls into question the role of institutions in women’s lives. It emphasizes collective independence from both the Church and State, breaking from longstanding traditional politics, and instead presents a new framework for considering women’s issues.

The second:

Enda, Enda

Where’s the referendum?

At protests, this chant is performed in a taunting manner. The speakers refer to then-Prime Minister, Enda Kenny by his first name, thereby denying him respect and formality. This language places the protesters and the nation’s Prime Minister on equal footing. Together, the structure and performance of these chants display the protesters’ resistance to traditional politics.

The third element of the Repeal coalition’s success in generating social capital rests in its official and unofficial social media presence. The official social media pages of just a few members of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth have over 65,000 followers between Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, plus avid supporters at entertainment news websites like her.ie, which boasts 175,000 followers on various social media platforms. Thousands of young people use social media as a platform for expressing solidarity and continued support: #repealthe8th was among the top trending hashtags in Ireland in 2016 and spiked at over 36,000 tweets in a single day during 2016’s March for Choice rally. The online community created by the Repeal coalition produces and reproduces social capital as online momentum grows.

Popular social media pages independent from the Coalition have also bolstered the coalition’s cause. Humans of The Sesh provides a solid example of the new political practices surrounding the Repeal the Eighth movement. With over 23,000 followers on Twitter and 556,000 on Facebook, Humans of The Sesh holds a special place in youth culture history in Ireland and the UK. They are nihilistic, self-proclaimed “sesh gremlin documenters” with a philosophy of recreational inebriation, deadpan commentary, and emotional decay. Primarily, they make memes. In June, Humans of The Sesh tweeted its annoyance at a
government move to discontinue large packs of Amber Leaf tobacco:

First and foremost, in this tweet, Humans of The Sesh expresses its frustration with the Irish government from a youth perspective. Second, the tweet equates two completely different policy points – tobacco and women’s healthcare. Notably, the tweet equates them to highlight their absurdity: repealing the Eighth Amendment should be just as straightforward as ‘repealing’ a tobacco product, and the Irish government is therefore out-of-touch and ridiculous for repealing one but not the other. As a group fundamentally catered to disaffected youth, it is significant that Humans of The Sesh deliberately referenced a socio-political issue. Their presence on social media platforms, separate from and critical of traditional political spaces, provides them with a source of social capital from young people. By referencing the Repeal the Eighth movement, Humans of The Sesh leveraged the movement’s social capital and amplified it for its own followers.

In another example, the Repeal movement’s social capital bleeds into independent social media in a post retweeted by the Abortion Rights Campaign:

This image demonstrates the flexible boundaries between political and non-political spaces for Irish youth. The people in the photo are attending Electric Picnic – the wildly popular summer festival best known for its teen-dream lineup and open-minded drug policies. By definition, it is a space outside of traditional politics. More importantly, it is a space distinct for young people in which festival goers gained social capital for embedding their political views. The people in the photo carry an inflated banana with the word “repeal” misspelled to make a pun about the fruit. Like Humans of The Sesh, their language choice draws attention to the movement in a humorous, accessible way. The social capital generated by the Repeal movement enabled these people to express their political opinion in a format that reproduced more social capital for themselves.

The Repeal the Eighth movement drew unprecedented numbers of young people into the fold by generating social capital for its participants. For Irish youth, the ethos of the Repeal campaign reproduced a familiar rejection of prescribed politics, and provided common access to socio-political discussions. Through the use of the REPEAL jumpers, protest chants, and social media, the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth gained enough power to pressure the Irish government into holding a Citizen’s Assembly and a referendum.

With the upcoming referendum set for the summer of 2018, the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment has achieved its principal goal. While popular opinion and all major political parties support repeal, many of these groups will likely begin to lobby to replace the amendment with certain restrictions on abortion access. Yet again to the credit of the women of Ireland, the most recent March for Choice celebrated tens of thousands of participants: now, women’s rights and lives depend on the Repeal coalition’s ability to sustain support and adapt to emerging political challenges.

Oppositional Identities: The Pitfalls of Postcolonial Identity Creation in Mongolia

As nations emerge from beneath the fold of colonial empires, they are faced with the task of differentiating themselves from their former sovereigns, yet while colonial nations had the luxury of centuries to try and test their identities, postcolonial nations are forced to hastily construct modern identities immediately after achieving their independence. The immense pressure to instantaneously distinguish themselves from their colonizers results in postcolonial nations often adopting modes of identity creation that give way to further long term hardship. One of these such pitfalls in postcolonial identity creation is the tendency to fall into the trap of grounding new identities purely in opposition to their former sovereigns. While responding to the damage done to postcolonial nations by the colonial project is an innate component of their postcolonial nations’ identity negotiation, new identities that are rooted exclusively in opposition fail to subvert the damaging material and cultural structures of colonialism that can remain latent and malicious if not deracinated by the development of entirely independent identities. The formation of a liberated and autonomous identity is an act of postcolonial resistance, yet if former members of the subaltern fail to develop identities beyond overt opposition, their identity is still inherently tied to the existence of their former oppressors. Postcolonial nations face further difficulty when undertaking efforts to economically develop, because the years of colonial exploitation often restructured their economies to be centered on the extraction of resources, without providing the technological means to even be able to extract such resources independently. The case study of Mongolia provides a quintessential example to understand the ways that postcolonial nations can fall victim to relying on oppositional identities through. While unique and independent musical and religious movements are developing in Mongolia, both movements have been closely tied to Mongolian nativist movements, and their focus on opposing external powers has delayed the development of independent cultural movements. Both the emerging Mongolian rap music scene and the resurgence of the shamanistic Tengriism religion have been tainted by nationalistic rhetoric. Problematically, the external powers, which newly created identities rely on opposing, are also some of the largest sources of the direct investment that many postcolonial nations’ economies depend upon. Opposed to following the problematic colonial model of identity creation and yielding to the simplicity of founding postcolonial identities on opposition to an ‘Other,’ true transcendence of colonial systems of oppression necessitates the development of identities founded on entirely independent ideology.

Identity creation is an integral component of truly pushing the influences of colonialism into the past in any postcolonial nation, giving citizens a way to differentiate themselves from their former rulers, yet too often this identity formation mirrors the failures of the colonial project by rooting itself in rejecting an epistemologically constructed ‘Other.’ Identities are not a monolithic entity that can be awakened from the miasma of our unconscious, but instead must be artificially invented based upon some central principles or values, as taught by Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined Communities. It is tempting to say that what principle a new identity is founded upon is irrelevant, as long as a new identity is constructed, yet this simplistic view of postcolonial identity creation problematically leaves room for nation’s growth to be stunted by singularly focusing on opposing their former colonizers. A nation cannot be expected to develop and differentiate themselves when their very national consciousness hinges on the identity of another nation. Furthermore, the damage done by the colonial system cannot be transcended when the central component of a nation’s new identity necessitates the continual concentration on the same invented ‘Other’ as their colonizers. Such an external focus perpetuates nations’ perception of themselves as the permanent victim, impeding any independent growth. In Orientalism, Edward Said expounds that Orientalism in the colonial system undertook the deconstruction and reconstruction of the colonized nations in the ‘orient,’ and that deconstruction is what can lead postcolonial nations to repeat the same mistakes as their colonizers. In Mongolia, from 1900-1911, the Chinese New Administration (Hsin Cheng) attempted to sinify Mongolia and force locals to assimilate in order to create a bulwark against Russian aggression, in essence working to eliminate the Mongolian identity that they perceived as the ‘Other.’ Yet, attempts to root the modern Mongolian identity on opposing the Chinese presence in Mongolia hinder the creation of an independent Mongolian identity, and result from the colonial system ingraining the ideology of difference into the Mongolian consciousness. Indeed, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak references Foucault to theorize that the epistemological violence that reconstructed consciousness in Europe enacted the same changes in the subaltern, elucidating that “The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as the Other.” Thus, the subaltern learned to base their own identity creation on the existence of an ‘Other’ by being essentialized as the ‘Other’ by the colonial system. The narrative of colonization indoctrinated colonial subjects in the subaltern to fix identity creation on the invention of an ‘Other’ in their own societies, hindering the subsequent identity creation of nations such as Mongolia by distracting from the formation of an independent identity.

