Two Keys to Sustainable Social Enterprise
How successful businesses change their own ecosystems

by Sally R. Osberg and Roger L. Martin

Angus Grieg

Summary. Social entrepreneurship has emerged over the past several decades as a way to identify and bring about potentially transformative societal improvements. Ventures in this realm are usually intended to benefit economically marginalized segments of society 

Social entrepreneurship has emerged over the past several decades as a way to identify and bring about potentially transformative societal change. A hybrid of government intervention and pure business entrepreneurship, social ventures can address problems that are too narrow in scope to spark legislative activism or to attract private capital.

To succeed, these ventures must adhere to both social goals and stiff financial constraints. Typically, the aim is to benefit a specific group of people, permanently transforming their lives by altering a prevailing socioeconomic equilibrium that works to their disadvantage. Sometimes, as with environmental entrepreneurship, the benefit may be extended to a broader group once the project has provided proof of concept. But more often the benefit’s target is an economically disadvantaged or marginalized segment of society that doesn’t have the means to transform its social or economic prospects without help.

GoodWeave

When customers buy carpets bearing the GoodWeave label, they know that their purchases were woven without child labor.

In Afghanistan, GoodWeave’s supply chain inspectors are all female, so they may enter the women’s quarters in homes, where most carpets are made.

The endeavor must also be financially sustainable. Otherwise the new socioeconomic equilibrium will require a constant flow of subsidies from taxpayers or charitable givers, which are difficult to guarantee indefinitely. To achieve sustainability, an enterprise’s costs should fall as the number of its beneficiaries rises, allowing the venture to reduce its dependence on philanthropic or governmental support as it grows.

In some cases a social enterprise may even spawn a profitable business. In the late 1970s, for example, Muhammad Yunus secured funding to conduct an experiment in which very poor borrowers were given tiny loans. The experiment grew into the famed Grameen Bank, a financially sustainable social business serving disadvantaged Bangladeshis. As others around the world saw that it was actually possible to make a tidy profit lending to poor people, they adopted the Grameen model, vastly magnifying the impact of Yunus’s initial innovation.

What can social entrepreneurs do to increase their chances of achieving sustainability—and perhaps even profitability? We think we have an answer. Over the past 15 years we have studied successful social entrepreneurs up close through our work for the Skoll Foundation, which was established in 1999 by the internet entrepreneur Jeffrey Skoll. Each year the foundation confers the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship (SASE) on a small number of people. More than 100 social entrepreneurs representing 91 organizations have received Skoll awards to date.

In studying these leaders and their ventures, we have found that they all focus on changing two features of an existing system—the economic actors involved and the enabling technology applied—to create sustainable financial models that can permanently shift the social and economic equilibrium for their targeted beneficiaries. In the following pages we’ll describe how representative entrepreneurs have successfully made these changes.

The Actors

Social and economic problems often reflect an imbalance of power among the economic actors involved. India’s handwoven-carpet industry offers a prime example of this dynamic. In the early 1980s the children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi, joint winner with Malala Yousafzai of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, saw that poor children were easy prey for labor brokers who recruited workers for a number of Indian industries, including carpet weaving.

Social entrepreneurs add new actors to an existing system: customers and government.

Captured by these middlemen, the children were sold to business owners who forced them to work 12 or more hours a day under brutal conditions, their small hands producing the handsome but inexpensive rugs retailers demanded. Three groups of players—owners, labor brokers, and retailers—dominated the country’s handmade-rug industry, their interlocking interests perpetuating a particularly ugly equilibrium that benefited them by exploiting children.

In situations like this, we have observed, social entrepreneurs aim to transform the equilibrium by adding new actors to an existing system. These actors fall into two categories: customers, whose role is to shift the power balance; and government, whose role is to alter the economics.
Customers and power.

Satyarthi began his career in activism primarily through advocacy and organizing raids on companies, in the hope that he could raise awareness of child exploitation. He recalls the point at which he forced himself to admit that this approach would never change the system. Following a harrowing but successful raid, he was headed home when he confronted yet another bunch of labor brokers boarding a train with dozens of children bound for a life of servitude. He realized that freeing 10 or 20 or 200 children, when another 200 or 2,000 would come right behind them, was not the solution.

What could make a difference, he discovered, was enlightened consumers who would refuse to buy rugs that had been made with slave labor. Satyarthi’s insight came when an elderly woman told him she had bought a carpet in utter ignorance of how it had been made, but once she learned that it had probably been woven by child laborers, she felt she had no recourse but to throw it out. “I’m very old,” she told the activist, “but you’re very young—you must do something so that I can buy a new carpet.”

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Satyarthi realized that this woman represented others who could be educated to shun products produced by exploitation in favor of those produced responsibly. In the mid-1990s he launched Rugmark (now GoodWeave International) as the first voluntary labeling scheme to certify rugs produced without child labor in South Asia.

Today GoodWeave operates globally, focusing on the top retail markets and key rug-producing regions across Asia. More than 130 carpet importers and retailers—including Target—have signed on, pledging to source woven rugs that have been certified by GoodWeave. Satyarthi understood, as have the many other social entrepreneurs introducing certification systems in a wide variety of industries, that consumers represent a potent and sustainable means of altering a suboptimal social equilibrium. As long as certification labels are undergirded by well-conceived and credible efforts, they inform and motivate consumers through increased transparency. When enough consumers vote with their wallets, retailers and suppliers get the message—and entire systems are forever altered.

Government and economics.

A number of successful social entrepreneurs have generated a better equilibrium by moving government from the sidelines to a far more productive place in the system. This new role leverages the effectiveness of citizens’ taxes or, in the case of emerging economies, development aid from wealthy nations, making government services more valuable. The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), for example, has tackled the problem of Amazon basin deforestation by rendering Brazil’s government a more effective actor in a system that previously pitted primarily indigenous peoples against the loggers, ranchers, and miners who were claiming more and more of the basin for development, razing millions of hectares of forest—often illegally—in the process. Although Amazonian peoples have for generations considered vast tracts of the basin as their own, their existence was increasingly tenuous, and they had few means of asserting control over those lands.

But as Brazil woke up to the massive problem of deforestation, the government could do little given the sheer magnitude of the violations. Again and again it found that by the time illegal use of indigenous peoples’ land in the rain forest was identified, the damage had already been done.

ACT’s core innovation was to equip tribal peoples with handheld GPS devices and train them to chart their ancestral lands. The resulting maps enabled them to advocate more effectively for their own interests by supplying the government with information needed for rain forest conservation. With their territories clearly identified, tribal peoples could monitor and protect the land on which their way of life depended. This distributed system of monitoring and conserving significantly outperformed any centralized approach. The balance of power in the struggle with commercial interests was cost-effectively shifted in favor of the indigenous peoples, contributing to more-efficient and more-effective conservation.
The Technology

Economic and social agents use structures, business models, and tools to achieve their desired ends in an existing equilibrium. The actors and their means of operating—the engagement “technologies” they use—combine to make the equilibrium unjust and suboptimal. A second way, therefore, to effect change is to dramatically improve a system’s technology while leaving the current actors in place. Such improvement is achieved in one of three ways: substitution, creation, or repurposing.

