cisd yearbook of global studies

ISSN 2056-5372

CISD Yearbook of

Global Studies

Volume 1 Number 1 June 2014

CISD Yearbook of Global Studies Volume 1 Number 1 June 2014

Contents Page

Dan Plesch

Introduction

i

Vincent Hakyemez

The Visa System in International Relations: Patterns of Hierarchy, Reciprocity and Regionalization

1

Anna Feuer

'New Wine in Old Skins:' Nonalignment 2.0 and the Enduring Vocabulary of Indian Foreign Policy Discourse

39

Sebastian Kratzer

Questioning Humanitarianism: Beyond Humanitarian Action and Space

64

Andrew Chapman

Defining and dangerous? An examination of the Assad regime's use of the Shabiha militia in the Syrian conflict

98

Marco Giovannetti

The Role of Shale Gas in U.S. Energy Policy: Explaining Cultural Perceptions of Risk as a Foundation for Policy Paradigms

120

Michaela Rhode

What is the future of agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa?

150

Tigist Ketema

Labour Exploitation in the Global Garment Industry: Who is to Blame?

174

Alexandra Portoff

Implementing the UN 'Project Respect Remedy; Framework: How Human Rights Due Diligence in Practice has Theoretical Implications on

Governance Systems

199

Erin Bishop

Neglected resistance: Counter-conducts and neoliberal governmentality through risk in International Relations

229

i

Introduction

This inaugural issue of CISD’s Yearbook of Global Studies highlights the nine dissertations of greatest distinction written by CISD students of 2012-2013. In deciding to create this Yearbook the Centre’s Management Committee determined to begin in this defined manner with the intention of building the range of research contributions and contributors in the years ahead. With this in mind, the Yearbook title echoes the Centre’s doctoral pathway in Global Studies.

The Yearbook was developed over some years. The idea began with a concept for working papers by the Centre’s own Dr. Mark Laffey but was first put to me fully formed by a then Research Associate, now back in his native Brazil, Prof. Dr. André Luiz Reis da Silva of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. The Centre considered the concept during this academic year and benefited from the advice of the Pro-Director for Research, Prof. Richard Black.

The quality of the contributions in this first issue sets a high standard to match and exceed. The theory and practice of UN Human Rights, and wider humanitarianism; the dynamics of the global garment industry; the insights gained from the world-wide visa system into globalisation are complemented by geographically focused studies on the energy industry in the United States, the Syrian civil war, and discourses in Indian foreign policy.

It is particular pleasure to mention that this latter study was written by Anna Feuer who was a finalist for the School Prize for best Masters Student.

Later this year we expect to welcome Vincent Hakyemez to begin to develop his dissertation into a Doctoral thesis under the supervision of Richard Black.

I am sure that you will enjoy all of these nine contributions,

Dan Plesch Director

Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy

SOAS, University of London


Vincent Hakyemez

Abstract

Visa policies and the international visa system are understudied. One of the most comprehensive studies done on the international visa system, Eric Neumayer's “Unequal Access to Foreign Space”, highlights the importance of economic and security factors when determining visa policies. The current research is based on a data collection of over 37,000 entries on bilateral visa relations among 193 countries and deepens Neumayer's analysis by focusing on political and identity-related aspects of the issue. Firstly, whereas Neumayer takes regions for granted, using both the World Bank definition and Huntington’s definition of regions, this analysis highlights the political significance of visas and their application in identifying groupings of countries. The analysis uses the collected data to highlight regional groupings which are contrasted with Neumayer's, thus allowing for a critique of Huntington's civilization-based categorization. Secondly, although Neumayer highlights reciprocity as a common feature of the visa system, he spends little time on that aspect. This study, in contrast, emphasizes reciprocity as an important driver of visa policies, particularly evident in the case of regional leaders such as Brazil, Russia, India and Nigeria. Thirdly, this research enhances understandings of the West. By acting like a bloc, the West accepts fellow western countries, but imposes visas on the vast majority of the rest of the world, and is therefore much less accepting than Neumayer's study implies. Finally, this research concludes by pointing out how the study of the visa system can be applied to the fields of International Relations, Migration Studies, and World System Theory.


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Introduction

In the past few years, several major political actors have repeatedly made comments on visa

Why do Visas Matter? 1

policies (See Appendix 1). Clearly these policies are significant to them. In places with high concentrations of travelers, such as large cities, shared experiences including high costs, unexplained rejections, demands perceived as arbitrary and complications for visits by family and friends indicate that visa requirements are a major hindrance. These experiences are often described as “unfair” and “humiliating” (Jileva, 2004; Wang, 2004). For many, a request for a visa is the first encounter with the world of international relations, and a direct and personal encounter with the power and inequality of states (Wang, 2004). However, difficulties are no rare burden – over 80% of the world population (and in some cases entire continents) are subject to these cumbersome procedures simply to visit western countries. Yet despite this, the field of International Relations has produced surprisingly few studies on this topic2

Many studies have indeed shown that not just people, but also goods and capital are still tied to specific locations (Yeung, 1998; Krugman, 1991:98). However, many authors who have studied the topic of international movement of people have noted it is much more constrained than that of goods and capital (Neumayer, 2006). Some borders might have disappeared, as liberals have been contending, but others have been considerably strengthened (Andreas, 2000; Bigo & Guild, 2003:22-24; Grabbe, 2000 and Neumayer, 2006). While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that leaving one's country, and returning to one's country is a human right, “few, if any, deny nation states the right to control and restrict entry into their territory. Such controls and restrictions have historically been viewed as inherent in the very nature of sovereignty”. As a result, while one might have the right to exit one's country, one might not be able to enter another, thus making the right to exit difficult in practice. As Amitava Kumar mentions, for certain nationals “the passport is without any value if it does not have the visa” (Neumayer, 2006).

, something which has been mentioned before (Neumayer, 2006). Visa issues are seen as “technical” (Bigo and Guild, 2003: 16 ; Jileva, 2004).; they also do not fit the standard globalization story, as advocated by liberal journalists and intellectuals such as Thomas Friedman in “The World is Flat” and Kenichi Ohmae in “The Borderless World” (Friedman , 2007; Ohmae,1990).

Far from being a “technical issue”, visas are an essential component in the arsenal of states to “police the border at a distance” (Bigo and Guild, 2003:22-4 and Koslowski, 2005). Rey Koslowski argues that “sovereignty can be understood as a state's ability to control its borders and determine its membership” (Neumayer, 2006). As international flows of people, goods and capital expand, and are seen as both legitimate and necessary for the development of state power (Rosecrance, 1986:136-154 and Hollifield, 2004), there is increasing pressure to avoid disrupting them by excessive checks at the border. The solution is to go further up the chain and policing at distance, away from the borders. With regards to the movement of people, consulate and visas procedures are the first line of defense, the second being the airline companies, who face fines if they board passengers without the proper documentation (Flynn, 2000; Bigo and Guild, 2003: 22-24; Bigo, 1996:336 and Koslowski, 2005).Visa 1 Like Neumayer's, this study is based on what is commonly referred to as the tourism visa. Tourism visas represent the vast majority of

international population movement that occurs. Other types of visas (work, study, residency, asylum...) tend to be more long term in their nature. According to the United Nations Development Program, there are “only” 200 million current long-term migrants (people who have been living for over a year in a country other than their own). In contrast, according to the UN World Tourism Organization, there are over 1 Billion international travels events every year. See United Nations Development Programme (2013) and World Tourism Organization (2013)

2 A quick glance at some of the major International Relations books, academic journals and databases (Millenium, JSTOR), Globalization studies (Held, 1999) demonstrate how difficult it can be to find a reference on the topic of visas, aside from the occasional mention about asylum seekers. Even Migration Studies seem to have little to say on the topic. See Castles and Miller M. (2009) and International Migration Review.

CISD Yearbook of Global Studies 1(1)

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procedures are therefore integral to the concept of sovereignty. Furthermore, visa procedures reflect broader shifts in police procedures and state surveillance, away from catching criminals toward a more proactive, statistics-backed, surveillance of target groups seen as dangerous. Visa requirements depend on the nationality, not the individual. Without record of previous offences, applicants are often rejected on the basis of suspicions and profiling (Bigo and Guild, 2003:82-96 and Gilboy, 1991). The emphasis on defending the border against potential criminals, terrorists or illegal immigrants, as opposed to foreign armies, is not a coincidental shift but rather one that happened after the Cold War. Firstly, as states have been seen as losing (some) control of flows of goods and capital, their ability to manage the movement of people has become all the more important in helping to maintain at least an “illusion of control” in the minds of their citizens (Snyder, 2000). Secondly, in the words of Didier Bigo, there is now a “continuum of threats” which has linked migrations, drugs, crime and terrorism into one broader idea, and has “replaced the Soviet soldier” in the western imagination (Bigo, 1996:259-263). This fear of the outsider, as a criminal, terrorist, or fleeing a world of chaos is reflected in writings (Kaplan, 1994), and parallels a focus on identities (Huntington, 1996:125-130) and societal security (Buzan, Waever, De Wilde, 1997:119-140). The broader western public discourse has likewise been greatly affected, something which 9/11 and the war on terror have only accentuated. There is a difference between “us” and “them”; the passport marks this “hierarchy of citizenship” (Castles, 2005), and the visa system is its control mechanism. This linkage between passport, visa-free zone and identity is best seen in Europe (Grabbe, 2000; Jileva, 2002 and 2003; Verney, 2007; Yilmaz, 2007). As one author has noted, the European Union's eastern border closely resembles the “Huntington border”. One could add the southern border is identical to it (Freudenstein, 2000; Andreas, 2000). This issue evidently strikes a popular chord; a former president of Ukraine has warned that Schengen visa rules would 'replace the Iron Curtain with a different, more humane, but no less dangerous paper curtain' (Neumayer, 2006). As more countries on the border of Europe democratize, it is a safe bet their elected leaders will face more pressure to challenge these barriers. Moreover, there is evidence the lifting of visa relations can be used as a bargain chip in negotiations or a gesture of goodwill. It can also be an indication of warming up of relations (Bigo and Guild, 2003:82-87)3. Smaller countries exert major political effort to be accepted by Western countries (Castles and Miller, 2009)4

. Far from being a “technical issue”, the international visa regime sits at the heart, or rather the “fault line”, of current International Relation issues.

Literature Review

Migration Studies have had surprisingly little to say about visas and have instead focused on migrants and asylum seekers

Migration Studies

5. While these are important issues, migrants and asylum seekers constitute only a small proportion of the people who cross borders every day6. Therefore a study of the visa system tells us more about the broader issue of international mobility, and the attempts to control it. It is difficult to separate migration from mobility, however (Neumayer, 2006; Koslowski, 2005)7

3 Bigo and Guild associate the Schengen list with a dividing line between friends and enemies. The implication is that a lifting of visa requirements can be understood as a sign of improving relations. See also BBC, Jan 15 2013 and Reuters Feb 6 2013.

, and one wonders why scholars of Migration Studies

4 See Appendix 1 about Russia and Turkey, and New York Times May 11 2013 about South Korea and Poland. 5 Ch. 13 “Migrants and Mobility in the twenty-first century” is revealing: Despite the use of the word “Mobility” in the title, the discussion almost exclusively focuses on migration. 6 See note 1. 7 Despite the commonly accepted view of the illegal immigrant sneaking across the border illegally at night or in the back of a truck or boat


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have not made a more concerted effort to explore issues of mobility8

.

In their two analyses of the passport, John Torpey “The Invention of the Passport” and Mark Salter “Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations” (Torpey, 2000; Salter, 2003) shed light on the importance of this travel document. Torpey discusses the intertwining connections between the passport and the creation of the state, the citizen, the foreigner/citizen dichotomy, and the domestic/international separation. In his account, the passport was part of an “identificatory revolution”, that allowed the state to identify and “embrace” its population in order to better extract resources and distribute benefits. It was therefore essential for the definition of citizenship and foreigner. Salter shows how societies have used the passport to control the movements of national and foreign “undesirables”, who are often blamed for violence and disease. Both Torpey and Salter claim that the movement control of the poorer and more marginalized was seen as essential, and the passport was an identification tool that was necessary to obtain such control. Along the process of state creation, freedom of movement was gradually allowed within the national realm, while control at the borders became more stringent, with fears shifting from the marginal and poor towards the foreigner and non-citizen

Study of the Passport by Torpey and Salter

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. The two studies discuss two aspects relevant to the current study: a) the importance that states have historically attached to controlling the movement of people, (especially the lower classes and marginalized sectors); and b) the profound link between the identification paper and identity, especially in relation to the concepts of “insider” and “outsider”.

Yet the works of Torpey and Salter do not discuss the visa system. Salter tries to do so in his later studies, where he concludes that “the loose structure of the global visa regime represents an important aspect of this international control of bodies or control of international bodies”

Bigo and Guild’s study of the Schengen Visa

10; however he does not describe the mechanisms of this structure. Bigo & Guild “La mise a l'ecart des etrangers: La logique du visa Schengen” (Bigo and Guild , 2003) discuss visas, especially the Schengen visa, from the perspective of the wealthier countries. In their study, the interests at play in the creation of the Schengen visa, notably the tension between the liberal pressure of allowing population flow for economic benefits, and the domestic security pressure of keeping foreigners out, are emphasized. Often the security aspect wins, as shown by the progressive increase in the number of countries subject to the Schengen visa (Neumayer, 2006)11. Other studies similarly mention this primacy of security, probably because they focus on the western world (Andreas and Snyder, 2000; Martin and Hollifield, 2004)12

. It is difficult to come across scholarly works that have studied visa policies from the perspective of non-western countries. When one comes across non-western points, it is often in relation to the West (Bertoli, Moraga and Ortega, 2010; Jileva, 2002 and 2003; Lavenex and Ucarer, 2004; Mohar and Alcaraz, 2000). We therefore get a view of the structure that is very western centric, and therefore tend to emphasize western concerns, namely, security.

“[In Europe], only 20% of illegal immigrants crossed the border illegally, whereas the vast majority entered the country perfectly legally, but then overstayed their allowed period of time”. In the U.S. it is estimated that 40% entered the country legally.

Neumayer’s Analysis

8 There has been some work done on mobility in the field of Sociology. However these studies remain far removed from the visa system. Examples include Urry (2000) and (2007), Cresswell and Merriman (2011) and Adey (2010).

9 As the illegal immigration debate in Western Europe demonstrates, the concepts of “poverty” and “foreigner” overlap. 10 Salter (2003) and (2006) specifically highlights the lack of a WTO equivalent for visa policies. 11 For the tension that exists between economic and securities objectives, see Flynn (2000), Siskin (2013) and Jileva (2004) 12 Cornelius, Martin and Hollifield claims to have a global perspective, but focuses exclusively on western countries.


