Gratitude for South Africans at the ICJ

South Africa’s existence as the country it is now is the result of a remarkable global collective struggle that many US residents played a part in. This struggle was only in small measure a legal one, but it built on the ways democracy, anti-racism, and equality of all nations were built into the global legal architecture since 1945. Apartheid was overcome in part by UN institutions deeming apartheid itself a crime.

Perhaps some day, decades from now, Palestinians and Israelis will sit side-by-side and advocate for the rights of others (whether as representatives of two states or one), and will remember their own troubled history and how they overcame it by ending violence and ensuring equal rights for all. If so, it too will be in part because voices worldwide could not abide the violent present, and used every means they could, including courts and diplomacy, boycotts and arms embargoes to chart another path..

Finding our moral and political compass on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

How should opponents of oppression, centralized power, militarism, and greed take a stance on the war begun by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Here’s a rundown of the (mostly aligned) factors people of good conscience and/or people on the political left ought to consider as they take a stand.

Note: This piece was born of a Twitter thread written as news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine broke on February 23. I’ve corrected a few things (mostly spelling, he said sheepishly) and enriched that thread with links to sources here.

Anti-imperialism

Anti-imperialism and self-determination are foundational values for looking at international conflicts.

Both are grounded in a refusal of the right to conquer territory by force. Since the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact and 1929 Litvinov Protocol, even imperial powers like the US and France, as well as the Soviet Union, are formally signed on to the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force.

Legal condemnation of the Axis Powers in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials are built on this foundation, so is modern international law. The UN Charter made this a treaty obligation of all states. Self-determination and decolonization built on this. Uprisings and resistance across the global South turned the UN framework, built by colonial powers, into an organization committed to decolonization.

“Occupation Is A Crime“: Poster for Palestine by Jorge Arrieta.

This is what we invoke when we defend(ed) Algeria, Vietnam, Palestine, Western Sahara, East Timor.

While freedom of smaller countries from foreign powers has been an uphill climb, large and substantial regional, inter-state peace—notably in Europe, Latin America—has also emerged in this framework. Where the 19th century and early 20th century were full of invasions and border wars in both regions, the European Union and several Latin American forums offer an alternative. (This is why this new invasion is both one point in a long series globally, with Iraq 2003, Georgia 2008, Yemen 2015 as prior examples, and a shocking break in the European context.) So principles of international law are both close to causes of justice and elements that are routinely violated.

Those of us who live in imperial powers have ample opportunity to take stands in defense of international law by demanding that our governments abandon occupied territories and occupying allies… For US Americans, this includes ongoing wars/occupations in Yemen, W Sahara, Palestine. But that doesn’t mean that we have no ethical interest in the anti-imperial struggles, or rights for self-determination of people affected by rival imperial powers.

In the early 21st century, there are at least three independent great powers:
the US (& many allies), Russia, and China.

All are expansionist. All are capitalist.

Part of our ideological work as anti-imperialists is refusing the cognitive structures of empire. We should reject the Monroe doctrine and US domination of Latin America. They are not our backyard. We have no right to veto governments there, or put down opposition protests, much less invade and occupy them.

And for the same reason, we must reject the concept of a Russian near abroad, a sphere of influence where it has a veto over local movements and self-determination, where it can invade with impunity.

Our efforts should focus on alliances and empathy with anti-militarists and anti-imperialists in Russia, not with Russian fears of an independent Ukraine. Mutual recognition among imperialists is our enemy, whether it is Trump’s idolization of Putin or Germany’s commitment to a Russian gas pipeline.

“Occupation of the Crimea is a shame of Russia” (Photo CC-BY-SA Bogomolov.PL)

We should educate ourselves about, and cultivate solidarity around past forms of imperial domination in the Russian orbit, notably the coordinated starvation of Ukraine and the mass deportation of ethnic groups across the Soviet Union. We must listen to Ukrainian voices in a time when they are under attack.

Anti-militarism and the threat of nuclear war

Inter-state wars have been rare since 1946. (Peace Research Institute Oslo)

The next level, militarism, is more complex: Confrontations among countries with large militaries are disastrous. We’re witnessing the beginning of one of only a handful of military-military conflicts since 1945. (Most wars in that period were fought by irregular, non-state forces on at least one side.) Iran–Iraq and US–Iraq (1|2) both illustrate the horrifying toll that such conflicts can bring. De-escalation is a huge priority. As is global diplomatic and economic isolation of states that start such wars.

Between wars, US military alliances like NATO are massive export markets for weapons manufacturers. Each sale increases the risks and costs of future conflict. Despite its successful deterrence so far, then, NATO represents a gamble that could eventually make future conflicts far more deadly.