APOPO

Bart Weetjens, who’d kept rats as childhood pets, realized they could be put to work detecting land mines. The rodents are trainable and weigh so little that they wouldn’t detonate the mines. His organization, APOPO, has since used rats to help clear more than 8 million square meters of land of some 1,000 unexploded bombs. The rats have also identified more than 7,000 tuberculosis patients, many of whom were initially deemed free of the illness by their local clinics.

Replace a key technology with a lower-cost one.

A number of SASE winners have succeeded by identifying a lower-cost technology that can substitute for a prevailing standard in a given function or product component.

Bart Weetjens, the founder of APOPO, realized that the greatest hurdle to clearing land mines was the high cost of the prevailing technologies, which included expensive equipment and trained dogs. For countries riddled with mines, de-mining machinery was hard to come by; furthermore, the weight of the dogs made them vulnerable to death from an exploding mine. Consequently, efforts to clear minefields were slow to gain momentum. Having kept rats as childhood pets, Weetjens knew they were smart and trainable enough to sniff out land mines. He showed that African giant pouched rats were perfect for the job, weighing so little that they wouldn’t detonate the mines. Countries and organizations can use APOPO’s services to remove mines at a radically lower cost and thus de-mine more land faster than was previously possible. (Weetjens has also trained his rats to sniff out tuberculosis in sputum samples. This cheap and readily available “technology” enables remote, isolated clinics to identify TB and get patients into treatment sooner.)

In settings where medical professionals are in short supply or strapped for time, many social entrepreneurs have discovered that paraprofessionals can deliver outstanding results. In sub-Saharan Africa the shortage of doctors and nurses is particularly acute, so the nonprofit Medic Mobile equips community health workers’ phones with applications that help the workers do everything from track drug inventories to register new pregnancies—tasks that would otherwise fall to professionals, distracting them from their more specialized, and critical, responsibilities.

In another example, mothers2mothers trains “mentor mothers” to monitor HIV-positive pregnant women. Such help has been shown to increase the latter’s adherence to the demanding treatment regimens required to increase their chances of delivering healthy, HIV-negative babies. As an added benefit, m2m’s mentor mothers leverage the international community’s enormous investment in antiretroviral drugs and other medicines to combat AIDS.

A New Model for Public Projects

Although social entrepreneurship started squarely in the private nonprofit world, striking ...

In the United States, Health Leads trains college students to “prescribe” what doctors would if they had the time and the information: nonmedical social support services to the many poor or struggling patients who use public health clinics or hospital emergency rooms. The organization recognizes that such patients stand a better chance of recovering from illness if their needs for food, shelter, and transportation are met. Better health outcomes reduce the workload on doctors and nurses and the cost burden on the public health care system.

Create a new enabling technology.

We have observed that social entrepreneurs also succeed by supplying or creating a new technology that allows users to do things they could not previously do. For example, before Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley created the Kiva platform, it was nearly impossible for small-scale lenders in wealthy countries to lend to small-scale borrowers in poor countries. The would-be lenders had no way to funnel funds through microfinance institutions (MFIs), which are largely regulated as banks by the countries in which they are based. Instead they had to stick with charitable giving by making donations to NGOs that offered microfinance programs in poor countries.

Medic Mobile equips community health workers’ phones with invaluable apps.

The Kiva platform provides a technology to break through these barriers. It enables microlenders worldwide to make loans as small as $25 to microborrowers in poor countries. Kiva manages the transaction and legal costs and requirements with its global network of MFIs and validates borrowers through locally based partners. Transaction costs on both sides have plummeted as more lenders and borrowers have begun to use the platform. Kiva is on track to facilitate more than $1 billion in microloans within the next couple of years. It has enjoyed a 98% repayment rate since its founding, in 2005, and its earned-to-contributed revenue ratio increases each year.

Repurpose an existing enabling technology.

The third mechanism is similar to the second. However, instead of creating a new technology, the social entrepreneur repurposes an existing one from a different context.

The SASE winner Victoria Hale, a former pharmaceutical company scientist and U.S. Food and Drug Administration staffer, created the Institute for OneWorld Health (iOWH) in order to scour pharmaceutical company shelves for drugs deemed unsuitable for developed world markets and incapable of generating profits in the developing world. She reasoned that some of this latent intellectual property could be repurposed to fight diseases endemic in the poorest parts of the world. An early target for iOWH, which subsequently merged with the global health organization Path, was visceral leishmaniasis (black fever), a fly-borne disease that infects half a million people and kills 30,000 each year, principally in rural India and East Africa. Black fever’s fatality rate existed not because the disease was incurable but because treatment was prohibitively expensive.

Hale identified a drug that had been fully developed but was no longer in production, paromomycin, which she believed could be used to cure black fever. Clinical trials in India proved her right. Eliminating the huge costs of drug development enabled iOWH to persuade the Indian government to make paromomycin available, turning “prohibitively expensive” into “life-saving” for those afflicted.

Imazon
JANUARY 2010


FEBRUARY 2011


Amazon's world-renowned monitoring system can track logging, small-road clearing, and fires in the Amazon rain forest, thus aiding efforts to stop deforestation and degradation. The organization uses its regularly updated data to spark frank discussion and to push for action, working with governments to stop illegal operations.

Meanwhile, in the Amazon basin once again, the SASE winner Imazon anticipated by about a decade Google Earth’s repurposing of public satellite infrastructure. The U.S. government and others built the infrastructure and incurred all the research, development, and other capital costs; Google acquired and repurposed it to provide a popular service.

Imazon repurposed the same infrastructure to track real-time changes in the Amazon basin—with a particular focus on the construction of new roads in the rain forest. Historically, given the size and remoteness of this terrain, illegal loggers could build an illegal road and use it for illegal cutting for years before being discovered and shut down. Imazon’s application of satellite technology, and its partnership with both government and the media, expose logging operations and other incursions so that perpetrators can be identified, stopped, and prosecuted.
A Blended Approach

The strategies we’ve described for succeeding in social entrepreneurship are not mutually exclusive. Many SASE winners draw upon several of them to achieve a new, sustainable equilibrium for their target constituents. For example, Debbie Aung Din Taylor and Jim Taylor, of Proximity Designs, understood that transforming Myanmar’s smallholder agricultural sector required them to fire on multiple cylinders: They had to reduce costs traditionally associated with a start-up, pare down the operating costs of product design and development, cultivate customers, shift government’s role, and continually enhance their technology solutions.

