ITALY’S FAR RIGHT BRINGS NEW EXTREMISTS TO THE TABLE
BY MILLIE BRIGAUD



SEPTEMBER 25, 2022

Giorgia Meloni is expected to be voted in as Italy’s first female PM. Although this achievement ought to be celebrated, a Meloni victory will threaten Italy’s democracy by normalizing her party’s neofascist platform and shifting the country’s political spectrum to the right, writes Millie Brigaud.

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iorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy political party is expected to be voted in as Italy’s first female prime minister this Sunday, September 25. Although this achievement ought to be celebrated, a Meloni victory will threaten Italy’s democracy by normalizing her party’s neofascist platform and shifting the country’s entire political spectrum to the right.

Whether Meloni wins or not, her party has moved from a fringe party to a legitimate contender in Italian elections. Brothers of Italy won less than 2% of the vote in 2008 and 2013, and only 4% in 2018. Now polls predict 24% of the votes will go to Brothers of Italy on Sunday.

Italy risks experiencing something similar to Éric Zemmour’s recent run for the French presidency. Le Pen—who was once feared by both the left and the right—now appears moderate compared to Zemmour’s right-wing extremism.

Le Pen proposed a ban on wearing hijabs in public, toughening family reunification and nationality laws, and withdrawing from the euro and Schengen agreements, but Zemmour one-upped her. Beyond promoting hardline policies on immigration, he has been convicted for hate speech and inciting racial violence three times. Zemmour publicly supports the racist conspiracy theory that white Europeans are being “replaced” by non-white immigrants. He has also been accused of sexual assault numerous times.

Le Pen’s National Rally party has become mainstream over time, enabling a candidate like Zemmour to take her place as the fringe extreme-right leader. In this last election, Le Pen could finally rebrand herself as moderate, standing up to Zemmour’s sexism and violence. There is reason to fear this could happen in Italy, too.

Moving from the Margins to the Mainstream

Women are not immune to far-right ideology. They have been turned off, however, by the extreme-right’s political style and brutality.

Recently, women leaders are transforming their parties’ identities to appeal to wider audiences. Le Pen kicked her father out of his own party, condemned racism and antisemitism, and eventually changed the name of the party. Meloni counters her party’s stereotypes, too. In 2018, she addressed the Italian public from her kitchen and then her garden. Just this week, Brothers of Italy suspended one of its members who had called Adolf Hitler a “great statesman” and celebrated Meloni as a “modern fascist” in 2016.

Immigration and family policies have increasingly lured female voters to the traditionally male-dominated far-right. Far-right groups make baseless claims that women are losing job opportunities to immigrants, and that immigrant men are sexual predators who threaten the safety of native women and children. Women leaders can embody this victimhood, disguising nativism as some new form of feminism. In Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, women far-right leaders have claimed they are the only politicians protecting women’s rights.

Meloni’s campaign slogan this year is, “I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian and you will not take that away from me.” She is a single mother and proud of her womanhood. Rather than pitting work and family against each other, Meloni plans to incentivize companies to be flexible with remote work and to set up work daycare centers.

New Fringes

The far-right in Europe successfully exploits gender discourse to soften and justify homophobic and nativist policies. While this is scary in itself, the consequences are even scarier. When a fringe ideology is normalized, new fringes develop.

Denmark is a prime example of this phenomenon. Pia Kjaersgarrd oversaw the tremendous success of the far-right Danish People’s Party. As with other female faces for the far-right, she redefined womanhood to fit right-wing ideals. But after the Danish People’s Party became the country’s second largest party in 2015, it quickly lost its momentum. Nye Borgerlige, a new and even more extreme party had joined the political discourse.

The International Republican Institute, a U.S.-based nonpartisan nongovernmental organization, calculated European states’ latent far-right support. The study looks at illiberal attitudes, perceptions of demographic change, and nationalism among voters in the far-right and center-right. Italy ranks at the top with 7% untapped support for the far-right, just ahead of countries like Poland and Denmark. The conditions for extremism to proliferate in Italy already exist. Meloni’s success could very well be the spark that sends this dormant catastrophe blazing.

This is not to say that women are the root of Europe’s far-right turn. Women leaders are not creating the ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and disillusionment toward democracy that push voters to the fringes (both the left and right). And in France, other factors such as the media contributed to Le Pen’s normalization.

But women have had a unique ability to make fringe groups palatable to a wider audience, and in turn legitimize new and even more extreme voices. This is especially true in Italy where Mussolini and fascism are still widely romanticized. This normalization of fringe ideology is disturbing and underscores the need for education on the horrors of fascism and need to counter nativism.

About

Millie Brigaud

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Millie Brigaud is an aspiring journalist pursuing a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and French at William & Mary (class of 2023). Before joining the Diplomatic Courier, Millie interned at Rue89 Strasbourg, a local online newspaper in Strasbourg, France.

The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.

