Back to the Future of the Arctic

The Enduring Relevance of Arms Control

SWP Comment 2024/C 18,

Michael Paul

02.05.2024, 

7 Pages
doi:10.18449/2024C18

Research Areas

Security and defence policy
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Russia’s war against Ukraine seems to have no immediate end in sight, the strategic competition between China and the US continues, and the expanding military cooperation between China and Russia increases the challenges facing the international com­munity. In this context, the Arctic seems to be a relic of the past, no longer the “zone of peace” that Mikhail Gorbachev described in 1987. Indeed, this Arctic exceptionalism ended long before Russia’s war of aggression began. In order to restore at least a minimum level of cooperation, informal talks are needed that could help to provide perspective after the end of the war. Two former relatively uncontroversial projects could serve as starting points: the recovery of radioactive remnants of the Cold War and an agreement to prevent unintentional escalation, namely, another Incidents at Sea Agreement (INCSEA). A return to old approaches to arms control could pave the way to renewed cooperation in the Arctic in the future.

Generalised mistrust has supplanted the trust that once anchored the Arctic Council, and it is difficult to see at what level and by what means the forum can be brought back to constructive engagement. Under Presi­dent Vladimir Putin, Russia has now either violated or terminated all remaining arms control agreements and fora. Trusting co­operation with Putin is no longer possible, and his aggressive, neo-imperialist policy will have a lasting impact. Yet, Russia still laments the loss of trust – as cynical as this may sound in view of the ongoing brutality of Russian warfare and violations of inter­national law.

Reinstatement of the Arctic as an area of cooperation and stability is the long-term goal of all member states of the Arctic Coun­cil. Indigenous peoples and observer states, including Germany, are also likely to agree on this. Even Moscow seems to be interested in some kind of stability, par­ticularly to enable the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation (AZRF) to function as its national resource base funded by foreign investments and thus to reduce its growing dependence on China. However, Russia cur­rently remains on a collision course with the West. The hostilities in Ukraine will not end in 2024, which will be a decisive year in many respects; a historic NATO summit will take place in Washington and several elections will occur, including the US presi­dential elections in November.

In order to make future cooperation pos­sible, it is advisable to reflect critically on certain measures that appear suitable to restore trust in the intentions and goals of Arctic actors. To this end, the original objec­tives and instruments of arms control should be reconsidered, and thought should be given to how they can be applied within the new Arctic security environment. This applies across the entire spectrum, from con­fidence-building measures to arms con­trol of weapons systems.

The Arctic: a hotspot of climate change and an area of political opportunity

The Arctic is a good starting point for un­official talks and an eventual resumption of positive diplomatic exchange, not least because of its geographic location far from current geopolitical hotspots in the Sino-American rivalry and its increasing impor­tance for both China and the United States. According to Canadian political scientist Rob Huebert, the US, China, and Russia form “a new Arctic strategic triangle” which essentially determines the potential for con­flict in the Arctic.

The effects of climate change in combination with strategic competition form a toxic mix when it comes to cooperation among the Arctic players. Due to continued warming, an ice-free Arctic Ocean will likely become a reality in the near future. In this case, the Arctic Ocean is expected to be covered by less than 15 percent sea ice in the summer months. Such a scenario is now foreseen to occur by the mid-2030s, whereas some time ago this was not ex­pected until the middle or end of the cen­tury. Due to this development, sea routes and resources in the Arctic will be more accessible soon. Civilian and military activ­ities are already growing and competition for access and influence in the Arctic is intensifying. This has created a need for rules governing states’ behaviour, while also taking into account transnational and indigenous relationships.

The increase of military activity requires arms control in the original and comprehensive sense. This means that potential adversaries should engage in all forms of military cooperation in the interest of re­ducing the probability, scale, and violence of a potential military conflict, as well as the political and economic costs of pre­paring for one. In this context, it is now a question of what can be used in the medium term to overcome the ongoing tensions and to shape mutually beneficial cooperation in the Arctic in the future. A certain degree of cooperation with Russia is necessary in order to avoid misunderstand­ings, miscalculations, and mutually unde­sirable events which could occur in the con­text of military activities. In the long term, stability is a prerequisite to the sustainable use of Arctic sea routes and resources. The Arctic states will need to involve new play­ers such as China if a “peaceful, stable, prosperous and cooperative Arctic” is to be possible in line with the US Arctic strategy.

Such a constructive approach currently has little chance of success within Russia, as with many NATO states. The Kremlin sees the collective West as an opponent and perceives willingness to negotiate as a weak­ness. Within NATO, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine has strength­ened internal cohesion, but the alliance is not united on the question of how security should be guaranteed against Russia in the future. The opinion in many NATO states is that Russia can only be countered from a position of strength, which thus requires comprehensive rearmament. Others, on the other hand, also consider risk reduction measures to be reasonable, which would require a minimum level of cooperation. A clear decision on NATO’s political direction is not expected before this year’s summit in Washington and the US presidential election.

First and foremost, it is necessary to reach a common understanding of how future relations with Russia should be shaped after the end of the war against Ukraine. The Arctic is of central importance to Russia not only as a national resource base and sea route, but also as a zone of security that guarantees Russia’s maritime nuclear second-strike capability. For their part, the north­ern European states, as well as the US and Canada, are facing new types of military threats that require novel concepts and costly investment in capacities. Former con­cepts such as crisis stability are being chal­lenged by the emergence of hypersonic weapons systems, and this puts political decision-making processes under even more pressure.

The security dilemma in the Arctic should be defused, the build-up of military capabilities contained, and crisis and con­flict prevention measures should be intro­duced. Ideally, these goals can serve as building blocks for a future security archi­tecture. Otherwise, the increasing activities in the Arctic – from civilian shipping to large-scale military exercises – exacerbate the risk of unintentional escalation as a result of misunderstanding or misperception. Thus, a dialogue on military security issues in the Arctic must be established.

At which level could the Arctic states resume dialogue?

Despite tensions with Russia, communication between the Arctic states continues, both at an official level, such as within the framework of the United Nations, and bilaterally insofar as it is enshrined in agree­ments that regulate border traffic, protect fishing activities, and maintain search and rescue commitments. Multilateral formats are also still active, for example among parties to the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement (CAOFA).

However, a security dialogue that includes Moscow and focuses explicitly on the Arctic no longer exists. Since its annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia is no longer in­volved in dialogue among the Arctic states’ military commanders (the Arctic Chiefs of Defence [ACHOD]) or in the annual meet­ings of the Arctic Security Forces Round­table (ASFR). Germany, France, the UK, and the Netherlands are also represented at the ASFR. Other formats of which Russia is a member such as the Arctic Council and the Arctic Coast Guard Forum (ACGF) do not address military security, nor does the Barents Euro-Arctic Council, from which Russia withdrew in September 2023. Even before the war, experts widely agreed that Russia needed to be reincluded in dialogue, but opinions differ among politicians and experts as to how this should be done.

The most obvious solution seems to be the least realistic, namely extending the mandate of the Arctic Council to include military affairs. Indeed, the Arctic Council has a high degree of institutionalisation and has been successfully active for over two decades. The extension of its mandate would therefore appear to be easier than creating an entirely new format as it also already brings together all of the main regional players. In spite of this, member states would need to agree on broadening the Council’s mandate to include military security issues, and this has already been rejected by some members. While Iceland’s Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir and Fin­land’s Prime Minister Antti Rinne spoke out in favour of such a solution in the past, others voiced concerns that this could hinder cooperation. Former Norwegian Arctic en­voy Bård Ivar Svendsen, for example, noted at a time of extensive cooperation that the dialogue with Russia in the Council only remained active precisely because security policy was not being discussed. Moreover, in 2021, Alaska’s Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) President Jimmy Stotts refused to address defence issues, stating, “[w]e don’t wish to see our world overrun with other peoples’ problems”. Consensus on this front therefore remains unlikely.

Another approach would be to resort to already established formats. For instance, in the beginning of Russia’s chairmanship of the Arctic Council (2021-23), Foreign Minis­ter Sergei Lavrov sought to reactivate dia­logue between the general staffs of the Arc­tic states. With this in mind, Russia’s Arctic ambassador Nicolay Korchunov declared his intention to resume informal exchanges between military experts from the Arctic states. The war against Ukraine has put an end to these ideas, and the accession of Fin­land and Sweden to NATO shows the need for an alternative interim approach aside from formats such as the ACHOD and ASFR that exclude Russia.

Even if scepticism is warranted, dialogue with Russia at an informal, expert level (Track 2) seems reasonable. This would make it possible to test potential approaches to confidence-building measures and, building on this, to initiate official talks at a formal level (Track 1) in due course. Informal talks are an instrument that stimulates reflective dialogue between actors in conflict, espe­cially when discussions at official levels are difficult or even impossible. In today’s new mistrustful and competitive reality, it is important to restore a minimum level of stability. Dialogue between military experts from all eight Arctic states could constitute a new interim format and initiate a process in which confidence-building measures are developed.