In Myanmar, where the two have worked since 2004, smallholders are the country’s backbone: More than 70% of the population depends on agriculture, and most farmers cultivate subsistence plots in rural locations. Only now emerging from decades of dictatorship, the government has neither the financial resources nor the capability to support this population. Private-sector businesses entering the region are focused on the larger and more sophisticated rice farmers whose output can be aggregated to meet market demands. And donors are more likely to be attracted to health or education programs than to the needs of smallholders. Rural farmers are left to eke out an existence on their own, effectively denied the information, tools, and training that would decrease their vulnerability and increase their productivity.

The Taylors were determined to transform this miserable equilibrium. A lean, focused, entrepreneurial organization from the outset, Proximity started life as a country office for International Development Enterprises, a well-established agricultural products NGO, which cut its start-up costs significantly. As it evolved and became an independent entity, its next task was to figure out how to significantly reduce product R&D costs. It did so in two ways: by partnering with Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and by actively recruiting low-cost, talented, and highly motivated design “fellows” and interns.

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Understanding its poor rural customers enables Proximity to meet their needs across the board. The organization designs its pumps and other irrigation products to be effective, durable, and affordable, and tests its seeds to ensure healthy crops. But a substantial number of Myanmar’s farmers can’t afford new seed stock or even the least expensive device, so Proximity has added microcredit to its suite of services. In addition, it supplements its products and financial services with advisory support, providing the technical assistance that might otherwise be delivered by a country’s agricultural extension services. Finally, the organization engages deftly with the government, which considers it a trusted adviser on issues of food security and a resource for training agricultural officers.

Proximity’s operating-cost reengineering has enabled it to constantly improve and add to its line of products and services. This, in turn, has increased market demand, grown the organization’s customer base, dramatically increased revenue, and—most important—substantially improved food security and livelihood for millions of people.

The government officials, social activists, and business entrepreneurs associated with the great social transformations that have improved our world may not have imagined how much their innovations would accomplish; many did not live to see it happen. Martin Luther King Jr. is a poignant example. The same may be true of today’s social entrepreneurs. But their hybrid method is helping to create change in ways that would be difficult for government or business.

To be sure, pursuing a social goal while being constrained by the requirement of financial sustainability is difficult. Yet the evidence we see from our work at the Skoll Foundation shows that many entrepreneurs are succeeding, in settings all over the world, at creating scalable social ventures to transform unhappy circumstances for a great number of people. The clearly emerging pattern in their successes can serve as a valuable road map for others, thereby speeding society’s journey toward a better, fairer future.

A version of this article appeared in the May 2015 issue (pp.86–94) of Harvard Business Review.

Read more on Business and society or related topics Corporate social responsibility and Public-private partnerships

Sally R. Osberg is the president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation.

Roger L. Martin is a former dean of the Rotman School of Management, an adviser to CEOs, and the author of A New Way to Think (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022).

High Time for a High-Seas Treaty

Feb 24, 2023

JENNIFER MORRIS

As with many common resources, the high seas are not yet protected by a truly comprehensive, agreed-upon framework governing conservation and economic activities beyond national jurisdictions. But this must change if there is to be any hope of achieving global biodiversity goals.

NEW YORK – Our planet’s tightly woven, interconnected natural systems are vital to life and livelihoods. Yet with each passing season, we are witnessing the crushing realities of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. In its 2023 Global Risks Report, the World Economic Forum warns that six of the top ten risks in the coming decade will stem directly from the loss and degradation of nature. In the face of extreme storms and floods, devastating droughts and wildfires, ocean dead zones, and food scarcity, demands for systemic change have reached a crescendo. Unless we embark on a new course, our crises will only deepen

Despite the challenge of reaching global agreements in such a fractured world, we have cause for optimism. In late 2022, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) achieved a breakthrough after languishing in relative obscurity for many years. At the COP15 summit in Montreal in December, countries completed four years of negotiations and approved the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), the most significant intergovernmental agreement on biodiversity in over a decade.

Under the GBF, governments have committed to protect 30% of the world’s land, freshwater, and ocean by 2030; improve the sustainability of agriculture, aquaculture, fisheries, and forestry; and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems. The framework establishes multiple pathways for scaling up solutions within and across borders. It includes down payments, financial commitments, and an implementation plan, and it is already spurring action by corporations, governments, and civil society.

But critical work remains to done. On February 20, UN member states gathered in New York to finalize a key piece of the ocean-governance puzzle: a new treaty to conserve and sustainably manage marine biodiversity in the high seas.

The high seas cover two-thirds of all ocean and almost half the planet, and are home to up to ten million species – many of them still unidentified. But much of this biodiversity remains out of sight and thus out of mind. As a result, life in this vast expanse is constantly threatened by weak regulation of activities such as shipping and fishing, and by poor enforcement of existing laws.

The high seas belong both to everyone and to no one. As with many common resources, there is no comprehensive, agreed-upon framework governing conservation and the sustainable use of the ocean outside of national jurisdictions. But since the same large petrels, leatherback turtles, sharks, and whales that we seek to protect on and off our shores spend much of their lives in the high seas, there is an obvious need for more robust global strategies to protect, manage, and monitor these areas.

Marine life does not recognize legal jurisdictions. For the conservation of migratory species and transboundary ecosystems to be effective, we urgently need a global high-seas treaty, which in turn will contribute to the implementation of the CBD’s ambitious new framework. Without it, the CBD will have much less chance of success. That is because, currently, there are no global powers to establish marine protected areas in the high seas. Even though the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea obligates states to assess the impact of activities in their waters, there is no global mechanism for assessing activities in the high seas. Instead, there is a patchwork of assessment mechanisms for different bodies that regulate parts of the high seas, but no minimum standards that ensure quality or consistency.

So, what needs to happen at the summit in New York? For a new high-seas treaty to make a difference, it must achieve multiple objectives. The first is to provide countries with the legal powers to establish and manage a representative network of marine protected areas in the high seas, as this is essential to protecting at least 30% of the ocean by 2030.

Moreover, we must dramatically strengthen governance of human activities that affect the high seas, by establishing robust, modern environmental assessment and management standards. And we need to ensure sufficient financial, scientific, and technical support for states that require it.

We will also need a mechanism for sharing the benefits of marine genetic resources fairly and equitably, as well as a voting procedure when all good-faith efforts to reach consensus have been exhausted. Otherwise, one or two countries will be able to block progress even on issues that are supported by the overwhelming majority.

Only through a strong high-seas treaty and bolder action within existing treaty bodies (especially fisheries-management agreements) can we protect the health of the ocean. We must adapt quickly to new activities like deep-sea mining, as well as to increased shipping collisions with large animals and rising waste, noise, and artificial-light pollution. This requires managing the whole ocean in a more comprehensive fashion. With ocean health declining, maintaining the status quo is not a viable option.