Ulaanbaatar emerged from colonization and dove head first into capitalism, leading to an increase in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), with an especially large amount of Chinese investment in the Mongolian mining sector. For centuries, Mongolia was ruled and occupied by Chinese empires. After 70 years of a command economy as a Soviet satellite state, Mongolia underwent a democratic revolution in 1990 and became “…one of the world’s fastest growing economies.” The majority of all investment flows directly into the capital, Ulaanbaatar, and the city has changed as a result of the foreign influence. The government promoted foreign investment by relaxing regulations and controls, allowing for the patterns of foreign domination and exploitation to arise from the shadows once more in Ulaanbaatar. In recent years, as economic growth boomed, new animosities have grown out of the influx of outside Chinese business investment which many Mongolians see as exploitative. The globalization and increased primarily Chinese Foreign Direct Investment encouraged by the government within Ulaanbaatar spawned new nationalists movements.

Mongolia attempted to create an environment favorable to external investment to replace the Soviet aid it had previously enjoyed. The government in Ulaanbaatar worked to liberalize policy to encourage FDI, fostering a market oriented free-trade regime. From the earliest days as a capitalist nation, Mongolia opened itself up to FDI by opening up currency exchanges. This opening up of the nation led to Mongolia relying on FDI to propel its economy from a transitioning phase to a growth phase – and it’s worked – with the GDP growth rate hitting new highs above five percent growth in 2004 and 2005. Yet, this growth comes at the cost of local control of much of the economy by the central government in Ulaanbaatar. Now the city is being dominated by outside companies looking to control the government so they can exploit that nation’s resources.

The gross majority of the FDI that flows into Mongolia flows directly into Ulaanbaatar from other Asian countries, specifically into the mining sector. China, Korea, and Japan constitute 63 percent of the total FDI. This illustrates the shifting manifestations of colonialism. Mongolia emerged from direct colonial rule under Dynastic China to neo-colonial domination under the USSR, and now became subject to imperial domination by the more developed Asian economies. Of that new investment, 95 percent of it flows directly into the new foreign company outposts in Ulaanbaatar. The hope of the government is that this investment will build linkages in the capital to other sectors of the economy, such as the service and retail industries, but in reality the only linkages that investors are creating are roads to the resources that they hope to extract. Mining investment makes up 40 percent of all foreign direct investment. While it is true that this investment is contributing to the success of the economy as a whole, with FDI increases paralleling GDP growth, native Mongolians perceive it as an exploitative relationship. China is clearly interested in Mongolia for the riches buried beneath its soil. The two largest FDI projects within Mongolia, Oyu Tolgoi and Taran Tolgoi, are both mineral extraction projects. While external companies on average invest $293,000 in Ulaanbaatar, those investing in mining interests invested $2,300,000 each. China already invested $10.8 billion in road networks to connect the investment hub Ulaanbaatar with mining prospects in the rest of the nation, laying down more than 3,000 kilometers of roads, and will further invest in Mongolia’s transportation channels with their ‘Belt and Road’ project. China even went as far as decreasing its income tariff for Mongolian goods from 24.6 percent 9.4 percent, not in order to promote equitable trade, but to promote the perceived beneficial exportation of ephemeral raw materials. External investment in the mining sector flows through the conduit of Ulaanbaatar, yet without bestowing any of the intended benefits upon it.

 In Ulaanbaatar, there are two kinds of migration occurring; that of wealthy Chinese business people entering the city’s core and that of rural Mongolians moving into the city’s periphery. While the Chinese constitute ‘skilled’ and ‘lifestyle’ migrants, the Mongolians compose ‘economic’ migrants. The Chinese are wealthy business people coming to work for the corporations such as the mining companies directly investing in Ulaanbaatar, whereas the Mongolians are forced to come to the city to find any work at all. This creates a divide between the two groups, and contributes to the Mongolian residents of Ulaanbaatar looking to separate themselves from the Chinese, and they have done so through rap. The sprawling Ger slums on the outskirts of the city, housing almost 1/3 of the entire nation have become a type of satellite city wherein the local population grows and expands such that it develops a different character than the core of the city. While many Mongolians in Ulaanbaatar have been pushed to the outskirts of the cities, the Chinese ‘middling trans-nationals’ are entering the economic core of the city given their higher economic status. The Mongolians in the slums of Ulaanbaatar have to fight with the fact that now outsiders are coming in and bringing their Chinese influence with them, while the While the Chinese are affluent enough to maintain many of their comforts of homeland, the Mongolians who are migrating into Ulaanbaatar for work are being pushed to the outskirts within their own city. Chinese became more and more prevalent as a language of business within Ulaanbaatar as a result of Chinese FDI. There is a growing fear among the periphery of Ulaanbaatar that they will be eventually pushed out due to the economic factors mainstreaming the Chinese identity. The Mongolians on the periphery of Ulaanbaatar are anxious about the increasing growth of a Chinese core fueled by FDI, resulting in animosity towards the Chinese and the evolution of a new differentiated Mongolian identity.

Chinese mining magnates’ relative free-reign allowed by the cooperative Mongolian government incites local tension due to the reinforced belief that their only intention is to strip wealth from the nation. The government is relocating the nomadic farmers which symbolize the nation on the falsified grounds that they are depleting the grasslands in order to allow mining companies to move in and take the land, sparking further anti-Chinese sentiments and provoking one Mongolian rapper to sing that “‘[o]vergrazing is a myth and a lie/ We have grazed animals here thousands of years/ Why has the desertification started since only a few decades ago?’” Mongolians know that they are being exploited by the Chinese, sparking rapper Gee to become almost violently anti-Chinses, going as far as to say that the Chinese want to take everything from Mongolia. The animosity is exacerbated by the intense connection many Mongolians feel to their land, and the destruction that Chinese mines bring to it. Many Mongolian rappers have songs that revere their beautiful grasslands which are now being turned into a dessert by bulldozers and dump trucks. The rappers see the wealth that the Chinese are squeezing dry from the teat of their nation juxtaposed against their own people starving for a drop to drink. Rapper Amraa calls for social reform and creates an economic commentary by positing that “‘[w]e have homeless children, we have poverty, but we also have a very grand history that was inherited from our ancestors. We sing about kids living in sewers, and we ask, ‘Where’s your kid living?’ We want to get a message to the corrupt upper class.’” The economic disparities present within Mongolia give fuel for Mongolian rappers to fire up their audiences calling for change, but the manifestation of that change is entrenching sinophobia in the Mongolian identity.