To this end, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) has had experience organising Track 2 (infor­mal) and Track 1.5 (with officials) meetings with Russian representatives before the in­vasion of Ukraine. Russia has a very limited pool of experts who have little or no ex­change with or influence over Russian policy- and decision-making. Since the beginning of the war, the Russian expert community has split into several groups: The first group has fled the country in exile; the second group is still in Russia, but is isolated and trying to fly under the radar; the third group is making a career for them­selves by adopting or echoing the Kremlin’s rhetoric. Even if exchange with the second group could be constructive, these (former) experts would be putting themselves at extreme risk by engaging. Interrogations at the borders are commonplace and these experts can easily be declared foreign agents. Track 2 activities are also known to have been infiltrated by Russian intelligence services; and even in cases in which Mos­cow has authorised such talks (such as the 1993–2013 Armed Forces Dialogue seminars with Russia, organised by SWP in cooperation with the German Federal Minis­try of Defence), no significant break­throughs have truly been witnessed.

With this in mind, informal talks on arms control and transparency measures represent another possible realm of engage­ment that does not necessarily require mu­tual trust in order to be successful. Rather, such measures are a means of en­abling predictable behaviour among parties who distrust one another and of creating trust in the long-term.

What kind of measures can restore trust?

Trust always involves a degree of uncertainty and the possibility of disappointment. Nevertheless, it also opens up more possi­bilities for action because, as the sociologist Niklas Luhmann puts it, “trust provides a more effective form of reducing complexity”. Those who act with confidence are opti­mistic about the future, which always con­tains a multitude of certain and uncertain events. If calculated rationally, risks cannot be eliminated, but they can be reduced. Ac­cording to Luhmann, such points of refer­ence can thus serve as a “stepping stone for jumping into a limited and structured uncertainty”.

According to its National Security Strategy, the German government “supports strategic risk reduction and the fostering of predict­ability, as well as the maintenance of reli­able political and military channels of com­munication in relations between NATO and Russia. [It] remain[s] open to reciprocal transparency measures where the prerequisites for them exist”. This includes the devel­opment of new approaches based on behav­ioural arms control that can help reduce tensions.

In 2023, Russia’s Arctic ambassador Nico­lay Korchunov once again expressed the desire for comprehensive cooperation that included military issues, stating that “[i]t can all be sorted out by dialogue, which would strengthen trust”. Despite this senti­ment, it will be difficult to start a dialogue in view of the consequences of the war in Ukraine. Russia’s current policy gives little hope for constructive talks, as deliberately playing with unpredictability is one of Rus­sia’s manipulation tactics to destabilise Western societies and institutions. This, however, should not prevent preparations and considerations with respect to how secu­rity and stability can be enhanced in the future.

Confidence-building measures (CBMs) should define acceptable and legitimate behaviour. They should help to promote transparency and reduce the risk of mis­judgements, and hence, unwanted esca­lation. In this way, a certain degree of crisis stability and trust in the intentions of the other side can be fostered. This could miti­gate the current security dilemma.

CBMs could, for example, focus on creat­ing transparency with regard to military activities, and they could incorporate recommendations from the former NATO-Russia expert dialogue. For instance, Arctic military bases could be subject to mutual visits. A regular regiment on visitation could be established and plans for military exercises could be disclosed. Advance notice of Russian exercises could help to avoid mis­interpretation. In turn, NATO allies could inform Russia about unscheduled activities.

Confidence- and security-building meas­ures (CSBMs) are rooted in the Vienna Docu­ment on CSBMs. In the 1990s, the Organi­zation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) created the world’s most advanced set of rules for arms control, veri­fication, and CBMs. Now many of the agree­ments under this arrangement have either been suspended or weakened as partners withdraw. According to OSCE Secretary General Helga Maria Schmid, however, this does not mean that CSBMs will not play an important role again in the future, as the instruments are still available.

New dialogue requires constructive sub­stance in the form of suitable projects that foster cooperation. In the long term, it is important to develop a new set of (multi­lateral) rules that serve both sides’ interests. According to a team of authors from the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, two basic conditions must be met to facilitate an effective multilateral agreement: The rules must be designed so that they are appropriate for solving the problems and these rules must be adhered to by the in­volved states. Accordingly, the crucial ques­tion is to what extent these rules will re­strict state action, including military action.

Potential cooperation projects

The oldest CSBM to prevent unintentional escalation is the Incidents at Sea Agreement (INCSEA), concluded between the US and the Soviet Union in 1972. Individual NATO states such as Norway have continued simi­lar agreements with Russia, taking into account new technological developments. All contain similar provisions that can be qualified as CSBMs. While bilateral INCSEA agreements between states with naval forces operating worldwide make sense, a multi­lateral Arctic INCSEA agreement or a NATO-Russia INCSEA agreement that would apply to all naval ships in the Arctic Ocean would be more purposeful. In practice, it would be easier for navy officers to work with a single set of signals than with many differ­ent ones, as noted by a RAND study. This would also mirror considerations for a simi­lar agreement between the US and China in the Western Pacific.

Further rules of conduct, such as a Arctic Military Code of Conduct, have long been discussed. One possible model is the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement, which provides a format for negotiations between the Arctic’s coastal states, four countries engaging in fishing activities in the Arctic, and the EU. In addition to the Arctic states, a military code of conduct could also in­clude countries that are capable of military operations in the Arctic. The purpose of this code would be to promote cooperation and keep tensions low.

A resumption of cooperation in the nu­clear realm would surely address spectres of the Cold War – whether submarine wreckage, nuclear weapons systems, reac­tors, or fuel rod disposal systems – which threaten to contaminate the fish-rich Barents Sea and adjacent areas – as far south as Norway – with radioactive material in the long term. This is one reason why Oslo has taken the lead in cleaning up Russian wreckage and waste in the High North in the past. A proposal put forward during the beginning of Russia’s chairmanship of the Arctic Council envisaged the recovery of two nuclear submarines (K‑27 in the Kara Sea and K‑159 in the Barents Sea) with financial support from the EU. The sub­marines would otherwise continue to cor­rode and eventually release radioactive waste. Beyond this, respective Russian and American researchers have submitted pro­posals on how to regulate the handling of civilian nuclear energy in the Arctic; both are follow-ons from the Arctic Military En­vironmental Cooperation that was founded in 1996. This cooperative efforts was aimed at mitigating the dangers posed by radio­active vestiges of Russia’s Northern Fleet, and it indirectly contributed to the establish­ment of what is today the Arctic Council.


Map


Source: Charles Digges, “War Puts Cleanup of Russia’s Radioactive Wrecks on Ice”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 28 November 2022 (map created by Thomas Gaulkin), https://thebulletin.org/2022/11/war-puts-cleanup-of-russias-radioactive-wrecks-on-ice/.


Seeing that discarded radioactive material is a cross-border, transnational problem, there should be just as much interest in its clean-up in Moscow as there is in Oslo and other northern European capitals. Seeing that the prevention and clean-up of oil spills and search and rescue operations rep­resent issues whose importance is undis­puted among Arctic states and which has formed an essential basis for successful cooperation in the Arctic, the proper dis­posal and clean-up of radioactive material could come to constitute a similar realm of cooperation.

Berlin in the High North

The Arctic is a challenge for Berlin because security must be ensured on NATO’s north­ern flank, and even more acutely in the future. New arms control ideas require first and foremost the restoration of deterrence and defence capabilities. Deterrence only works if backed by substantial defence capabilities in the event that deterrence fails. The military potentials of both China and Russia, which have been growing for decades, must be taken into account in terms of their significance for the Arctic and North Atlantic region when it comes to determining adequate contributions to alliance defence. Only on the basis of such a shared perspective within NATO can prom­ising arms control activities be deter­mined. Similar to the NATO Dual-Track Decision initiated by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1977, armament and arms con­trol must both be considered as equally important, and a comprehensive rearmament process must be planned, financed and, implemented.

Even if Russia’s interest in stability in the Arctic grows, its war in Ukraine and on­going confrontation with other Arctic states still serve to stabilise Putin’s regime. It there­fore remains to be seen whether the Kremlin is prepared to take concrete actions to stabi­lise the situation in the spirit of arms con­trol and thus to relativise the image of adversity that is useful to Putin, or whether it intends to expand the war given its already mobilised war economy.

For NATO’s navies, comprehensive mari­time situational awareness is required in order to better detect and track Russian activities over, on, and under the water. It should be noted that cooperation between China’s Coast Guard and Russia’s Border Guard will increase as codified in the Mur­mansk Agreement of April 2023. The UK foresees an increase in the number of NATO’s P-8 maritime patrol aircraft along­side a proposal to extend cooperation between the US, UK, and Norway which should also involve countries such as Den­mark and Germany.