The negotiations for the first international ocean treaty in over 40 years, and the first to target the conservation and sustainable use of marine life in the high seas, offer another opportunity to rebalance our relationship with nature. Building on the momentum from COP15 in Montreal, we must now set a course to address the biggest risks facing our planet in the next decade.



JENNIFER MORRIS  is CEO of The Nature Conservancy.

Who stands for freedom?

US corporations that have benefited from government largesse have created the myth of ‘free enterprise,’ robbing Americans of their most basic freedom in the process

• By Joseph Stiglitz / NEW YORK
•  
   

The Republican Party has long wrapped itself in the US flag, claiming to be the defender of “freedom.” The party believes individuals should be free to carry firearms, spew hate speech, and eschew vaccines and masks. The same goes for corporations: Even if their activities destroy the planet and permanently change the climate, the “free market” should be trusted to sort things out. Banks and other financial institutions should be “liberated” from regulation, even if their activities can bring down the entire economy.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the acceleration of the climate crisis, it should be obvious that this conception of freedom is far too crude and simplistic for the modern world. Those who still espouse it are either mind-numbingly blinkered or on the take. As the great 20th-century philosopher Isaiah Berlin put it: “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.” Or, put another way, freedom for some is unfreedom for others.

In the US, the freedom to carry guns has come at the expense of the freedom to go to school or the store without being shot. Thousands of innocent people — many of them children — have died so that this particular freedom can live. And millions have lost what former US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt thought was so important, the freedom from fear.

There is no such thing as absolute freedom within a society. Different freedoms must be balanced against each other, and any reasoned discussion among typical Americans (meaning one not captured by political activists and special interests) would inevitably conclude that the right to an AR-15 is not more “sacred” than others’ right to live.

In complex modern societies, there are innumerable ways that one’s actions can harm others without one having to bear any consequences for it. Social media platforms constantly pollute our “information ecosystem” with disinformation and content that is well-known to cause harm (not least to adolescent girls). While the platforms present themselves as neutral conduits of information that is already out there, their algorithms are actively promoting a socially harmful substance.

However, far from paying any costs, the platforms are reaping billions of dollars in profits every year.

The US tech giants are shielded from liability by a 1990s-era law that was originally designed to foster innovation in the inchoate digital economy. The US Supreme Court is now considering a case involving this legislation and other countries around the world are also questioning whether online platforms should be able to avoid accountability for their actions.

For economists, a natural measure of freedom concerns the range of things one can do. The greater one’s “opportunity set,” the freer one is to act. Someone on the verge of starvation — doing what she must just to survive — effectively has no freedom. Viewed this way, an important dimension of freedom is the ability to realize one’s potential. A society in which large segments of the population lack such opportunities — as is the case in societies with high levels of poverty and inequality — is not really free.

Investments in public goods (such as education, infrastructure and basic research) can expand the opportunity set for all individuals, effectively enhancing the freedom of all.

However, such investments require taxes and many individuals — especially in a society that valorizes greed — would rather free ride, by avoiding paying their fair share.

This is a classic collective-action problem. Only through coercion, forcing everyone to pay their taxes, can we generate the revenue needed to invest in public goods. Fortunately, all individuals, including those who have been forced against their will to contribute to society’s investments, may be better off as a result. They will live in a society where they, their children, and everyone else has a larger opportunity set. In such circumstances, coercion is a source of liberation.

Neoliberal economists have long ignored these points and focused instead on “freeing” the economy of what they view as pesky regulations and taxes on corporations (many of which have benefitted massively from public expenditures).

However, where would US business be without an educated labor force, the rule of law to enforce contracts, or the roads and ports needed to transport goods?

In their new book, The Big Myth, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway show how business interests managed to sell the US public on the staunchly anti-government, “free market” vision of capitalism that emerged in the decades after World War II. The rhetoric of “freedom” was key. The captains of industry and their academic servants systematically re-characterized our complex economy — a rich matrix of private, public, cooperative, voluntary and not-for-profit enterprises — as simply a “free enterprise” economy.

In books like Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, capitalism was crudely equated with freedom. Central to this vision of capitalism is the freedom to exploit: Monopolies should have unfettered power to trample potential entrants and squeeze their workers, and firms should be free to collude to exploit their customers. Yet only in a fairy tale world (or an Ayn Rand novel) would such a society and economy be called “free.” Whatever we call it, it is not an economy that we should want; it is not one that promotes broadly shared prosperity; and the greedy, materialistic individuals that it rewards are not who we should want to be.

The Democratic Party needs to reclaim the word “freedom,” as do social democrats and liberals around the world. It is their agenda which is genuinely liberating, which is expanding opportunities, and which is even creating markets that are truly free. Yes, we desperately need free markets, but that means, above all, markets that are free from the stranglehold of monopoly and monopsony, and from the undue power that big businesses have amassed through ideological myth-making.

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is university professor at Columbia University and a member of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation.

Copyright: Project Syndicate

A Year After Invasion, Russian War Crimes Inflict Death and Ruin on Ukraine



Video by PBS NewsHour. Ukraine, 2023.

In the year since Russia invaded their country, Ukrainians have remained resilient in the face of what the U.S. calls crimes against humanity committed by Russian forces. With the support of the Pulitzer Center, Nick Schifrin reports on what prosecutors and investigators documenting Russia's war crimes in Ukraine have found.




As a nonprofit journalism organization, we depend on your support to fund coverage of global conflicts. Help us continue funding the hard costs of in-depth coverage of the Ukraine invasion—including travel, hostile environment safety training, and the increased security expenses that arise from reporting in war zones.

Read the Full Transcript

Nick Schifrin: The person who pushed the button that launched the missile that struck 13 Marat Street, Kramatorsk, almost certainly did not know of the apartments that once stood here, the people and families who once lived here, and the lives that were stolen here. But 60-year-old Valentina knows. She might have lived on the fourth floor, but all that she owns fell here in the lobby. She salvages what she can from the Russian strike on February 1 that Ukraine and the U.S. called indiscriminate. She walked up to her apartment, despite the frequent air raid siren. She has lived here longer than Ukraine has been independent. She was in her apartment when the missile struck. She is lucky to be alive. Today, she uses it for storage. This is what remains of her possessions. The wall that used to have a window into the bathroom is now a window onto the ground below. That's her bathtub, and the aqua tiles installed by her and her son.

Valentina, Resident of Kramatorsk, Ukraine (through translator): I was asleep. And I was lucky that I was on the other side of the apartment. Had I been sleeping on the side, you see for yourself.

Nick Schifrin: So, that's your son. She shows me videos of her son. In 2014, he went to fight following Russia's initial invasion. He never came back.

Valentina (through translator): On March 23, he would have been 44. My life has been lived. For 60 years, I was saving, creating this home, and now it's all gone. There was a grocery store here. And they got me some groceries, just strangers, total strangers. This was the first year they have opened the store. They called me and asked: "Do you need anything?" I said: "I have never asked anyone for anything my whole life. I'm very ashamed. But I don't have anything." And they got me groceries. They said: "This is for you from our family." That's it. Everybody left. I'm here all alone.