Opinion – The Centrality of Yemen’s Tribal Politics in Peace Efforts

Poornima B

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Sep 25 2022 • 

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The intractability of the civil war in Yemen is mainly rooted in weak state-society relations fuelled by divided sects, unequal distribution of resources and involvement of external powers. These factors have together intensified through the years and complicated Yemen’s situation. Decades of mistrust and dissatisfaction with the state mechanism and governance have eroded the interaction between the state and society in Yemen. Tribalism is an influential aspect of Yemeni society. It forms a layer of identity that plays a role in social, political and security dimensions. Many political leaders have hailed from powerful tribes like former President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who hailed from the Hashid tribes. Saleh steered through his political career by gaining the support of the elites, including those from the tribes, mainly by pitting one group against the other.

The role of tribes has become more robust and autonomous in Yemen as tribal governance and traditions came to compensate for the lack of a strong central government. Tribal identities generally precede national identities. In a war-torn, fragile state with weak state-society relations, tribal affiliation is more robust, thus, becoming a decisive factor in the trajectory of the conflict. For instance, in Syria, the Islamic State gained tribal support by taking advantage of inter-tribal rivalries and the tensions between Arab tribes and the Kurds. At the same time, the Syrian Defence Forces were also highly reliant on the local tribes to fight off ISIS (Dukhan 2018). A similar situation prevails in Yemen. Tribes have donned a prominent position in deciding the war’s progression. While the tribes have been instrumental in slowing down the momentum of the Houthi movement in several provinces, they have also lost many of their kin, including the Sheikhs or the tribal leaders, as collateral damage (Al-Dawsari 2020).

The inability of the Yemeni government to form a strong core hailed from many variables, of which external intervention played a considerable part. In particular, Saudi Arabia perceived any attempts by the Yemeni government at consolidating state power as threatening its interests. Autonomous groups were motivated to undermine any efforts to strengthen the centre, which was vividly observed in Northern Yemen, especially in the areas near the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border (Okruhlik and Conge 1997, 560; Peterson 2018).

Such interventions from regional and extra-regional powers have impacted state-society relations in Yemen. As groups at the grassroots level increasingly exercised autonomy, a stable government could not sustain itself, and a powerless centre passed down the onus of governance to tribal groups in most parts of the state (Dresch 2009, 7). Even though the tribes managed their ties with the government, they fell victim to co-option and divide and rule policy adopted by the politicians. This phenomenon had ripple effects on elections, press freedom and on the overall development of Yemen.

In protracted conflicts, the tribal sections develop interests and assume important positions, whether to choose whom to support or help in conflict management or transformation efforts. Some tribes remain neutral and help in the mediation processes. They have been responsible for prisoner swaps, protecting civilians and arranging for temporary ceasefires. There have been countless incidents where tribal members have successfully negotiated and contained a high-tense situation (Almashhad Alyemeni 2021).

However, these tribal groups struggle between the Houthis’ impunity and an ineffective central government. This disposition, compounded by inadequate political representation, has reduced the efficiency of the tribes’ potentialities in managing the conflict. Reports cite that the UN’s intervention has sometimes derailed tribal mechanisms to deal with negotiations and settlements at the local level (Al-Dawsari 2021). The tribes had already lost economic assistance from the centre, and losing political and military assistance would highly likely only complicate the conflict.

Many tribes want to see the war end as early as possible. At this juncture, their desperation can sway either way. One possibility is that the tribal leaders could call a truce with the Houthi militia, assuring non-intervention and, in return, ensuring the safety of their tribal areas. This would mean that the tribes will also not fight for the government forces or support them in any way. The other way is that these tribal groups can be given the necessary political autonomy and representation to work with other stakeholders on peace processes from the bottom to the top to bring out a comprehensive arrangement that stops the brutality of the ongoing civil war in Yemen. The tribes would prefer this option as they realise that the Houthis will break truce agreements, as happened multiple times in the past, namely in Bayda in 2020 and Hajour in 2019 (Al-Batati 2020; Al-Ashwal 2019).

The government and its supporters must work on confidence building mechanisms with the tribes as short-term measures to establish a united front for peace efforts. The focus needs to be laid on building state-society relations in the aftermath of the war as part of the post-war reconstruction framework and sustaining stable and just governance. Either way, the tribes have constantly proven their significance to the identity of the Yemeni society. Rather than exaggerating or downplaying the role of tribes, any peace initiative introduced by any well-intentioned party should involve the tribal fraternity and employ their services optimally.

References

Al-Ashhwal, Ammar. 2019. “Hajour Tribes, Houthis Locked in Key Battle in Northern Yemen”. Al-monitor, March 6, 2019. https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2019/03/yemen-houthis-hajour-tribes-battle-war-saudi-arabia-strike.html#ixzz7fclD1R17

Al-Batati, Saeed. 2020. “Houthis Intensify Clampdown on Opponents.” Arab News, July 21, 2020. https://www.arabnews.com/node/1707576/middle-east

Al-Dawsari, Nadwa. 2020. “Analysis: Tribal Sheikhs and the War in Yemen.” Al Masdar Online, February 17, 2020. https://al-masdaronline.net/national/345

Al-Dawsari, Nadwa. 2021. “Peacebuilding in the Time of War: Tribal Ceasefire & De-escalation Mechanisms in Yemen”. Middle East Institute. Accessed 23 September, 2022. https://www.mei.edu/publications/peacebuilding-time-war-tribal-cease-fire-and-de-escalation-mechanisms-yemen

Almashhad Alyemeni. 2021. “Tribal Mediation by AlBukahaiti Led to the Evacuation of 250 Corpses of Houthi Militiamen West of Marib.” (Arabic), March 1, 2021. https://www.almashhad-alyemeni.com/196190

Dhukan, Haian. 2018. “The Syrian Civil War: What Role do Tribal Loyalties Play?”. London School of Economics. Accessed 23 September, 2022. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2018/07/13/the-syrian-civil-war-what-role-do-tribal-loyalties-play/

Dresch, Paul. 2009. “Words and Things: Tribal Identity in Arabia.” Etudes Rurales 184, no.2: 185-202.