Furthermore, the German Navy’s 2035+ objectives must be implemented as soon as possible. New F‑126 frigates should not only be suitable for operations in the sea ice of the Baltic Sea, but F-127 frigates should also be capable of operating in Arctic waters like the U212 CD German-Norwegian submarines. Long-range airborne surveillance and recon­naissance drones should also be equipped to operate in this arena, as should unmanned long-range underwater vehicles that monitor critical maritime infrastructure on the seabed.

Germany indeed needs to take a “new look” at the Arctic, and new guidelines for Germany’s Arctic policy will need to take shifting security considerations into ac­count. It is rightly accepted that Russian aggression against Baltic states or in the Barents Sea would trigger a war with NATO. None­theless, because of Putin’s erratic behaviour, an escalation in the Arctic cannot be ruled out.

The restoration of trust is nowhere on the horizon, but in the meantime, a certain degree of cooperation on critical issues must continue where necessary during Russia’s war against Ukraine and where possible after the war, especially in the Arctic. As in climate policy, what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. However, how Russia’s war of aggression ends will have a profound effect on whether and how co­operation with Russia may occur in the future.


Dr Michael Paul is a Senior Fellow in the International Security Research Division at SWP.

© Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, 2024

All rights reserved

This Comment reflects the author’s views.

SWP Comments are subject to internal peer review, fact-checking and copy-editing. For further information on our quality control pro­cedures, please visit the SWP website: https://www.swp-berlin.org/en/about-swp/ quality-management-for-swp-publications/

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ISSN (Print) 1861-1761

ISSN (Online) 2747-5107

DOI: 10.18449/2024C18

(Updated and expanded English version of
SWP-Aktuell 3/2024)

No country for children: The not-so-hidden horrors of child sexual abuse in Pakistan

Are religious institutions shielding predators? 

Delve into the harrowing truth of systemic child abuse in Pakistan, where clerical influence and misguided donor efforts perpetuate a cycle of silence and impunity.

Afiya S. Zia 

Published April 24, 2024

Recent reports of sexual molestation of children by clerics and incriminating videos of corporal punishment of madrassa students are neither new discoveries, nor particular to Pakistan.

Globally, totalitarian institutions — seminaries, the Vatican, and even lay establishments like boarding schools, military barracks, orphanages, and shelters — have long records of systemic abuse. However, the power of clerical lobbies in Pakistan often secures impunity for religious institutions and only the high risks taken by whistleblowers, fearless activists, and survivors result in any kind of justice.

Unfortunately, over the past 20 years, the more temporal approaches to social development in Pakistan have been displaced by a generation convinced that sacralising development is appropriate for Muslim sensibilities. This has complicated pre-existing challenges in Pakistan’s colonial and Islamic hybrid legal regime, deepened the shame and stigma associated with concepts of gender and sex, and privileged clerical authority over human rights advocacy.

Vocational sex abuse

According to data gathered by Sahil, an NGO working on cases of child sexual abuse, the overwhelming majority of abusers are acquaintances or neighbours in communities or family members. At the same time, the data also shows that institutionally, the highest number of complaints emerge against religious teachers or clerics — more so than police, school-teachers, or nuclear family members.

In 2020, the Associated Press documented several cases of sexual abuse in madrassas, including the case of 8-year-old Yaous in Mansehra, where despite the arrest of the offender, Qari Shamsuddin, fellow clerics and worshippers at the mosque disputed the charges, terming him innocent and a ‘victim of anti-Islamic elements in the country’. The cleric was later sentenced to 16.5 years imprisonment.

Primary data remains limited and organisations rely on media reports and police complaints but the trend over the past 20 years shows the gender divide of abused girls in madrassas is slightly higher than that of boys (‘Cruel Numbers’). The recent case of Qari Abubakar Muaviyah’s alleged rape of a 12-year-old boy in Shahdara initially looked like a lost cause due to the usual clerical pressure for the survivor to resile.

Under the amended anti-rape law, the police and prosecutors are duty bound to continue investigation and judicial hearing, even if the survivor resiles, yet they prefer compromises. The difficulty of obtaining DNA forensics is another escape route in many cases. In the end, it was only social media pressure over the Muaviyah case that resulted in a political and legal response against powerful religious lobbies.

Over the years, there have also been several reports of gang rapes in such seminaries. In very rare cases do children fight their rapists off and where parents are resilient in their pursuit for justice.

The madrassa reform debacle

Historically, Pakistani madrassas have been subject to cycles of reorganisation and reform but only over curricula or funding and not institutional accountability.

In 2003, at the peak of the ‘war on terror’, a new form of war anthropology and research methods emerged, relying on fixers, handlers, translators, NGO research and No Objection Certificates awarded by the military authorities at their discretion. This new paradigm produced a body of newly minted ‘experts’ on Islam, terrorism, jihad, security and conflict studies and now, Islam and development, as funded by British and American governments under the pretext of Muslim exceptionalism (especially, Muslim women and the poor).

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) implemented a five-year, $100 million bilateral agreement in 2002. Another multi-million pound religions and research project was spearheaded by DFID in 2008, paving the way for faith-based approaches to social change in Pakistan. With the help of overseas Pakistani consultants, they found that religion can be valuable in terms of providing organisational resources for social movements, with religious leaders and Muslim NGOs as ‘partners’.

Policy briefs from such projects stressed on the need to review and include religion into the mainstream of development research and policy itself, including support to madrassas and to encourage women’s religious leadership as alternatives to Western feminism.

At the time, Gen Musharraf’s US-compliant government was facing domestic resistance for registering madrassas as suspected support bases and havens for terrorists. The top-down consultant policy briefs insisted on the kind of reform that was acceptable to the undefined “Ulema” and ignored the experiences of civil society on the subject by dismissing any critique of faith-based development by feminists as ‘western and liberal-secular orientalism’.

The experts producing such research rode the crest of Gen Musharaff’s duplicitous project of enlightened moderation and recommended the inclusion of madrassas and clerical leaders into the social development sector. Even those claiming radical credentials, and who were critical of the binaries of western secular departure from religious-based education, invested hope in the role of madrassas as some decolonising, non-Western social safety nets for children from impoverished backgrounds and in women’s empowerment through mosque and madrassa piety.

These researchers and studies completely ignored — as some orientalist presumption — the history of corporal punishment and child sexual abuse at mosques and madrassas that human rights activists had been documenting for at least a decade. This was a revealing and damaging missed opportunity.

This ‘partnership’ between donors and clerics has empowered the latter as community gate-keepers (especially, in projects related to education, vaccination, child protection committees and labour). Recent cases have shown, however, that some of these clerics, who are now power brokers, may pressurise victims to resile charges of sex abuse in communities and madrassas, and who facilitate compromise and settling cases outside of courts, especially when it involves fellow clerics.

Law as protection, not a right

Research studies, academic theses and donor reports continue to recommend that Pakistan’s government should make genuine efforts to understand how the madrassa leadership perceives reform and modernisation, and for involvement in social development projects without any caution for regulation of widespread allegations of physical or sexual abuses.

Every other sector of reform is subjected to correction as a constitutional and moral imperative (especially, the ‘corrupt’ bureaucracy and judiciary) but the one sector where appeasement by government and donors remains consistent is religion and its institutional influence. This extends and sustains moral and legal impunity to the priestly classes and prevents rights-based progress.

In the first instance, legal reform has managed to chip at some religious exemption by way of releasing rape and honour crimes from the Qisas and Diyat loophole. It took 30 years of consistent advocacy from women’s rights activists and not the route of some decolonial thesis, nor due to reinterpretive exegesis. The amendments to many discriminatory laws have been rationalised by liberal appeal and universalising influences within the Constitution and while some opportunist clerics and politicians have been ‘encouraged’ to curb their opposition, this does not count as ‘success’ of ecclesiastical partnerships.

Secondly, many gender and religious biases are underwritten in family laws which prevent consensus or consistency on matters of sexual maturity and underage marriage. Over 18 per cent of girls and 4 pc of boys in Pakistan are married before the age of 18 and prevention is complicated by our dual legal regime and by societal trends of forced conversions of girls from religious minorities. If marriage remains an unequal legal arrangement for all women, and an economic safety net for the poor and a social status for the rich, girls will remain devalued for just their labour and reproductive worth and their virginities and sexual purity will serve as premiums.

Third, overwhelmingly, cases of any but especially child sexual abuse continue to be subject to attrition where survivors or victims’ families resile under counsel and social pressure from community, police or clerical leaders. As human rights lawyers point out, as long as the judicial process privileges ocular evidence over corroborative forms and courts are unwilling to try cases despite resiling, sex crimes will not be subject to justice.

Mythos over logos

Beyond legal recourse, social protection for Pakistani children remains precarious due to misguided beliefs and flawed remedies.

The first myth that family, marriage, and community are safe havens encourage private settlements in sex abuse cases and perpetuate lifelong generational trauma. The second damaging myth is that biology is the driver of sexual violence instead of unequal power relations, especially between genders.