In the process of differentiating themselves from the Chinese colonizers, the residents of Ulaanbaatar have developed an anti-Chinese sentiment that derails attempts at forming an authentically distinct identity. When discussing sinphobia in Mongolian rap music, I reference an interview with rapper Gee in my article Straight Outta Ulaanbaatar, in which he expounds that “‘I’m not racist toward anybody… except the Chinese. I hate the Chinese.’” The attention given to former colonial powers became a predominant discourse intertwined with efforts to protect the Mongolian identity through musical proliferation, with some racial slurs against the Chinese prevalent and one group going as far as to release a song entitled ‘Don’t Overstep the Limits, You Chinks.’ The presence of Chinese investors in Mongolia is used as a focal point for Mongolian rappers to mobilize their followers against, coming as a consequence of the hyper-nationalistic rhetoric they employ. This fear and hatred stems from the superiority and chauvinism endemic to any exclusionary identity, and unfortunately by promoting the identity, Mongolian rappers are also promoting the animosity.

Rap music became prevalent in Mongolia because there are many Mongolian artists who have made the genre their own, providing a mode to create an entirely distinct cultural object important to the emergence of a new postcolonial identity, yet unfortunately the rise of Mongolian rap music is marred by the rise of Sinophobic tropes within the genre. As a consequence of ubiquitous Chinese FDI, Mongolians are fearful of their new identity being eclipsed by the influx of foreign nationals. Producing rap music in Mongolians’ own tongue is a vital component of encouraging the creation of Mongolians’ own unique identity, yet the mobilization of xenophobic rhetoric exemplifies the ways in which Mongolian identity creation is hindered by lackadaisically following the same problematic methods of identity creation utilized by foreign powers when they controlled Mongolia. Mongolian rapper Amraa and rap group TST both are proud to be outspoken nationalists, hoping to inspire young Mongolians to have pride in their language and their nation, at a time when many young Mongolians are learning Mandarin in pursuit of greater economic opportunities. The focus on protecting the Mongolian language is just one way that Mongolian rappers display their adroit social commentary; rapper Gee has lyrics that show his desire to help Mongolia differentiate itself in the face of neoliberal economic imperialism, rapping that “‘[i] n the ocean of globalization, Mongolia is like a boat without paddles. You better start to care before we … drown.’” Yet, when fighting against the tides of globalization, it is important to recognize that the ‘Other’ is entirely discursively constructed. While independent cultural identities can be created through the ‘Other,’ altering aspects of external influences to localize them in positive ways instead of ignoring them, the foundation of the new identities created does not need to be opposition to ‘Others.’ Despite the significant sinophobia present in Mongolian rap, there are aspects of the musical genre that provide reason to hope for positive identity creation in the future. Rappers have a strong emphasis on environmentalism, even if driven by nationalistic sentiments, wanting to protect their homeland. Mongolian rappers have also rejected the materialism and consumerism endemic to the music of their Western counterparts, allowing listeners to claim a new identity by emphasizing cultural identity over luxury goods in a country where roughly 30 percent of the population lives in poverty.

In efforts to differentiate themselves from their former colonizers, Mongolians have embraced the resurgence of the historic shamanistic religion of Tengriism (sometimes referred to as Tengrism), but this religious resurgence is coupled with the emergence of hyper-nationalist groups that have embraced the religion as a focal point of their identity as Mongolians. Since 1990, the population of shamans in Mongolia ballooned from 10 to 20,000. The rebirth of Tengriism was been largely influenced by the presence of Chinese mining interests within the nation, with a heavy emphasis on environmental concerns, accentuated by the fact that deities in Tengriism have physical geographic representations that are worshipped. Yet, nationalists’ approbation of Tengriism is a stumbling block for the development of a new Mongolian identity. While the resurgence religion in isolation is an incredibly positive way to reclaim an aspect of Mongolia’s precolonial identity, it is tainted by the endorsement of swastika-toting ultra-nationalists. One group, called Tsagaan Khaas, engages in violent crimes such as shaving the heads of Mongol women they suspect of having slept with foreigner. The leader of another previously hyper-nationalist group, Standing Blue Mongol, was convicted of killing his daughter’s boyfriend for studying in China. Presently, Standing Blue Mongol adopted an environmentalist agenda, and is fighting against a Canadian mining company intending to extract resources from a locally revered mountain. While this action is not problematic in and of itself, Standing Blue Mongol used to be a neo-Nazi organization that latched onto Hitler’s beliefs of ‘ethnic purity.’ Even as Tengriism offers a positive route to developing an independent identity, Mongolians turn to nationalist groups because they fear that their capital city is being overrun by Chinese foreigners who they perceive to be ethnically impure. In “Religious Revival, Nationalism, and ‘Tradition,’” Marlène Laruelle examines the ties between the resurgence of Tengriism and ethnocentrism, postulating that “a process of an ethnicization of the divine with ambiguous political consequences reveals the deep ideological changes and the process of social recompositions, which are being experienced by post-Soviet societies.” The use of distinct religious traditions to differentiate nations in the subaltern from their colonizers is widespread throughout former Soviet satellites, with ranging from neo-paganism in Baltic States to Zoroastrianism in Tajikistan. Unfortunately, the construction of this religious identity as exclusive inhibits the successful development of a postcolonial identity, for no nation is entirely homogenous and precluding members of the society from subscribing to a nation’s new identity only serves to create further internal divisions. These examples Tengriism being coopted by nativist movements in Mongolia provide important examples of how easily nations can fall victim to tacit identity creation attempts, such as chauvinism. If attempts at identity creation hinge on rejecting an ‘Other,’ then Mongolia will be inexorably tied to their invented ‘Other’ and the nation will never go on to develop its own unique identity that is necessary to dismantle the remaining structures of colonial oppression.

The process of inventing a national identity out of thin air has been shown to have many obstacles that must be avoided, such as those associated with grounding a new identity on opposing an ‘Other,’ yet the mobilization of exclusive identities to endeavor to develop a postcolonial character also has serious implications for members of nations’ own populations. Women in Mongolia are put in a tenuous position as hyper-nationalism gains prevalence, for as explained by Undarya Tumursukh, “problems arise when we deconstruct the homogeneous and static image of the nation and recognize that contemporary societies, democratic or not, are structured so as to systematically privilege some groups over others along class, race, ethnicity or gender lines.” Tumursukh elucidates that when being masculine is seen as synonymous with being Mongolian, as is evident in the rhetoric employed by nationalist groups such as Tsagaan Khaas, women become the ‘Other’ in society as much as foreigners. Just as it is dangerous for a postcolonial identity to rely on their former oppressors, it is equally dangerous for nationalism to come part and parcel with the domination and control of women’s bodies. As evidenced by the attacks perpetrated by ultra-nationalist groups against women who are suspected of copulating with outsiders, the control that such groups attempt to asset over Mongolian women’s sexuality is the antithesis of modernity and could bar Mongolia from claiming a postcolonial identity if it propagates.

As the case study of Mongolia exemplifies, nations can fail to emerge from beneath structures of colonialism if their attempts at identity creation are stained by the tendency to rely on constructing an ‘Other’ to be oriented against. Oppositional identity creation such as that invoked by Mongolian rappers and ultra-nationalists may result from external exploitation, but it is self-propagating by perpetuating reliance on an ‘Other,’ both inside and outside of the postcolonial society. Oppositional identity creation must be avoided in order to successfully develop a postcolonial identity, for it impedes the authentic identity creation necessary to transcend systems of exploitation.