Okruhlik, Gwenn and Patrick Conge. 1997. “National Autonomy, Labour Migration, and Political Crisis: Yemen and Saudi Arabia.” The Middle East Journal 51, no.4: 554-565. 

Peterson, J.E. 2018. “Tribe and State in Contemporary Arabian Peninsula”. London School of Economics. Accessed 23 September, 2022. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2018/07/12/tribe-and-state-in-the-contemporary-arabian-peninsula/ 

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• Opinion – Escalating Conflict Endangers Prospects of Peace in Yemen
• Deadly Stalemate in Yemen
• Opinion – Civil War’s Splinters Indicate a Fractured Future for Yemen
• The Human Cost of Remote Warfare in Yemen
• The Crime of Hunger: Yemen’s Humanitarian Crisis
• Environmental (In)Security in the Middle East

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Poornima B is a PhD research scholar & TMA Pai Fellow at the Department of Geopolitics and International Relations, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India. She mainly writes on Geopolitics of the Middle East and North Africa, International Negotiations, Conflict & Peace Studies. Her doctoral research is on the protracted social conflict in Yemen. She can be reached on Twitter @aminroopb

SHOULD HUMANITIES PROFESSORS BE AUTOMATED?

BY
NICHOLAS AGAR




SEPTEMBER 24, 2022


Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have added to the angst about the future of the humanities. We should reconnect with the “human” in the humanities because we will need it more than ever to help us navigate this novel terrain, writes Nicholas Agar.

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here has been much hand-wringing about the crisis of the humanities, and recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have added to the angst. It is not only truck drivers whose jobs are threatened by automation. Deep-learning algorithms are also entering the domain of creative work. And now, they are demonstrating proficiency in the tasks that occupy humanities professors when they are not giving lectures: namely, writing papers and submitting them for publication in academic journals.

Could academic publishing be automated? In September 2020, OpenAI’s deep-learning algorithm, GPT-3, demonstrated impressive journalistic abilities by writing a credible-looking Guardian commentary on “why humans have nothing to fear from AI.” And earlier this year, the Swedish psychiatrist Almira Osmanovic Thunström asked the same algorithm to write a submission for an academic journal.

Thunström was less prescriptive than the Guardian editors. She instructed the algorithm simply to, “Write an academic thesis in 500 words about GPT-3 and add scientific references and citations inside the text.” She reports that “GPT-3’s paper has now been published at the international French-owned preprint server HAL and … is awaiting review at an academic journal.” Even if the paper is rejected, it presages an era when AI papers won’t be.

Similar experiments have been conducted with AI-generated creative design. This past June, the editors of the Economist used the AI service MidJourney to generate the cover art for their weekly print edition. Having recently seen a Salvador Dalí exhibition, I was particularly impressed by MidJourney’s ability to produce images in the famous surrealist artist’s style. Dalí experts doubtless would spot many problems with MidJourney’s renditions, and gallery curators might admit MidJourney’s images only as a surrealist joke. Yet if we consider the experiment strictly in economic terms, satisfying a potential customer like me would presumably be good enough to credit the AI with a win.

We should take the same approach to Thunström’s experiment. A practiced eye might identify many imperfections in GPT-3’s scholarship, especially if the reader knows that the author is a machine. But blind peer reviews are the standard approach in academic publishing. Reviewers thus would be faced with a classic “Turing Test.” Is this intelligence indistinguishable from that of a human? And even if GPT-3’s scholarship falls short, human academics should still worry that a GPT-4 or -5 will have overcome whatever advantage they still hold over machines.

Moreover, by focusing on egocentric writing tasks—asking the AI to write about AI—Thunström and the Guardian’s experiments understate the broader challenge to academic writing. In addition to deep-learning algorithms, one also must consider the central role that Google Scholar plays in today’s academy. With this index of all the world’s academic literature, AI scholarship should be able to expand far into new frontiers.

After all, we applaud thinkers who uncover novel links between different academic fields and debates. If you can make an unexpected connection between an overlooked point by the German idealist philosopher Johann Fichte and the current debate on climate change, you may have found the basis for a new journal article with which to pad your CV. And when you go to write that article, you will duly cite all the other relevant academics on those topics. This is necessary both to signal your supposedly exhaustive knowledge of the subject and to attract the attention of your peers (one of whom might end up being the peer reviewer for your paper).

But it must be said: This standard approach to academic writing is decidedly robotic. An AI scholar can instantaneously scour the relevant literature and offer a serviceable summation, complete with the obligatory citations. It can also likely spot all those previously unidentified connections between Fichte and climate change. If the Google Scholar of the future can overcome its current Eurocentric biases, one can easily imagine AIs discovering fascinating linkages between Boethius, Simone Weil, and Kwasi Wiredu—insights that I, with my training in Australia’s contemporary analytic philosophical tradition, would be unlikely to find.