Feminists have countered both these fallacies. They refute the notion that sex abuse is a private matter by insisting that the personal is political and risk their lives to speak out on the commonality of violence in families and marriages. The Aurat March movement has expanded this cause with many members narrating their own experiences of sexual offences and providing ventilation for other survivors. Stigmatising sex education, or underplaying abuse on the pretext of immorality or false respectability, disarms the potential victim from self-defence — silence and shame is the paedophile’s best alibi.

Glorifying the virtues of domesticated pious women and obedient children justifies discipline and decision-making as the male guardian’s natural right. Feminists contend that it is not biology but elite capture of social, economic, political resources that buys impunity for powerful abusive men. They also point out that while there is significant challenge in addressing attitudes within clerical, judicial, and political circles where some may justify male privilege, dismiss allegations of sex crimes, or blame victims, such figures often remain in positions of leadership and trust.

Age of innocence; beyond reliance and alliances

Despite these conceits of legal, social and sexual inequalities, the self-defeating solutions continue to fixate on laws, liberation theology, and male allies — but each needs reconsideration.

Pakistan has no standard legal definition of a child — ages for voting, marriage, sex crime, factory work, succession age, or as a juvenile liable to criminal proceedings — vary considerably across the country and provinces. Addressing sex crimes either involves deferring responsibility to communities and families, which may perpetuate abuse, or relying on technological solutions as a last resort.

There are at least 17 officially listed helplines for children-related complaints, yet members of Sahil say that hardly any child uses the helplines to complain (it is mostly parents or other adults who use the referral system). The high profile and politicised Zainab Alert App for missing children offers lopsided results nationwide and reports more abduction of boys than girls in every province, offering no analysis.

Most laws and policies on women’s and children’s rights are missing data or evaluation, yet random remedies continue to sink the country’s global ranking. The girl-child has been the poster figure for the UN and donor organisations that have sponsored efforts to change the fate of generations of stunted, anaemic, illiterate Pakistani girls from growing into disenfranchised, disinherited, dependent and vulnerable adult women.

But the hubris that has insisted on religious inclusivity in donor programming over the past 20 years, has escalated faith-based approaches to girls’ and women’s development and which essentially bribe male religious leaders to approve projects that deliver basic rights. This approach has reinforced the role of clerics as gatekeepers in community programmes —officials note a variety of specialised roles among clerics, including those focusing on polio, family planning, and gender issues.

Those who defended piety politics and appealed for faith appropriate alternatives to ‘Western’ rights have subdued radical resistance into reformative donor projects and culture festivals. This has also trapped the Aurat March movement, since pietist women oppose the demands for sexual equality in a not-so-docile manner.

Improving conviction rates for sex offences is important but castration or cajoling male allies to detox their masculinities is not going to end sex abuse. The only proven difference is when women and children refuse to remain silent; instead, they subvert and challenge all disparities, insist on equal educational, inheritance, marital, and professional rights, rather than constantly bargain with patriarchy or plead with its institutional representatives.

Rather than pouring resources into Sisyphean programmes for community behavioural change, perhaps, it is time to empower the child directly. This could involve implementing rights-based approaches and providing information and leadership to diminish the influence of community leaders, guardians, and traditional intermediaries. Such measures would help restore a sense of balance while ensuring the safety and self-reliance of children.

As long as academics sanitise religious institutions and activists promote faith-based laws and rights as decolonial tools; as long as newspapers refuse to carry ‘sensitive’ discussions on religion or sex, and feminists wait politely on the good will of male allies to introspect and lose their privileges; as long as governments continue to appease the political clerical classes while donors continue their paradoxical faith based social development, the country will fail to secure the godliness that is, a safe childhood.

Header image taken from Reuters.

DAWN

Cultural Politics And Public Intellectuals In The Age Of Emerging Fascism

By Henry A. Giroux

April 4, 2024
Source: Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

The “En L’An 2000,” or “Life in Year 2000” by Jean-Marc Côté depicts the futuristic culturization of humanity. (Françoise Foliot , Wikimédia France, Paris, CC BY-SA 4.0)

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Introduction

When I wrote “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals, in 2004,” I wanted to stress the contribution that cultural studies made for educators in broadening their understanding of how politics and power worked through language, diverse symbolic processes, and a range of cultural apparatuses and institutions. My concern then was directed at the need for a new language among educators that would address how matters of agency and pedagogy were both related to power and were increasingly constructed and legitimated within several institutions ranging from universities to the rise of the social media and other cultural apparatuses. My aim was to broaden an understanding of how the dynamics of power and domination include not only economic forces but also those pedagogical practices that shape beliefs, desires, identities, and social relations that are central to forces of oppression and empowerment.

At the time, I wanted to point to new locations of struggles, new sites of politics, new forms of cultural production, and new spaces of resistance. Put simply, I wanted to make clear that cultural studies were redefining and interrogating culture as a new space for politics, resistance, and hope. In addition, I wanted to make critical pedagogy central to both cultural studies and to politics itself. Moreover, I argued that cultural studies offered a new understanding for the role that academics might play as public intellectuals in addressing a variety of audiences in the multiple spheres in which culture, power, and politics are produced, distributed, and normalized.

Central here is the development of a politics and pedagogy, if not a revitalized role for academics as public intellectuals. Such a view stresses the challenge with renewed vigor of not only keeping alive the habits of democracy, but of stressing that education should be the place where students realize themselves as critically informed and engaged citizens. Equally important is the recognition that education must be defended as a democratic public sphere, especially at a time when it is under massive assault by far-right extremists. My emphasis was on defining education through its claims on democracy and having academics acknowledge that there is no democracy without informed citizens. Under such circumstances, I stressed that educators as public intellectuals had to become border crossers by not limiting themselves to their disciplines or only speaking to other academics. Put simply, there was a need for them to speak to a variety of audiences in and out of the academy. Of major concern in my position was emphasizing how the merging of cultural studies and critical education clarified that matters of agency and subjectivity are the grounds of politics itself.

Today, culture has been weaponized unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s in Europe. The mobilizing passions of fascism are now being produced, circulated, and legitimated though all aspects of the mass media, which are increasingly under the control of a billionaire class. Cultural politics in the face of the growing fascist threat is more important to address than ever before, and the responsibility of academics to function as public intellectuals as urgent today as it ever was in the past. Politics is no longer a matter of simply voting or reforming institutions, it is also about changing consciousness so that individuals, students, and others can adopt a critical stance to take control over the forces that shape their lives and change the structures of domination that bear down on them. What I build up and stress in this article is that we are facing a political crisis in the narrow sense of the term — changing politics and economic structures – but also a cultural crisis, a crisis of the civic imagination. Hence, my article argues for changing both habits and minds connected to the capacity to not only understand the problems we currently face as educators and citizens but also how to intervene in the world in order to change it.

Cultural politics needs to function as an act of resistance and hope against the threat of a paralyzing indifference to the current threat of fascism. The ghosts of the past do not reside simply in the forgotten archives of history; they have turned into a living nightmare that that now shapes the present. Matters of culture and pedagogy are crucial sites where the struggle for a radical democracy needs to take place. Without that understanding, democracy in the current moment has little chance of surviving.

The long shadow of domestic fascism, defined as a project of racial and cultural cleansing, is with us once again both in North America and abroad. Educators have seen the ghosts of fascism before in acts of savage colonialism and dispossession, in an era of slavery marked by the brutality of whippings and neck irons, and in a Jim Crow age most obvious in the spectacularized horror of murderous lynchings. More recently we have viewed fascist acts of terror in a politics of disappearances and genocidal erasures under the dictatorships of Adolf Hitler, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and others. Claims of genocide have also been made by an increasing number of international organizations and prominent public figures against the killing of civilians by both Israel and Hamas in the current war, but especially against Israel’s disproportionate killing of children in Gaza, now numbering over 5000 as of November 2023.Footnote1 And in each case, history has given us a glimpse of what the end of humanity would look like.Footnote2 Yet the lessons of history with its language of hate, machineries of torture, death camps and murderous violence as a political tool are too often ignored.

An upgraded form of fascism with its rabid nativism and hatred of racial mixing is currently at the center of politics in the United States. Traditional liberal values of equality, social justice, dissent, and freedom are now considered a threat to a Republican Party supportive of staggering levels of inequality, white Christian nationalism, and racial purity. Yet the lessons of history are too often ignored–though its mobilizing fascist passions are once again on the horizon.Footnote3 This politics of numbness and denial is not only true of the mainstream press but also applies to many liberal and left-oriented academics.Footnote4

America’s slide into a fascist politics demands a revitalized understanding of the historical moment in which we find ourselves, along with a systemic critical analysis of the new political formations that mark this period. This is especially true as neoliberalism can no longer defend itself. The destabilizing conditions of global capitalism with its mix of savage inequalities and expanding methods of control and repression point to both a legitimation crisis and a turn towards a revitalized and rebranded form of fascism. This neo-fascist resurgence is part of a counter-revolution waged against the student revolts of the sixties, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and a range of resistance insurgencies that have gained force over the last 60 years.Footnote5

The promise and ideals of democracy are receding as right-wing extremists breathe new life into a fascist past. This is particularly true, as education has increasingly become a tool of domination as right-wing pedagogical apparatuses controlled by the entrepreneurs of hate attack workers, the poor, people of color, trans people, immigrants from the south, and others considered disposable. Confronting this fascist counter-revolutionary movement necessitates creating a new language, rethinking education as a central element of politics, revitalizing the role of academics as public intellectuals. This impending threat also necessitates the building of a mass social movement to construct empowering terrains of education, politics, justice, culture, and power that challenge existing systems of white supremacy, white nationalism, manufactured ignorance, civic illiteracy, and economic oppression.