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With a background in geography, Neumayer takes a more global approach to the study of visa restrictions. In his study of 150 countries, he researches the motivations for the imposition of visa restrictions through a statistical analysis of his large data sample. Neumayer asks, since visa restrictions reduce travel flows, tourism, bilateral trade and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), why impose these restrictions? In response he highlights statistically significant factors that include a state's wealth, restriction on political freedom, link to terrorism, the presence of armed conflict, the importance of tourism as an industry for the country and bilateral trade. Neumayer shows that the wealthier a country is, the more tourists it sends abroad, and the more bilateral trade it conducts, the less likely it is to face visa restrictions. In contrast, the more dictatorial, war torn, and linked to terrorism it is, the more likely it is to face visa restrictions. The more it relies on tourism, the less likely it is to impose visa restrictions on others. States from the same region (as defined by the World Bank) or same civilization (as defined by Huntington) are less likely to impose visas on each other. Lastly, colonial linkage is not a major factor, except in the case of the Commonwealth. He concludes by describing a world of “unequal access to foreign space”, where “States are willing and eager to systematically keep out passport holders from certain nations. For OECD passport holders the world appears in easy reach, with relatively few restrictions imposed. If mobility is one of [Globalization's] defining features, then its realization is highly stratified and subject to states' monitoring, interference and control” (Neumayer, 2006) While it is well known that Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) passport holders benefit from very privileged visa access (The Economist, 2010; Bauman, 1998 and 2000:69-76; Castles, 2005), it is Neumayer's methodology and research that stands out. Specifically, his global approach, data collection and quantitative analysis allow us for the first time to look at visas as a system and greatly advances our understanding of its dynamics. However, by his own admission, his analysis remains “broad-brush”. For example, Neumayer's analysis of the impact of regions on visas tells us very little about the countries which choose not to be part of a specific region. Central Europe is a case in point: as a former Latvian ambassador to the US explains, its choice of joining the EU as opposed to a Russian dominated bloc is of utmost political and economic importance (Bloomberg, 2013). Such decisions are especially important for countries that lie at the border of regions. A more detailed analysis can therefore help us to draw an entirely new map of the world based on visa policies13

A second point which needs to be explored is the reciprocity dynamic. Indeed, most of the hypotheses tested by Neumayer seem driven by economic and security concerns, implying a hierarchy between the wealthy states and the rest of the world. Wealth for instance is hierarchical: The wealthier a country is, the less visa restrictions its citizen are likely to face, and the more likely it is to place visa restrictions on the poor countries. A poorer country faces the opposite situation. This tends to lead to uneven bilateral visa relations. Some of Neumayer's other hypotheses are also linked to this wealth disparity: A tourist-sending country is likely to be wealthy, and a country that relies on tourism for most of its exports is likely to be poorer. Similarly, bilateral trade has a strong correlation with wealth (Held, 1999:171-2). Likewise, the presence of armed conflict, repressive regime and links with terrorism are all much more likely to be found in non-western countries (Collier, 2008:3-16). Yet despite these factors, Neumayer states that reciprocity dominates the system. In Neumayer's analysis there is a clear contradiction between the emphasis on hierarchical factors and the prevalence of reciprocity.

.

Despite this contradiction, Neumayer gives us a sense of the relationship between the

13 For more on the relevance of maps to politics, see Lewis and Wigen (1997:47-73)


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West and the rest of the world. He also clarifies the factors that are at play within the west, and within the non-west. Wealth, conflict, government type, and tourism all play a role. Furthermore, these factors suggest a gradation. It would therefore be useful to take Neumayer's analysis one step further and describe the structure in more detail by locating patterns of reciprocity and hierarchy. Using Neumayer's analysis as a base, this research will explore the following questions: Can we visualize the gradation? Are regions emerging, with different poles? Where are the borders, and are they well-defined? How “connected” are the states? If the West imposes visas on most of the rest of the world, how does the rest of the world react? Neumayer seems to aspire to a complimentary study on his analysis in the fields of Politics and International Relations: “To my knowledge, despite its significance in restricting travel opportunities for billions of people, no such analysis has ever been undertaken, by political scientists, scholars of international relations, or geographers”. Study Description and Goals The visa system covers nearly 200 countries, most of whom, despite several border disputes, all recognize each other14. All have visa policies toward citizens of other states. That is to say, the sovereign state system, and with it the passport and visa system, are nearly all-encompassing mechanisms. Mere exceptions, such as stateless individuals and non-recognized entities, validate this observation15

The data for our research comes from government and consular websites which list the countries requiring, or not requiring a visa, and the International Air Transportation Association (IATA) book, which is a publication for airlines and travel agencies listing travel restrictions for all countries and territories. The data collection was conducted from April to December 2012 (The IATA handbook is the October 2012 version)

. The passport and visa system is such an integral part of the modern state system that one can conceptualize the following “scale of acceptance”: Two countries 1) recognize each other, 2) do not require visa for entrance, 3) do not require passport for entrance (associations of countries known as passport union, such as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) ), 4) allow working and settlement rights (such as the EU), 5) merge into one federation/country. The goal of this paper is to analyze the structure of the visa system, by using a database of bilateral relationships for over 190 countries compiled for this purpose, totaling nearly 38,000 entries. From a data perspective this study is both similar and heavily indebted to Neumayer's analysis and will respond to his call for a complementary study from an International Relations perspective by paying closer attention to the structure of the visa system, particularly to two patterns: 1) reciprocity and hierarchy 2) regions and borders.

16

Visa policies fall into three groups: 1) no visa required, 2) visa available upon arrival, 3) visa required. This paper measures mobility, defined here as the ability to enter a country simply by boarding a plane or a bus, as opposed to the need to go to a consulate, prepare a lengthy dossier, and face a real possibility of rejection. As such, out of the three groups, the first two are considered equally open, since visa on arrival generally is more about the raising of revenues for the host country than a real bureaucratic check (Neumayer, 2006). The last group however, is a real bureaucratic barrier to entry. Based on the above groups a spreadsheet is prepared and populated with the following numbers: “1” (visa required), “2” (no visa required, or visa on arrival), and “0” (country not recognized, and therefore refuses

.

14 Israel, which is not recognized by 13 states, is the main exception. 15 According to UNHCR, there were 12 million stateless people in the world in 2011, or 0.17% of the world population (UNHCR, 2013). 16 Taking UN General Assembly members as the starting point, the study excludes Palestine, Kosovo, or entities like North Cyprus or South Ossetia, but includes Hong Kong and Macau. Vatican, Andorra, Monaco and San Marino were discarded for reasons that will be explained later in Part 5).


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entrance – a rare occurrence). The spreadsheet allows for the compilation of two lists, one ranking countries by the numbers of countries whose nationals they accept visa-free , and the other ranking countries by the number of countries whose nationals are accepted as visa-free . The lists are instrumental in measuring reciprocity and hierarchy in the visa system. Each country has two scores: a) the number of countries which accept it and b) the numbers of countries which it accepts. By subtracting “b” from “a”, hierarchical scores for each country are obtained. If a country has a score of zero, it means that it accepts exactly the same number of countries which accept it. If a country gets a high (positive) score, it is accepted much more than it accepts. It can thus be said to “extract positive hierarchy”, or benefit from the system. If a country gets a low (negative) score, it accepts a lot more countries than it is being accepted by17

. This allows for measuring and identifying hierarchy and reciprocity in the visa system; an area that Neumayer’s study did not explore.

“Filters” and “Free Riding” in the System The requirements for a well-functioning visa system are expensive. Not only is there more need for consulates in a lot of countries, but there is also additional demand for staffing, security, border control, IT systems, and complex procedures. If one also adds the loss of potential tourism and trading opportunities produced by these artificial barriers, it should not be surprising that many states choose to invest their resources differently. Noteworthy examples include the principalities of Andorra, the Vatican, San Marino and Monaco. These four small, but wealthy, countries have no visa requirements whatsoever. At least two do not even have border controls of any kind. Their rationale is simple: in the absence of an airport, the only way to get to these countries is through a third country (either via Spain, France or Italy). The principalities simply rely on the external border control of neighboring countries, and save themselves the cost of similar action. Similar trade-offs are found in larger countries as well. Ireland allows holders of United Kingdom visas to enter, New Zealand allows holders of Australian visas to enter, and Turkey allows in holders of Schengen or British visas. In all three cases, a smaller entity lying geographically close to a large entity uses the larger entity's filtering system to their own benefit. This policy allows the smaller entities to attract more tourists without incurring the extra costs of monitoring them. It could be argued these countries are using “filters” in order to “free ride” the system. The above-mentioned trade-off is probably why Neumayer found that these countries with the most liberal visa policies are not western states but consist “mainly of small island countries (Barbados, Maldives, Micronesia, Haiti, Jamaica)”. These small islands are not very wealthy; indeed some are actually quite poor. They are not the most tempting migration destinations and are also difficult to reach easily. For most of the world’s population, getting there requires buying multiple plane tickets, and travelling long distances and passing through third countries visa checks. The international state and visa system effectively offers these small countries “filters”. Tourism is also likely to be a significant industry for these economies, thus making the trade-off between consulate/border control apparatus and easier freedom of movement an easy decision for them to make – an involved security apparatus is simply not worth it. An Overview of Acceptance Rankings Countries’ acceptance rankings18 can be divided in two groups: 1) most/least accepted19

17 By definition, the sum of all the scores is zero.

18 This passage repeats some of Neumayer's findings, which will be useful reference for the rest of the analysis. See Neumayer (2006)


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countries (Appendix 2) and 2) most/least accepting countries (Appendix 3). Not surprisingly, western countries top the list of most accepted countries, something already noted in several other writings (Neumayer, 2006; The Economist, 2010). At the other end of the scale, the least accepted countries tend to be war torn, poor, and dictatorial (Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq, Eritrea...). Interestingly, they still are accepted by at least 20 countries, a not insignificant number. The surprisingly high number of countries that accept war torn countries can be explained by looking at the list of 20 countries that do have very open visa policies. It can be swiftly observed that they largely are small island states relatively far removed from conflict zones. The top 23 most accepting countries (referred to afterwards herein as “L23”) accept an average of 188 countries out of a possible 191. The L23 group represents 2.5% of the world population and 0.3% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with an average GDP/Capita that is barely over $1000. As explained earlier, the majority of the L23 group are benefiting from natural filters in the system, based on utilizing the specificities of their small size, isolation, and low economic development. This explanation means that the least accepted countries are likely to be much more isolated than their numbers suggest. For instance, Afghanistan is accepted visa-free by 22 countries – almost all in the L23, and none its neighbor. The benefit of an Afghan passport holder having visa-free access to St. Vincent, East Timor or Tuvalu is questionable. If one removes the L23 group from the analysis, the least accepted countries’ “acceptance score” diminishes considerably. For example Afghanistan, instead of being accepted by 23 countries, is only accepted by 2; Somalia drops from 26 to 5, Pakistan and Iraq from 27 to 6, and Eritrea from 29 to 8 (See below). 20 Least Accepted Countries

Adjusted - Removing impact of L23

North Korea 34

Yemen 15 Comoros 34

Gabon 15

Dem. Rep. Of Congo 34

Bangladesh 14 East Timor 34

Lebanon 14

Sri Lanka 33

Syria 14 Burundi 33

Cameroon 13

Syria 33

North Korea 12 Burma 32


Angola 32

Burma 11 Sudan 32

Nepal 11

Equatorial Guinea 32

Sudan 10 Nepal 32


Djibouti 31

Angola 10 South Sudan 30

Ethiopia 9

Ethiopia 30

Eritrea 8 Eritrea 29

South Sudan 8

Pakistan 27

Iraq 6 Iraq 27

Pakistan 6

Somalia 26

Somalia 5 Afghanistan 23

Afghanistan 2

The above discussion helps to explain why Kumar says – “[for some], the passport is without any value if it does not have the visa. In other words it is meaningless as a passport”. Citizens of the 20 least accepted countries are mostly “trapped by the lottery of birth” (Neumayer, 2006). If, as Bauman suggests, mobility is a status marker in the globalized world, then citizens of the 20 least accepted countries represent the lower class of citizen (Neumayer, 2006; Bauman, 1998:69-76; Castles, 2005). Unlike the L23, these 20 least 19 For the purpose of this text, “accepted” and “accepting” apply to countries only; “accepted” means to be accepted visa-free (or visa on

arrival). “accepting” means to accept another country visa-free (or visa on arrival).


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accepted countries are sizeable: They represent 800 million people, or 12% of the world’s population. Their population is poor, however, representing only 1% of the world economy. They also face strong restrictions on civil liberties.

The rankings shows that western countries are not among the most open to foreigners, at least from a visa perspective, as not a single western country appears in the top 50 of the most accepting countries – the western countries tend to be in the middle of the ranking, situated between the most accepting and the least accepting. The least accepting countries, as Neumayer has already highlighted, consist mainly of countries whose commitment to civil and political liberties is weak. The bottom 21 include all 9 of the so-called “Worst of the Worst” list in terms of civil and political liberties released by Freedom House, and 10 of the other 12 fare barely better (Freedom House, 2011). This finding does seem logical, however, as repressive regimes by instinct have a stronger desire to control people, view foreigners with deep suspicion, and tourism does not rank high on their priority list.

Hierarchy and Reciprocity

Reciprocity is an important concept of diplomacy and the international visa system. It is so important that by law the United States cannot grant visa-free access to countries that do not reciprocate (Neumayer, 2006; Siskin, 2013). The EU has a similar stance. Of course this reciprocity requirement is a one-way requirement, as many countries who do grant visa-free access to the US or the EU are denied access in return. This unequal relationship is plain for all to see. For example, as a Frenchman, I enjoy visa-free to Tunisia, the Ukraine, Turkey and Thailand, while citizens of these countries need to line up at the French consulate for lengthy, expensive, uncertain, and often humiliating procedures to enter France. This difference of treatment is often perceived as unfair, can create resentment. It is a reminder of the ongoing inequality of countries and citizens. In certain cases, such as Turkey and Russia, this inequality feeds into the longer history of (perceived or real) unequal treatment, which might explain their sensitivity to the issue of unequal visa management (Gong, 1984:13-20; Neumann, 1999:Ch.2, 3 and 6). However these two countries reacted differently: Turkey accepts EU citizens visa-free, and therefore, accepts the unequal relationship, while Russia imposes visas on EU citizens, therefore ensuring reciprocity. The Russian visa policy is not due to a fear of the European citizen, as the Russian government has been quite vocal about its desire to see all restrictions lifted (Appendix 1); it is simply an insistence on reciprocity.