Nick Schifrin: Artem Shalata is a Donetsk region war crimes prosecutor who is investigating the strike he calls a violation of the rules of war.

Artem Shalata, Donetsk Region War Crimes Prosecutor (through translator): During this attack, a married couple died. A 61-year-old woman and her 31-year-old daughter died. And 17 people were wounded.

Nick Schifrin: He and his fellow prosecutors visit the aftermath of many strikes, and try to find the Russian missile that can be sometimes be linked with specific units. And they document graves of the Ukrainians whom Russians have killed with overwhelming regularity. What is the scale of Russian crimes in Donetsk?

Artem Shalata: We are overseeing investigations of more than 20,000 criminal cases, in connection with violations of the rules of war.

Nick Schifrin: One of the most notorious occurred here, the Kramatorsk train station, where the horror of what happened hangs heavy for even soldiers and the memorial marks the most innocent victims. Last April 8, hundreds of Ukrainians from the east arrived on the platform and inside the station to try and flee the war. Suddenly, they flinched. Human Rights Watch investigated the attack and created this animation. At that moment, a mile-and-a-half above the station, a Tochka-U cluster bomb 20 feet long with 50 bomblets inside exploded and released its deadly submunitions, each with explosions and metal rings. When they land, they burst into thousands of fragments and create terror. At least 58 people died, more than 100 injured, one of the war's deadliest moments. Left behind, the suitcases that would never be used again, the prized possession that would never be held again. Apparently, the Russians considered the attack tit for tat. The missile that landed here was spray-painted "Payback for our children."

Ida Sawyer, Human Rights Watch: I mean, absolutely horrific what they did. This was a known evacuation point. We counted over 500 people at this train station at the moment of the attack.

Nick Schifrin: Ida Sawyer directs the Crisis and Conflict Division at Human Rights Watch.

Ida Sawyer: This attack at the train station clearly a violation of the laws of war and an apparent war crime. These are people desperately fleeing war. We have seen extensive war crimes, crimes against humanity being committed over the past year. And it is — it's just one thing after another.

Nick Schifrin: In so many ways, Russia has taken a page from its own playbook and targeted Ukraine's most vulnerable. This used to be a psychiatric institution, hit by four Russian rockets, one of at least eight hospitals in this city alone struck by Russia, part of what independent researchers call a nationwide campaign against Ukrainian medical facilities. Physicians for Human Rights mapped every attack on a medical facility between February 24 and December 31. They counted 707. If you think this is new, you haven't been paying attention. Russia has used the same tactics in Syria for eight years. But now Russia's committing a new crime. These children might look happy for Russian propaganda cameras, but each is Ukrainian, stolen from their homeland and forcibly made Russian. This is the reality. Russians besieged Mariupol, and forced its children into Russia, including those of Yevhen Mezhevyi.

Yevhen Mezhevyi, Father (through translator): I put the children on the bus, hugged and kissed them.

Child (through translator): One man said he would be returned in seven years. People said five or seven years.

Child (through translator): They asked me again, do you want to join a foster family or an orphanage?

Nick Schifrin: They told their story in a "Vanity Fair" documentary for The Reckoning Project. Nataliya Gumenyuk is the group's founding member.

Nataliya Gumenyuk, The Reckoning Project: From some of the testimonies and also analytical reports and what we hear from the people, there is an attempt to indoctrinate those kids with the different policies, with the different ideas, and actually creating kind of a hatred and denial of the Ukrainian state.

Nick Schifrin: Mezhevyi managed to travel to Moscow and escape with his children to Latvia. The U.S. says Moscow's actions are taken at all levels of the Russian government, including the top. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin met the presidential commissioner for children's rights in Russia, who said she — quote — "adopted" her own Ukrainian child.

Nataliya Gumenyuk: I think Russia, in particularly, in previous wars in Syria, in Chechnya, they were acting with such an impunity, thinking that nobody would care. In Ukraine, they made a mistake. We do care. We record. We document. There is the will of the people of the country to do something. And that gives a hope that that — the justice can prevail.

Nick Schifrin: Ukraine wants to create an independent tribunal to pursue Russia's leadership. But the U.S. has so far refused to support that, and instead prioritizes the International Criminal Court. Accountability there will take years, while the Russian missiles keep falling. The strike blew open a dozen homes and rained debris on the playground. The same playground where 61-year-old Sergey Seydaliev's children used to play. He stares at his now-destroyed home, where he lived with his parents and his family for the last 42 years. There is so much torment here, but it's mixed with a tenacious will.

Sergey Seydaliev, Resident of Pokrovsk, Ukraine (through translator): We lost all of our savings. This is my whole life. And now everything is gone. Everything is gone. I'm an older man. But we will make it through. Life does not stop here. We will win, for sure, I have no doubt whatsoever.

Nick Schifrin: After all the Russian crimes, most Ukrainians say the only justice would be victory. For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Nick Schifrin in Kramatorsk, Ukraine.

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Sleepwalking Toward Accidental Conflict
Feb 27, 2023

STEPHEN S. ROACH


The argument minimizing the risk of a war between major powers – that today’s globalized, interconnected world has too much at stake to risk a seismic unraveling – is painfully familiar. It is the same argument that was made in the early twentieth century, when the first wave of globalization was at its peak.


NEW HAVEN – Too many observers have lost sight of one of the key lessons of World War I. The Great War was triggered by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, which occurred against the backdrop of a long-simmering conflict between Europe’s major powers. This interplay between conflict escalation and a political spark has special resonance today.

The Only Way to End the War
FRANS TIMMERMANS explains why there remains no other option than to give 

Ukraine the means to push Russia back militarily.


With war raging in Ukraine and a cold-war mentality gripping the United States and China, there can be no mistaking the historical parallels. The world is simmering with conflict and resentment. All that is missing is a triggering event. With tensions in Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Ukraine, there are plenty of possible sparks to worry about.

Taiwan is a leading candidate. Even if, like me, you do not accept the US view that President Xi Jinping has consciously shortened the timeline for reunification, recent actions by the US government may end up forcing his hand. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi traveled to Taipei last August, and her successor, Kevin McCarthy, seems intent on doing the same. The newly established House Select Committee on China appears likely to send its own mission shortly, especially following the unannounced recent visit of its chairman, Mike Gallagher.

Meanwhile, a just-completed visit to Taipei by a senior official from the Pentagon, in the aftermath of the December enactment of the $10 billion Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act, leaves little doubt about US military support for China’s so-called renegade province. While the US squirms to defend the One China principle enshrined in the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, there can no longer be any doubt about US political support for preserving Taiwan’s independent status. That is a red line for China – and a geopolitical flashpoint for everyone else.