Humanities scholars nowadays often joke about the tiny readership that we can expect for our published papers. In the absence of mainstream media coverage, the standard philosophy journal article might be read by the five other philosophers who are mentioned therein and almost no one else. Yet in a future of AI-generated academic writing, the standard readership will be largely confined to machines. Some academic debates might become as worthy of human attention as are two computers playing each other in chess.

For those of us who view the humanities as one of the last essentially human disciplines, the first step to salvation is to think about how we engage with students. Students today want to lend their voices to debates about the world and the future possibilities for humanity, but they are often met with crash courses on academic writing and disquisitions about the importance of not randomly switching between citation styles.

Rather than structuring our courses like apprenticeships in specialized academic journal writing, we should reconnect with the “human” in the humanities. Today’s digital media landscape has created a deep longing for credibility and authenticity. In a world of AI writing, rhetoric itself would become flattened and formulaic, creating a new demand for genuinely human forms of persuasion. That is the art that we should be teaching our students.

Likewise, if academia is heading for a future of AI-driven research, we will need the humanities more than ever to help us navigate this novel terrain. The volume of new literature that a future GPT-3 could churn out would rapidly exceed our absorptive capacity. How will we determine which of those machine-generated insights apply to our own lives and social systems? Amid such an abundance of knowledge, we would need to remember that humankind is not just a rational but also a social and political animal.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2022.

About

Nicholas Agar

:

Nicholas Agar, Professor of Ethics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, is a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Australia, and the author of How to Be Human in the Digital Economy, MIT Press, 2019.

The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.

Book Review: Global Shareholder Stewardship edited by Dionysia Katelouzou and Dan W. Puchniak

In Global Shareholder Stewardship, editors Dionysia Katelouzou and Dan W. Puchniak bring together contributors to explore the complex state of global shareholder stewardship and its future prospects. This extensive collection is invaluable given the current cultural transformations to corporate governance, writes Irina Bevza.

Global Shareholder Stewardship. Dionysia Katelouzou and Dan W. Puchniak (eds). Cambridge University Press. 2022.

Global Shareholder Stewardship, edited by Dionysia Katelouzou and Dan W. Puchniak, provides an in-depth analysis of the shareholder engagement framework at international and regional levels. The book explains the complex state of global shareholder stewardship and discusses its prospects.

Shareholder stewardship largely refers to how institutional investors manage capital to generate long-term value for beneficiaries and other stakeholders. Shareholder stewardship saw a rise in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis after the UK released the world’s first stewardship code in 2010. This defined stewardship as ‘the responsible allocation, management and oversight of capital to create long-term value for clients and beneficiaries leading to sustainable benefits for the economy, the environment and society’. However, in Global Shareholder Stewardship, Katelouzou and Puchniak dissuade readers from the idea that the shareholder stewardship codes that followed at international and regional levels adopted the philosophy of the UK code.

In fact, due to region and jurisdiction-specific factors, global stewardship is far more complex than it appears. Moreover, it serves various functions ‘which would have never been anticipated by the original drafter of the UK Stewardship Code’ (5). For example, government bodies might develop stewardship codes to demonstrate their jurisdiction adheres to global norms of good corporate governance. At the same time, institutional investors might create a code to promote self-regulation and avoid being regulated by the government.

A more notable difference, however, is the lax enforcement of stewardship codes globally: none of the jurisdictions that have adopted a UK-style code has followed the UK’s model of enforcement. In contrast, stewardship codes were made voluntary in scope. One stark example is Kenya, where a government-issued stewardship code has zero signatories, as discussed in the chapter by Austin Ouko.

Image Credit: Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

The collection’s empirical research presents mixed evidence of the impact of stewardship engagement by institutional investors on corporate performance. Moreover, in the chapter ‘Investment Management, Stewardship and Corporate Governance Roles’, Roger J. Barker and Iris H.-Y. Chiu suggest that ‘the reliance of shareholders ‘‘to do the right thing’’ in monitoring the corporate economy for the common good is […] a lofty ambition, and one that institutional investors have not quite lived up to, and may not be well placed to fulfil’ (530).

The UK Stewardship Code (revised in 2020) and the Shareholders Rights Directive (EU) 2017/828 require that the investment management industry engages in corporate governance as part of good stewardship. However, business incentives and existing business models can impact the effectiveness of their engagement. Existing literature offers a variety of reasons why investment managers might be disincentivised from investing resources in stewardship. These reasons include excessive trading of securities in the portfolio to generate transaction charges by active investment strategies (where a portfolio manager runs a more concentrated portfolio and targets to outperform the benchmark market index); and disengagement from the real economy in passive strategies (where a portfolio manager tracks the benchmark market index).

Moreover, some fund beneficiaries might not be interested in the long-term wellbeing of investee companies either. For instance, defined benefit pension funds have defined liabilities and will target liability-driven strategies that might be short-termist and not adhere to a long-term good stewardship perspective. However, Barker and Chiu point out that UK and EU regulators only began to grapple with numerous obstacles to investment management’s productive engagement with investee companies to improve corporate governance. Nevertheless, they stress that ‘perhaps ‘‘stewardship’’ can be the starting point for cultural adjustment on the part of the investment management industry as it considers how its structures, incentives, business models and governance affect the ultimate saver’ (548).