The North Korea Question; U.S. Strategy in the Korean Peninsula

For decades, the United States’ foreign policies toward North Korea have centered on non-proliferation, with the objective of preventing North Korea from developing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States. Unfortunately, these policies have failed. Considering that change, it is time to transition into a new era of policies focused on another goal; preventing catastrophic war between the United States and North Korea. The United States has two options; the first, to use the U.S. military to either bring about regime change in North Korea, or to conduct surgical strikes on North Korean missile test sites or storage facilities; or the second, to de-escalate tensions and to adopt a policy of deterrence. The military option is no option—It likely would lead to retaliation by North Korea against the United States, or U.S. allies, and even then it might not succeed, which leaves only the second option. Sadly, both the United States and North Korea have adopted a policy of brinkmanship and threats, which does not de-escalate tension. Neither country wants nuclear war to occur, but it is quite possible that the continuation of these policies of brinkmanship will cause the U.S. or North Korea to bumble into a war with unimaginable consequences. This needs to be avoided at all costs. If the United States is going to have to learn to live with a nuclearized North Korea, which they are going to have to whether they like it or not, is necessary that a policy of de-escalation is pursued immediately.

A Slow Moving Cuban Missile Crisis? 

Robert Litwak, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, has described the current standoff between the United States and North Korean as “the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.” However, one could argue that the current crisis between the United State and North Korea is actually more dangerous than the crisis President Kennedy handled so skillfully in October of 1962. For one, the Cuban missile crisis was not between the United States and newly emerging nuclear state. For another, the current standoff is between two leaders who do not have advisors who can effectively speak the truth if it differs from what their leader wants to hear. Kim Jong Un has had his own family members killed, and it has become clear during his presidency that Donald Trump does not suffer advisers who disagree with him, going as far as to call Lt. General McMaster a “pain” for correcting him in a meeting. This combination of factors means that the situation the U.S. and North Korea find themselves is even more dangerous than what the United States, the U.S.S.R, and Cuba were in in 1962.

The Military Option is No Option

When faced with options like the United States has with North Korea, it is easy to make the mistake of overestimating the United States’ chances of success, and underestimating the costs of an attack. Arguments for using preventative military options against North Korea severely overestimate the likelihood that the United States would succeed in their objectives. The history of attempted decapitation strikes by the United States is rife with failure, as is the history of surgical strikes. Given North Korea’s fears of U.S. infringement on their sovereignty, any sort of strike would need to have a 100 percent success rate. If the strikes were not completely successful in decapitating the Kim regime or in removing North Korea’s ability to retaliate, it is highly unlikely that North Korea would do nothing. If they retaliated, untold death and destruction would envelop the Korean peninsula, and potentially targets outside of the peninsula which are in range of attack.

If it were to retaliate, it is possible that North Korea would use a nuclear weapon. It is challenging to estimate the fatalities of a nuclear strike by the North Koreans, but all attempts to do so have indicate that the impact would be catastrophic. According to NUKEMAP, a modelling tool that allows users to estimate the impact of a nuclear weapon on a map, a 100 kiloton (the estimated explosive yield capability of North Korean nuclear weapons based on their tests) nuclear weapon detonated over Busan, South Korea, would kill 440,000 people immediately. A similar-sized bomb over Hagåtña, Guam would kill 14,360 people instantly, and in Tokyo around 191,820 would be killed in the first few minutes after the blast. These estimates only account for the impact of the initial blast, not the impact of the ensuing fallout, which would increase that number drastically. No matter their target, if North Korea were to detonate a nuclear weapon it would be catastrophic.

Even if the North Koreans chose not to use their nuclear weapons to retaliate and instead employed their conventional weapons, the results would also be catastrophic. The Nautilus Institute published a study in 2012 entitle “Mind the Gap Between Rhetoric and Reality,” in which they found that North Korea has thousands of pieces of artillery along the demilitarized zone which could inflict around 64,000 fatalities in Seoul alone on the first day of war. This study did not account for North Korea’s five thousand metric tons of chemical weapons, which would drastically increase the number of fatalities if they were employed against South Korea. Whether chemical weapons would be employed or not, even if the retaliation was to remain localized to the Korean peninsula, the results would be horrific. In such an event, the South Koreans would likely retaliate as well, completely enveloping the peninsula in destruction. The costs of not engaging in preventative military options are far smaller than the costs of engaging and triggering retaliation. Despite what has been said by the Trump administration and previous administrations, there is no military option.

Brinkmanship and Threats

When the United States’ goal was to prevent North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons, utilizing threats was a viable option. In the strategic environment that exists now, this strategy is ineffective and dangerous. Brinkmanship is a strategy employed by nuclear states when attempting to convince another nuclear state to do or not do something, in which one state exerts pressure on the other state by taking steps that raise the risk that events will spiral out of control. The United States and North Korea are both employing this strategy, North Korea by repeatedly testing missiles and making threats, such as the one directed at Guam, and the United States by repeatedly threatening military action against North Korea. In situations in which brinkmanship is practiced, there is a real risk of events culminating in a catastrophic exchange. At each stage, a state is faced with the choice of acquiescing, or holding on a little longer—increasing the risk of a catastrophic event in hopes the other state will bow out. If no state backs down, the crisis continues to escalate until a state does out or events spiral out of control. In brinkmanship games, the state that has the higher resolve will prevail, unless a catastrophic event occurs in which case both states lose. According to a game theoretic model of brinkmanship designed by Robert Powell, in cases where a larger state is engaged in brinkmanship with a rogue state, the rogue state will usually prevail—the cost of an attack on the larger state is far worse than the consequences of not intervening in the rogue state. The United States will not prevail in a game of chicken with North Korea because North Korea the risk of their regime is at stake, their resolve is clearly higher than the United States’.

The Kim regime has made it clear since the outset of their nuclear program that the impetus behind the program is to prevent the United States and other states from infringing on their sovereignty. They theorize that the United States will not risk nuclear war by trying to bring about regime change in North Korea. The logic behind this has been confirmed by the actions of the United States in the past in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and the North Korean government knows that and has issued a number of statements in which they argue that if those states had had nuclear weapons, the United States would not have attacked them. North Korea will not follow in South Africa’s footsteps, they won’t voluntarily end their nuclear program, and they certainly won’t do so in the face of threats from the United States that just further qualify their fear of the United States. Actions by the United States to increase tensions between the United States and North Korea will not induce North Korea to give up their weapons, it will just increase the risk that a catastrophic event occurs.

De-escalation and Deterrence 

The past three U.S. administrations have stressed that “all options are on the table.” This statement sounds less threatening than the alternative threats of “fire and fury,” but it still increases tensions between the United States and North Korea in an irresponsible fashion. The longer these increased tensions exists, the more likely it is that some sort of catastrophic event will occur. To effectively navigate out of this crisis, the United States needs to convince the Kim regime that an attack on the U.S. or its allies will automatically lead to the to end of their regime, but the United States also needs to acknowledge that the United States is not interested starting a war. North Korea will not take these types of statements at face value, so it also will be necessary to stop offering a preventative strike as an option. In addition to its legally dubious status, a preventative attack on North Korea will all but guarantee the deaths of millions. The U.S. has serious qualms with North Korea, but as long as there is not an actionable threat by the North Koreans, the cost of failure is far higher than the cost of not interfering with the regime.