I worry just as much about a spark in Ukraine. One year into this horrific and once-unthinkable conflict, there is a new and ominous twist to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spring offensive. The US is warning of an escalation of Chinese support for Russia from non-lethal assistance (like purchasing Russian energy products) to lethal aid (weapons, ammunition, or logistical arms-supply capabilities).

The Biden administration’s vague threat of serious consequences for China if it offers lethal aid to Russia’s war effort is reminiscent of similar US warnings that preceded the imposition of unprecedented sanctions on Russia. In the eyes of US politicians, China would be guilty by association and forced to pay a very steep price. Just as Taiwan is China’s red line, Washington believes the same can be said of Chinese military support for Russia’s war campaign.



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There are plenty of other potential sparks, not least from ongoing tensions in the South China Sea. The recent expansion of US access to Philippine military bases located midway between Taiwan and China’s militarized islands in the Scarborough Shoal and the Spratly (Nansha) Archipelago is a case in point.

As the US continues to enforce freedom of navigation in the international waters of the South China Sea by sailing naval vessels through it, the possibility of an accident or unintended confrontation can hardly be ruled out. A near-miss between a US reconnaissance flight and a Chinese warplane in late December is indicative of these risks, which are all the more serious given the breakdown in military-to-military communications between the two superpowers – glaringly evident during the great balloon fiasco earlier this month.

Context is key in assessing the likelihood of any spark. Under the political cover of what it bills as a battle between autocracy and democracy, the US has clearly been the aggressor in turning up the heat on Taiwan over the past six months. Similarly, the Chinese surveillance balloon incident brought the cold-war threat much closer to home for the US public. And senior diplomats on both sides – US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi – have taken on the role of classic cold warriors. Their belligerent rhetoric at the recent Munich Security Conference mirrored that of their first meeting in Anchorage nearly two years ago.

As was the case before World War I, it is tempting to minimize the risk of a major conflict. After all, today’s globalized, interconnected world has too much at stake to risk a seismic unraveling. That argument is painfully familiar. It is the same one made in the early twentieth century, when the first wave of globalization was at its peak. It seemed compelling to many right up to June 28, 1914.

The historical comparison with 2023 must be updated to reflect the grand strategy of cold war conflict. A decisive turning point in the Cold War with the Soviet Union came in 1972, when US President Richard Nixon went to China and ultimately joined with Mao Zedong in executing a successful triangulation strategy against the USSR. Today, the US is on the receiving end of a new cold-war triangulation, with China having joined Russia in a partnership “without limits” that takes dead aim at US hegemonic power. This pivotal shift brings the lessons of 1914 into increasingly sharper focus.

Having just published a book about accidental conflict as an outgrowth of dueling false narratives between the US and China, I am particularly worried about “narrative segmentation.” Each side is convinced that it holds the moral high ground as conflict lurches from one incident to another. For the US, China’s surveillance balloon was a threat to national sovereignty. For China, US support for Taiwan is a similar threat. Each point of tension then triggers a cascading stream of retaliatory responses without recognition of collateral implications for a deeply conflicted relationship.

Three great powers – America, China, and Russia – all seem to be afflicted by a profound sense of historical amnesia. They are collectively sleepwalking down a path of conflict escalation, carrying high-octane fuel that could be ignited all too easily. Just like 1914.



STEPHEN S. ROACH a faculty member at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, is the author of Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China (Yale University Press, 2014) and Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale University Press, 2022).

 

Frantz Fanon and the Inefficacy of Anti-colonial Violence

Jodie Bradshaw

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Feb 27 2023 • 

This content was originally written for an undergraduate or Master's program. It is published as part of our mission to showcase peer-leading papers written by students during their studies. This work can be used for background reading and research, but should not be cited as an expert source or used in place of scholarly articles/books.

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“For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time” (Sartre, 2000, 22). Fanon’s central defence for his argument favouring anti-colonial violence is that “violence is necessary because it works” (Frazer and Hutchings, 2008, 9). This essay interprets Fanon’s argument in The Wretched of the Earth as follows: anti-colonial violence has the potential to emancipate the colonised subject from the immanent violence colonisers have subjected to them. The central argument of this essay is that Fanon’s claim is indefensible because of the inefficacy of anti-colonial violence in achieving the aim of enabling colonised subjects to re-create themselves.

The first section will define Hirst et al.’s notion of immanent violence (forthcoming 2023) to shed light on Fanon’s description of the psychological impact of colonial violence on colonised subjects. Fanon’s argument will be outlined in the second section, and its strengths will be acknowledged. It will then be argued that Fanon’s claim is mistaken on two fronts. Firstly, Fanon mistakenly argues that anti-colonial violence will liberate the colonised subject from the co-production of subjectivity with the coloniser. This essay argues that all individuals are always co-constituted by the other and that Fanon simply substitutes the essentialising mould proposed by the coloniser for another. Secondly, contrary to allowing all colonised subjects to re-create themselves, anti-colonial violence and the coloniser’s retaliatory violence entails an intensified gendered immanent violence, whose victims are doubly victimised by colonisers and anti-colonial revolutionaries alike. Thus, it will be concluded that a more effective way of combatting colonial immanent violence is to dismantle the racialised and gendered discourses that make this violence possible. However, this is not to say that anti-colonial violence is ineffective at achieving different aims to re-creating the self, such as establishing national sovereignty.

Immanent Violence and the Colonial Matrix of Power

While colonialism simultaneously constitutes a form of physical, structural, and immanent violence, the latter is most relevant to an analysis of re-creating the self in the wake of colonial violence. By immanent violence, this essay refers to the forms of violence which operate “in the internal realm of values, beliefs, and identity” in our patterns of thinking, language, concepts, speaking and behaving (Hirst et al., forthcoming 2023, 8-10). This form of violence is at play in our assessments of ourselves and other people and the knowledge we produce about each (Hirst et al., forthcoming 2023). When the knowledge made by a people is systematically disregarded and invalidated, then immanent violence has been committed inasmuch as these people are not regarded as active subjects in knowledge production (Hirst et al., forthcoming, 2023). Frequently this occurs to colonised people, who are treated as objects in Western forms of knowledge production (Hirst et al., forthcoming 2023).

While immanent violence can be committed unconsciously, it can also be deliberate, calculated, and ideological, as was typically the case with colonisation. According to Mamdani, all colonial endeavours are characterised by the “native question”: “how can a tiny and foreign minority rule over an indigenous majority?” (1996, 16). For Sartre and Fanon, the solution to this question is immanent violence. Their anti-colonial resistance is debilitated by dehumanising the colonised subject and having them internalise this dehumanisation. To achieve this end, the coloniser undertakes a campaign of immanent violence, equating the colonised subject with a quintessence of all that is bad (Fanon, 2002, 44). Not only is the colonised subject declared to be impervious to ethics and lacking values, but they are also represented as the very negation of values: evilness in its most complete form (Fanon, 2002). This epitomises Said’s conceptualisation of orientalism, whereby Western writings represent the distinction between the ‘Orient’ and the ‘West’ along binary lines (1979). According to an orientalist logic, the ‘Orient’ is characterised by, in short: irrationality, backwardness, and exoticism, while the ‘West’ is depicted as rational, moral, and the pinnacle of civilisation (Said, 1979). Describing the ‘Orient’ in this way means, for Said, that orientalism amounts to a Western strategy for “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1979, 3).