Separately, the involvement of nuclear powers represents both a severe risk and a mechanism that can cause military powers to think twice before escalating. For a mirror image example, consider Cuba in the 1960s… the Soviet Union developed an alliance with a former colony of the US, provoking a nuclear crisis, but also likely deterring a full-scale US invasion.

Ukraine would be a nuclear power too, were it not for a series of denuclearization agreements in which both Russia and the US promised to respect its sovereignty and territorial integrity. There are long-term implications of a world that reneges on protection for giving up nuclear weapons. Those of us who want a nuclear free world have an implicit stake in Ukrainian security.

Democracy

Last but not least, the conflict in Ukraine sees a democratic government facing invasion by a oligarchical and authoritarian one, whose leader has declared that it isn’t a real nation. Nothing good can come of that.

As anarchists in Russia put it: ”this will mean the further spread of the so-called ‘Russian world’: a crazy combination of neoliberal oligarchy, rigid centralized power, and patriarchal imperial propaganda. This consequence is not as obvious as the rise in the price of sausages and the sanctions on smartphones—but in the long run, it is even more dangerous.”

To sum up

In short, there are wide reasons for left sympathy with Ukraine in this conflict.

In the context of Russian threats, and violence, Ukraine’s practical refuge is engagement with the EU and future alliance with NATO, two institutions leftists have long questioned.

Leftists’ rightful rejection US imperial power should not cloud our moral rejection of Russia’s current imperial invasion.

We can simultaneously be a voice that highlights divisions and dissent in the invading power, builds cross-border alliances against imperial power, supports bold moves to undercut fossil fuel revenue to Russia, and urges caution on military actions.

Other left analyses:

• War and Anarchists: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives in Ukraine
• Against Annexations and Imperial Aggression A Statement from Russian Anarchists against Russian Aggression in Ukraine

Putin and his oligarch friends seek a divided world and the destruction of democracy. We must stand with the Ukrainian people against this war, and with the Russian people who are demonstrating against their corrupt, reckless president who started it. pic.twitter.com/xVCM8gwQ6Q

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) February 25, 2022

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is indefensible. The U.S. is right to impose targeted sanctions on Putin & his oligarchs. We also must work with our allies to prepare for a refugee crisis on a massive scale. Finally, any military action must take place with Congressional approval. https://t.co/XpQqwEKlN0

— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) February 23, 2022

Top photo: Maidan Square with mist, Kyiv, Ukraine. CC-BY Juan Antonio Segal.

Indigenous voices echoed by Papal Encyclical on the environment

With the release of the Papal Encyclical on the environment, I am reminded of how indigenous peoples have been offering spiritual and practical guidance on the global ecological crisis for decades. These two statements seem particularly relevant to me:

Our cultural principles include the defense of the right to a dignified life, respect for mother earth and the environment, essential and sacred elements that we should leave as an inheritance to our children, grandchildren and their descendents. 

An Anarchist Response to Ebola

Anarchists are part of the global conversation on what’s broken in the world, but when things really fall apart — like with the current Ebola outbreak — is the state the only answer? How might a stateless society respond to a challenge like this one? This article provides an anarchist response to these questions, while highlighting issues that require those of us with anarchist politics to carefully think through our position.

This article, written with Chuck Munson, takes on that question: “An An Anarchist Response to Ebola.” It was written for Agency, a new anarchist PR project. Here are “Part One: What Went Wrong?” and “Part Two: Envisioning an Anarchist Alternative.” A single-page, prettified version is posted here on Medium.

Watching the Maidan protests in Ukraine

This post will differ from most on this blog in being more of a pure log of links than an a formulated story or opinion.

I’ve been loosely following the protests in Ukraine and its capital Kyiv since they began in November. No surprise there since my main research topic is how protest movements use urban spaces. The EuroMaidan movement is happening just a bit north to Turkey’s Gezi Park protests, but the ability of the rolling waves of antiglobalization, antiwar, Occupy, Arab Spring, take the square, anti-austerity movements to see it as an extension of or parallel to themselves is much more complicated. Like these protests, EuroMaidan raises questions about how politics is done in the street, the rights (or wrongs) of protesters occupying public buildings and interrupting public life, the ways that mass movements involve an interplay between mass calm gatherings and (smaller) mass confrontation, the tactical interplay between unarmed and armed forces, and the quickening and fracturing of political coalitions. These sorts of questions seem pretty similar across different nations, and there are lessons to be learned from each mass movement for all.