In the UK, the government contributes to pension investments through provision of a tax credit, which makes it a significant financial investor in the market. In ‘The Market for Stewardship and the Role of the Government’, Katelouzou and Eve Micheler suggest that the UK government should tailor tax credits to investments that are stewardship active. The UK government oversees financial service providers and is a significant economic contributor to the financial services industry – pension schemes represent 90 per cent of revenues of investment consultants and fiduciary managers. So, if the government makes a financial contribution to investment, it is entitled to know how investment and stewardship decisions for pensions are taken. The authors conclude: ‘like all other beneficiaries of and contributors to the market, the government should act as a steward in relation to its own investment’ (87).

The environmental, social and governance (ESG) trend has gathered political attention and become embedded in business models for an increasing number of institutional investors. Katelouzou and Puchniak note that a focus on ESG considerations in investment management has motivated the adoption of stewardship codes. However, there has been lax enforcement, along with a regulatory design that assumes that institutional shareholders hold the majority of shares across listed companies (while most of the institutional investors are minority shareholders). They conclude that these ‘undercut the ability [of shareholder stewardship] to solve most firm-specific or systematic corporate governance problems in most jurisdictions around the world. However, the rise of ESG as a recent focal point of stewardship appears to present a hopeful possibility for its future’ (36).

Since 2010, policymakers, private-standard setters, corporate stakeholders and institutional investors have increasingly adopted the shareholder stewardship concept and embedded it in their practices. Yet, as this book demonstrates, the development of global stewardship has proved to be much more complicated than anticipated. Katelouzou and Puchniak have given readers a collection that explores previously unknown complexities of the global stewardship movement. This extensive work will be invaluable amid the cultural transformation that the corporate governance field is undergoing.

• This review first appeared at LSE Review of Books.

Please read our comments policy before commenting.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. 

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About the reviewer

Irina Bevza – Trinity College Dublin
Irina Bevza is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin. Her research interests include corporate governance, finance and portfolio management. She has been working in the investment industry for almost ten years. She also holds a Chartered Financial Analyst designation and chairs a member value committee at the CFA Ireland society.

Review – Beyond the Steppe Frontier

Giulia Sciorati
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Sep 25 2022 •

Princeton University Press


Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border
By Sören Urbansky
Princeton University Press, 2020

Sören Urbansky’s Beyond the Steppe Frontier is a timely addition to scholarly discussions in the discipline of Border Studies. The author understands border formation as much the bottom-up exercise of borderlanders as the result of central elites’ top-down directives. In so doing, Urbansky contributes to studies aiming to give agency back to states’ peripheries, arguing that “the local population … played a more significant role in the story of territorialisation of the state than has been previously acknowledged” (p.6).

Using the terms “Russia” and “China” to encompass the two entities’ numerous historical regime changes (such as the Soviet Union and Manchukuo, respectively), the author grounds his argument in an ambitious historical investigation on a segment of the Sino-Russian border, one of the longest in the world. Urbansky specifically focusses his analysis on the Argun river basin (a land triangle between modern-day China, Russia, and Mongolia), investigating social interactions between the transborder twin railway cities of Manzhouli (China) and Zabaikalsk (Russia). The study spans over three hundred years, drawing from the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk and discussing border formation up to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, with Manzhouli and Zabaikalsk grounding the reader during this extensive voyage through history.

Urbansky’s rationale for the historical case selection is convincing. As the author notices, the Argun basin developed an incredible resilience to changes, making it more akin to a state border than a periphery. Moreover, the natural and artificial geographical frontiers – the river and the railway – make the region a critical case to achieve the research objective – i.e., to study the impact of across-the-river interactions between borderlanders on borders.

Empirical work enhances the volume’s contribution to the literature, rightfully placing Beyond the Steppe Frontier among the must-read volumes on Sino-Russian relations. The author’s archival evidence and biographical accounts are particularly inspiring, and Chapter 7 should enter the reading lists of Cold War history modules internationally. In particular, the evidence Urbansky uncovers advances our understanding of the border and borderlanders’ diplomatic role during the Sino-Soviet split. For instance, details on the consecutive official visits by Chinese and Soviet representatives of railway workers across the Argun border in the early 1960s opens space for future research on the impact of railroad diplomacy – or, more generally, people-to-people exchanges – in the process of rapprochement between China and the Soviet Union.

Data collection is also a critical aspect of the book. In his introduction, Urbansky recognises the difficulty of accessing Chinese archival sources. As he puts it, this struggle was mainly due to the political sensitivity of issues like borders and minorities in contemporary China and the country’s unique archival culture (p.13). The author’s efforts to balance Russian and Chinese sources (mainly by relying on shared historical evidence) should be noted, yet Russian perspectives remain prominent throughout the book. The imbalance in biographical accounts is especially noticeable, as the most telling historical figures belong to the Russian camp. This limitation does not undermine the volume’s argument for bottom-up border formation. Still, it affects the extent to which the analysis assesses borderlanders from both banks of the Argun river, as it develops a persistent Russo-centric narrative that sometimes dominates the reader’s view.