Introduction

Measuring the amount of hierarchy and reciprocity can thus help facilitate a better understanding of the visa system worldwide. The hierarchy ranking (See Appendix 4) shows there is an overwhelming preponderance of western countries, as the top 3 non-western countries rank No. 29 (Brazil), 33 (Taiwan) and 35 (Mexico). On the whole, western countries benefit from their high degree of acceptance by others, while they rank somewhere in the middle with regard to accepting others. The countries suffering from the lowest (negative) hierarchy scores are the same countries that have the most open visa policies (the L23). This result should not be surprising, as these countries are quite poor; therefore, their people are more likely to be refused by the wealthier countries.

Measuring hierarchy and reciprocity

The least accepting countries on the other hand, all score positively – again this result makes sense, since by definition a country that accepts no other country cannot have a negative score, and will benefit from the open visa policies of the L23. Afghanistan, for


10

instance, requires a visa from everyone – yet it is accepted by 23 countries. North Korea and Burma are nearly as closed, yet are accepted by 30 countries. Most of the countries who accept these two countries are in the L23.

The above discussion also demonstrates how reciprocity and hierarchy intertwine, namely, countries with open visa policies disregard reciprocity by accepting everyone. The West, on the other hand, requires reciprocity, but of course enjoys hierarchy. If every country insisted on reciprocity, then by definition every score on the hierarchy ranking would be zero. Conversely, if a perfect hierarchy existed

Visualizing Hierarchy and Reciprocity

20

The concept of reciprocity also sheds light on the isolation of repressive governments: because they tend to be less accepting of other countries, they also tend to be accepted less. The “gravity of reciprocity” pulls them down. Reciprocity also helps locate these states that do accept hierarchy and those who are more insistent on reciprocity. Large non-western states like Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey and South Africa accept this uneven relationship with the West. Yet the largest and most influential non-western states, i.e. China, India, Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria are emphasizing reciprocity with the West (Appendix 7)

, the result would be a straight declining score (from +192 to -192). The current situation can thus be compared to the two ideal models to visualize the amount of hierarchy and reciprocity actually embedded in the visa system. Appendix 5 shows that the current visa system is somewhere in between perfect reciprocity and perfect hierarchy, and also there is a disproportionate amount of hierarchy on the left (The western countries) and the right (the L23). However, in the middle, which represents 70% of the states and 82% of the world population, the principle of reciprocity seems to be dominant. Excluding the West and the L23 thus gives us a more equalitarian picture of the world (See Appendix 6).

21

. Since the West requires visas, these states too require visas from the West. For example, Brazilian citizens do not require visas to enter the UK and the EU and in return UK and EU citizens can travel to Brazil visa-free. The US and Canada, on the other hand, require visas from Brazilian nationals and in return Brazil, by observing the principle of reciprocity, imposes visas on the nationals these countries as well. Furthermore, these states accept visa-free certain non-western countries on the basis of reciprocity (Russia has visa-free agreements with Turkey and Argentina for instance). It can be concluded therefore that the concept of reciprocity in these states is strong enough to override the positive material benefits of allowing the wealthy West in visa-free.

It is tempting to see the West as an “extractor of uneven treatment” and continuing the tradition of unequal treaties, well described by Gerrit Gong in his book “The Standard of Civilization”. By focusing on the Ottoman Empire, Siam, Japan and China, the author argues that the European powers justified their unequal treaties imposed on non-European countries because the latter were not seen as having reached the accepted “Standard of Civilization”. There is a major difference here however, in that the unequal treaties were partially underpinned by military force, whereas in the case of visas, no country's decisions are today being made on the basis of military threat. A non-western country can always re-establish

Unequal Visa Relationships as a continuation of Unequal Treaties?

20 The first country would be accepted by all, but would accept none; the second country would be accepted by all, save the first one, and would refuse all, save the first one; and so forth, until the last country, which would accept all and yet be accepted by none) 21 It can be argued that China and Saudi Arabia impose visas on the West because they are oppressive regimes and therefore they impose

visas on almost every country. However this same rationale can not be said about India, Russia, Brazil and Nigeria; India has an open visa relationship with Indonesia for instance; Brazil with South Africa and fellow Latin American countries; and Russia with Turkey, Brazil, Chile and Argentina.


11

reciprocity with the west by requiring visas from the western countries; as shown above many do. That country only stands to lose potential visitors and money. Rather than imposition, compellence is the motivation: some non-western countries are willing to accept an unequal relationship because they want to attract tourism, investments, and send a positive signal to the West. Other states seem to be willing to forgo these material benefits because they consider the basic principle of reciprocity as more important.

Regions, Civilizations & Identities

In Neumayer's analysis, countries from the same regions (as defined by the World Bank) and civilizations (using Huntington's classification) are found to be less likely to impose visas on each other. However this methodology is imprecise, since likelihood does not mean certainty. It is also unhelpful in differentiating between civilizations and regions. The two do not overlap, especially in Central Europe, South East Asia, South Asia, and the Muslim world in Central Asia and Africa. Furthermore, from an International Relation point of view, countries that have an antagonistic relationship with their neighbors and countries that lie on the border of a region can be the most interesting cases, as highlighted before in the case of Central Europe. A more detailed analysis is therefore needed, however, to delineate these regions more precisely, locate the borders, and judge how closed these borders are. Using both the reciprocity and hierarchy patterns, one can aim to build a world map around visas, and link such map to Politics (Lewis and Wigen, 1993:47-72).

Regions in Neumayer’s Analysis

Indeed, visas can shed new light on International Relations. First, and according to Neumayer, “imposing visa restrictions is likely to be regarded as an unfriendly act”, and conversely, “granting visa-free access to one's territorial space is perhaps the most welcoming thing that can be done for passport holders from other nations” (Neumayer, 2006). A state's choice of its visa partners is therefore significant. Furthermore, when civilizations exist, meaning people across national boundaries with whom we feel we share feelings of greater cultural values, then one might expect this shared sense of civilization to be reflected in the visa policies of the different countries (Bigo and Guild, 2003:82-85)

The Linkage between Visa, Regions and Identities

22

. In these days of fear of illegal immigrants, visa policies can give us important hints about the insider/outsider dichotomy at the international level. In such a way visas are linked to the broader question of identities.

Visa policies have the tremendous advantage of being publically available, comparable and also measurable. Not many features of international relations share such characteristics. The quantification of visa relations allows us to determine “regions of acceptance”, or those groupings of countries that accept each other much more than they accept and are accepted by countries outside the group. Using this methodology, several regions stand out: the West, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Arab League & Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Latin America, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Southern African Development Community (SADC) & the Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU), the East African

Findings of the Visa Analysis: Regions

22 In Bigo and Guild’s view, the visa is an indication that citizens of specific countries are seen as “undesirable” and “threatening”


12

Community (EAC), Central Africa, and the Pacific Islands (see Appendix 8). The major countries of China and India, however, stand relatively isolated. The regional groupings have various degrees of internal cohesion, reciprocity, and hierarchy, and also various degrees of interactions with other regions. However they are all notably less accepting of other regions than they are of their own region (see Appendix 9). For instance, the ECOWAS, a group of 15 West African countries, is completely visa-free internally, which means that all 15 countries within this group accept, and are accepted by the other countries at a rate of 100%. In contrast, the rest of the world accepts the ECOWAS countries on average at 18%, and the ECOWAS accepts the rest of the world on average at 32%. What the above exercise does reveal is that visa distribution tends to follow pre-existing political groupings which cover most of the world, excluding a few extremely closed, or war-torn, countries. These groupings are so well-defined they have very little overlap (only one country, Tanzania, belongs to two groupings). Visas are therefore deeply embedded in the modern political system.

Such a unique way of defining regions also argues against Huntington's civilization paradigm, as the Muslim world has no coordinated visa policies, and the border zones of Islam belong to other multicultural regions (Central Asia in the CIS, the Sub-Sahara in ECOWAS, Malaysia and Indonesia within ASEAN). In other words, a Muslim country is not more likely to give visa-free access to another country simply because it is a fellow Muslim country. If there is any linkage at all in this regard, it rests within the Arab world, where one can see a pattern of hierarchy between the GCC and the rest of the Arab League. If Neumayer's visa analysis shows that Huntington's civilization paradigm has an impact on visas, that probably is because of other civilizations (the West and Latin America notably), that coincide with the World Bank definition of regions.

Huntington’s Civilizational Categorization and the Visa Analysis

Unlike the World Bank and Huntington’s concept, this visa analysis portrays Sub-Saharan Africa as non-homogeneous, split into four different zones, the largest three of which are existing political groupings. The same analysis makes Japan part of the West and unambiguously draws the border of Western Europe at the Russian, Belarus, Ukrainian, Moldavian and Turkish borders. The visa analysis contradicts both that of the World Bank, which places Central Europe in the “East”, and Huntington’s which splits it among religious lines. The analysis also suggests a very ambiguous and varied position for Turkey and Iran, caught as they are between different groupings23

. The visa analysis therefore helps to identify and understand regions. The next section will highlight some of the findings of this analysis, first with respect to the West, and secondly with respect to the other regions.

The West: Wealth, Civilization and Geography

The most prominent of the regions highlighted by the visa analysis is what is commonly known as “The West”. Comprising the U.S., Canada, Western and Central Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand, the West stands out among the list of most accepted countries. It also dominates the list of wealthy countries, notwithstanding a few oil-fuelled economies and offshore financial centers (see Appendix 10). The western countries are also active members of other forums such as the G8, the OECD, North Atlantic Treaty

Introduction

23 This situation might explain Turkey's zeal to expand its own “visa-free zone”, especially since the prospect of visa free access to the EU

has now become more distant. In the last 5 years, Turkey has established visa-free agreement with, among others, Russia, Syria, Mongolia, Ukraine, Libya and South Africa.


13

Organization (NATO), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and are all liberal democracies. Accordingly, the West portrays itself as open and accepts quite a few countries visa-free. Neumayer was not surprised to find that despite immigration worries, Western countries' acceptance of other countries ranked somewhere in the middle, below the all-accepting countries, but well above the repressive states.

However, by taking a closer look at the countries the West accepts without visas, a different reality emerges. The western countries share very similar lists which tend to include mostly other western countries. It is obvious in the case of the Schengen area, where 26 countries accept each other, but the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Korea also have very similar lists. Western countries accept 60 countries on average (Canada 45, the US 33, and Australia as few as 29), and yet 40 out of 60 of these are western countries. In effect, this grouping of countries has high internal cohesion, but rejects most of the countries outside that grouping. Seen under this different light, the West appears much less open to the movement of people than the ranking of its individual countries would suggest. In addition, the number of countries in Europe produces a distorting effect

The West’s Similar Visa Lists Reinforces the “Fortress” Thesis

24

The study of visas allows for the visualization of the “western fortress” which is made up of three distinct units: Canada and the US in the Americas, Western Europe on the western edge of Eurasia, and Korea and the islands of Japan, Australia and New Zealand on Eurasia's eastern edge. Fortresses must be bounded and thus, Canada and the US form one bounded territory, which does not accept any country south of the Rio Grande

: If Schengen is considered one country (for visa purposes, it would not be unreasonable), the US, Canada and Australia all accept less than 15 countries each, placing all three among the most visa restrictive countries on the planet. It seems like the repressive states are not alone in fearing foreigners (see Appendix 11).

25

Such view of the western fortress can be refined further by looking at which non-western countries the West accepts. These countries can be grouped into two categories: a) small, wealthy countries, often island-states (Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, Bahamas, Antigua, St Kitts, Barbados and Israel

. Europe has its own bounded territory by including the western Balkans in the visa-free zone, ahead of Turkey, despite the latter's legal entitlement to visa-free access (Deutsche Welle, 2009; Groenendijk and Guild, 2010). Europe does not accept any country visa-free east of the EU border. Accepting Turkey or Russia would seriously weaken the “bounded” aspect of their fortress. In the Far East, Japan, New Zealand and Australia are naturally bounded since they are islands; Korea is virtually bounded as its only land border with North Korea is sealed. The other two land borders in the West (U.S./Mexico and the EU's eastern border) are both heavily monitored. The short water separations are also heavily guarded (New York Times, July 8 and July 19 2013, Al Jazeera, August 13 2013). There is an economic angle to this aspect, as the West represents 15.5% of the world population, but 65% of its GDP, which partially explains the anti-immigration stance in the West, but also at the same time its attractiveness for would-be migrants.

26

24 Also noted, for different reasons, in Lewis and Wigen (1993:7-10)

), which represents about 1% of the world population and 2.2% of its GDP; and b) at times, large and poor continental states, as long as they are far away in terms of geographical distance. For instance, while the U.S./Canada does not accept Latin America, Europe does; While Europe does not accept

25 Since Canada started imposing visas on Mexico in 2009 (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2009), Canada now only accepts a few small island states, such as the Bahamas.

26 Israel of course, is not an island, but its complex position in its region often leads some of its leaders to speak about it as if it was an island (Israel Embassy to the US website, 2013)


14

Turkey or the Arab States, Japan and New Zealand do27. This preference seems to imply that the West accepts a privileged few (the small and the wealthy), and when it does accept others, it relies on the “natural filter” of distance to make sure access is only granted to the wealthier few who can afford the plane ticket28

Within the western fortress, there is no complete uniformity. Hierarchy lurks, mainly with regard to Central Europe. Australia does not accept any of the central European states, while the US and Canada only accept some of these. Even within Europe, there is a sort of hierarchy in this regard: While Bulgaria and Romania are now part of the EU and have, therefore, visa-free access, they are still being blocked from joining the Schengen Area (Spiegel Online, March 8 2013); The Western Balkans are not even in the EU, which seems to reflect a wealth disparity, as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary are wealthier than Romania and Bulgaria, which in turn are wealthier than the Western Balkans. Despite this hierarchy, however, the West is still remarkably open internally, especially given the geographical spread and quantity of countries (see Appendix 8)

. In both cases, entering the “fortress” visa-free is only possible if one can fly long distances. This preference helps re-emphasize the aversion to land borders for large non-western states, and highlights how sensitive the West is in terms of controlling the flow of non-western people into its territories

To conclude and summarize this section: 1) the visa system allows for the development of a closer understanding of the West, and where the West/non West borders lie; 2) the West is made up of bounded entities, situated on the edges of landmasses 3) The West is a small minority of the world population that owns most of its wealth and heavily selects and controls the movement of the rest of the world toward its territory; 4) The West has a high level of internal visa acceptance and a high degree of rejection toward the rest of the world. Special attention is paid to land borders, or short water separations.