In 1947, George Kennan, already famous for the “Long Telegram,” published an article in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “Mr. X,” in which he argued that a strategy of “patient but firm and vigilant containment,” would eventually lead to “the break up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” Kennan’s argument was based upon the idea that if the U.S.S.R. could be contained and deterred, the structural issues within the country would eventually bring about its down fall. While there are immutable differences between the U.S.S.R. and North Korea, there are many similarities, the largest being the structural problems in both of their economies. Eventually, the ineffectiveness of the North Korean economy will lead to its downfall, just as it did for the U.S.S.R. Until that point, the United States just needs to ensure that nuclear war doesn’t occur.

“Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” 

This type of policy change runs contrary to much of the rhetoric espoused by past U.S. administrations, and it particularly runs contrary to President Trump’s “tough-talking” mantra. It also ignores the human rights abuses that are occurring within North Korea, which is a challenging pill to swallow for anyone who cares about humanitarian issues. Strategies for addressing North Korea are often referred to as the “least bad option,” and this instance is no different. The U.S. administrations don’t need to “love” the bomb, but they need to realize that the opportunity to prevent North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons has long past. It is time to move into a new era of policies that aren’t centered around threats of military action, and instead use other methods of addressing individual crises with North Korea. Even rational actors can make mistakes, and the longer the United States and North Korea embrace brinkmanship, the higher the likelihood of something terrible happening is. The impact of such an event is unimaginable, thus everything possible needs to be done to prevent it from occurring. The United States should strategize to play the long game.

The Kurdish Predicament; A Policy Prescription for a Fractured KRG

Introduction

For nearly a century, Turkish government officials and Erdogan nationalists have been overwhelmed by “Sevres syndrome” — a nationalist paranoia that ethnic Kurds, inspired by miscalculated borders and ethnic nationalism, would pursue separatism. The short-lived Treaty of Sevres and the central powers that signed the agreement laid the foundation for future treaties, such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Treaty of Lausanne, to determine the fate of the regional order. Yet, unlike Sykes-Picot’s British and French zones of imperial ‘influence’, Sevres was much more self-deterministic; the treaty’s Section III, Articles 62-64, offered ethnic Kurds to conduct a referendum to chart their own course as a nation.

In 2017, the Kurdish nation is fragmented across Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi state lines. While the Kurds have created a transnational identity, their statehood objectives differ across Syrian, Iraqi, and Turkish governmental constraints. A year ago I remarked how a unified Kurdistan in the Levant was nearly impossible — how the Syrian, Iraqi, and Turkish identities intercepted any uniform statehood strategy among the Kurds, and in many ways, complicated the chances for Iraqi independence. This is a truth that still stands. A year ago, Kurdish statehood, of any kind, was a near-impossible phenomenon — even with international recognition, thriving oil exports, and an Islamic State exterminated from Northern Iraq. Kurdistan’s geopolitical position— straddled between the crossfire of Syria’s civil war, Iraq’s battle against Daesh, and Turkey’s illiberal presidential republic — seemed too costly to pursue separatism.

The Kurdish President Masoud Barzani shocked the international community when he announced Iraqi Kurdistan would conduct an independence referendum on September 25, 2017. The announcement was met with rhetorical caution, derision, and even interventionist threats from Kurdish neighbors, Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, while the United States encouraged a delay so that war-torn Iraq would first be unified. Even though the referendum was non-binding and implicated no blueprint for negotiations, the international community perceived statehood as Barzani’s absolute objective. This is not the case; President Barzani recognizes Kurdistan’s internal setbacks and has crafted the referendum to achieve autonomy within the Iraqi government, not secession. Even if the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) can achieve greater leverage with the Iraqi government, the referendum has caused a schism in Kurdish theaters of trade, politics, and civil society. The very act of conducting the referendum has resurfaced many tensions, inequities, and setbacks that the Kurdish nation must face before pursuing concrete separatism. 

Photo: A worker in an oil field in Kirkuk

Obstacles in the Oil Sector

Despite the strides Kurdistan has made towards democratization and de facto control of disputed territories, there remain many signs of political immaturity and economic stagnation. While Kurdistan has operated a bustling crude oil industry and expansive network of international oil companies (IOCs), it’s economic output has been reliant on what Denise Natali deemed“political limbo.” The KRG has been able to operate under the Iraqi government’s radar through leaving trade agreements, territorial boundaries, and revenues ambiguous — leaving ample leverage for a bustling oil trade. The Kurdish government has been able to sell nearly half their crude oil in 2017 to Israeli private firms— recipients that cannot be legally targeted by the Iraqi government for violating trade agreements. The ambiguity that has surrounded the oil-abundant province of Kirkuk, Nineveh, and Diyala, has enabled the Kurds to produce as much medium-grade crude oil necessary for economic independence. Yet, these blurred lines of legal uncertainty and the anagram of the ‘correct’ territorial perimeter with Iraq, are only temporary fixes. Post-secession, an independent Kurdistan may find it challenging to retain many of its valuable trade partners, no longer free-riding on Iraqi revenues and unable to offer attractive rates per barrel. Furthermore, while the KRG regards Kirkuk as an incredible geopolitical and economic asset to their road to independence, the province is aligned with the ruling party’s rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and is deeply fragmented along sectarian and ethnic lines. It is challenging for the KRG to even negotiate with Baghdad while the ruling party, the KDP, struggles to retain political control in Kirkuk. Kurdistan, while economically independent, is geo-economically splintered; the KRG should craft policy to appease the PUK in the Kirkuk province and confer with key trade partners — well before approaching the negotiating table in Baghdad.

Disappearing Political Unity

The Iraqi Kurdish government has been hailed as one of the most pro-democratic forces in the Levant, a stark contrast to Kurdish neighbors Iran and Turkey. The Kurdish parliament houses a plurality of factions, with the ruling Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), opposed by the PUK, the Movement for Change (Gorran), and Kurdistan Islamic Group (KIG), and have pursued a special experiment in direct democracy.

While a large majority of elected officials support the objective of independence, the Kurdish parliament clash’s over the timing, process, and prerequisites are a reflection of the deep schism in Kurdish political unity. The very idea of the referendum was met with disdain by many parties that opposed the PUK, encouraging the Kurdish government to focus on democratic reform at home before pursuing a controversial road to separatism. Even a bi-partisan negotiation to determine the referendum’s date and conditions was boycottedby major elected officials in the Gorran party and the KIG, leaving KDP and PUK majorities to mitigate some of the most important conditions for Kurdistan’s fate. The Kurdish Parliament has not met as a body since

PHOTO: The entryway of the Iraqi Kurdish Parliament

October 2015, nor does the nation have a constitution to guide it. In 2009, the KRG’s parliament drafted a national constitution, yet did not ratify, rendering any referendum laws, parliamentary rules, and legislative procedures nonexistent in Kurdistan.

President Barzani’s KDP party shares a strained relationship with many of its rivals. Barzani and his supporters are perceived as opportunists, conducting a swift referendum for political support and re-election while gambling with the Kurdish nation’s fate. Furthermore, Barzani has presided the executive office for more than four years and has delayed the next election, stating the nation needs political consistency during their fight against the Islamic State (ISIS). Despite the 2005 decision to limit the presidency to two terms and require the speaker of parliament to succeed, the KRG extended Barzani’s term by two years in 2013. It will be increasingly difficult for any KRG delegation to represent the national interest with no blueprint, conditions, or terms approved by parliament, and will undoubtedly increase frustration among Kurdish officials and civil society.