Neoliberalism’s death march

We now live in a world that resembles a dystopian novel. This is a world marked by new crises and the intensification of old antagonisms. Since the late 1970s, a form of predatory capitalism or what can be called neoliberalism has waged war on the welfare state, public goods, and the social contract. Neoliberalism insists that the market should govern not just the economy, but also all aspects of society. It concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite and elevates unchecked self-interest, self-help, deregulation, and privatization as the governing principles of society. Under neoliberalism, everything is for sale, consumerism is the only obligation of citizenship, and the only relations that matter are modeled after forms of commercial exchange. At the same time, neoliberalism ignores basic human needs such as universal healthcare, food security, decent wages, and quality education. Moreover, it disparages human rights and imposes a culture of cruelty upon young people, people of color, women, immigrants, and those considered disposable.

Neoliberalism views government as the enemy of the market – except when it benefits wealthy corporations, limits society to the realm of the family and individuals, embraces a fixed hedonism, and challenges the very idea of the public good. Under neoliberalism, the political collapses into the personal and therapeutic, rendering all problems a singular matter of individual responsibility, thus making it almost impossible for individuals to translate private troubles into wider systemic considerations. This over emphasis on personal responsibility depoliticizes people by offering no language for addressing wider structural issues such as the call for better jobs, schools, safer neighborhoods, free education, and a basic universal wage, among other issues. It also stresses the language of emotional self-management, further producing a kind of ethical tranquilization and indifference to wider democratic struggles for racial, gender, and economic reforms. Moreover, under neoliberalism economic activity is divorced from social costs further eviscerating any sense of social responsibility at a time when policies that produce systemic racism, environmental destruction, militarism, and staggering inequality have become defining features of everyday life and established modes of governance. As Bernie Sanders notes, “It is not moral that three people on top own more wealth than the bottom half of American society, 165 million Americans … that’s not moral. That’s not right. That’s not what should exist in a democratic society.”Footnote6

Clearly, there is a need to raise fundamental questions about the role of education in a time of impending tyranny. Or, to put it another way, what are the obligations of education to democracy itself? That is, how can education work to reclaim a notion of democracy in which matters of social justice, freedom and equality become fundamental features of learning to live in a society.

The scourge of fascist education in the US

In the current historical moment, the threat of authoritarianism has become more dangerous than ever – one in which education has taken on a new role in the age of upgraded fascism. This authoritarian project is evident particularly in the United States as a number of far-right wing governors have put a range of reactionary educational policies in place that range from disallowing teachers to mention critical race theory and issues dealing with sexual orientation in their classrooms to forcing educators to sign loyalty oaths, post their syllabi online, give up tenure, and allow students to film their classes. Regarding the banning of books, Judd Legum notes,

Across the country, right-wing activists are seeking to ban thousands of books from schools and other public libraries. Those promoting the bans often claim they are acting to protect children from pornography. But the bans frequently target books ‘by and about people of color and LGBTQ individuals.’ Many of the books labeled as pornographic are highly acclaimed novels.Footnote7

The latter include Animal Farm, Maus, and The Color Purple. Such policies echo a fascist past in which the banning of books eventually led to both the imprisonment of dissidents and the eventual disappearance of bodies.

Not only are these attacks on certain books and ideas aimed at educators and minorities of class and color, this far-right attack on education is also part of a larger war on the very ability to think, question, and engage in politics from the vantage point of being critical, informed, and willing to engage in a culture of questioning. More generally, it is part of a concerted effort to destroy public and higher education and the very foundations of civic literacy and political agency. Under the rule of this emerging authoritarianism, political extremists are attempting to turn education into a space for killing the imagination, a place where provocative ideas are banished, and where faculty and students are punished through the threat of force or harsh disciplinary measures for speaking out, engaging in dissent, and holding power accountable.

In this case, the attempt to undermine public schooling and higher education as public goods and democratic public spheres is accompanied by a systemic attempt to destroy the notion that they are vital democratic public goods. Schools that view themselves as democratic public spheres are now disparaged by far-right Republican politicians and their allies as socialism factories, government schools, and citadels of left-wing thought.

In fact, as Jonathan Chait observes, what is being said by a right-wing Republican Party about American schools echoes a period in history in which fascist regimes used a similar language rooted in the cold war rhetoric of McCarthyism. For instance, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has called schools “a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.” Former secretary of State Mike Pompeo claims that “teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids,” will “take this republic down.” Donald Trump has stated that “pink-haired communists [are] teaching our kids” and “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” run higher education. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stated on Fox News that if he won the presidency in 2024, he “will … destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history.”Footnote8

This is more than anti-democratic, authoritarian rhetoric. It shapes poisonous policies in which education is increasingly defined as an animating space of repression, violence and weaponized as a tool of censorship, state indoctrination, and terminal exclusion. The examples have become too numerous to address. A short list would include a Florida school district banning a graphic novel version of Anne Frank’s Dairy,Footnote9 the firing of a Florida principal for showing her class an image of Michelangelo’s ‘David,’Footnote10 and the publishing of a textbook that removed any hint of racism from Rosa Park’s refusal to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955.Footnote11 There appears to be no limits on the part of right-wing activists in Florida to ban books. For instance, on July 12, 2023, an effort by right-wing extremists was made to ban the book Arthur’s Birthday, from libraries in the Clay County School District. The book by Marc Brown is “part of a popular children’s series that was spun off into an Emmy-winning children’s cartoon.”Footnote12 It gets worse.

In a number of states controlled by Republican governors, academic freedom is under assault as bills are passed with ban topics such as “Critical Race Theory, Critical Ethnic Studies, Radical Feminist Theory, Radical Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Social Justice, or Intersectionality.”Footnote13 At Idaho’s public universities, faculty cannot talk about, teach, or write about abortion “may now face up to fourteen years of imprisonment.”Footnote14 There is more at work here than an attack on academic freedom, there is also an attempt to turn public universities into indoctrination centers modeled after the repressive modes of censorship endemic to past and present authoritarian regimes. All these actions are warning signs of a history about to be repeated.

At the current moment, it would be wise for educators to heed the words of Holocaust survivor and brilliant writer Primo Levi who argued in his book, In The Black Hole of Auschwitz, that “Every age has its own fascism.” In his book, The Voice of Memory, Levi elaborates on what he considered the elemental features of fascism. He wrote:

There is only one Truth, proclaimed from above; the newspapers are all alike, they all repeat the same one Truth. … As for books, only those that please the state are published and translated. You must seek any others on the outside and introduce them into your country at your own risk because they are considered more dangerous than drugs and explosives … Books not in favour … are burned in public bonfires in town squares … .In an authoritarian state it is considered permissible to alter the truth; to rewrite history retrospectively; to distort the news, suppress, the true, add the false. Propaganda is substituted for information.Footnote15

Making education central to politics

It is hard to imagine a more urgent moment for taking seriously Paulo Freire’s ongoing attempts to make education central to politics. At stake for Freire was the notion that education was a social concept, rooted in the goal of emancipation for all people. Moreover, his view of education encouraged human agency, one that was not content to enable people to only be critical thinkers, but also engaged individuals and social agents. Like John Dewey, Freire’s political project recognized that there is no democracy without knowledgeable and informed citizens. Today this insight is fundamental to creating the conditions to forge collective international resistance among educators, youth, artists, and other cultural workers in defense of public goods, if not democracy itself. Such a movement is important to resist and overcome the tyrannical fascist nightmares that have descended upon the United States, Italy, Hungary, India, and a number of other countries plagued by the rise of right-wing populist movements, far right militias such as the Proud Boys, and neo-Nazi parties.

The signposts of America’s turn toward a fascist notion of education are everywhere. Trans students are under attack, their history is being erased from school curricula, and the support of their care-givers is increasingly criminalized. African American history is sanitized and rewritten, while teachers, faculty, and librarians who contest or refuse this authoritarian script are being fired, demonized, and in some cases also subject to criminal charges. Mirroring an attack on trans people and the Institute for Sexual Science similar to the one that took place in the early years of the Third Reich, far right-wing politicians and white supremacists are waging a vicious war against trans youth and their teachers who are now treated as social pariahs while their supporters are slandered as pedophiles and groomers.