Conclusion

Patterns of Reciprocity, Hierarchy and Regionalization in the non-western World

This author does not have the necessary expertise to provide a detailed analysis on the various regions of the world from a visa perspective, so further research by regional specialists is highly encouraged. However, several important points shall still be presented. One is the criticism of Huntington's grouping, especially with regard to the Muslim world. Indeed, given the insider/outsider dichotomy underpinning of the visa system, one would expect countries from the same civilization to be more open to each other than to countries from different civilizations. In Latin America, the map projected by visas matches Huntington's civilization theory. In the case of the West, the visa analysis and Huntington's civilization concept start to diverge, notably in Central Europe and in the case of Japan and Korea. In South East Asia, where Huntington sees a mixture of civilizations, and therefore a region prone to conflict, the visa lens shows a remarkably cohesive region. In contrast, in Sub-Saharan Africa, where Huntington sees unity in the African civilization, in opposition to Islam, the visa analysis exposes four groupings, all internally cohesive, but not necessarily very open to each other. Furthermore, in Africa, Huntington's theory supports a clash between the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world and yet is seriously contradicted by the ECOWAS grouping in West

Lack of Cohesion in the Muslim World

27 The contradiction of being more accepting of the countries farther away creates an image problem for the EU, and both Putin and Erdogan have been quick to point this issue out to the European counterparts (See Appendix 1) 28 As planes become more affordable, this logic might start to erode. See the case of Ecuador and Spain (Bertoli, Moraga, Ortega, 2010)


15

Africa, combining as it does Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Central Asia as well, is shown to be much more aligned with the rest of the CIS than with the rest of the Muslim world. Unlike the other highlighted regions, the countries in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which represent the broader Muslim world, do not show any significant preference for granting visa-free access to each other when compared to the non-OIC countries (see Appendix 8).

One of the striking features of the Arab League, as seen through the visa lens, is the core-periphery dynamic between the GCC countries and the non-GCC countries. The GCC countries are wealthy, have freedom to travel internally, and are generally accepted by the rest of the Arab League members. The latter countries on the other hand, are poor, face visa restrictions among themselves, and are almost entirely denied visa-free access to the GCC

Core-Periphery Patterns in the Visa System

29

. In a way, this relationship is a microcosm of the entire visa system. The West is wealthy, faces little hindrance to internal travel, and is accepted by a large portion of the rest of the world, which is poorer. The rest of the world, on the other hand, is divided in different regions, which give each other less visa-free access than they give the West (see Appendix 9).

In this uneven world, the visa dynamics have become complex. Some accept their unequal relationship with the West, and some insist on reciprocity (see Appendix 7). However almost none, save for the large states of India and China, seem to be left out of a visa-free zone or at least an accepting region. This tendency for grouping results in states like Nigeria, Brazil or Russia to accepting some poorer neighbors visa-free and refusing entry to the wealthier West. Since the West monopolizes the wealthy states, if the few other large states want to create a visa-free zone, they have little choice but to accept their poorer neighbors. South Africa has thus extended visa-free status to its much poorer neighbors, such as Malawi and Mozambique

The Prevalence of Visa-Free Regions, and Implications for Non-Western Countries

30

The states left in between visa zones are not in an easy situation. Iran, for instance, has a very antagonistic relationship with the Arab world, and the GCC in particular. The only two Arab countries that accept Iran visa-free are Iraq and Syria, surely not a coincidence. Turkey, whose aspirations for swift integration into the European Union have remained unfulfilled (Yilmaz, 2007; Verney, 2007), has been quite active in recent years in establishing visa-free relationships with a number of countries

. There have been to date very few studies on the motivations of the non-western states regarding their visa policies, but such research would surely shed important light on the mechanism of the entire visa system.

31

One of the advantages of a visa analysis is that it applies equally to all states. In that way, the Pacific Islands, which are usually not a major topic in the field of International Relations, are shown as a cohesive visa group. Similarly, in Central Africa, Cameroon, Chad, the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo are also shown as forming what is probably the most distinct visa grouping. These four countries grant visa-free status to each other, but very few countries outside. Further, even though they do not seem to form a specific political grouping, they do not overlap with the other African countries groupings. This lack of overlap would suggest their visa linkage is not fortuitous.

, mostly in the CIS and the Arab League. Turkey has been very successful in this regard, to the point that it would not be far-fetched to include it in the CIS from a visa analysis point of view.

29 In that regard, the “solidification” of the Saudi/Yemen border is telling (BBC, April 9 2013). 30 South Africa’s GDP/Capita is over ten times larger than the one of Malawi and Mozambique. 31 See Note 23.


16

Conclusion In summary, the visa system is significant, as it is essential to states' efforts to control population movements and separate the welcomed foreigners from the suspicious ones on the basis of their nationality. In doing so, the system does reveal political groupings of states, borders, and asymmetric relationships. While Neumayer's study offered a significant contribution to the understanding of the visa system as a whole, it focused perhaps too heavily on economic and security factors. These factors are important, but also understate the political aspects of the visa systems. Specifically, the political significance of the visa allows us to deepen our understandings of regions. Secondly, visas highlight the importance of the notion of reciprocity for certain states. Some states will accept an uneven relationship for economic reasons; on the other hand others, especially the more powerful states, insist on reciprocity with the West, despite the economic costs. Further, the prevalence of regions means that the latter states end up granting visa-free status to poor neighbors. Finally, this study shows the West as a whole to be a lot less accepting of others than Neumayer's study implied, mainly because it acts as a block. The West's visa policy seems to be driven by a “bounded” vision of itself, and in so doing, has a tendency to reject large, populous states on its own doorsteps, while being more open to distant, smaller, island states. It accepts a wealthy few, and relies on a combination of visa requirements, land border controls and natural filters to manage and thus keep the rest away. Given the political significance of the visa system, the public nature of the information, and the ease of its use for comparison purposes, it is surprising visas have not garnered more research interest from social scientists. Specifically, Migration Studies could broaden their scope and move away from asylum seeking, legal and illegal migration to include other issues related to international mobility. There is already some evidence that illegal immigration, for instance, cannot be dissociated easily from the visa system32

. International Relation scholars could apply this current study to issues of regionalization and identity. It would also be interesting to test for a relationship between insistence on visa reciprocity and insistence on reciprocity in other aspects of International Relations. Lastly, this study of the visa system should have some application to World System analysis. If, as Wallerstein argued, there is a “ferocious and [ongoing] struggle over the frontier policies of states” (Wallerstein, 1983:51), then the terms upon which goods, capital, and people are allowed to cross borders deserve the utmost attention. The visa system, which does indeed regulate the movement of people across national borders, can help shed greater light on the broader world system.

32 See note 7


17

Appendix 1 Selected Comments from Turkish and Russian Politicians on Visas

1. The Moscow Times, Nikolaus von Twickel,

“Russia Threatens EU with 'Retaliation' if No Visa Deal by 2014”

November 28th 2012, last accessed September 8th 2013:

“The Foreign Ministry on Tuesday threatened the European Union with "retaliation" if visa-free travel is not introduced in time for the Sochi Olympics in February 2014.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/russia-threatens-eu-with-retaliation-if-no-visa-deal-by-2014/472082.html

Anvar Azimov, the ministry's point man on visa negotiations with the EU, said Tuesday that Moscow wants to see a breakthrough by the end of 2013.

"We will be patient for another year. But you know, it is hard to put Russians under a yoke — and then the strike [back] will be adequate and asymmetric," he told reporters, according to Interfax”

“Lavrov accuses EU of hampering visa-free travel deal with Russia”

2. The Voice of Russia, February 25th 2012, last accessed September 8th 2013:

“The decision on [Russia’s] visa-free regime with the EU is being torpedoed by some EU member states on political grounds,” [Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov] said”.

http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_02_25/Lavrov-accuses-EU-of-hampering-visa-free-travel-deal-with-Russia/

“Visa-free freeze? Russia ready for new EU travel regime – FM”

3. Russia Today, October 8th 2012, last accessed September 8th 2013

“Due to the solidarity principle adopted in the EU, or rather due to the distorted interpretation of solidarity, there is an opinion that it is politically unacceptable to offer Russia a visa-free regime prior to offering it to member states of the Eastern Partnership (EaP),” Lavrov observed.

http://rt.com/politics/lavrov-visa-free-eu-923/

“Visa travel: throwback to the Iron Curtain – Duma Speaker”

4. Russia Today, February 6th 2013, last accessed September 8th 2013

State Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin has renewed Moscow’s call for open borders between Russian and the European Union.

http://rt.com/politics/russia-eu-duma-visa-putin-548/

“Visa travel is an element of the Iron Curtain and it still exists,” said during a working visit to France. “We are offering its dismantlement, abolition [to European colleagues] but, so far, our partners refuse to meet us halfway.”

“Putin presses EU on visa-free travel and trade”

5. Russia Today, December 21st 2012, last accessed September 8th 2013

“The Russian President criticized the existing visa regime between Russia and the European Union, saying it is thwarting the development of economic relations between the trading partners.The Russian leader cited a list of countries whose citizens are able to travel freely to the EU, including Venezuela, Honduras, Mauritius, and Mexico.

http://rt.com/politics/putin-europe-trade-visas-brussels-summit-582/

Another 40 states, which are located thousands of kilometers from the EU, also enjoy visa-free privileges, Putin added.Despite the fact that bilateral trade between Russia and the European Union “stands at $400 billion,” the European Commission in November proposed adding “five Caribbean countries and ten countries located in the Pacific Ocean” to this list, he said”

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/russia-threatens-eu-with-retaliation-if-no-visa-deal-by-2014/472082.html�

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/russia-threatens-eu-with-retaliation-if-no-visa-deal-by-2014/472082.html�


18

“Your visa has expired. Stand and leave' - Putin”

6. Russia Today, June 4th 2012, last accessed September 8th 2013

“Judging by the amount of time Putin devoted to the visa issue at the opening of the 29th Russia-EU summit, it is clear he is serious about resolving the matter.

http://rt.com/politics/putin-eu-russia-visa-regime-905/

The Russian leader stressed that true partnership between Russia and the European Union "is impossible with existing visa barriers in the way of contacts between people." “

“Europe shuts Russia off with visa iron curtain”

7. The Voice of Russia, May 17th 2010, last accessed September 8th 2013

“Europe is now trying to shut Russia off with a “visa iron curtain”. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expressed this opinion in an article published in the “Itogi” magazine”

http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/05/17/7978907/

8. Trend, March 1st 2011, Last accessed September 8th 2013 “Erdogan calls EU to reveal its true intentions over Turkey's membership bid” http://en.trend.az/regions/met/turkey/1837881.html “Erdogan also criticized [...] the European Union's visa regime on Turkish nationals, saying nationals of countries such as Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, which have no geographical ties to the EU, were granted visa-free travel to the Union.” Why the Turks are not treated the same way? The question is that is the European Union is a Christian club or is it the address of a community of civilizations. The current picture shows that the EU is a Christian club. This must be overcome, Erdogan said.

“Turkish President Gül slams EU visa policy for Turkey”

9. Hurriyet Daily News, April 5th 2013, Last Accessed September 8th 2013

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkish-president-gul-slams-eu-visa-policy-for-turkey.aspx?pageID=238&nid=44296

“Turkish President Abdullah Gül criticized yesterday the European Union over its slow visa procedures during a speech at the Lithuania-Turkey Business Forum in Vilnius. “Visa procedures unfortunately take too long and this is a big injustice. What we request from Lithuanian officials, primarily from President Dalia Grybauskaite, is to discuss in meetings, which Turkey doesn’t attend, that this is not fair and to take steps that we expect,” Gül said. “It is a shortcoming for the EU not to sign a visa exemption agreement with a big economy like Turkey while signing it with Brazil, which is a Latin American country, and with countries which haven’t even started membership negotiations,” Gül said. The Turkish president also expressed Turkish business people’s problems regarding the EU’s visa policy. Turkey is a member of the Customs Union and while Turkish goods can freely circulate in the area, their producers and owners cannot, he said.”

“Former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma warned that the Schengen visa rules would 'replace the Iron Curtain with a different, more humane, but no less dangerous paper curtain'”

10.Lavenex & Ucarer (2004), cited by Neumayer (2006)

http://en.trend.az/regions/met/turkey/1837881.html�

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkish-president-gul-slams-eu-visa-policy-for-turkey.aspx?pageID=238&nid=44296�

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkish-president-gul-slams-eu-visa-policy-for-turkey.aspx?pageID=238&nid=44296�


19

Appendix 2: Ranking of Countries by the Number of Countries who Accept them Visa-Free


20

Rank

Accepted by... Rank

Accepted by... Rank

Accepted by... 1 Finland 148

65 Montenegro 86

129 Dominican Republic 49

2 Denmark 148

66 Bosnia 84

130 Indonesia 48 3 Norway 146

67 Nicaragua 84

131 Cape Verde 48

4 UK 146

68 South Africa 83

132 Tajikistan 48 5 Netherlands 146

69 Trinidad and Tobago 83

133 Mali 47

6 Sweden 146

70 Russia 83

134 Guinea 46 7 Ireland 145

71 Macau 82

135 Uzbekistan 46

8 Germany 145

72 Saint Vincent 78

136 Benin 46 9 Luxembourg 145

73 Saint Lucia 78

137 Cote D’Ivoire 45

10 Italy 144

74 Albania 75

138 India 45 11 Belgium 144

75 Belize 74

139 Nigeria 45

12 Spain 143

76 Grenada 72

140 Burkina Faso 45 13 France 143

77 Dominica 71

141 Morocco 45

14 Austria 143

78 Solomon Islands 70

142 Mauritania 45 15 USA 143

79 Fiji 70

143 Niger 44

16 Portugal 142

80 Jamaica 70

144 Senegal 44 17 Greece 142

81 Samoa 69

145 Togo 43

18 New Zealand 141

82 Ukraine 69

146 Turkmenistan 43 19 Canada 140

83 Vanuatu 68

147 Haiti 42

20 Australia 140

84 Maldives 67

148 Mongolia 42 21 South Korea 139

85 Kuwait 67

149 Algeria 41

22 Japan 139

86 Tonga 66

150 Central African Rep. 41 23 Iceland 138

87 Tuvalu 66

151 Guinea-Bissau 41

24 Switzerland 137

88 UAE 66

152 Mozambique 41 25 Malta 136

89 Kiribati 65

153 Rep. Of Congo 39

26 Singapore 134

90 Peru 65

154 Liberia 39 27 Malaysia 134

91 Qatar 64

155 China 39

28 Slovakia 132

92 Guyana 63

156 Jordan 39 29 Hungary 131

93 Bahrain 62

157 Egypt 39

30 Czech Rep. 131

94 Gambia 61

158 Bhutan 39 31 Poland 130

95 Nauru 60

159 Sao Tome and Pr 39

32 Slovenia 130

96 Botswana 60

160 Rwanda 39 33 Cyprus 129

97 Kenya 59

161 Chad 38

34 Lithuania 126

98 Saudi Arabia 59

162 Madagascar 38 35 Brazil 126

99 Papua New Guinea 59

163 Laos 38

36 Estonia 125

100 Tanzania 59

164 Vietnam 38 37 Argentina 124

101 Malawi 58

165 Gabon 37

38 Latvia 124

102 Ecuador 58

166 Libya 37 39 Bulgaria 121

103 Lesotho 58

167 Yemen 37

40 Romania 121

104 Suriname 57

168 Iran 36 41 Israel 121

105 Bolivia 56

169 Cambodia 36

42 Chile 119

106 Thailand 56

170 Cameroon 36 43 Hong Kong 117

107 Kazakhstan 56

171 Lebanon 35

44 Brunei 117

108 Tunisia 56

172 Bangladesh 35 45 Barbados 116

109 Oman 56

173 North Korea 34

46 Bahamas 111

110 Marshall Islands 55

174 Comoros 34 47 Mexico 111

111 Belarus 55

175 Dem. Rep. Of Congo 34

48 Saint Kitts 111

112 Zambia 55

176 East Timor 34 49 Antigua 108

113 Swaziland 55

177 Sri Lanka 33

50 Venezuela 106

114 Colombia 54

178 Burundi 33 51 Uruguay 105

115 Namibia 54

179 Syria 33

52 Croatia 104

116 Uganda 54

180 Burma 32 53 Seychelles 101

117 Sierra Leone 53

181 Angola 32

54 Costa Rica 100

118 Moldova 53

182 Sudan 32 55 Paraguay 99

119 Philippines 52

183 Equatorial Guinea 32

56 Mauritius 99

120 Ghana 52

184 Nepal 32 57 Taiwan 98

121 Palau 51

185 Djibouti 31

58 Panama 94

122 Georgia 51

186 South Sudan 30 59 Guatemala 90

123 Zimbabwe 50

187 Ethiopia 30


21

60 Turkey 89

124 Azerbaijian 50

188 Eritrea 29 61 Honduras 89

125 Kyrgyzstan 50

189 Pakistan 27

62 El Salvador 88

126 Armenia 50

190 Iraq 27 63 Serbia 88

127 Micronesia 50

191 Somalia 26

64 Macedonia 87

128 Cuba 49

192 Afghanistan 23


22

Rank

Accepts...