Orientalism facilitates Western domination of the ‘Orient’ because of the immanent violence it entails. The discursive practices employed become sites through which the identities of subjects and objects become constructed and positioned in relation to one another (Foucault, 1972, 49). For instance, Fanon gives the example of the use of zoological language by colonisers when they speak about the colonised subject, reducing them to an animal (2002, 45). Here, a hierarchy is established, with the colonised subject being the inferior object and the coloniser being the superior subject. In the coloniser’s discourse, each colonised subject is subsumed into an indistinct mass, effacing all nuance and individuality (Fanon, 2002, 46-47). This stereotypical labelling of human beings “can have an emptying and rigidifying effect” (Phillips, 1994, 208) on the colonised subject, catalysing the alienation introduced into the core of the colonised people (Fanon, 2002, 45). This results in the colonised subject experiencing what Du Bois has coined as “double-consciousness”, whereby one experiences “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”, leading to a feeling of “twoness” as a result of these “two warring ideals” inside of oneself (1997, 615). That is to say that the colonised subject come to see themselves through the perspective of the coloniser, as well as through their own eyes. Yet, even in their own eyes, they are debased. With the colonised having had to choose between death and submission, the choice to live is experienced with such shame that it strips them of their status as “a man” (Sartre, 2000, 15). Ultimately, being subjected to immanent colonial violence leads to the internalisation of an inferiority complex (Fanon, 1963, 94).

The Emancipatory Potential of Anti-colonial Violence

According to Fanon, anti-colonial violence has an emancipatory potential for the colonised subject subjected to this immanent violence. It is by means of this “irrepressible violence” that “man recreat[es] himself” (Sartre, 2000, 21). During the liberation struggle, the colonised subject puts an end to the history of colonisation and brings “into existence the history of the nation—the history of decolonisation” (Fanon, 2000, 51). In the act of anti-colonial violence, they discover that their life is equal to that of the coloniser, that the coloniser’s skin is worth no more than their own (Fanon, 1963, 48). Having learnt this, the colonised subject is no longer immobilised nor petrified by the coloniser (Fanon, 1963). Consequently, anti-colonial violence “frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect” (Fanon, 2000, 94). In turn, Fanon effectively argues that anti-colonial violence not only expels the coloniser from the colonised territory but also from the colonised mind. It becomes a cathartic moment of discrediting the coloniser’s orientalist characterisation of the colonised subject.

What is compelling about Fanon’s argument is that he forces his readers to acknowledge that the experience of colonial occupation is inherently violent. Therefore, whether or not to engage in revolutionary anti-colonial violence is not a choice between peace and violence. In fact, Barber goes as far as to argue that violence is not an instrument of choice under all tyrannical governments (2003, 77, 88). As the powerful are most frequently victorious in confrontations based on force, Barber argues that violence is mostly a last resort by those who are disempowered by the existing political order (2003). Hence, asserting the need for oppressed people only to pursue peaceful means may very well constitute tolerating their ongoing “oppression, dispossession, unrecognition, [and] indignity” (Baier, 1995, 213). This undermines Fanon’s critics, who appeal to deliberative ideals of peaceful resolution.

With this said, it is ironically in Fanon’s representation of victims of violence where the downfall of his argument can be located. In chapter five of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon illustrates “the corrupting and debilitating effects of violence, whether reactionary or revolutionary, on both perpetrators and victims” post-decolonisation (Frazer and Hutchings, 2008, 10). This suggests that anti-colonial violence did not, in fact, cure subjects of pathologies induced by colonialism (Frazer and Hutchings, 2008, 10). Therefore, it calls into question the potential for anti-colonial violence to re-create the self in overthrowing colonial influence. It is this question that the next section will address.

The Inefficacy of Anti-colonial Violence: Recreating the Self

In order for Fanon’s instrumental justification of anti-colonial violence to be defensible, there must be reasonable certainty that the end it pursues is likely to be attained. For Arendt, “violent action is ruled by the means-end category”, and this action is only rational “to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end that must justify it” (1969, 4&79). Following this reasoning, this section argues that Fanon’s anti-colonial violence is indefensible because of the discrepancy between its intended outcome (a re-creation of the self) and its actual outcome (the inexorable co-constitution of the self by the (colonial) Other). That is to say, the self is inherently “co-dependent and co-constituted by others” (Martens, 2016, 70), and therefore one’s “self-portrait [inevitably] comes from the realm of the Other” (Doubrovsky, 1993, 37), even after the physical presence of the colonial Other is removed. “Physical absence is thus not sufficient to free one from constraint” (Mercken-Spaas, 1974, 58) because the Other still inhabits us in our memory (Kristeva, 2000, 66). For this reason, O’Loughlin describes the other as “a spectral and silent presence in my subjective experience of self” (2009, 100).

In turn, the oppressive encounter with the colonial Other which Fanon describes can be interpreted as an inescapable part of lived experience: it is the human predicament. As a result of the inevitability of the Other moulding the self, all subjects, including the colonised subject, cannot re-create their sense of self. Jefferson explains this in terms of the necessary interconnection between subjectivity (the content of selfhood) and intersubjectivity (2000, 40). As subjectivity is conceptualised in terms of sameness and difference, it is “inextricably bound up with the subject’s relation to the other” (Jefferson, 2000, 40). In fact, Jefferson even goes as far as to say that the totality of a subject’s experiences constitutes an experience of other subjects (Jefferson, 2000). Echoing DuBois’ point, as mentioned earlier, Jefferson argues that the subject is thus shaped by the image of themselves which they meet in the eyes of others (2000, 47). However, unlike DuBois, Jefferson argues that this is experienced universally by subjects (2000, 40), as opposed to being limited to the colonial context and its legacies.