Another issue that emerges from Beyond the Steppe Frontier relates to the conclusions drawn by the author. When reading Urbansky’s work, the fundamental idea presented in his reasoning is the impact of local communities on borders at specific historical moments vis-à-vis central elites. As the author argues, before the Sino-Soviet split, borderlanders had de facto constructed an informal border through unofficial routes and exchanges that superseded the geographical limits imposed by central elites. However, with bilateral interactions and communications collapsing between China and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s and the Argun basin’s subsequent militarisation, Urbansky argues that the local society-constructed informal border also ceased to exist. Discussing these changes more in-depth, assessing their long-term effects, and offering a precise periodisation might have been worth pursuing. Such an analysis would have helped readers to better contextualise the central-local nexus and the consequences of central elites’ decisions on bottom-up border construction. After the Sino-Russian rapprochement, Urbansky offers evidence of the adverse effects of broken transborder generational linkages, showing that informal interactions between Chinese and Russian borderlanders never fully recuperated. This ambiguity on the impact of central over local does not undermine the volume’s original contribution. However, future works must address this question to strengthen the author’s overall argument on borderlanders as agents of border formation.

These issues notwithstanding, Sören Urbansky’s Beyond the Steppe Frontier gives life to the Sino-Russian border. With this work, the author has brilliantly served students, scholars and history enthusiasts by presenting a compelling, innovative, and well-researched book on the recent Sino-Russian past that reminds us that human interactions make history. This human dimension, which is so central to the volume, is also responsible for making Urbansky’s thought-provoking work such an enjoyable read.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Giulia Sciorati is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Trento, a Temporary Lecturer at the University of Pavia and the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, and an Associate Research Fellow at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI). Her research focuses on China’s foreign and security policies, relations between China and Central Asia and the country’s peripheries. She was awarded a PhD by the School of International Studies of the University of Trento in September 2020. Giulia was a visiting researcher at the University of Nottingham (spring 2018) and the University of Oxford (autumn 2021).

EDITORIAL CREDIT(S)
Sam Noble

Poverty in Lebanon's 'city of billionaires' drives deadly migration
After a migrant boat tragically sunk, leaving 94 dead in an ill-fated voyage, new light is shed shed on poverty in Lebanon.

By REUTERS
Published: SEPTEMBER 25, 2022 

lebanon refugees 
(photo credit: AP)

In the city from which Lebanon's richest politicians hail, the poorest residents once again mourn their dead.

Among them, Mustafa Misto, a taxi driver in the city of Tripoli, and his three young children, whose bodies were found off Syria's coast on Thursday after they left Lebanon on a migrant boat carrying more than 100 people.

With 94 bodies recovered, dozens of them reported to be children, it marks the deadliest such voyage yet from Lebanon, where mounting despair is forcing ever more people to attempt the perilous journey on rickety and overcrowded boats to seek a better life in Europe.

Before embarking on the ill-fated voyage, Misto had fallen heavily into debt, selling his car and his mother's gold to feed his family yet still unable to afford simple things, like cheese for his childrens' sandwiches, relatives and neighbors said.

"Everyone knows they may die but they say, 'Maybe I may get somewhere, maybe there is hope,'" said Rawane El Maneh, 24, a cousin. "They went... not to die, but to renew their lives. Now they are in a new life. I hope it's much better than this one here."

A view shows the exterior of Lebanon's Central Bank building in Beirut, Lebanon June 29, 2022. (credit: REUTERS/MOHAMED AZAKIR)

The tragedy has underscored soaring poverty in northern Lebanon, and Tripoli in particular, that is driving ever more people to take desperate measures three years into the country's devastating financial collapse.

It has also brought into focus stark inequalities that are particularly acute in the north: Tripoli is home to a number of ultra-rich politicians but has enjoyed little in the way of development or investment.

While many of Lebanon’s sectarian leaders have spent money in their communities to shore up political support, residents in Tripoli say their area has been neglected despite the wealth of its politicians.

As mourners gathered to pay their respects in Tripoli's impoverished Bab al-Ramel neighborhood, many voiced anger at the city's politicians including Najib Mikati, Lebanon's billionaire tycoon prime minister.

"We're in a country where politicians just suck up money, talk, and have no regard for what people need," El Maneh said.

Tripoli, Lebanon's second city with a population of roughly half a million, was already Lebanon's poorest before the country plummeted into financial crisis, the result of decades of corruption and bad governance overseen by ruling elites.

People sit together as they pay condolences for Mustafa Misto, a Lebanese man who was on the migrant boat with his three young children which sank off the Syrian coast on Thursday after sailing from Lebanon (credit: REUTERS)

Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center said Tripoli had seen no major development efforts since the 1975-90 civil war despite the political rise of rich businessmen from the city. This "resembled the growing inequality and income disparity in the country," he said.

Billionaires and Poverty

Mikati made much of his fortune in telecoms and is ranked the Arab world's fourth richest man in 2022 by Forbes.

Mikati's office said in a statement to Reuters on Thursday that he had been the "biggest supporter of socio-economic development in Tripoli" for more than 40 years, through his charitable foundations.