Rank

Accepts...

Rank

Accepts...

1 Sao Tome 192

65 El Salvador 78

129 Papua New Guinea 53 2 Micronesia 191

66 Honduras 78

130 Paraguay 51

3 Samoa 191

67 Swaziland 77

131 Namibia 51 4 Tuvalu 191

68 UK 77

132 Serbia 50

5 Maldives 191

69 Guatemala 77

133 Bolivia 46 6 Sri Lanka 191

70 Indonesia 76

134 Canada 45

7 Cambodia 191

71 Argentina 74

135 Moldova 44 8 East Timor 191

72 Panama 74

136 Bahrain 44

9 Comoros 191

73 Macedonia 72

137 Marshall Islands 44 10 Mozambique 191

74 Thailand 71

138 Senegal 42

11 Uganda 191

75 South Africa 70

139 Guyana 41 12 Togo 191

76 Malawi 70

140 Ethiopia 39

13 Seychelles 191

77 Bangladesh 70

141 Gambia 39 14 Cape Verde 191

78 Lesotho 69

142 Taiwan 38

15 Madagascar 191

79 Macau 69

143 Kuwait 34 16 Guinea-Bissau 190

80 Slovakia 68

144 Qatar 33

17 Palau 189

81 Oman 68

145 USA 33 18 Djibouti 189

82 Slovenia 68

146 UAE 32

19 Mali 188

83 Netherlands 67

147 Pakistan 31 20 Haiti 185

84 Finland 67

148 Australia 29

21 Ecuador 179

85 France 67

149 Syria 27 22 Saint Vincent 179

86 Croatia 67

150 Russia 27

23 Burundi 178

87 Norway 67

151 Cuba 26 24 Nepal 177

88 Romania 67

152 Benin 26

25 Kenya 177

89 Portugal 67

153 Niger 24 26 Tanzania 171

90 Estonia 67

154 Suriname 22

27 Armenia 165

91 Denmark 67

155 Guinea 21 28 Laos 162

92 Poland 67

156 Cote D'Ivoire 21

29 Singapore 160

93 Luxembourg 67

157 Nigeria 18 30 Zambia 160

94 Austria 67

158 Ghana 18

31 Malaysia 155

95 Spain 67

159 Liberia 16 32 Philippines 151

96 Sweden 67

160 Belarus 16

33 Hong Kong 142

97 Italy 67

161 Sierra Leone 15 34 Jordan 133

98 Malta 67

162 India 14

35 Bahamas 114

99 Germany 67

163 Rwanda 13 36 Jamaica 110

100 Czech Rep. 67

164 Azerbaijian 13

37 Barbados 110

101 Iceland 67

165 Vietnam 13 38 Mauritius 110

102 Switzerland 67

166 Yemen 11

39 Egypt 109

103 Cyprus 67

167 Kazakhstan 11 40 South Korea 105

104 Belgium 67

168 Chad 11

41 Turkey 104

105 Lithuania 67

169 Algeria 10 42 Fiji 103

106 Hungary 67

170 Rep. Of Congo 10

43 Vanuatu 99

107 Latvia 67

171 China 10 44 Georgia 96

108 Greece 67

172 Central African Rep. 9

45 Grenada 96

109 Kiribati 67

173 Mauritania 9 46 Saint Kitts 94

110 Tunisia 65

174 Uzbekistan 9

47 Antigua and Bar. 93

111 Bosnia 64

175 Sudan 8 48 Belize 91

112 Solomon Islands 63

176 South Sudan 8

49 Iraq 91

113 Tonga 63

177 Mongolia 6 50 Peru 90

114 Morocco 63

178 Cameroon 5

51 Trinidad and 90

115 Brazil 63

179 Saudi Arabia 5 52 Israel 90

116 Bulgaria 63

180 Dem. Rep. Congo 5

53 Botswana 89

117 Uruguay 62

181 Eritrea 3 54 Dominican Rep. 88

118 Venezuela 61

182 Libya 3

55 Dominica 87

119 Japan 58

183 Bhutan 3 56 Saint Lucia 85

120 Burkina Faso 56

184 Iran 2

57 Colombia 85

121 Kyrgyzstan 56

185 Angola 2 58 Nicaragua 84

122 Montenegro 56

186 Gabon 1

59 Ireland 84

123 Albania 55

187 North Korea 1 60 Tajikistan 84

124 Ukraine 55

188 Burma 1

61 Costa Rica 83

125 Brunei 54

189 Equatorial Guinea 1 62 Chile 82

126 New Zealand 54

190 Somalia 1


23

(Note: Freedom House 2011 “Worst of the Worst” are highlighted in grey

Appendix 3: Ranking of Countries by Number of Countries they Accept Visa-Free

(The above mentioned data belongs to appendix 3 – The countries shaded in grey are listed as “Worst of the

Worst” by Freedom House)

63 Lebanon 80

127 Mexico 53

191 Turkmenistan 0 64 Zimbabwe 80

128 Nauru 53

192 Afghanistan 0


24

Appendix 4

Country Hierarchy Score

Australia 111

North Korea 33

Trinidad and Tobago -7 USA 110

Kuwait 33

Tunisia -9

Canada 95

Central African Rep. 32

Ethiopia -9 New Zealand 87

Burma 31

Mauritius -11

Denmark 81

Algeria 31

Lesotho -11 Japan 81

Israel 31

Burkina Faso -11

Finland 81

Qatar 31

Malawi -12 Norway 79

India 31

Oman -12

Netherlands 79

Cameroon 31

Turkey -15 Sweden 79


Thailand -15

Luxembourg 78

Angola 30

Dominica -16 Germany 78

Montenegro 30

Belize -17

Italy 77

China 29

Morocco -18 Belgium 77


Malaysia -21

Austria 76

Rep. Of Congo 29

Swaziland -22 Spain 76

Nigeria 27

Grenada -24

France 76

Chad 27

Peru -25 Portugal 75

Yemen 26

Hong Kong -25

Greece 75

Rwanda 26

Singapore -26 Iceland 71

Eritrea 26

Indonesia -28

Switzerland 70

Vietnam 25

Botswana -29 Malta 69

Guinea 25

Zimbabwe -30

UK 69

Somalia 25

Colombia -31 Czech Rep. 64

Sudan 24

Vanuatu -31

Slovakia 64

Cote D'Ivoire 24

Fiji -33 Hungary 64

Afghanistan 23

Bangladesh -35

Brazil 63

Liberia 23

Tajikistan -36 Brunei 63

Cuba 23

Dominican Republic -39

Poland 63

Gambia 22

Jamaica -40 Cyprus 62

Guyana 22

Lebanon -45

Slovenia 62

South Sudan 22

Georgia -45 Ireland 61

Panama 20

Iraq -64

Taiwan 60

Bosnia 20

Egypt -70 Lithuania 59

Benin 20

Seychelles -90

Mexico 58

Albania 20

Jordan -94 Estonia 58

Niger 20

Philippines -99

Bulgaria 58

Bahrain 18

Saint Vincent -101 Latvia 57

Saint Kitts and Nevis 17

Zambia -105

Russia 56

Costa Rica 17

Tanzania -112 Saudi Arabia 54

Macedonia 15

Armenia -115

Romania 54

Antigua and Barbuda 15

Kenya -118 Argentina 50

Ukraine 14

Ecuador -121

Paraguay 48

Guatemala 13

Samoa -122 Venezuela 45

South Africa 13

Laos -124

Kazakhstan 45

Macau 13

Maldives -124 Uruguay 43

Marshall Islands 11

Tuvalu -125

Turkmenistan 43

Honduras 11

Uganda -137 Belarus 39

El Salvador 10

Palau -138

Serbia 38

Bolivia 10

Mali -141 Sierra Leone 38

Moldova 9

Micronesia -141

Uzbekistan 37

Nauru 7

Haiti -143 Croatia 37

Solomon Islands 7

Cape Verde -143

Chile 37

Papua New Guinea 6

Burundi -145


25

Azerbaijian 37

Syria 6

Nepal -145 Bhutan 36

Barbados 6

Togo -148

Mauritania 36

Tonga 3

Guinea-Bissau -149 Gabon 36

Namibia 3

Mozambique -150

Mongolia 36

Senegal 2

Madagascar -153 Suriname 35

Nicaragua 0

Sao Tome and Pr -153

Iran 34

Kiribati -2

Cambodia -155 Libya 34

Bahamas -3

Comoros -157

UAE 34

Pakistan -4

East Timor -157 South Korea 34

Kyrgyzstan -6

Sri Lanka -158

Ghana 34

Saint Lucia -7

Djibouti -158


26

Appendix 5

Current Visa System versus Perfect Reciprocity and Perfect Hierarchy

Appendix 6

Current Visa System amended by Removing the West and L23

-250

-200

-150

-100

-50

0

50

100

150

200

250 Au

stra

lia

Belg

ium

Br

azil

Saud

i Ara

bia

Chile

Ku

wai

t Re

p. O

f Con

go

Cuba

An

tigua

and

Bar

buda

Pa

pua

New

Gui

nea

Tuni

sia

Swaz

iland

Do

min

ican

Rep

ublic

Ke

nya

Nep

al

Perfect Reciprocity

Perfect Hierarchy

Actual Score

-150

-100

-50

0

50

100

150

Taiw

an

Bulg

aria

Ka

zakh

stan

Ch

ile

Liby

a Ga

bon

Mac

au

Eritr

ea

Nig

er

Sene

gal

Leso

tho

Guat

emal

a N

icar

agua

Ba

ngla

desh

Do

min

ican

Rep

ublic

Perfect Reciprocity

Perfect Hierarchy

Actual Score


27

Appendix 7: Selected reciprocity/hierarchy cases – Large non-western countries and the West

accepted by accepts accepted by accepts

Schengen Schengen UK UK

Saudi Arabia No No No No Russia No No No No India No No No No Indonesia No Yes No Yes China No No No No Brazil Yes Yes Yes Yes South Africa No Yes No Yes Nigeria No No No No


US US Canada Canada

Saudi Arabia No No No No Russia No No No No India No No No No Indonesia No Yes No Yes China No No No No Brazil No No No No South Africa No Yes No Yes Nigeria No No No No


Australia Australia Japan Japan

Saudi Arabia No No No No Russia No No No No India No No No Yes Indonesia No Yes No Yes China No No No Yes Brazil No No No Yes South Africa No Yes No Yes Nigeria No No No No


28

Appendix 8: Regional Scores

Appendix 9: Inter-Regional Acceptance

The… West CIS Latam GCC AL ECO. EAC SADC ASEAN PACIF.