Projections

As Kurdistan strategizes to contend with Baghdad across the negotiating table, the KRG should first establish definitive plans for the presidential election and a possible referendum for the 2009 constitution. Parliamentary elections are scheduled to take place on November 1, 2017, however, Barzani’s seat of power continues to be unrivaled. The KRG should also first assess their most paramount trade partners, such as Israel and Italy, to establish newfound conditions under different commercial routes, national taxation and revenue systems, and state alliances. Kurdistan is in dire need of economic diversification, and only its trade partners and few regional allies can aid such an endeavor. The political schism in Kurdistan is detrimental, but can only be remedied if the KRG reverses its autocratic tendencies, revives a dormant constitution, and re-calls parliament into session to discuss the conditions of separatism.

Cuban Connectivity: The rise of free speech in the Digital Age

The virgin telecommunications market that is Cuba, has large tech corporations such as Amazon, Google, and Apple ready to invest as soon as restrictive United States sanctions are removed for the island to enter a smaller globalized world. Freedom of speech via global internet connection would give Cuban citizens an unprecedented arena to project their grievances, and access world information. An article by Freedom House labels Cuba as one of the world’s longest ranking repressive environments for information and communication technologies. The lack of digital communication on the island has also left the Cuban people frozen in time; and although around 27 percent of the people in Cuba have access to the internet, it is often through illegal streaming sites, extremely slow service and costly fees. But, through pressures being put on the Cuban government, by human rights campaigns, and the international community- the people of Cuba are growing ever more connected and facing less internet restrictions and punishments for projecting their beliefs. Rather than having the Cuban government see the internet as a tool of coercion, they should perceive it as a tool to unify the people

New technology, has been empowering individuals, in both positive and negative ways. And over the past couple year, the Cuban government has made progress to make internet access more feasible to its citizens, although recently this has become harder to accomplish due to the Trump  administrations rollback on Cuban – U.S. foreign policy, “cancelling” plans to ease cold- war tensions with Cuba, hindering negotiations being made by the government and companies such as Google. The Trump administration has not made it easier to for U.S. companies to provide commercial telecom and internet services, as well as to export cell phones, computers, and set up joint ventures with Cuban entities.

Technological corporations should not see this new U.S. policy as an opportunity to pull their small but growing investments, but as a reason to ensure the Cuban people that their voices will continue to be heard, because as the current President Raul Castro is proposed to retire in early 2018, Foreign Affairs magazine calls for in response to these difficulties, demands from centrist activists for a greater say in future economic decisions and in the coming leadership transition. The Cuban are already demanding more from their government, from better living conditions to more WI-FI. The people’s continuous effort to surpass government internet restrictions while pushing for better internet accessibility to promote progress and social changes within the country, should encourage more technological companies to invest more resources into infrastructure development. These internet spaces that create free speech promote movements can be important vehicles for social and political change, and have the potential to transform the systems of institutionalized politics in which they occur. Social movements can give us an insight into human action and why people voluntarily cooperate, mobilize and could have potential positive implications in the spread of democracy, or regime change.

A younger Cuban generation is hoping to emphasize the importance of internet connection for all, a “promise” their government is working to achieve for all its citizens by the year 2020, announcing plans to expand broadband access to 80 percent of business entities (private and state-owned), 95 percent of educational and health centers, and 50 percent of households by 2020. This level of connectivity would require significant investments in infrastructure, and with new regulations being rolled out by the Trump administration, unless the Cuban government supports heavy investing in their technological industries, change could take years longer than hoped for by the international community and the Cuban people.  

Cubans, have become much more aware of the power the internet possesses through projecting social justice projects to address their poor living condition, and shrinking gross domestic domestic through the closures of small businesses on the island. The internet is critical tool to advocate for government reform, and although the government believed that limiting access was for the safety and betterment of their people, it in fact, only hinders the progress the country is making toward government and economic reform.

The government has begun to take notice, of the positive possibilities that come from joining an interconnected world and has even increased education funding to computer software and computer sciences industries. Cuban universities have begun expanding their technology science curriculums, making it possible for grassroots efforts to provide more multimedia accessibility to the island. From these investments, emerges a generation of highly skilled graduates whose technical and abilities known as the “knowledge economy”, often go underdeveloped due to the lack of resources and support from the international community. In order to unlock the “knowledge economy”, the international community should aid in the WiFi revolution, by ending technological barriers between Cuba and its trading partners.

German Sociologist, Lorenz von Stein, introduced the term ‘social movement’ into scholarly discourse in the 1950’s. It conveyed the idea of a continuous, unitary process by which the whole working class gained awareness and power. Luckily, at the touch of a button, the Cuban working class is beginning to feel that power, along with the pressures and luxuries that come with internet exposure. While becoming more aware of how other people live and talking about their experiences to people all over the world, feeling that they are finally being given the chance to speak up and express their grievances and the actions other countries should be taking in order to facilitate a smooth transition of power from a communist regime to a more democratically based one.

Before the Obama administration began to normalize relations with Cuba, there was already an interconnected underground system that aimed to provide an alternative internet broadband. There is an entire informal job sector network growing out of these grassroots internet distributors working to provide affordable online streaming services to the people of Cuba. American corporations such as Netflix are beginning to stream to the island, but at 8 dollars a months, it is unaffordable to a majority of citizens that work at a wage between 20 and 60 dollars a month. More needs to be done by the government to support these efforts to secure the economic future of its small business and technological informal sector.

Weak infrastructure and innovation-stifling corruption are just some of the obstacles technological companies have been facing. Investing in telecommunications towers, and creeping away from government run-wifi would be a huge step in providing accessible internet. Since 2008, when the Cuban government lifted an almost total ban on the World Wide Web, there has been a skyrocketing number of Cubans beginning to engage in internet consumption. While Cuba remains one of the world’s least connected societies, ordinary citizens’ access to the internet has exploded since 2015 due to the government’s opening of over 200 public WiFi spots in parks and street corners all over the country. With an increasing number of WiFi hotspots becoming available to the public, spending the day outside scrolling through phones is becoming a daily routine for a younger Cuban generation. We are not only seeing WiFi being provided in hotel lobbies, and internet cafe’s; today’s WiFi availability in public spaces is creating a new type of socialization among the people.When most Americans think of internet consumption they picture a recluse teenager sitting, spending the entire day inside; but in Cuba, where internet at home is a rare luxury, many people have to go outside to public spaces to get connected.

Social movements are caused changes in organizational structures such as economic, institutional and social contexts of a country occur. In this context by growing the country’s access to social media,these changes in structural conditions make movements more likely. Social movements are not created by a single variable but rather by a set of variables that create an interaction effect, but successful movements are about mobilizing people for action and when they can persuade a significant amount of people that their cause is relevant and significant to the society’s betterment.

People in parks now sharing with each other what they find on the internet and holding discussions about what they are missing out on is just a stepping stone in the reform the Cuban people are hoping to achieve.  The internet being used as a tool for mobilization is giving their cause more attention and deeply worrying communist supporters who are wary about the impact it would have on the future of their party and political life on the island.  Discovering new ways to mass organize is just as essential for the occurrence of social movements as the grievances that would intrigue the people to organize in the first place, and social media is just one of the many websites giving voices to those people who would have not had one. By having ordinary people challenge the status quo and expressing their grievances in public spaces, potentially could lead to a new social movement. This is a step up from the extremely slow internet connection, and government run websites where most of the material posted was censored, and privacy rights violated.