He also understood "the agony the people of Lebanon in general and Tripoli in particular are going through," due to the crisis, it added.

Electricity cables are seen near shops at Tripoli's impoverished Bab al-Ramel neighbourhood

 (credit: REUTERS)

Mikati's seaside mansion on the city's edge, known locally as "Mikati's Palace," has been a rallying point during protests in recent years over government corruption and economic desperation.

A Lebanese prosecutor in October 2019 charged Mikati with illicit enrichment for using funds designated for a subsidized housing loan scheme for poor families - accusations he has denied.

His office said the charges were "politically motivated to smear" his reputation, and noted another judge dropped the case earlier this year.

Troubled Region

Reflecting a disconnect between people in Tripoli and the politicians and a belief nothing will change, just three in 10 people in the city voted in May parliamentary elections.

The north has been one of Lebanon's most troubled regions since the end of the civil war. The city and its surrounding areas have been a fertile recruiting ground for young Sunni Muslim jihadists.

A woman walks down the stairs near residential buildings in Tripoli 

(credit: REUTERS)

Most recently, Tripoli has been a focal point of a worsening security situation linked to the financial collapse.

Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi has announced a new security plan that followed a spike in crimes and violence.

Several dozen of the people on the migrant boat came from the sprawling Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, according to camp residents. There were also many Syrians, around 1 million of whom live in Lebanon as refugees.

The economic crisis has led poverty to sky-rocket, with 80% of the population of some 6.5 million poor, according to the United Nations. The government has done little to address the crisis, which the World Bank has called a deliberate depression "orchestrated" by the elite through its exploitative grip on resources.

Several other boats attempted the voyage from Lebanon last week: Cyprus rescued 477 people from two vessels that left Lebanon.

Shadi Lababidi's brother sits at their home in Tripoli 

(credit: REUTERS)

The UN Refugee Agency said 3,460 individuals had left or attempted to leave Lebanon by sea this year, more than double the number in the whole of 2021.

Those who perished on the boat carrying Misto also included a woman and her four children from the northern Akkar region. The father was one of few survivors, said Yahya Rifai, the mayor of their town. He said the crisis was worse than the civil war.

"I don't know what's wrong with these politicians," he said. "They will have to answer for this."

Book Review: Environmentalism and Global International Society by Robert Falkner

In Environmentalism and Global International Society, Robert Falkner explains how environmentalism has transformed from being largely a fringe social movement to a primary institution within global society. As societal circumstances change, academics and policymakers can use this book to better understand how social relations influence environmentalism and extend its insights into improving global environmental conditions, writes Dan Ziebarth. 

If you are interested in this book review, you can read a recent LSE Research for the World article by Professor Robert Falkner on the role of great powers in the international politics of climate change. 

Environmentalism and Global International Society. Robert Falkner. Cambridge University Press. 2021.

You don’t have to be a scientist to be aware that climate change has become an increasingly prominent global issue, and consequently a central focus of global social and political concerns. Changing climate conditions across the world have led scholars in a range of academic disciplines to place greater emphasis on the relationship between climate change and humanity. In Environmentalism and Global International Society, Robert Falkner seeks to explain how, and why, environmentalism has gone from being largely a fringe social movement to becoming a primary institution within global society.

The book is divided into three main sections. The first part involves the theoretical background. The second is the lengthiest and covers the historical development of environmentalism through a global view. The third section presents analytical perspectives on how the theoretical background may be applied to future global environmental governance.

The focal point of the book is the spread of environmentalism as an international norm and how this change has been the result of interactions between state and non-state actors. The theoretical background is grounded in the ‘English School’ of International Relations, which focuses largely on how ideas and norms influence global society, as opposed to simply material power. Within the English School, there is distinction between the international system, which is the process of contact between two or more states impacting one another’s decisions; international society, when states share a common set of rules; and world society, whereby non-state actors interact with and alongside state actors (Hedley Bull, 1977). From this perspective, social structures and international institutions are particularly important for how we understand the rise of global environmentalism.

Another central aspect of the English School approach is the differentiation between primary and secondary institutions. Introduced by Barry Buzan (2004), this distinction separates primary institutions – those which involve deep and durable social practices viewed as legitimate behaviour in international society, such as sovereignty and territoriality – from secondary institutions, which by contrast are typically intergovernmental arrangements established by states, such as the United Nations or the World Bank (Buzan and George Lawson, 2018).

Image Credit: Photo by Photo Boards on Unsplash

In the book, Falkner regularly discusses this distinction in relation to the spread of international norms regarding environmentalism. Falkner argues that environmentalism is not merely a trendy buzzword but has become a fundamental principle in international affairs. This suggests that global environmental politics holds international legitimacy, and that this legitimacy has created a new relationship between environmentalism and International Relations.

This is particularly applicable to the normative order of international society, where the rise of environmental stewardship has been an important case of norm transfer from world society to international society. This process began in domestic and transnational debates during the nineteenth century. The hardening of environmental stewardship began following the rise of the modern environmental movement, starting in the 1960s, and has since been adopted as a fundamental norm.

The book also uses the conceptual dyads of pluralism and solidarism, and international society and world society, taken from the English School, to outline four ideal types of global green order: Green Westphalia; eco-localism; global environmental governance; and eco-globalism.