The growing threat of authoritarianism is also visible in the emergence of an anti-intellectual culture that derides any notion of critical education. What was once unthinkable regarding attacks on education has become normalized. Ignorance is now praised as a virtue and white supremacy and white Christian nationalism are now the organizing principles of governance and education in many American states and several countries globally.

This right-wing assault on democracy is a crisis that cannot be allowed to turn into a catastrophe in which all hope is lost. This suggests viewing education as a political concept, rooted in the goal of empowerment and emancipation for all people, especially if we do not want to default on education’s role as a democratic public sphere. Moreover, as I mentioned in my 2004 article, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” the issue of recognizing that culture is a site of active struggle and integrates institutionally and symbolic forms in making education central to politics is more important today than ever before. For too many theorists, culture has become merely a site of domination, used by the far right to weaponize language, images, and a range of information platforms. Not only does such a reading misread the emancipatory possibilities of culture, but it also denies the powerful role it can play as a radical educational force.

Culture as a site of struggle represents a pedagogical practice that calls students beyond themselves, embraces the ethical imperative for them to care for others, embrace historical memory, work to dismantle structures of domination, and to become subjects rather than objects of history, politics, and power. If educators as public intellectuals are going to develop a politics capable of awakening students’ critical, imaginative, and historical sensibilities, it is vital to engage education as a project of individual and collective empowerment – a project based on the search for truth, an enlarging of the civic imagination, and the practice of freedom.

It would be wise for educators to remember that the first casualty of authoritarianism are the minds that would oppose it. Fascism begins with the language of hate, and as Thom Hartmann observes

Before fascism can fully seize power in a nation, it must first be accepted by the people as a “patriotic” system of governance, representing the will of the majority of the nation. This is why fascists always scapegoat minorities first … before they acquire enough power to subjugate the entire nation itself.Footnote16

Against this warning, it is important for us as educators to note that the current era is one marked by the rise of disimagination machines that produce manufactured ignorance and concoct lies on an unprecedented level, giving authoritarianism a new life. As the historian Federico Finchelstein notes, it is crucial to recall that “one of the key lessons of the history of fascism is that racist lies led to extreme political violence.”Footnote17 We live at a time when the unthinkable has become normalized so that anything can be said and everything that matters unsaid. Moreover, this degrading of truth and the emptying of language makes it all the more difficult to distinguish good from evil, justice from injustice. Under such circumstances, the American public is rapidly losing a language and ethical grammar that challenges the political and racist machineries of cruelty, state violence and targeted exclusions.Footnote18

Education both in its symbolic and institutional forms has a vital role to play in fighting the resurgence of false renderings of history, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism, an accelerating militarism, and ultra-nationalism. As far-right movements across the globe disseminate toxic racist and ultra-nationalist images of the past, it is essential to reclaim education as a form of historical consciousness and moral witnessing. This is especially true at a time when historical and social amnesia have become a national pastime, further normalizing an authoritarian politics that thrives on ignorance, fear, the suppression of dissent, and hate. The merging of power, new digital technologies, and everyday life have not only altered time and space, but they have also expanded the reach of culture as an educational force. A culture of lies, cruelty, and hate, coupled with a fear of history and a 24/7 flow of information now wages a war on historical consciousness, attention spans, and the conditions necessary to think, contemplate, and arrive at sound judgments.Footnote19 This is evident in the use of the new social media by Trump and his allies to deny election results, saturate the culture with lies about everything from climate change to attacks on trans students and Black history.Footnote20

The cultural force of education in the twenty-first century

It is crucial for educators to learn that education and schooling are not the same and schooling must be viewed as a sphere distinctive from the educative forces at work in the larger culture.Footnote21 The point of course is that an array of cultural apparatuses extending from social media and streaming services to the rise of artificial intelligence and corporate controlled media platforms also constitutes vast educational machinery with enormous power and influence. What both schooling and the wider cultural sphere of education have in common is that they often work in tandem to shape and orchestrate dominant social relations, constitute prevailing notions of common sense, and open up conceptual horizons, modes of identification, and social relations through which consciousness and identities are shaped and legitimated.

In the current age of barbarism and the crushing of dissent, there is a need for educators to acknowledge how the wider culture and pedagogies of closure operate as educational and political forces in the service of fascist politics and other modes of tyranny. Under such circumstances, educators and others must question not only what individuals learn in society, but what they must unlearn, and what institutions provide the conditions for them to do so. Against those cultural apparatuses producing apartheid pedagogies of repression and conformity – rooted in censorship, racism, and the killing of the imagination – there is the need for critical institutions and pedagogical practices that value a culture of questioning, view critical agency as a fundamental condition of public life, and reject indoctrination in favor of the search for justice within educational spaces and institutions that function as democratic public spheres.

A critical consciousness matters

Any viable pedagogy of resistance needs to create the educational and pedagogical visions and tools to produce a radical shift in consciousness; it must be capable of recognizing both the scorched earth policies of neoliberalism and the twisted fascist ideologies that support it. This shift in consciousness cannot occur without pedagogical interventions that speak to people in ways in which they can recognize themselves, identify with the issues being addressed, and place the privatization of their troubles in a broader systemic context.

An education for empowerment that functions as the practice of freedom should provide a classroom environment that is intellectually rigorous and critical, while allowing students to give voice to their experiences, aspirations, and dreams. It should be a protective and courageous space where students are able to speak, write, and act from a position of agency and informed judgment. It should be a place where education does the bridging work of connecting schools to the wider society, connect the self to others, and address important social and political issues. It should also provide the conditions for students to learn how to make connections with an increased sense of social responsibility coupled with a sense of justice. Pedagogy for the practice of freedom is rooted in a broader project of a resurgent and insurrectional democracy– one that relentlessly questions the kinds of labor practices, and forms of knowledge that enacted in public and higher education.

If the evolving authoritarianism and rebranded fascism in the United States, Canada, Europe and elsewhere is to be defeated, there is a need to make critical education an organizing principle of politics and, in part, this can be done with a language that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. Hannah Arendt was right in arguing that language is crucial in highlighting the often hidden “crystalized elements” that make authoritarianism likely.Footnote22 The language of critical pedagogy and literacy are powerful tools in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehoods and injustices. Moreover, it is through language that the history of fascism can be remembered and be used to make clear that fascism does not reside solely in the past and that its traces are always dormant, even in the strongest democracies.

Against those politicians, pundits, and academics who falsely claim that fascism rests entirely in the past, it is crucial to recognize that fascism is always present in history and can crystallize in different forms. Or as the historian Jason Stanley observes, “Fascism [is] ‘a political method’ that can appear anytime, anywhere, if conditions are right.”Footnote23 The historical arc of fascism is not frozen in history; its attributes lurk in different forms in diverse societies, waiting to adapt to times favorable to its emergence. As Paul Gilroy has noted, the “horrors [of fascism] are always much closer to us than we like to imagine,” and our duty is not to look away but to make them visible.Footnote24 The refusal by an array of politicians, scholars, and the mainstream media to acknowledge the scale of the fascist threat bearing down on American society is more than an act of refusal, it is an act of complicity. What is noticeable is that the fascist threats emanating from Trump and his political allies have become so unabashedly overt that there has been a fury of articles in the mainstream press warning about the fascist threat Trump poses to American democracy.Footnote25 Unfortunately, almost none of them focus on the political, economic, and cultural conditions that support him or even made Trump possible as a threat to democracy.

Ignorance now rules America. Not the simple, if innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious manufactured ignorance forged in the arrogance of refusing to think hard and critically about an issue, and to engage language in the pursuit of justice. James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in No Name in the Street that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”Footnote26 For the ruling elite and modern Republican Party, thinking is viewed as an act of stupidity, and thoughtlessness is considered a virtue. Traces of critical thought increasingly appear at the margins of the culture, as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society and a number of other countries across the globe. A culture of lies and ignorance now serves as a tool of politics to prevent power from being held accountable.

Under such circumstances, there is a full-scale attack on thoughtful reasoning, empathy, collective resistance, and the compassionate imagination. In some ways, the dictatorship of ignorance resembles what John Berger once called “ethicide,” defined by Joshua Sperling as “The blunting of the senses; the hollowing out of language; the erasure of connection with the past, the dead, place, the land, the soil; possibly, too, the erasure even of certain emotions, whether pity, compassion, consoling, mourning or hoping.”Footnote27 Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility, and choice have been deformed by a market and authoritarian logic that narrows their meaning to either a commodity, a reductive notion of self-interest, or generates a language of bigotry and hatred.

Freedom in this context means removing oneself from any sense of social responsibility, making it easier to retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence and communities of hate. Such actions are legitimated through an appeal to what Elizabeth Anker has called ugly freedoms. That is, freedoms emptied of any substantive meaning and used by far-right politicians and corporate controlled media to legitimate a discourse of hate and bigotry while actively depoliticizing people by making them complicit with the forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives.