Improving the ability of Cubans to the connect with the rest of the world will help foster economic growth and improve human rights on the island.

By being able to engage in discussions on relevant issues facing the community in open spaces with others listening,could one day lead to a new type of government for and by the people. Freedom of expression in internet communities could potentially lead a younger more exposed generation to radicalize through exposure to centrist, capitalist policies. This new type WiFi revolution would open the people of Cuba to unlimited reproduction and instantaneous distribution of digitized intellectual property of any kind worldwide virtually without cost.

The Cuban people do not want their growing right taken away, nor do they want to abuse their newly found power. Pressuring government authorities to facilitate talks with representatives from companies such as Google and Amazon to build partnerships and secure the economic future of small businesses, would open the door to new economic endeavors and allow declining industries that have been hindered by slow or no internet connection to prospers on the island.It may take some time to see some government reforms in Cuba by the people, but the eagerness and willingness by the people is there, they just need a better outlet to form a platform and united coalition.

Charles Tilly, who also defined social movements as a series of contentious performances, displays and campaigns by which ordinary people make collective claims on others, would agree when I say, that in a competitive world; in order to succeed we must be capable of handling technology in an appropriate matter, to express those opinions that matter the most to us, in order to catch up to other leading global players and not stay trapped in the 1950’s as Cuba once was.

Cold War Revivalism? Characterizing the U.S.-Russian Relationship in the Contemporary World Order

The Soviet Union disintegrated exactly 25 years ago this past winter. It was the final nail in the Cold War’s coffin. Yet today, a quarter of a century later, rhetoric from politicians, and pundits declare there is a “New Cold War” or a “Cold War 2.0.” While it is clear that tensions exist between the United States (U.S.) and Russia, especially with regards to Syria, Ukraine, and allegations of Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections, to say these elements are analogous to those of the Cold War would be a fundamental misunderstanding of history. For starters, U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles have been slowly yet surely decreasing, rather than increasing as part of an arms race. Additionally, neither state is boosting its military budget vis-à-vis the other’s moves. Next, there are no definitive examples of proxy wars between Washington and Moscow like those that existed during the Cold War. Many will argue the situations in Ukraine and Syria count as proxy wars, but that is not possible due to the lack of U.S. or North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops in either state directly combatting Russian forces. Lastly, and probably most importantly, while the Cold War was fought along ideological lines, today there is no ideology and no “-ism” to which Russia adheres. While the U.S. still sees itself as the defender of capitalism and liberalism, Russia has been experiencing a dearth of ideology for it to exemplify in the world. There is no “New Cold War” between Russia and the United States because the current relationship cannot be compared to the ideologies and motives either party defended throughout the second half of the 20th century. Neither power is looking to trump the “ism” of the other, nor do they see themselves as a savior to world order in relation to each other.

For starters, the arms race synonymous with U.S.-Soviet relations of the mid- to late 20th century is behind us. Data shows that since 1991, the U.S. and Russia have each reduced their nuclear arsenals to a quarter of what they once were. The arms race was a key component to the Cold War, with the militaries dominating each country’s federal budget. In his 1963 speech at American University, President Kennedy stated, “[W]e are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other, and new weapons begetting counter-weapons.” Presently, neither government is forming its policies based on what the other side does. Each country’s policy remains largely independent of the other’s. True, there is still plenty of suspicion between Moscow and Washington, but that is not fuel for greater stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Additionally, Russia’s military budget is about one ninth of what the U.S. spends. Even if Russia wanted to spend the same dollar amount on its armed forces that Washington does, it would require the Kremlin to spend 45% of its gross domestic product (GDP) in military, compared to the 5.4% that it spends now. The Russian economy cannot handle that burden. Thus, it is impossible to have an arms race today like that seen several decades ago.

It should be noted that the Cold War never involved direct military conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but rather was comprised of many smaller-scale wars around the world. These wars were fought to install governments friendly to either Soviet communism or American liberalism. These wars were known as proxy wars. Herein lies another difference between current Russo-American relations: neither state is intervening in countries around the world in order to prevent the other from “winning.” The world is no longer seen through a “zero sum” lens, which is to say an actor that does not support one state does not necessarily support that state’s enemies. For Washington, this means that a state not being aligned with the U.S. does not mean that it is aligned with Russia. While issues like Crimea can be seen as zero sum (either Ukrainian or Russian), the same cannot be said of Afghanistan, Iraq or Kosovo, where U.S. and NATO troops are stationed. The U.S. and her allies have avoided sending in troops into active combat duty in Syria and Ukraine, where Russian actions are most prevalent. During the Cold War, Washington was quick to send in troops and covert specialists when it looked like there would be a leftist swing in states like Vietnam, Honduras, and Iran. Today, states cannot “fall to Russia” or its ideology. Herein lies the last yet greatest difference between the Cold War and current Russo-American relations: the role of ideology.

For the duration of the Cold War, a widespread fear was held in the U.S. that its geopolitical adversary would seek to spread its ideology to any and every part of the world it could. George Kennan first wrote about this in his Long Telegram, stating, “Russians will strive energetically to develop Soviet representation in…countries in which they sense strong possibilities of opposition to Western centers of power.” To Kennan – and everyone in Washington thereafter – Moscow was on a mission to turn the whole world against the West. In other words, the Soviets saw themselves as the defenders and propagators to communism, collectivism, and Leninism throughout the world. On the other side of the Atlantic, the U.S. saw itself in a similar manner towards capitalism and liberalism. Thus, both sides sought to curb the spread of the other’s core ideology, or the other’s “ism.” This objective can be best seen in President Reagan’s 1982 speech to the British Parliament, where he declared, “the march of freedom and democracy will leave Leninism and Marxism on the ash heap of history.” Here the mission of the Western world was no longer to contain Soviet ideology, but to vanquish the “ism.” Such rhetoric does not exist anymore, and for good reason: Russia no longer has an “ism” to champion. As the Soviet Union disintegrated, so too did communism, collectivism, and Leninism throughout Eurasia. Russia has been experiencing an existential crisis ever since. Furthermore, because the Kremlin does not have an “ism” of its own, there is no Russian ideology for the U.S. to counterbalance. Bearing in mind that nearly every foreign policy move taken by Washington during the Cold War was to trump Soviet communism, it is clear that current relations do not resemble a “Cold War 2.0.”

Elements that were present during the Cold War can be seen in current Russo-U.S. relations, although they do not constitute a “New Cold War” by themselves. First, there is the Syrian Civil War and the Russian annexation of Crimea. From a quick glance and brief background knowledge of either conflict, echoes of past U.S.-Soviet standoffs are evident. Both Moscow and Washington have shown support for actors who are conflicting with each other. Furthermore, these actors are operating in a “zero sum” arena – it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that President Bashar al-Assad will create a coalition government with the rebels similar to how it is unlikely that Donetsk and Luhansk will ask to rejoin Ukraine. Yet these do not qualify as proxy wars because, while Russian troops are present in Syria and eastern Ukraine, NATO and U.S. forces have limited intervention to airstrikes and aid packages. At the same time, it is evident that both the West and Russia have interest in integrating Kiev into their own respective institutions and governance systems. Therefore, Ukraine can be best seen as a sphere of influence battle, a phenomenon seen throughout the Cold War. In the Syrian case, on the other hand, all actions conducted by the U.S.-led coalition have been in the name of counterterrorism, rather than toppling the Russian-friendly regime. Thus, Western intervention has not been necessarily geared towards countering Russian actions or gaining influence over Syria, but rather as part of the War on Terror.