While tactical affinities are obvious, the evidence of the presence or absence of political affinities is contradictory. Is an encampment that began with a defense of a European Union agreement comprehensible to those occupying squares against EU austerity inside the Union itself? Is this a movement for democracy, and is democracy being rethought from the street, as Occupy-ers found? Or are politicians “engineering” the occupations and clashes for their own ends? Is the threat of foreign domination in this case represented by Russia and Putin or by NATO and John McCain? Is this a challenge to corruption and concentration of wealth, or the opportunism of a right-wing and its merely ecstatic allies?

I don’t feel close enough to the situation to sort out all the answers to these questions, but the protesters are not just occupying the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, they’re occupying my thoughts. Here are some sources of insight if they are of interest to you as well:

• Wikipedia on Euromaidan, the Hrushevskoho Street riots, and Regional State Administration occupations.
• 13 Images Of the Massive Protest Taking Ukraine By Storm (secretly, a low-attention-span primer written in December)
• Tactics of Occupation: How do you organize an occupation? | Maidan Inside Out |
  In Kiev City Hall, Energized Protesters Settle In for a Long Winter’s Uprising
• Debate: Is Ukraine’s Opposition a Democratic Movement or a Force of Right-Wing Extremism?
• Four of the Largest Misconceptions about the Protests in Ukraine
• Ukraine: what’s going on, and what does it mean?
• Language politics: Is It Time For The West To Stop Calling It ‘Kiev’ And Start Calling It ‘Kyiv’? | Do you speak Surzhyk?
• Movements within the Movement: Manifesto: 10 Тheses of the Leftist Opposition in Ukraine | The Ukrainian Nationalism at the Heart of ‘Euromaidan’ | Support Ukrainians but do not legitimize the far-right and discredited politicians!
• Ongoing coverage: EuroMaidan PR in English | Kyiv Post | LeftEast | Imagining Youth | Maidan on the Internet

Big Plans: Scientists, indigenous people urge new frameworks for development

Last week, a group of scientists and development experts and the Colombian indigenous confederation each urged a fundamental rethinking of the priorities for planning “development”* in the twenty-first century. The technical experts published their perspective in a commentary in the prestigious journal Nature, “Sustainable development goals for people and planet,” while the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia published a report called Another Vision, Indigenous Peoples and the Millennium Development Goals. (coverage from Intercontinental Cry). Both texts are intervening in the global discussion on the next version of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Outside of the United States (where this kind of international planning is treated as purely a foreign policy matter that won’t affect our future), the MDGs are taken as a general yardstick for directing aid and setting policy objectives, with goals like achieving universal access to primary school and eliminating extreme poverty that may change hundreds of millions of lives. Since I write from the USA, however, let’s pretend that this is just an intellectual discussion for how to think about the world. Even from that perspective, the scientists and the indigenous people raise some really important questions.

From Bolivia to Egypt: Overcoming Death and Fear

As I alternate between interviewing Bolivians about the process of mass collective action that overthrew two neoliberal governments in 2003 and 2005, and watching the unfolding uprising in Egypt by the Internet, I’m doing my best to learn from both situations. For now, here’s one bit of writing describing Bolivia’s 2003 Gas War that seems especially relevant to events in Egypt in 2011:

Hay ocasiones en que la muerte y el miedo son los puntos infranqueables que detienen una insurgencia social frente a las murallas del gobierno. Por eso el Estado necesita monopolizar la coerción legítima pues ésta, que encarna el posible uso de la violencia y muerte en contra de la sociedad, es la garantía última y final de todo orden político constituido. Sin embargo, hay momentos en que la muerte cataliza el ímpetu de la sublevación, en que la muerte es la seña que permite unificar colectividades distanciadas dando pie a un tipo de hermandad extendida en el dolor y el luto. En ese momento la muerte es derrotada por la vitalidad de una sublevación de voluntades sociales llamada insurrección.

There are occasions when death and fear are the insuperable obstacles that stand in the way of a social insurgency outside the walls of government power. For this reason, the State needs to monopolize legitimate coercion, which embodies the possible use of violence and death against the society, since this is the last and final guarantee of every constituted political order.

Nevertheless, there are moments in which death [instead] catalyzes the impetus of the uprising, in which death is the sign under which formerly distant collectivities can unify, giving rise to a sort of extended bortherhood of pain and mourning. In that moment, death is defeated by the vitality of the uprising of social wills that is called insurrection.