Green Westphalia represents the pluralism-international society ideal type, which is a state-centric international order with decentralised decision-making, low levels of international cooperation and high levels of value diversity. Eco-localism represents the pluralism-world society ideal type, whereby there would be greater normative convergence and more cooperation among states. Global environmental governance represents the solidarism-international society ideal type, in which there would be greater decentralisation and high levels of value diversity like Green Westphalia, but local communities would be the main vehicles through which environmental aims are met. Finally, eco-globalism represents the solidarism-world society ideal type, where individual and society groups are able to pursue a common set of environmental values as opposed to a state-centric process.

Falkner presents a thorough, insightful and well-informed history of environmental movements, or at times simply attempts at environmental movements, through a global point of view. Falkner’s work is particularly impressive in its ability to trace the early origins of disparate efforts to improve environmental conditions, both within different countries as well as among international and transnational actors, and collect them into a cohesive story which shows the interconnections between many of these events and actors.

Falkner seamlessly weaves together the interactions between domestic environmental advocacy groups, domestic political institutions and international organisations, and how these interactions changed over the course of two centuries to reshape global environmentalism. It should come as no surprise here that the longest section of the book is focused on history. This proves to be the heart of the work and is particularly interesting and engaging.

Environmentalism and Global International Society will be particularly useful for scholars firmly embedded in the English School of IR literature and debates surrounding how to further extend this school of thought into issues of global environmentalism. As Falkner notes, early English School work largely neglected environmentalism, and this book presents a thorough account of how environmentalism became an established international norm. In addition, Falkner’s novel presentation of four ideal types of global green order will likely serve as a meaningful starting point for future work among scholars and policymakers when considering transnational environmental goals. Connecting different pluralist and solidarist perspectives on long-term aims in environmentalism is a key part of Falkner’s theory, and this will likely be a significant aspect of how English School scholars in particular consider international environmental norms.

While Falkner provides a detailed history and convincing account of the spread of environmentalism as an international norm, critics may call into question whether the spread of these norms has actually been as consequential as presented in the book. Even those who agree that environmentalism has become a salient international norm that has established itself in global affairs in recent decades could question the extent to which this has created sufficient action by state and non-state actors. While environmentalism may now be a fundamental principle in international affairs, determining whether this has translated into actions defending environmental principles in practice on a global scale will need to be the terrain of future work.

Moreover, while the book deftly presents theoretical considerations, further research will need to build on this text to put forth more testable hypotheses. Many issues and institutions presented in the book ‘overlap’ and affect one another. While this honestly reflects the multipolar nature of international politics, it sometimes means readers may be left unclear as to whether any true causes and effects can be gleaned from our understanding of the rise of international environmental norms.

Overall, Environmentalism and Global International Society is a welcome addition to the study of environmentalism in international politics and should become an important read for those seeking to gain a greater understanding of the history of global environmentalism and the English School of International Relations. This work can serve as a starting point for scholars of global environmental politics, as well as researchers of IR and international law more broadly, to comprehend the development of norms and institutions regarding environmentalism. As societal circumstances change, academics and policymakers should use this book to better understand how social relations influence the concept of environmentalism and extend its insights to new challenges in improving global environmental conditions.

• This review first appeared at LSE Review of Books.

Please read our comments policy before commenting.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. 

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About the reviewer

Dan Ziebarth – George Washington University
Dan Ziebarth is a PhD Student in the Department of Political Science at George Washington University and a PhD Candidate at the Institute for Transnational Legal Research (METRO) at Maastricht University. His research interests include Climate and Environmental Politics, Climate and Environmental Law, Human Rights, Migration Studies, Public Opinion, Party Politics, and Comparative Politics.

Climate change protesters in Nairobi demand compensation from rich nations

VIDEO Climate change activists in Nairobi -

 
Copyright © africanews

AFP
By Philip Andrew Churm
09/25/22

KENYA

Hundreds of demonstrators took the streets of Nairobi on Saturday to demand wealthy countries do more to tackle climate change in Africa.

Areas of Kenya have been devastated by the worst drought in forty years which many are blaming on global warming.

And campaigners say industrialised nations should should compensate them for their losses.

Duncan Omwami was one of the activists taking part.

”We need the Global North to pay for the damages they are causing,” he said.

“Remember from the [IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report, 96 percent of the emissions are being emitted by the Global North.

“4 percent is emitted by the Global South. Africa at our position, with only 4 percent, we are not able to make any great contribution to these emissions so we are demanding for the Global North to pay for the loss and damage."

The march took place as part of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance.

The youth-based movement hold street marches and protests demanding that wealthier nations pay for the huge damage done to the land of smallholder farmers and pastoralists across Africa.

Another protester, Elizabeth Wathuti, said: ”These disasters and these challenges are not just happening in Kenya, they are happening across the African continent. And this is a continent that has done the least to cause the climate crisis but still continues to bear the biggest brunt.

“So, we are asking that countries which have contributed the most to this crisis should definitely not abandon these communities on the frontline to their fate but they should step up and fulfil the pledges they have made on climate finance."

In September 2021 almost 3.5 million Kenyans became victims of extreme weather with the government declaring it a national disaster.

In the same period, around 200,000 people were displaced by flooding.

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