Secondly, propaganda has been playing a heavy role in influencing each society’s perception of the other. Russian media outlets enthusiastically backed Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign while U.S. outlets have run the story that Russia rigged last year’s elections. While the rhetoric has softened over the past 25 years, Russophobia is alive and well in the United States just as it was in the mid-20th century. However, propaganda does not equate to war. Information battles have been waged between Moscow and Washington for several years now, but they are not analogous to those seen during the Cold War. Indeed, the propaganda we see is developed under the banner of fear and alarmism rather than actual threats. Russia will not be the end of the American way of life; that will come only from the American people.

The Relationship Between the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program and Immigrant’s Mental Health

“After the election, I thought I was lower than everyone in society, that I had no voice or role or place here — an alien, like people say . . . But then I got to a point where I didn’t care because I knew I was going to commit suicide and nothing would bother me after death,”  — William, a 16 year old immigrant from the Dominican Republic

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Program

Following President Donald Trump’s recent movement towards an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the news media and journalistic literature has been scrambling to publish information describing the program to the general public. An extensive amount of this literature has been dedicated to analysing the economic benefits that DACA recipients bring to the United States economy. Some studies have estimated that summarily deporting all of the immigrants previously covered under DACA would cost the U.S. economy upwards of $280 billion. This type of commentary describes what DACA should mean to U.S. citizens, but not enough attention is given to what DACA means to the immigrants themselves.

The following sections will touch upon the effects that DACA has on a little explored aspect of immigrant’s lives, their mental health. There have been some impressive studies done on this topic, and now it is important to have a conversation about it.

First, take a quick look at the basics of the DACA program.

DACA 101

The program was introduced by Barack Obama in 2012 through an act of
prosecutorial discretion. It is designed to protect from deportation undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children. The protected immigrants receive work authorization and a two year renewable deferred action status. Most of them are employed, most are educated, and none of them have committed a felony. The following is the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) criteria for DACA eligibility:

• Were under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012;

  1. Came to the United States before reaching your 16th birthday;

  2. Have continuously resided in the United States since June 15, 2007, up to the present time;

  3. Were physically present in the United States on June 15, 2012, and at the time of making your request for consideration of deferred action with USCIS;

  4. Had no lawful status on June 15, 2012;

  5. Are currently in school, have graduated or obtained a certificate of completion from high school, have obtained a general education development (GED) certificate, or are an honorably discharged veteran of the Coast Guard or Armed Forces of the United States; and

  6. Have not been convicted of a felony, a significant misdemeanor, or three or more other misdemeanors, and do not otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety.

Approximately 800,000 people are registered under DACA. In 2012, around 200,000 children had parents who were eligible for DACA.. The program has been beneficial to the welfare of immigrants and their children.

DACA and Immigrant’s Mental Health

There are hundreds of sources illustrating how higher wealth and socioeconomic status are associated with positive mental health. An article from Dartmouth University shows higher rates of stress hormones in those living in poverty, another article from the World Health Organization ties poverty to poor mental health, and another from The Atlantic discusses possible remedies. Significant mental health benefits for immigrant families stem from the DACA program’s history of poverty alleviation. Additionally, immigrants and their children are more likely to seek out mental health care services when they experience less fear about Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and deportation.

Without the protection of DACA for their parents, children can suffer from many anxieties, including “parental anxiety, fear of separation, and acculturative stress.” In the following excerpt from the New York Times, an assistant professor at Harvard University, describes the effects of immigration enforcement related anxieties on children:

Experts on immigrant mental health say they have already seen a spike in symptoms since President Trump’s inauguration. Roberto Gonzalez, an assistant professor of education at Harvard who studies undocumented youth, says he has seen parents pull their children from school out of fear.

“This kind of elevated fear and anxiety can have detrimental physical and mental health effects in the long term,” he told me. “Many of the young people I’ve been studying have shown physical and emotional manifestations of stress: chronic headaches, toothaches, ulcers, sleep problems, trouble getting out of bed in the morning, eating issues.” It will get only worse, he said, with Mr. Trump’s DACA announcement.

A study in Social Science and Medicine elaborates on these mental health effects. It states that the stigma immigrants feel due to strict immigration enforcement practices can lead to depression, anxiety, and feelings of isolation. The children of deported parents often assume new responsibilities and face economic challenges on their own, exacerbating mental health issues. Deportation related fears also have a chilling effect on integration efforts and access to healthcare for immigrant families; reports in Massachusetts show evidence of immigrants missing health care appointments due to fears of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local police. The following infographic from the same Social Science and Medicine study illustrates many of the effects of aggressive immigration enforcement on immigrants health.

Clearly, there are detrimental and unanticipated effects that stem from aggressive immigration enforcement. The protected status that DACA recipients receive helps both parents and children get the help they need, and it decreases mental health related stressors. These next sections will provide a look into specific studies regarding mental health and DACA.

The Scientific Literature

A recent article published in Science is aptly titled “Protecting Unauthorized Immigrant Mothers Improves their Children’s Mental Health.” The study took a sample of immigrant mothers, some with birthdays before the DACA cutoff and some after, and looked at their children’s mental wellbeing. The results indicated a relationship between DACA eligibility and childhood mental health. The children of parents with unauthorized status were significantly more likely to suffer from various developmental issues and health problems than children whose parents were authorized. The study showed that children whose mothers were eligible for DACA were about 50 percent less likely to suffer from an adjustment or anxiety disorder. The specific drop was 7.8 percent to 3.3 percent. It was concluded that the immigration status of the mothers had a dramatic effect on the mental health of their children.

Another study published in The Lancet Public Health journal titled “Health consequences of the US Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration programme: a quasi-experimental study,” exhibited similar findings.  A decrease of moderate to severe psychological stress was observed in DACA eligible study participants, while non-DACA eligible participants remained relatively the same in terms of mental health.

This last study was conducted by UC Davis’ Center for Poverty Research. The following information was published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. This study looked at developmental issues alongside mental health issues. The researchers found that in California, children of unauthorized Mexican parents are 53 percent more likely than children of US-born Mexican American and white parents to be at risk of developmental problems. In adolescence, children of unauthorized parents have higher rates of depression and anxiety than children of authorized parents.

Conclusion

By compiling all of the previous literature into one overarching narrative it is clear that any attempt to do away with the DACA program will most likely have negative effects on the mental health of immigrants and their children. This report strongly recommends keeping in place, and even expanding the DACA program. The economic benefits are enormous, the humanitarian benefits are noble, and the mental health benefits are well documented.

One final note is the acknowledgement that conducting proper research regarding undocumented immigrant communities is difficult. There are issues of perceived researcher credibility and trust of confidentiality regarding immigration status that make it hard to paint an accurate picture; the previously cited Science article touches on these issues. While the findings of the previous studies are by no means conclusive, the general trend does show positive mental health benefits stemming from the DACA program, and negative mental health effects of aggressive immigration enforcement. If you take anything away from this report it should be the realization that on top of the benefits to the United States, the DACA program does so much more for immigrant families