Accepts the… West 99% 48% 90% 61% 53% 39% 77% 77% 82% 86%

CIS 0% 81% 35% 3% 21% 27% 67% 46% 38% 38%

Latam 48% 20% 69% 7% 26% 28% 80% 55% 53% 57%

GCC 6% 29% 32% 100% 69% 27% 80% 40% 78% 39%

AL 2% 15% 18% 27% 35% 33% 70% 35% 48% 37%

ECOWAS 0% 6% 17% 0% 12% 100% 72% 33% 38% 41%

EAC 0% 8% 24% 0% 9% 37% 100% 67% 44% 52%

SADC 14% 11% 36% 3% 13% 32% 84% 79% 45% 55%

ASEAN 29% 22% 35% 30% 25% 27% 82% 48% 82% 56%

PACIFIC 7% 8% 48% 0% 21% 27% 80% 61% 47% 95%

Note: The number expresses a regional grouping average visa-free acceptance of another grouping. AL includes GCC

Regional Scores

Acceptance by Acceptance of

Internal Intensity External Intensity other countries other countries

West 98.73% 43.09% 66.33% 19.85% CIS 81.06% 23.39% 25.18% 21.59% Latam 68.28% 39.67% 39.30% 40.04% GCC 100.00% 23.62% 30.66% 16.58% AL 39.05% 25.19% 21.23% 28.85% ECOWAS 100.00% 25.14% 18.42% 31.86% EAC 100.00% 49.16% 23.83% 75.53% SADC 78.57% 38.84% 26.67% 51.01% Central Africa 100.00% 10.97% 18.88% 3.06% ASEAN 82.22% 42.92% 33.39% 52.46% PACIFIC 95.45% 41.53% 28.68% 54.37% INDIA NA 15.45% 23.56% 7.33% CHINA NA 12.83% 20.42% 5.24%

OIC 31.01% 27.97% 32.23% 23.71% SSA – World Bank 43.77% 26.51% 16.97% 36.05% SSA – Huntington 46.12% 29.44% 19.63% 39.24%

Note 1: Intensity is defined as accepting + getting accepted as a % of total combinations

Note 2: Acceptance by other and of others allows us to track the hierarchical component of External Intensity

Note 3: West Acceptance of other countries: Without list of 11 small wealthy states, drops to 13.18% Note 4: GCC Accepted by Arab League at 67.86%, accepts AL at 2.38% only! (Oman accepts Lebanon and Tunisia)

Note 5: OIC countries do not differentiate meaningfully OIC countries from non-OIC countries. Accepts GCC at 35% only, different from AL/GCC relation

Note 6: Adjustment to OIC to reflect Huntington Muslim Civilization does not alter results meaningfully


29

Appendix 10: The West, the OECD, and Wealth

The West – OECD and Wealth OECD List

GDP/Capita (in Dollars)

Australia

115,377 Luxembourg Austria

98,565 Norway

Belgium

92,682 Qatar Canada

85,794 Switzerland

Czech Rep

67,039 Australia Denmark

65,551 Macau

Estonia

59,581 Denmark Finland

57,134 Sweden

France

57,102 Kuwait Germany

50,565 Canada

Greece

50,215 Netherlands Hungary

50,087 Singapore

Iceland

49,686 Austria Ireland

48,887 Finland

Italy

48,836 Ireland Japan

47,882 USA

South Korea

47,807 Belgium Luxembourg

46,407 Japan

Netherland

43,865 Germany New Zealand

43,240 Iceland

Norway

42,921 UAE Poland

42,642 France

Portugal

40,301 Brunei Slovak Rep

38,918 UK

Slovenia

36,874

New Zealand

Spain

36,124 Italy Sweden

34,161 Hong Kong

Switzerland

32,123 Israel UK

31,820 Spain

USA

30,523 Cyprus

26,251 Greece

Chile

25,536 Oman Turkey

24,709 Slovenia

Mexico

23,067 South Korea Israel

22,431 Bahamas

22,409 Equatorial Guinea

22,226 Portugal

21,269 Malta

21,262 Saudi Arabia

20,607 Czech Rep. Note: Non-western countries in Italic


30

Appendix 11: The West’s Acceptance List:

Australia US Canada NZ Schengen Japan Schengen* Schengen* Schengen* Schengen Schengen

UK UK UK UK UK UK Ireland Ireland Ireland Ireland Ireland Ireland

Canada Canada Canada Canada Canada USA USA USA USA USA

South Korea South Korea South Korea South Korea South Korea South Korea

Japan Japan Japan Japan Japan New

Zealand New Zealand

New Zealand New Zealand

New Zealand

Australia Australia Australia Australia Australia

Bulgaria Bulgaria Bulgaria

Romania Romania Romania

Croatia Croatia

Bosnia

Albania

Macedonia Macedonia

Montenegro

Serbia Serbia

Turkey

Brunei Brunei Brunei Brunei Brunei Brunei Malaysia

Malaysia Malaysia

Singapore Singapore Singapore Singapore Singapore Singapore HK

HK HK HK HK

Taiwan Taiwan Taiwan Taiwan Taiwan

Macau Macau Macau

Israel Israel Israel Israel

Bahamas

Bahamas Bahamas

Antigua

Antigua

Barbados

Barbados Dominican Rep.

St Kitts

St Kitts Mauritius

Papua Mexico Mexico Mexico

Solomon Argentina Argentina Argentina

Samoa Brazil Brazil

Chile Chile Chile

Uruguay Uruguay Uruguay

Paraguay Suriname

Venezuela

Bahrain Costa Rica Costa Rica

Kuwait El Salvador El Salvador

Oman Guatemala Guatemala

Qatar Honduras Honduras

Saudi Nicaragua

Panama

South Africa

Tunisia


31

Note: The Schengen Area includes Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Czech Rep., Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia,

Cyprus and Poland. Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia are not currently part of it, but are legally bound to join

* Australia does not accept any of Schengen's former Eastern European countries. The US still refuses Cyprus and Poland,

Canada refuses the Czech Rep.


32

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New York Times. (Jul 8th 2013). “Pope Offers Mass on Island Beacon for Refugees” Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/world/europe/pope-offers-mass-on-island-beacon-for-refugees.html (Last accessed on September 14th , 2013) New York Times. (Jul 19th 2013). “Australia adopts tough measures to curb asylum seekers” Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/world/asia/australia-adopts-tough-measures-to-curb-asylum-seekers.html

(Last accessed on September 14th , 2013) Reuters. (Feb 6th 2013). “Iran to let in Egyptians without Visas” Available at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/06/us-egypt-iran-visas-idUSBRE91517W20130206 (Last accessed on September 14th , 2013) Spiegel. (Mar 8th 2013). “World from Berlin: Friedrich Stoking Anti-Immigrant Sentiment” Available at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/press-review-on-blocking-romania-and-bulgaria-from-schengen-area-a-887668.html (Last accessed on September 14th , 2013)

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Anna Feuer

Abstract

This essay examines the conceptual vocabularies that characterise Indian foreign policy discourse and, accordingly, enable or constrain elite political action. Nonalignment 2.0 and the conversations it produced provide a window through which to examine nonalignment's core themes as enduring features of public debates on international affairs in India. Drawing from Rochana Bajpai's work on the form of Indian political discourse, this essay attempts to sketch the conceptual structures of nonalignment rhetoric, both in its original iteration in the early years of the Republic and its contemporary articulation in Nonalignment 2.0. Within the limited scope of this study, I compare two discursive "snapshots"––one from the late 1940s and 1950s; one from 2012––to reveal the persistence of a single set of justificatory norms. With R. Bajpai, I propose that the ideals traditionally expressed in public debate on foreign policy, such as freedom and global political/economic justice, be understood as interrelated components of a long-held legitimating vocabulary. Nonalignment 2.0 evokes traditionally Nehruvian concepts while simultaneously recasting their relative priority in order to propose an economic policy diametrically opposed to that advanced by Nehru in the decade following independence (specifically, India's deeper integration into the liberal international economic order).


40

Introduction: A Book By Its Cover In February 2012, a group of influential statesmen gathered in New Delhi to celebrate the publication of a much-anticipated report on Indian grand strategy for the twenty first century. National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon, former National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra, and West Bengal Governor M. K. Narayanan participated in the launch of the report,1 itself authored by an esteemed group of strategic thinkers, including academics, former Government of India officials and Indian Army officers, and leaders of the business and media sectors. Nonalignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty First Century (2012) aims to define a "broad perspective and approach" for Indian policymakers in an increasingly multipolar international system (Khilnani et. al., 2012: iii). As its title implies, the report advocates "a re-working for present times of the fundamental principle that has defined India's international engagements since independence"––Jawaharlal Nehru's Cold War policy of nonalignment (Ibid.: 8). The strategy document attracted all the more attention in light of a growing "cottage industry" (Tellis, 2012: 3) of Indian and American critics that insists upon Indian foreign policy's dismal lack of institutional capacity and strategic culture (Markey, 2009; Tharoor, 2009; Krepon, 2010).2

Despite the fanfare surrounding Nonalignment 2.0's publication, its reception fell flat, attracting scathing criticism and even ridicule––especially for its provocative title––from prominent Indian and American critics from across the spectrum of political allegiances. A few commentators, such as Seema Mustafa writing in DNA, commended the report for resuscitating Nehruvian ideals despite the efforts of the Manmohan Singh administration to "take India away from the path of non-alignment into the lap of the US [and] weaken her voice in the developing world" (Mustafa, 2012). Many more, however, attacked the report's authors for their backward looking approach. "Like a pesky ghost that won't be exorcized," wrote Indian journalist Sadanand Dhume in a Foreign Policy article titled "Failure 2.0," "Nehru's nonalignment policy continues to hover India's foreign relations" (Dhume, 2012). The foreign policy analyst Nayan Chanda, writing in The Times of India, lamented the authors' allusions to the Nehruvian era:

Whatever glory, mostly self-congratulatory, non-alignment might have brought evaporated like morning dew in the post-Soviet world. Why then drag it out of the musty archives to encapsulate a foreign policy approach designed to serve a new world? (Chanda, 2012). Likewise, in the United States, the South Asia scholar and former George W. Bush administration adviser Ashley Tellis dismissed the relevance of nonalignment policy to the post-Cold War order, warning against "the perils of old wine in new skins" (Tellis, 2012a). It is unsurprising that the report's title proved such a lightning rod. While Nehruvianism still permeates Indian strategic thinking (K. Bajpai, 2003: 238), foreign policy observers have increasingly challenged its usefulness, particularly since India crossed the "nuclear Rubicon" in 1 Menon, Mishra, and Narayanan delivered speeches at the launch of Nonalignment 2.0 at the Ashok Hotel, New Delhi on 28 February 2012. Podcasts available at the Centre for Policy Research Website, http://www.cprindia.org/workingpapers/3844-nonalignment-20-foreign-and-strategic-policy-india-twenty-first-century. 2 George Tanham's 1991 "Indian Strategic Culture: An Interpretive Essay" is considered the canonical study of India's (lack of) strategic planning. Since the publication of Nonalignment 2.0, The Economist and Foreign Affairs have run features on the subject (The Economist 2013; Miller 2013).


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1998 (Mohan, 2003). "It is hard to adequately discuss the significance of the Soviet demise and the end of the Cold War on India's foreign policy," write Sumit Ganguly and Rahul Mukherji in their account of India's changing role in international relations (Ganguly and Mukherji, 2011: 22-23). Likewise, for C. Raja Mohan, the transformation of the international system from bipolar to unipolar––accompanied by the rapid expansion of India's economic and military capacities––made impotent India's nonaligned position: "The contours of [India's] future foreign policy would bear no resemblance to the idea of nonalignment, which had shaped its image in the world so definitively in the early decades of the republic" (Mohan, 2003: 29). Yet, despite the revolutionary changes that have transformed the international environment since the 1990s, Ganguly and Mukherji lament Indian policymakers' limited success in articulating a new direction for Indian foreign policy that could replace the persistent themes of nonalignment. "In the new global order," they assert, "India cannot content itself with allusions to "enlightened self-interest" and the quest for "strategic autonomy" (Ganguly and Mukerji, 2011: 55). The task before Indian strategists is to ensure that [India] does not lapse into backsliding as it confronts new challenges...To that end, [India's policymakers] will have to forge a national consensus regarding key goals and objectives for India's foreign and security policies. (Ibid.) In its attempt to articulate the principles and objectives that should guide India's behaviour in this transformed international order, Nonalignment 2.0 elicits a number of questions about the discourse surrounding Indian foreign policy. What remains of "nonalignment 1.0" in public discussion of grand strategy? To what extent do Nehruvian concepts prove persistent elements of contemporary discussion of foreign policy? Which concepts have been discarded? In seeking to forge consensus on India's foreign policy for the coming decade, have policy elites turned to traditional ideals or formulated new principles for a changed world order? This essay examines the conceptual vocabularies that characterise Indian foreign policy discourse and, accordingly, enable or constrain elite political action (R. Bajpai 2011: ix). Nonalignment 2.0 and the conversations it produced provide a window through which to examine nonalignment's core themes as enduring features of public debates on international affairs in India. Drawing from Rochana Bajpai's work on the form of Indian political discourse, this essay attempts to sketch the conceptual structures of nonalignment rhetoric, both in its original iteration in the early years of the Republic and its contemporary articulation in Nonalignment 2.0. Within the limited scope of this study, I compare two discursive "snapshots"––one from the late 1940s and 1950s; one from 2012––to reveal the persistence of a single set of justificatory norms. With R. Bajpai, I propose that the ideals traditionally expressed in public debate on foreign policy, such as freedom and global political/economic justice, be understood as interrelated components of a long-held legitimating vocabulary (Ibid.: 21). Nonalignment 2.0 evokes traditionally Nehruvian concepts while simultaneously recasting their relative priority in order to propose an economic policy diametrically opposed to that advanced by Nehru in decade following independence (specifically, India's deeper integration into the liberal international economic order). In encouraging a conceptual approach to Indian foreign policy discourse, I intend to provide an explanatory account of political change. Rhetorical maneuvering is by no means a singular factor in political outcomes, nor, indeed, is it always a causal factor. However, in line with Freidrich Kratochwil's characterisation of the relationship between ideas and policy as a "a


42

bridge which allows us to get from 'here' to 'there'" (Kratochwil, 2001: 66), I suggest that policymakers' ability to develop a convincing consensus is enabled or constrained by the continued salience (or rhetorical fatigue) of long-held ideas. This essay proceeds in four parts. First, I provide a brief overview of Nonalignment 2.0's formulation, publication, and reception. Second, I critique the efforts of strategic cultural theorists to explain the relationship between the ideas expressed in public discourse and the execution of foreign policy and, instead, advance the conceptual approach provided by R. Bajpai. Third, drawing on the work of Mithi Mukherjee, I examine nonalignment 1.0's "conceptual schema" (R. Bajpai, 2011: 72); i.e. I identify a central concept, global justice, around which the other elements of Nehru's legitimating vocabulary, such as freedom, are construed. Finally, I provide a close reading of Nonalignment 2.0 in order to suggest: 1) by privileging freedom, rather than justice, within their legitimating vocabulary, the authors successfully frame their liberal argument for an open economic order in distinctly Nehruvian terms; 2) the authors are less successful in their efforts to frame Nehruvian ideals as a potential source of India's material power, indicating the limited salience of the Nehruvian discourse of Indian exceptionalism in foreign policy discourse today. The Production and Reception of an Indian Grand Strategy Document Dozens of scholars, from George Tanham (1991) to Manjari Chatterjee Miller (2012), have pointed to India's lack of strategic planning capacities and the absence of publicly available documents delineating the principles of Indian strategic thinking. As a result, Indian foreign policy often appears to be conducted on an ad hoc basis, a consequence of "who[mever] the government spoke to last" (Bagchi, 2012). As a first attempt at articulating a strategic vision for a rising India, Nonalignment 2.0 is necessarily conservative in its intentions: "It should be clear that the document does not intend to prescribe specific policies," the authors warn. However, the report does insist upon "the critical need for a strategic consensus and for a unified approach to India's international engagements" (Khilnani et. al., 2012: iii). As such, Nonalignment 2.0 is an attempt to articulate premises, objectives, and a course of action and around which policy elites can agree at a time when India is on the ascent to great power status.3

Given their seniority, the report's authors were in an influential position to encourage consensus within India's strategic community. While Nonalignment 2.0 is attributed to eight authors (see Appendix), some commentators supposed that Sunil Khilnani and Srinath Raghavan, the so-called Nehruvians of the coalition, were most responsible for the report's foreign policy recommendations with the exception of its suggestions vis-a-vis China; the sections on China were attributed to Prakash Menon, a senior policy advisor in the National Security Council Secretariat.