Given the current crisis of politics, agency, history, and memory, educators need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world where anti-democratic forces draw upon an unprecedented convergence of resources – financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological–to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control.

As a political and moral practice, critical pedagogy combines a language of critique and a vision of possibility in the fight to revive civic literacy, civic activism, and a notion of shared and engaged citizenship. Politics loses its emancipatory possibilities if it cannot present the educational conditions for enabling students and others to think against the grain, and realize themselves as informed, critical, and engaged individuals. There is no emancipatory politics without a pedagogy capable of awakening consciousness, challenging common sense, and creating modes of analysis in which people discover a moment of recognition that enables them to rethink the conditions that shape their lives.
Academics as public intellectuals

Against the emerging fascist politics, educators should assume the role of public intellectuals and border crossers within broader social contexts. For example, this might include finding ways, when possible, to share their ideas with the wider public by making use of new media technologies and a range of other cultural apparatuses, especially those outlets that are willing to address a range of social problems critically. Embracing their role as public intellectuals, educators can speak to more general audiences in a language that is clear, accessible, and rigorous. As educators organize to assert their role as citizen-educators in a democracy, they can forge new alliances and connections to develop social movements that include and expand beyond working simply with unions. For example, we see evidence of such actions among teachers and students organizing against gun violence and systemic racism and doing so by aligning with parents, unions, and others to fight the gun lobbies and politicians bought and sold by the violence industries. Moreover, we see faculty joining with students, social justice activists, and youth movements in fighting back against white supremacists, some liberals, and far right politicians such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who are restricting academic freedom, attacking critical race theory, erasing African American history, undermining tenure, and banning books in public colleges and universities. Moreover, a number of critical scholars of race and gender such as Robin D. G. Kelley, Cornel West, Angela Y. Davis, and others speak to multiple and diverse audiences in a variety of sites, amplifying their role as engaged public intellectuals.

Education operates as a crucial site of power in the modern world and critical pedagogy has a key role to play in both understanding and challenging how power, knowledge, and values are deployed, affirmed, and resisted within and outside of traditional discourses and cultural spheres. This suggests that one of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers, parents, and other cultural workers is the task of developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect, as Freire once suggested, a critical reading of the word and the world.

There is no agency without hope

In taking up this project, educators as public intellectuals should create the conditions that enable young people to view cynicism as unconvincing and hope practical. We live in an era in which hope is wounded, but far from lost. The anti-public intellectuals and anti-democratic politicians now attacking public and higher education have betrayed Hope, but at the same time hope becomes central to a larger struggle for social justice and democracy itself. Hope in this instance is educational, removed from the fantasy of an idealism that is unaware of the constraints facing the struggle for a radical democratic society. Educated hope is not a call to overlook the difficult conditions that shape both schools and the larger social order, nor is it a blueprint removed from specific contexts and struggles. On the contrary, it is the precondition for imagining a future that does not replicate the nightmares of the present, for not making the present the future.

Educated hope provides the basis for dignifying the labor of teachers; it offers up critical knowledge linked to democratic social change, affirms shared responsibilities, and encourages teachers and students to recognize ambivalence and uncertainty as fundamental dimensions of learning. Without hope, even in the darkest times, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and struggle. Agency is the condition of struggle, and hope is the condition of agency. Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present. Such hope offers the possibility of thinking beyond the given. As the great writer and novelist Eduardo Galeano once argued, we live at a time when hope is wounded but not lost.

As Martin Luther King Jr, John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Nelson Mandela argued there is no project of freedom and liberation without education and that changing attitudes and institutions are interrelated. Central to this insight is the notion advanced by Pierre Bourdieu that the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical and lie on the side of belief and persuasion. This suggests that academics bear a responsibility in acknowledging that the current fight against an emerging authoritarianism and white nationalism across the globe is not only a struggle over economic structures or the commanding heights of corporate power. It is also a struggle over visions, ideas, consciousness, and the power to shift the culture itself. It is also as Arendt points out a struggle against “a widespread fear of judging.”Footnote28 Without the ability to judge, it becomes impossible to recover words that have meaning, imagine a future that does not mimic the dark times in which we live, and create a language that changes how we think about ourselves and our relationship to others. Any struggle for a radical democratic order will not take place if lies cancel out reason, ignorance dismantles informed judgments, and truth succumbs to demagogic appeals to unchecked power. As Francisco Goya warned “the sleep of reason produces monsters.”Footnote29

Democracy begins to fail, and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of those vital public spheres such as public and higher education in which civic values, public scholarship, and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage. Without financially robust schools, critical forms of education, and knowledgeable and civically courageous teachers, young people are denied the habits of citizenship, critical modes of agency, and the grammar of ethical responsibility. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting pedagogy to the practice of freedom, social responsibility and the public good.Footnote30 I want to conclude by making some suggestions, however incomplete, regarding what we can do as educators to save public and higher education and connect them to the broader struggle over democracy itself.

Elements of reform

First, in the midst of the current assault on public and higher education, educators should reclaim and expand its democratic vocation and in doing so align itself with a vision that embraces its mission as a public good. Understanding education as fundamental to a democracy, raises a central question here is what the role of education is in a democracy and in what capacity as David Clark argues is “democracy … an education that nurtures our capacity for democracy, and for sharing power rather than enduring or deferring to authority.”Footnote31 Second, educators should also acknowledge and make good on the claim that there is no democracy without informed and knowledgeable citizens. At stake here is the need to create the institutional contexts for faculty to have control over the conditions of their labor, enjoy academic freedom, and provide students with an education that nurtures their capacity to be critical and engaged citizens. Moreover, in addition to gaining control over the conditions of their labor, educators have a responsibility to connect their work to both those issues that make a democracy possible –matters of justice, freedom, and equity – while working to educate a broader public about the work they do and how crucial it is to all individuals, not just their students.

Third, education should be free and funded through federal funds that guarantee a quality education for everyone. The larger issue here is that education cannot serve the public good in a society marked by staggering forms of inequality. Rather than build bombs, fund the defense industry, and inflate a death dealing military budget, we need massive investments in public and higher education–This is an investment in which youth are written into the future, rather than potentially eliminated from it.

Fourth, in a world driven by data, metrics, fragmented ways of thinking, and the replacement of knowledge by the overabundance of information, educators need to teach students to be border crossers, who can think dialectically, comparatively, and historically. With the rise of data sciences, neurosciences, AI technology, zoom, and other electronically produced platforms, technological rationality increasingly defines and undermines the humanities and liberal arts. Spaces where broad-based knowledge and a culture of questioning might flourish are under threat giving a new urgency to the struggle to protect and preserve the liberal arts and humanities as fundamental to what it means to be educate students as critical and engaged citizens. Educators should teach students to engage in multiple literacies extending from print and visual culture to digital culture. Students need to learn how to think intersectionally, comprehensively, and relationally while also being able to not only consume culture, but produce it; they should learn how to be both cultural critics and cultural producers. In a world marked by increasing forms of social atomization, it is important to provide comprehensive understandings of the self, others, and the larger world to create the conditions for merging differences, building formative communities, and expanding the boundaries of compassion and solidarity.

Fifth, educators must defend critical education as the search for truth, the practice of freedom, and pedagogy of disturbance. Such pedagogy should unsettle commonsense, inform, and expand the horizons of the imagination. Such a task suggests that critical pedagogy should shift not only the way people think but also encourage them to shape the world in which they find themselves for the better. As the practice of freedom, critical pedagogy arises from the conviction that educators and other cultural workers have a responsibility to unsettle power, trouble consensus, and challenge common sense. This is a view of pedagogy that should disturb, inspire, and energize a vast array of individuals and publics. Such pedagogical practices should enable students to interrogate common-sense understandings of the world, take risks in their thinking, however difficult, and be willing to take a stand for free inquiry in the pursuit of truth, multiple ways of knowing, mutual respect, and civic values in the pursuit of social justice. Students need to learn how to think dangerously, push at the frontiers of knowledge, and support the notion that the search for justice is never finished and that no society is ever just enough. These are not merely methodical considerations but also moral and political practices because they presuppose the creation of students who can imagine a future where justice, equality, freedom, and democracy matter and are attainable.

Sixth, educators need to argue for a notion of education that is viewed as inherently political – one that relentlessly questions the kinds of labor, practices, and forms of teaching, research, and modes of evaluation that are enacted in public and higher education. Education is political in that it is always related to relations of power, connected to the acquisition of agency, and is a place where students realize themselves as citizens. Moreover, there is no mode of education that stands outside of the relationship between power and knowledge, escapes defining what knowledge is of most worth, and is free from envisioning notions of the future. While such an education does not offer guarantees, it defines itself as a moral and political practice that is by necessity implicated in power relations because it produces versions and visions of civic life, how we construct representations of ourselves, others, our physical and social environment, and the future itself.