This understanding of selfhood differs significantly from that of The Wretched of the Earth, which Sartre interprets as a self which is created in “the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us” (2000, 17). However, in seeking to eject the unified sense of self-imposed onto the colonised subject by colonisers, Fanon ends up replacing it with a new totalising mould. In the text, Fanon demonstrates what Tidd describes as a Derridean desire for self-totalisation: a production of narratives about the self that therapeutically allows individuals to comprehend their experiences (1999, 78). In the wake of the insecurity induced by the colonial domination, Fanon seeks ontological security for the colonised subject, which he acquires by essentialising the collective self of these colonised subjects. Indeed, ontological security can be secured through structures, narratives, and routines which manage dread (Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2017, 20). Landy points out that such systematisation of experience sustains “the fantasy of an existence purged of all contingency” so that the subject may “live in harmony with itself” (2009, 198). However, these resources have a sacrificial logic, meaning they render a collective self by excluding the stereotypical other (Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2017, 20). With this in mind, Fanon’s pursuit of ontological security can be read as an obsessive fixation with rejecting and disassociating from intersubjectivity with the colonial Other. Fanon vehemently refuses to recognise the role of the Other in defining the self post-decolonisation. Despite the comfort this provides, we should remember that we cannot abolish antagonistic confrontations between interiority and the exterior world (Mercken-Spaas, 1974, 61) and accept it as necessarily influencing the self.

Anti-colonial Violence and the Intensification of Gendered Violence

Furthermore, Fanon’s conceptualisation of the self is undeniably masculine. Due to this narrow lens, he can disregard the fact that his calls for militarisation will entail intensified gendered immanent and physical violence. Indeed, his text itself directly contributes to this gendered immanent violence. This is apparent in descriptions of the “native” who will re-create “himself”; for instance: “[w]hen the native is tortured, when his wife is killed or raped, he complains to no one” (Fanon, 2000, 92). Here, women are not the “natives” who will be engaging in anti-colonial violence and re-creating the self, for they are to play the role of the wife in this teleological tragedy, for which their deaths serve to make their male counterparts sympathetic. The allusion to women as collateral damage during anti-colonial violence is likewise present in Sartre’s preface: “[i]t will not be without fearful losses … they massacre women and children … This potential dead man has lost his wife and his children” (2000, 23). In both cases, women are only evoked to provide insight into the psychological suffering of the male protagonist, which the coloniser has inflicted.

As mentioned above, Hirst et al. argue that immanent violence has been committed when people are regarded as objects instead of active subjects in knowledge production (forthcoming 2023, 9). This essay argues that this occurs to women in The Wretched of the Earth. The objectification of women is most apparent in Sartre’s reference to women and children in conjunction. Enloe has usefully criticised this as a recurring tendency for both collective nouns to appear together as “womenandchildren” (1993, 166). This “serves discursively to associate women necessarily with children” and, in turn, to compare the former with the latter, who “are not fully mature”, are “not fully capable of rational thought”, and who are “in need of care and protection” (Shepherd, 2005, 395). Indeed, as the victims of both “massacre” and “rape”, it is clear that both Fanon and Sartre do not treat them as active subjects, neither in the text nor in real-life anti-colonial violence.

In the examples cited above, the coloniser has administered gendered physical violence. It is worth conceding that Fanon’s call for anti-colonial violence cannot be delegitimised based on the gendered physical violence committed by the colonial power alone. Indeed, Fanon himself insists that while the colonised subject accepts all the consequences for the violence they have pursued, they should not be held accountable for the actions of others (1963, 88). Yet, the coloniser is not the only actor who commits gendered immanent violence in Fanon’s text. For example, Fanon describes the colonised subject’s envy of all of the “possessions” of the coloniser, painting a picture of their fantasies of sitting at the coloniser’s table, sleeping in his bed, and “his wife if possible” (Ibid., 39). This is likewise an instance of objectifying women, as women are reduced to a man’s possession and are only of interest insofar as they are sex objects. Additionally, it appears that she is only desired insofar as she becomes a means of masculine vengeance through cuckoldry. In this way, the colonised male subject in Fanon’s text also commits gendered immanent violence.

Moreover, the militarisation called for by Fanon exacerbates gendered immanent violence. This is because militarism is generally informed by patriarchal values, which can “deepen the privileging of men as a group and masculinity as an idea” (Enloe, 2000, 144). This is especially the case as women are frequently pawns in military strategies. When military actors perceive women principally as breeders, as the property of men, and as the symbols of male honour (Enloe, 2000, 134), the military operations they devise often include targeted sexual violence towards women as a means to assault the male enemy’s masculinity (Roseneil, 1995). This demonstrates Shepherd’s point that “violences are sites at which gendered identities are reproduced” (2006, 390). In other instances, women are frequently victims of additional violence, such as the “lootpillageandrape” “litany” evoked by Enloe (2000, 134). Both cases involve gendered immanent violence as women’s perspectives are systematically disregarded and invalidated. They are not treated as legitimate active subjects: they are reduced to an object of pleasure or a tool to emasculate another subject. This objectification is compounded by the fact that the perpetrator is not always an enemy soldier; they may be a fellow citizen, “a neighbour-turned-wartime-rapist” (Enloe, 2000, 144&151). This is relevant to anti-colonial violence as militarisation and gendered sexual violence extensively co-occur despite the:

“Different cultures, different religions, different political ideologies, different foreign allies, different modes of warfare, different military-civilian relationships- but in each situation the rapes of women were by men who thought of themselves as soldiers”.

(Enloe, 2000, 134)

The psychological effect of this is much akin to that of the colonised subject described by Fanon: female victims of wartime sexual violence are “reduced in her own eyes to a nonperson” (Enloe, 2000, 130). However, unlike her male counterpart in The Wretched of the Earth, she is denied an active role in anti-colonial violence. She does not get an outlet for her built-up rage, and she cannot re-create her sense of self.

Conclusion

To conclude, this essay argues that the question of how “man re-creat[es] himself” can be reworded as how to rehabilitate the victims of immanent colonial violence so that they do not “become so preoccupied with earlier atrocities that the past swallows up the present and stymies the future[?]” (Enloe, 2000, 151). The solution proposed by Fanon for male colonised subjects is the cathartic release attained by anti-colonial violence. Furthermore, he optimistically asserts that this will pave the way for a better society, as it introduces the notion of a common cause and a national destiny in the consciousness of the mobilised masses (1963, 90). The fundamental shortcoming of Fanon’s argument is that his means of violence cannot justify the end of re-creating the self because of the inefficacy of the means. This essay has sought to illustrate the universal inability for self-re-creation in the sense of dispelling the influence of the Other more broadly and the colonial Other in particular. This is because subjectivity is inseparably bound to its relation with the Other and is therefore constituted by intersubjectivity (Jefferson, 2000, 40). This essay has also shown that rather than curing colonised subjects from their internalised inferiority inflicted by immanent violence, anti-colonial violence – and violence more broadly – heightens gendered immanent violence. In conclusion, this essay proposes that the answer to treating the harm caused by immanent violence may be in dismantling the racialised and gendered discourses that make this immanent violence possible. Future research is encouraged to critically engage with these discourses to destabilise the violence they commit.

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Phillips, J. (1994). Figures of the feminine: Doll as referent, doll as metaphor in the work of Nathalie Sarraute. Australian journal of French studies, 31(2), 200-214.

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