4

3 For an analysis of the lack of political consensus on foreign policy issues since the Cold War, see Sullivan (2008).

Khilnani and Raghavan have both written extensively about Nehru. While much of Khilnani's work has focused on Nehru's nation-building efforts in the context of domestic policy, his influential The Idea of India (1999) commends Nehru's "outstanding successes" in "establishing India as a forceful and independent voice in international politics" (Khilnani, 1999: 39). His praise is tempered, however, by the humiliating Sino-Indian war of 1962, which left

4 Kanti Bajpai (National University of Singapore, Singapore), personal interview with the author, 5 June 2013; Kalyan Raman (Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi), personal interview with the author, 6 June 2013.


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Nehru "with nothing but pathetic fury" and marked "a brutal end to his effort to restructure international relations" (Ibid.: 40). In contrast, Raghavan, in War and Peace in Modern India (2010), insists upon the continuing relevance of Nehru's constructivist understanding of international relations: "The most important and relevant aspect of Nehru's strategic approach is his grasp of the nature and the limits of power," Raghavan affirms. "It is important to remember that every strategic choice feeds into the adversary's set of assumptions and anticipations about our behaviour, and so influences the relationship in the long run" (Raghavan, 2010: 320). Unlike Khilnani, who identifies China policy as nonalignment's Achilles heel, Raghavan's work on Sino-Indian relations proceeds from a Nehruvian premise, insisting that efforts to bring Indian and Chinese perceptions into line ultimately promise peaceful relations between the two rivals (Raghavan, 2013). In an interview with the author, Khilnani defended the choice of title as reflective of a long historical current in foreign policy decisionmaking. The authors rejected C. Raja Mohan's notion that India had crossed the Rubicon from Nehruvian idealism to the hard-nosed realism of great powers. Admitting that the report's title was rather gimmicky, a means of connecting with a readership, Khilnani also emphasised that the title was meant to highlight the difference between Nehruvian nonalignment and its reinterpretation in a new context; while they maintain continuity of thought, the authors appreciate that India exists in a dramatically different environment today.5

Most critics of Nonalignment 2.0 judged the report to be more or less, and for better or worse, consistent with Nehruvian principles. Kanti Bajpai characterised the report as "Nehruvianism with a bit of attitude"––the attitude being the report's advocacy of a quid-pro-quo strategy vis-a-vis Chinese aggression. The report's emphasis on diplomacy and economic engagement, its faith in international institutions and normative regimes, and its insistence upon equidistance from great powers stayed true to the principles of nonalignment 1.0.

6 It is this apparent adherence to the Cold War-era iteration of nonalignment that so concerned many of Nonalignment 2.0's detractors. Bharat Karnad of the Centre for Policy Research, a conservative strategist, dismissed the report as Nehruvian "feebleness dressed up as a theoretical framework."7 K. Shankar Bajpai, a former Foreign Secretary and ambassador to Pakistan, China, and the United States, suggests that nonalignment became a form of neutrality by which India avoided taking stances on pressing international issues; in insisting upon the freedom of policy direction, India merely sacrificed meaningful policymaking experience.8

That the report's supporters and detractors alike characterised Nonalignment 2.0 as Nehruvian––whether a refreshing return to principles or a misplaced exhumation of a long-dead concept––is striking, given that the report advocates policies that are diametrically opposed to those advanced by Nehru in the early years of the Republic. In the area of economic policy, the report calls for the unabashedly liberal strategy of deepening of India's integration into the liberal international economic order––a far departure from Nehru's autarkic economic policies and the Non-Aligned Movement's pursuit of a New International Economic Order. Nonalignment 2.0's advocacy of economic liberalisation policies that began in the 1990s in terms originally used to advance the policies of the 1950s and 1960s demonstrates the ways in which policy elites draw upon traditional ideals to promote new strategic directions. At the same time, the report's attempt to frame India's accumulation of national power in terms of Nehruvian notions of Indian

5 Sunil Khilnani (King's College London), personal interview with the author, 23 August 2013. 6 Kanti Bajpai, personal interview with the author, 5 June 2013. 7 Bharat Karnad, personal interview with the author, 12 June 2013. 8 K. Shankar Bajpai, personal interview with the author, 12 June 2013.


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exceptionalism demonstrate the limits to elite manipulation of nonalignment's legitimating vocabulary. Critical Backgrounds: Taking Rhetoric Seriously This essay is concerned with the ideas expressed in Indian foreign policy discourse - not the execution of foreign policy itself. Most accounts of Indian political discourse adopt one of two approaches. The dominant postcolonial approach to discourse analysis seeks to reveal the macro-social relations or processes, such as the rise of the Indian bourgeoisie, that underpin political debate (R. Bajpai, 2011: 70). More crucial for this essay, constructivist accounts, following the strategic cultural theorist Alastair Ian Johnston, locate particular self-understandings and beliefs as conveyed through political debate to explain and predict policymaking. The efforts of strategic cultural theorists to map the most influential strategic visions expressed in Indian foreign policy discourse provide a useful, shorthand way of thinking about the many options on offer in India's ideational marketplace. However, their careless conflation of preferences and policy is problematic as an analytical approach. While the development of Indian foreign policy indeed may reflect the ideas exchanged in public discourse, the relationship between ideas and policy is not causal, but constraining. With Rochana Bajpai, this essay advances an approach to Indian foreign policy discourse that seeks the defining structural features of the discourse on India's foreign policy for the twenty-first century. Actors operate within this discursive structure by attempting to recast the meanings of dominant concepts and rearrange their relative priority in relation to each other (R. Bajpai 2011.: 14-15; R. Rao 2012: 586). Ideological battles are contests of conceptual architecture: the comparative influence of ideas shifts as ideologues reconfigure the discourse's core concepts to 'sell' their policy recommendations most convincingly. Strategic Cultural Theory: Kanti Bajpai and Rahul Sagar Borrowing from Johnston's definition of strategic culture,9

9 According to Johnston, strategic culture is "an integrated set of symbols...that acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting grand strategic preferences by formulating concepts of the role and efficacy of force in interstate political affairs." Quoted in Kanti Bajpai, "Indian Strategic Culture," in Chambers (ed.), South Asia in 2020: Future Strategic Balances and Alliances, Strategic Studies Institute, 2002: 247.

K. Bajpai seeks to identify the "basic assumptions about orderliness in the world" that characterise Indian thinking about foreign policy (K. Bajpai, 2002: 247). He identifies three strands of thought - Nehruvian, neoliberal, and hyperrealist - each of which begins from distinct premises. Suggesting that these basic precepts can tell us something about "how India might behave over the next decade or so" (Ibid.: 245), he attempts to gauge the political salience of Nehruvian, neoliberal, and hyperrealist visions by juxtaposing their strategic prescriptions against the policies carried out by the Government of India at significant junctures since 1990. For example, K. Bajpai affirms that "the basics of the Nehruvian approach, which sees the need for a multifaceted engagement with Pakistan that tries to change Pakistani attitudes, are clearly visible" in Indian policy towards Pakistan, citing official policy promoting trade, travel, and people-to-people exchanges (Ibid.: 288).


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Strategic cultural theorists, like constructivists, have continually run up against the problem of how to demonstrate empirically the causal nature of ideas. Efforts to demarcate culture as an independent variable can appear tautological, as political structures and decisions are identified as sources and reflections of political culture. Additionally, constructivists understand cultures as dynamic and evolving, thus challenging the strategic cultural theorist's method of looking to canonical texts as repositories of cultural precepts still relevant to contemporary policymaking (Lantis, 2002: 105). K. Bajpai encounters this challenge in his efforts to map the discourse surrounding foreign policy onto the execution of foreign policy. For example, why do Nehruvian recommendations vis-a-vis Pakistan continue to bear influence, even after the disappointing breakdown of the 2001 Agra negotiations on Kashmir? In simply looking for similarities between ideational preferences expressed in public debates on foreign policy and the actual course that Indian foreign policy takes, K. Bajpai offers an insufficient account of the causal relationship between culture and policymaking. He neglects to delineate the circumstances in which Nehruvian, neoliberal, or hyperrealist thinking is evoked, or why one gains traction over another at a particular time. Moreover, he does not make clear whether it is the development of public discourse or the dynamics between those most closely involved in policymaking that determines which strand of thought is dominant at a given time. While strategic cultural theory aims to demonstrate the depth to which ideologies permeate state policymaking apparatuses, at best K. Bajpai hints at a circumstantial connection between preferences and policy. Rahul Sagar improves upon K. Bajpai's approach by delineating the contexts in which some ideational preferences gain prominence over others. Borrowing K. Bajpai's taxonomical approach, he identifies four strategic visions that compete for influence among policymakers (Sagar, 2012: 64). "On the whole," he writes, "it is unlikely that any one of the [four] visions...will monopolise the world-view of Indians in the twenty-first century because they represent ideas about politics that wax and wane with circumstances. What matters therefore is their comparative influence in any given period" (Ibid.: 69-70). In seeking to identify which strand of thought holds greatest comparative influence at a given time, Sagar looks to the context provided by India's domestic political dynamics. For example, he suggests that while economic liberalisation continues to enjoy broad support, the liberal vision's reach is limited by "an increasingly salient identity politics" that threatens to obstruct the removal of trade barriers, etc. (Ibid.: 70). In characterising the link between ideological preferences expressed in public debate and the execution of Indian foreign policy as circumstantial at best, Sagar indicates that the work of Johnston and other strategic cultural theorists, which explains the development of foreign policy with reference to long-held political ideas, is of limited utility in the Indian context. However, even if we put Indian foreign policymaking to one side, both K. Bajpai's and Sagar's analyses fail to provide a full account of why the discourse surrounding foreign policy takes the shape that it does at particular politico-historical junctures. Sagar's suggestion that the Indian strategic community adopts and discards ideological preferences solely on the basis of political occurrences is one-dimensional. In depicting ideological debates as wholly reactive to political developments - i.e. discursive actors respond rationally to changing circumstances in the political and security environments - Sagar neglects to consider the impact of political norms on the shape of public discourse.


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Rochana Bajpai: A Conceptual Analysis of Political Discourse With Rochana Bajpai, I draw upon Michael Freeden's notion of conceptual contestability to pursue a richer account of the dynamics of Indian foreign policy discourse. Ideologies, for Freeden, attempt to attach particular meanings to contested political concepts; political interests gain or lose influence by successfully or unsuccessfully deploying those concepts to legitimate their respective political or strategic visions. Thus he distinguishes between the concepts that have proved longstanding features of public debate and the political agendas that maneuver those concepts into justificatory frameworks. R. Bajpai builds upon Freeden's conceptual (rather than functional10

R. Bajpai applies Freeden's thesis to her history of Indian debates over group-differentiated rights, identifying democracy, secularism, social justice, national unity, and development as comprising the interlinked political concepts from which political interests draw a legitimating vocabulary. This "conceptual constellation" thus provides the defining structural features of the public discourse on minority rights. Actors operate within this discursive structure by attempting to recast the meanings of dominant concepts and rearrange their relative priority in relation to each other (Ibid.: 14-15; Rao, 2012: 586). For example, R. Bajpai argues, in the years following Independence, national unity constituted "the core concept in relation to which all the concepts were construed"––the axis around which the other elements of the legitimating political vocabulary were organized (Ibid.: 75).

) analysis of political discourse to offer an account of the construction and breakdown of political hegemony (R. Bajpai, 2011: 13-14).

R. Bajpai's analysis "brings to light the prevailing normative vocabulary that is an enabling or inhibiting condition for political action, and thereby provides an important bit of the story of how an outcome was brought about" (Ibid.: 20-21). Discursive boundaries enable or constrain political elites in their efforts to advance a particular course of action. This approach does not seek a mechanistic connection between norms and policymaking, in which ideas constitute a causal and independent variable. Rather, in the vein of Friedrich Kratochwil, it aims to provide a fuller account of a given action by thinking "along the lines of 'building a bridge' which allows us to get from 'here' to 'there'... No 'mechanism,' no hammer hitting a lever, no springs, no billiard balls are involved here" (Kratochwil, 2001: 66). We cannot conclude that policymakers necessarily proceed from the intersubjective values or normative frameworks expressed in public discourse, as much constructivist and strategic cultural theory scholarship suggests, but their ability to develop a convincing consensus is enabled or constrained by the continued salience of treasured ideals. R. Bajpai's approach thus makes ambiguous the direction of constructivism's causal arrow. While political elites attempt to attach new normative content to political concepts in order to justify new policy orientations (norm substitution), 11

they are also bound to justificatory structures that, once rooted in public debate, can only be stretched so far.

10 R. Bajpai critiques institutionalist instrumentalist and Marxist functionalist analyses, which are primarily concerned with the social relations that produce ideologies. R. Bajpai, 2011: 16. 11 For a similar analysis of top-down discursive interventions resulting in norm substitution, see Jeffrey S. Lantis (2011), "Redefining the Nonproliferation Norm? Australian Uranium, the NPT, and the Global Nuclear Revival," Australian Journal of Politics and History 57:4, 543-561.