Seventh, in an age in which educators are being censored, fired, losing tenure, and in some cases subject to criminal penalties, it is crucial for them to fight to gain control over the conditions of their labor. Without power, faculty are reduced to casual labor, play no role in the governing process, and work under labor conditions comparable to how workers are treated at Amazon and Walmart. Educators need a new vision, language, and collective strategy to regain the power, rightful influence, control and security over their work conditions and their ability to make meaningful contributions to their students and larger society.

It is crucial to remember that there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice. The central question here is what the role of education in a democracy is and how we can teach students to govern rather than be governed. There is no hope without a democratically driven education system. The greatest threat to education in North America and around the globe is anti-democratic ideologies and market values that believe public schools and higher education are failing because they are public and should not operate in the interests of furthering the promise and possibility of democracy. If schools are failing it is because they are being defunded, privatized, and modeled after white nationalist indoctrination spheres, transformed into testing centers, and reduced to regressive training practices.

Finally, I want to suggest that in a society in which democracy is under siege, it is crucial for educators to assume the role of public intellectuals to connect their work to crucial social issues and to fight for education as a crucial public good, especially in the face of a rising fascism across the globe. Hope matters, suggesting that educators remember and assert that alternative futures are possible and that acting on these beliefs is a precondition for making social change possible. In closing I want to return to my 2004 article in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and cite a paragraph, which is more important and relevant today than when I first wrote it in 2004.

At a time when our civil liberties are being destroyed and public institutions and goods all over the globe are under assault by the forces of a rapacious global capitalism, there is a sense of concrete urgency that demands not only the most militant forms of political opposition on the part of academics, but new modes of resistance and collective struggle buttressed by rigorous intellectual work, social responsibility, and political courage. The time has come for intellectuals to distinguish caution from cowardice and recognize the ever-fashionable display of rhetorical cleverness as a form of “disguised decadence.” As Derrida reminds us, democracy “demands the most concrete urgency … because as a concept it makes visible the promise of democracy, that which is to come.”

At issue here is the courage to take on the challenge of what kind of world we want – what kind of future we want to build for our children? The great philosopher, Ernst Bloch, insisted that hope taps into our deepest experiences and that without it reason and justice cannot blossom. In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin adds a call for compassion and social responsibility to this notion of hope, one that is indebted to those who will follow us. He writes: “Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them … . [T]he moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out.” Now more than ever educators must live up to the challenge of keeping fires of resistance burning with a feverish intensity. Only then will we be able to keep the lights on and the future open. In addition to that eloquent appeal, I would say that history is open, and it is time to think differently in order to act differently, especially if, as educators, we want to imagine and fight for alternative democratic futures and build new horizons of possibility.
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Notes

1 Radhika Sainath, “The Free Speech Exception.” Boston Review (October 30, 2023). Online: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-free-speech-exception/; Adam Tooze, Samuel Moyn, Amia Srinivasan, et al. “The principle of human dignity must apply to all people,” The Guardian (November 22, 2023). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/22/the-principle-of-human-dignity-must-apply-to-all-people; Judith Butler, “The Compass of Mourning.” London Review of Books (October 19, 2023). Online: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning.

2 Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism,” Boston Review. (October 27, 2020). Online http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/alberto-toscano-long-shadow-racial-fascism.

3 Henry A. Giroux, Pedagogy of Resistance (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

4 Anthony DiMaggio, “Fascism Denial American Style: Exceptionalism in the Ivory Tower,” Counterpunch (April 5, 2023). Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/05/fascism-denial-american-style-exceptionalism-in-the-ivory-tower/.

5 Henry A. Giroux, Insurrections: Education in an Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).

6 Jon Queally, “When 3 Men Richer Than 165 Million People, Sanders Says Working Class Must ‘Come Together’,” CommonDreams (June 4, 2023). Online: https://www.commondreams.org/news/immoral-inequality-bernie-sanders.

7 Judd Legum, “Banning Book Bans,” Popular Information (May 31, 2023). Online: https://popular.info/p/banning-book-bans?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1664&post_id=124913640&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email.

8 Martin Pengelly, “Ron DeSantis says he will ‘destroy leftism’ in US if elected president,” The Guardian (May 30, 2023). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/30/ron-desantis-fox-news-interview-destroy-leftism.

9 Gloria Oladipo, “Texas teacher fired for showing Anne Frank graphic novel to eighth-graders,” The Guardian (September 20, 2023). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/20/texas-teacher-fired-anne-frank-book-ban.

10 Richard Whiddington, “The Florida Principal Fired for Allowing a Lesson on Michelangelo’s ‘David’ Went to Italy to See the Sculpture Herself—and Was Rather Impressed,” ArtNews (April 28, 2023). Online: https://news.artnet.com/news/fired-florida-principal-visited-michelangelo-david-2292636#:~:text=Museums-,The%20Florida%20Principal%20Fired%20for%20Allowing%20a%20Lesson%20on%20Michelangelo’s,way%2C%22%20Hope%20Carrasquilla%20said.

11 Charisma Madarang, “Publisher Deletes Race From Rosa Parks Story for Florida,” Rolling Stone (March 16, 2023). Online: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/race-deleted-rosa-parks-history-florida-textbooks-1234698582/.

12 Jedd Legum, “Right-wing activists seek to ban “Arthur’s Birthday” from Florida school libraries,” Popular Information (July 20, 2023). Online: https://popular.info/p/right-wing-activists-seek-to-ban.

13 Tom Mockaitis, “Attacks on academic freedom undermine the quality of US education,” The Hill (April 21, 2023). Online: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/3962012-attacks-on-academic-freedom-undermine-the-quality-of-us-education/.

14 Elizabeth Gyori, “Idaho Wants to Jail Professors for Teaching About Abortion,” ACLU (August 9, 2023). Online: https://www.aclu.org/news/reproductive-freedom/idaho-wants-to-jail-professors-for-teaching-about-abortion.

15 Primo Levi, “Primo Levi’s Heartbreaking, Heroic Answers to the Most Common Questions He Was Asked About ‘Survival in Auschwitz’,” The New Republic (February 17, 1986). Online: https://newrepublic.com/article/119959/interview-primo-levi-survival-auschwitz.

16 Thom Hartmann, “Trump Town Hall: Is CNN Normalizing Fascism Next Week?” The Hartmann Report (May 3, 2023). Online: https://hartmannreport.com/p/trump-town-hall-is-cnn-normalizing.

17 Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 1.

18 Frank B. Wilderson III, “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics,” in Red, White, & Black, (London, UK: Duke University Press, 2012), 1–32.

19 See especially, Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond The Digital Age To A Post-capitalist World. (London: Verso Books, 2022).

20 Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Long War on Black Studies,” The New York Review of Books (June 17, 2023). Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/06/17/the-long-war-on-black-studies/.

21 See, for example, Jane Mayer, “The Making of the Fox News White House,” The New Yorker (March 4, 2019). Online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house.

22 Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Trade Publishers, New Edition, 2001).

23 Cited in Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “What Is Fascism?” Lucid Substack (December 7, 2022). Online: https://lucid.substack.com/p/what-is-fascism.

24 Paul Gilroy, “The 2019 Holberg Lecture, by Laureate Paul Gilroy: Never Again: refusing race and salvaging the human,” Holbergprisen, (November 11, 2019). Online: https://holbergprisen.no/en/news/holberg-prize/2019-holberg-lecture-laureate-paul-gilroy.

25 See, Chauncey Devega, “Americans are sleepwalking into a Trump dictatorship,” Salon (December 5, 2023). Online: https://www.salon.com/2023/12/05/americans-are-sleepwalking-into-a-dictatorship/; even neo-conservatives are raising the alarm about Trump’s fascism, see, for instance, Robert Kagan, “ A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.,” The Washington Post (November 30, 2023). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/.

26 Cited in Toni Morrison, ed. James Baldwin, Collected Essays: No Name in the Street (New York: Library of America, 1998), 437.

27 Joshua Sperling cited in Lisa Appignanesi, “Berger’s Ways of Being,” The New York Review of Books (May 9, 2019). Online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/05/09/john-berger-ways-of-being/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Tintoretto%20Berger%20Mueller&utm_content=NYR%20Tintoretto%20Berger%20Mueller+CID_22999ee4b377a478a5ed6d4ef5021162&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=John%20Bergers%20Ways%20of%20Being.

28 Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” in Jerome Kohn, ed., Responsibility and Judgement, (NY: Schocken Books, 2003). Online: https://grattoncourses.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/responsibility-under-a-dictatorship-arendt.pdf.

29 Mark Vallen, “Goya and the Sleep of Reason,” Art for Change (March 31, 2023). Online: Francisco Goya warned “the sleep of reason produces monsters”.

30 Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019).

31 David L. Clark, “What is Democracy?,” NFB Blog (March 27, 2023). Online: https://blog.nfb.ca/blog/2023/05/04/edu-higher-learning-what-is-democracy/.


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Henry A. Giroux (born 1943) is an internationally renowned writer and cultural critic, Professor Henry Giroux has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets, and is one of the most cited Canadian academics working in any area of Humanities research. In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on