—Álvaro García Linera, “La sublevación indígena popular en Bolivia
[The Indigenous Popular Uprising in Bolivia],” 2004

1.3 Million Asians* built this World Cup host

Tommy: Yea, its an Irish ship.
Fabrizio: It’s English…no?
Tommy: No, it was built in Ireland. Fifteen thousand Irishmen built this ship. Solid as a rock.
(Titanic)

These lines rolled off the tongues of actors in James Cameron’s 1994 film, showing just how accessible a mentality that’s critical of capitalism (who owns the things a society makes anyway?), of ethnic bias (who are you calling a second class citizen?), and of xenophobia (among white countries, at least) is to Americans today. The RMS Titanic was in fact built in Belfast by Irish workers. Workers and third-class passengers, often Irish, numbered disproportionately among the dead in the ship’s maiden voyage sinking.

Flash forward a century from the Titanic, and we can see that the luxurious extreme of modern life is still often made possible by the hard work of second-class non-citizens. Case in point, the winning bid (official website) to host the 2022 World Cup, Qatar.

Qatar is an absolute monarchy, ruled by an Emir and a 35-member Consultative Council, currently appointed. Elections for the Council were promised for 2007, 2008, 2010, and are now promised for 2013, although municipal elections have already been held. Qatar is proposing to build or upgrade twelve stadiums, each with a capacity of 40,000 or more for the 2022 World Cup.

Or rather, Qatar is proposing that foreign workers build or upgrade twelve stadiums. As of 2008, most everyone in Qatar was a foreigner: 1,305,428 people, making up 86.5% of the population, and rising. A year earlier, 92.5% of workers in Qatar were foreign nationals, including 72,765 domestic service workers (International Labour Organization, International labour migration and employment in the Arab region). Population estimates for Qatari citizens alone vary widely, although 180,000 in 2006 is one estimate. Those with citizenship could not fill the stadium seats to be built for the World Cup.

Throughout the region’s tiny monarchies, grouped in the US-allied Gulf Cooperation Council, citizenship coexists with a temporary rotating underclass of workers, who lack the right to organize and do not receive the social benefits they make possible. Their hardworking stays in the region are organized through the Kefala or sponsorship system (some times called Kafeel, the word for sponsor). Sponsored workers have their residence rights strictly conditioned on the approval of their employers. This results in illegal abuses such as “working and living conditions, irregular payment of wages and, in extreme cases, retention of travel documents. Foreign workers are more often than not forced to accept these circumstances having incurred the costs of finding jobs and travelling.” Or as the Guardian puts it less diplomatically:

Workers arrive in the country heavily indebted, having borrowed from moneylenders or mortgaged their land to finance inflated travel and visa costs. Their passports are immediately and customarily confiscated and they are typically forced to sign a revised contract that pays them a significantly lower rate than was originally agreed.

…

The results are depressingly familiar: unpaid wages, inhumane living conditions, unsafe working conditions and suicides.Qatar, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, has been referred to as a “death trap for hundreds of thousands of construction workers” from some of the poorest countries in the world. Female domestic workers, meanwhile, are not covered by national labour law – an omission which, as Amnesty International rightly pointed out, “allows employers to exploit, enslave, abuse, assault and injure their domestic workers with virtual impunity”. There is a strong argument for saying that in the worst cases of abuse, the treatment of migrant workers constitutes slavery in international law.

The ILO is forced to make extremely minimal demands for the labor rights of migrants, such as its recent calls for Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates to reform the sponsorship system, institute a minimum wage, and allow unions to form. (A theoretical right to unionize was established in 2005, but only applies to worksites with 100 or more Qatari nationals. The AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center reports no unions have yet formed; more from them here.)

Like the Titanic, the World Cup is the ultimate in luxury. It will be up to a global public to decide whether it can stomach a worldwide party built by rights-free labor. For now, at least, we can stop saying that Qatar is hosting a World Cup, and start saying that Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Bangladeshis, Egyptians, and Yemenis are making possible a celebration of sport most of them could never afford to attend.

* Yes, the title is not technically accurate: I know Qatar is in Asia. However there is no short, identifiable word for the vast region that provides migrants to the Middle East monarchies. Maybe they’re should be. Also, I know that more than 1.3 million people (the current number of foreigners present) will have cycled through Qatar during the run-up to its World Cup bid. Sadly, details are hard to come by. Labor history is disadvantaged from the start under conditions of large-scale exploitation.

Climate Scoreboard: Copenhagen pledges currently far short

[clearspring_widget title=”Climate Scoreboard” wid=”4b0afdf054484c54″ pid=”4b2bcf45205be2c8″ width=”530″ height=”470″ domain=”widgets.clearspring.com”]

What do these temperatures mean for the world? The Guardian (London/Manchester, UK) reports on five scenarios.