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Kate Sullivan: Repurposing Old Rhetoric for New Purposes While Kate Sullivan's examination of the discourse surrounding the 2008 Indo-U.S. civil nuclear agreement usefully demonstrates the ways in which policy elites attempt to recast traditional concepts so as to advance new policy orientations, her argument would have benefited from the conceptual approach advocated by R. Bajpai. Sullivan characterises the debates that preceded the civil nuclear deal as a competition to fix the meanings of those concepts that remain persistent elements of the Indian political imaginary. Identifying freedom as a core conceptual legacy of both the independence movement and Cold War-era nonalignment policy, Sullivan demonstrates how politicians on both sides of the nuclear deal debate appropriated notions of freedom to advance their policy prescriptions (Sullivan 2008: 73). Both the right-wing Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) and left-wing Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-M) drew upon the same legitimating vocabulary: while the NJP claimed that the terms of the deal jeopardized the development of India's nuclear weapons and thus its strategic autonomy, the CPI-M presented the deal as evidence of the Manmohan Singh's administration's willingness to subvert independence on foreign policy matters to U.S. objectives (Ibid.; 74). In identifying a clear overlap between the normative terms used to legitimate the nuclear deal and those articulated by Nehru during the early years of the Republic, Sullivan suggests that old rhetoric might be repurposed to sell new policies. However, her analysis lacks the conceptual specificity essential to explaining exactly how discursive actors recast long-held political norms to serve new, and sometimes radically different, policy directions. "Notions of freedom have certainly not been omitted from the leadership's foreign policy rhetoric," Sullivan writes: "The concept of freedom advocated by the current leadership extends beyond the previous vision of an isolated self-reliant India, to a self-confident India taking an active and proactive role in global affairs" (Ibid.) As Sullivan constructs her comparison of Nehruvian and contemporary notions of freedom, political leaders seem capable of imbuing the term "freedom" with any useful meaning. This implies that freedom is, indeed, merely a term - that the ideas evoked by Nehru and consolidated, however insincerely or confusedly, over time through reiteration, are empty signifiers or politically expedient buzzwords (R. Bajpai 2011: 74). Moreover, Sullivan fails to account for any resistance on the part of Singh's audience; the consumers of rhetoric, having accepted and internalized a particular understanding of freedom, may not readily accept its invocation in the service of another policy position. That is not to say that conceptual vocabularies are not adapted and transformed over time; it is the aim of this essay to demonstrate that transformation. However, a more useful analysis of political rhetoric demonstrates specifically how legitimating concepts are recast to suit new contexts and objectives. This approach illuminates the extent to which traditional ideas persist in political discourse and locates the spaces in which new meanings have been or might be introduced. This essay attempts an analysis of Nonalignment 2.0's contemporary iteration of nonalignment policy. Much of R. Bajpai's study examines the process by which the traditional concepts comprising policy elites' legitimating vocabularies are consolidated, recast, or reprioritized over time; crucially, she emphasises that much of this evolution takes place in the process of everyday discussion and debate, rather than in the creative minds of "innovative ideologists" like Nehru (R. Bajpai, 2011: 18). It is beyond the scope of this essay to examine the processes by which the conceptual constellation of nonalignment 1.0 of the late 1940s and 1950s transformed into that of Nonalignment 2.0. Although I do not attempt to provide a filmic account of nonalignment's evolution, I maintain that a comparison of the two discursive "snapshots"


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offers useful insights into the ways in which discursive structures exert a limiting force on policy development. I emphasise that I do not intend to suggest that the authors of Nonalignment 2.0 themselves are responsible for the restructuring of nonalignment discourse, but Nonalignment 2.0 certainly provides an illustration or reflection of this structural evolution. Borrowing R. Bajpai's approach, by which I unpack the normative terms traditionally associated with nonalignment, I compare the conceptual architectures of "nonalignment 1.0" and Nonalignment 2.0. While Nehruvian nonalignment prioritized global justice as its central concept in relation to which the other normative themes of nonalignment were construed, Nonalignment 2.0 privileges power as the conceptual axis around which other ideas are situated. In some issue areas, such as economic development, this conceptual rearrangement proves compelling; in others, such as security, it falls short of convincing readers that its policy prescriptions contain normative substance. Nonalignment 1.0: A Conceptual Snapshot Most assessments of Nehru's rhetorical representations of nonalignment make use of a functionalist, rather than conceptual, critique. Nonalignment is alternatively represented as a counterhegemonic challenge to the contemporary world order or a politically expedient rhetoric aimed at maximizing the national interest (Abraham, 2008: 195). The former interpretation positions nonalignment as the product of a Gandhian moral subjectivity, rooted in the anti-colonial struggle; the latter understands it as a fence-sitting strategy designed to maximize gains from the competing superpowers in the absence of substantive hard power capacities (Ibid.) Even Srinath Raghavan, considered one of Nonalignment 2.0's Nehruvian thinkers, characterises nonalignment rhetoric in terms of its political expediency (Raghavan, 2010: 20-21). This essay is unconcerned with the sincerity of Nehru's rhetoric; rather, it is concerned with the specific concepts deployed to persuade India's policymaking elite to support nonalignment policy, regardless of their function. I recognize that nonalignment was, even in Nehru's time, highly amorphous: responsive to world events, such as the disastrous 1962 Sino-Indian conflict, the normative underpinnings of nonalignment hardly constituted a consensus (Mohan, 2003: 34). The sheer volume of Nehru's speeches, writings, and correspondences make any attempt to pin down the political objectives and ideological underpinnings of nonalignment an extremely difficult task. Bearing in mind these challenges, I advance Mithi Mukherjee's efforts to situate Nehru's writing and oratory on nonalignment policy and the role of the United Nations within a juridical discursive framework. Drawing from Mukherjee's argument, I construct a conceptual schema by which to understand the specific meanings of the terms included in nonalignment's legitimating vocabulary. Global justice was the central concept within this discursive space. Following Independence, India faced two primary challenges (K. Bajpai, 2003: 240-243). As an underdeveloped, postcolonial nation, India was ill-served by a discriminatory global capitalist system that benefited wealthy states at the expense of weak states. Nehru was also fearful of the bipolar nature of the international system during the Cold War. As K. Bajpai explains, the Cold War struggle, increasingly exacerbated by the dangers of nuclear weapons, posed the possibility of all-destructive war to which no state would be immune: "The distribution of power would be totalizing; under the threat of global annihilation, there would be enormous pressures on virtually every country to side with one superpower or another" (K. Bajpai, 2003: 240). Within this


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context, freedom from influence from either bloc constituted an essential component of Nehru's security strategy; but Nehru had no intention, nor hope, of compelling the United States and the Soviet Union to reduce tensions. Rather, Nehru conceived of India's role as a mediator and advocate for postcolonial states' interests within a rule-bound international system. Global justice thus comprised the central axis of nonalignment 1.0's conceptual vocabulary. The other elements of that vocabulary––for the purposes of this essay, I focus on freedom and power––were construed in relation to the pursuit of global justice. Nehru presented freedom from the undue influence of the Cold War power blocs, or policy independence, as instrumental to the achievement of global justice. The presence of aligned blocs impinged upon the ability and willingness of the great powers to rule on international disputes in an unbiased manner; moreover, India maintained its legitimacy as a mediator only by remaining nonaligned. Power was also theorized in relation to the pursuit of a more just international order. Nehru's notion of global justice was constitutive of India's role in international affairs: lacking the material capacities of those nations seated on the United Nations Security Council, Nehru represented India as an advocate of Asian interests in a forum dominated by Western powers. It was India's lack of material power that facilitated its role as advocate––Mukherjee affirms that "India saw its international standing as deriving from representing the claims of others, not as a nation that used power on its own behalf" (Mukherjee, 2010: 262). The Permanent Five, in contrast, were necessarily in a position to encourage international equality by serving as impartial arbiters. For Nehru, "justice was seen as necessarily tied to and emanating from power" (Ibid.: 261); as a weak nation, India did not seek to challenge the most powerful states, but rather to make appeals to peace and justice from its non-aligned vantage point. A Juridical Framework Maintaining that "the pursuit of national power was not a central plank of India's foreign policy in the postcolonial period,"12 Mukherjee affirms instead that "nonalignment, as a policy, was determined by the ideal of justice as impartiality or neutrality" (Mukherjee, 2010: 253). In a 1949 speech at Columbia University, Nehru identified nonalignment's core objective as "the pursuit of peace, not through alignment of any major power or group of powers, but through an independent approach to each controversial or disputed issue" (cited in Mukherjee, 2010: 253). This juridical conception of policy independence or freedom from influence13

is most clear in Nehru's comments on the role of the United Nations in resolving international conflicts: Mukherjee goes as far as to suggest that this discursive feature is only "predicated on the existence of the United Nations as a supranational juridical institution for the resolution of conflict between nations" (Ibid.). In a broadcast to the nation in 1948, Nehru "visualised a future wherein the United Nations might become for nations what nations were for individuals" by

an extension of the federal principle...giving each national unit freedom to fashion its destiny according to its genius but subject always to the basic covenants of a world government. (Cited in S. Rana, 1970: 48)

12 Explain here: Mukherjee locates Nehru's juridical discursive framework in India's colonial legacy. 13 Note about the meaning of "neutrality" in this context. "I do not like the word 'neutral' as being applied to India," Nehru affirmed. "Without doubt, we are unaligned...but the important fact is we are committed to various policies, various urges, various objectives, and various principles" (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1983: 86).


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For Nehru, India's role in pursuing global justice had little to do with the buildup of national power. "Nehruvians are not so untutored as to imagine that a Third World coalition could confront the great powers in any real military or balance of power sense," K. Bajpai explains (K. Bajpai, 2003: 251). Rather, Nehru represented India's role in the pursuit of global justice as that of advocate for the nonaligned states.14

In its role as advocate, India's "strategy was to call upon the Security Council and call upon it to judge fairly the issues that affected nonaligned countries" (Mukherjee, 2010: 264). The crucial issue facing the nonaligned states was economic equality. For Nehru, the policies of the Bretton Woods institutions unfairly advantaged weak states, allowing "rich countries to exploit the postcolonial economies and deepen the misery of millions of people worldwide" (K. Bajpai, 2003: 243). In a speech to the UN General Assembly delivered on 3 November 1948, Nehru remarked, "It is a strange thing that when...people in many parts of the world are dying from hunger, the attention of this Assembly of Nations is concentrated only on a number of political problems." (Mehrotra, 1989: 120). Ultimately, Nehru reasoned, India could make Western powers understand

On the issue of nuclear disarmament, for example, Nehru made no effort to coerce or compel the United States and the Soviet Union to cease testing. Instead, affirming "that it is in the power of America and Russia to...save humanity from the ultimate disaster that faces it," Nehru made "this appeal to the great powers, more especially the leaders of America and Russia, in whose hands fate and destiny have placed such tremendous power today" (cited in Mukherjee, 2010: 262).

that if some parts of the world do not progress, remain backward, they have an adverse effect on the whole economy of the world and they tend to drag down those parts that are at present prosperous. Therefore, it becomes inevitable to consider these problems in the global way and to pay even more attention to those parts which are relatively backward. (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1983: 255) Nehru's privileging of international equality as the conceptual core of nonalignment also aimed at demonstrating the usefulness of nonalignment policy for Indians at home. Swadesh Rana emphasises Nehru's care to represent nonalignment as an extension of the Indian national interest from the domestic to the international sphere: Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the Indian Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Nehru's sister, affirmed in a 1956 Foreign Affairs article: "We need peace not in order to become powerful or prosperous, but in order to...eat, to be clothed, and housed and made literate" (Rana, 1970: 50). Economic equality––ultimately, under Indira Gandhi at the helm of the Non-Aligned Movement, conceptualized as global economic redistribution and regulation––best served India's development needs. Tandem to the centrality of justice in Nehru's discursive position is the "absence of a discourse of national power" (Mukherjee, 2010: 254). Indeed, for Mukherjee, the discourse

14 Nehru justified India's role as advocate for poor and postcolonial nations in part by reference to its size and geographical location. In his inaugural address at the third session of the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East in 1948, Nehru implored his audience to "look at the map... whatever regions [in Asia] you may have in mind, the importance of India cannot be ignored" (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1983: 22)


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surrounding nonalignment 1.0 "was both incompatible with a discourse of national power and excluded resort to war as a solution to disputes" (Ibid.) Given the injustice––the dangerous, self-interested power blocs of the Cold War international system and the exploitative capitalist order––threatening India's security and economic development, Nehru identified the pursuit of a more equal and inclusive international order, rather than the build-up of national power to challenge the great powers, as India's central foreign policy objective. Accordingly, notions of freedom or policy independence––"freedom" being the conceptual buzzword most often associated with nonalignment––took on a specifically juridical meaning. Nonalignment's legitimating vocabulary thus developed in a very particular postcolonial context in which India's lack of material capabilities drove a particular rhetorical strategy. Written in a dramatically different context, Nonalignment 2.0 attempts significant rhetorical maneuvering in order to update nonalignment for the new century. Nonalignment 2.0: Freedom, Justice, Power It goes without saying that India's circumstances have changed drastically since Nehru began his pursuit of a more equal global order over sixty years ago. By many accounts, India's ascendance towards Great Power status has been accompanied by a reappraisal of the Nehruvian legacy. Echoed in many of the criticisms directed at Nonalignment 2.0, a "pragmatist" strain in Indian foreign policy thinking has questioned the ideals of the Nehruvian era and rejected the notion that India should try to live up to such traditions (Ollapally and Rajagopalan, 2011: 150). Former Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor expressed his impatience with the moralism often associated with Nehruvianism in 2010, remarking that the "foreign policy of Nehru and Gandhi was more like a moralistic running commentary" (Vasudevan, 2010). Pointing to India's de facto alliance with the Soviet Union,15

On the other hand, Indian policy elites have insisted upon their commitment to long-held Nehruvian ideals, in spite of the apparent structural pressures of great power status. Sonia Gandhi, at the 2006 Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on India's future as "The Next Global Superpower," indicated that she was "somewhat uneasy with the very word 'Superpower'" because

Ganguly and Mukherji deem India's historical commitment to nonalignment "quaint at best and hypocritical at worst" (Ganguly and Mukherji, 2011: 18).

for too many of us, it evokes images of hegemony, of aggression, of power politics, of military might, of division and conflict...During long periods of our past, India exercised a profound influence over the course of world history, and it did so without exercising any kind of overt power. Why should we think of ourselves as a 'Global Superpower?' Why not instead work towards becoming a global force for Peace, Progress, and Prosperity? (Cited in Chacko, 2012: 1) The authors of Nonalignment 2.0 too sense a structural pressure to conform to the demands of great power politics. "We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that great power competition of a classical kind will continue to define aspects of the global order," they caution

15 India signed the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 1971. While not a formal alliance, India's acceptance of the agreement constituted a major departure from the Nehruvian era.


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(Khilnani et. al., 2012: 69). Still, echoing Sonia Gandhi, the report insists upon India's exceptionalism and suggests that India will not forced to behave like other great powers: Will India be like great powers of the past? Or will it set new standards in moral and ideological leadership? In many ways the paradox is that precisely at the moment nations become powerful, they are vulnerable to being blindsided by their own ambition. Precisely at the moment they have an ability to shape the world, they shape it according to imperatives of power. India must remain true to its aspiration of creating a new and alternative universality. (Khilnani et. al. 2012: 69; italics mine) Nonalignment 2.0's rejection of power politics appears consistent with Nehru's privileging of global justice as the central objective of Indian foreign policy. However, the report's vision of an "alternative universality" differs widely from that advocated by Nehru in the years following Independence. Committed to the economic liberalisation as a means of maintaining India's growth rate, the authors elevate freedom––defined in a negative sense, as freedom from the interference of international economic regulation––over a more just international order within their conceptual framework. Global justice, in keeping with the requirements of economic freedom, is conflated with a liberal vision of an open economic order––precisely the opposite of Nehru's conception of an equal international order. On the one hand, Nonalignment 2.0's successful deployment of Nehruvian vocabulary to advance liberal economic policy demonstrates the lasting power and flexibility of nonalignment 1.0. On the other, its lame effort to link India's growing material capabilities to its moral legitimacy points to the limitations of nonalignment concepts in forging a new political consensus. Freedom as an Open Economic Order Nonalignment 2.0 advocates an unabashedly liberal policy of deeper integration into the international economic order––a far cry from Nehru's autarkic policies or the New International Economic order envisioned by the Non-Aligned Movement. Still, the authors argue for India's continued commitment to an open economic order in the same terms that Nehru utilised: global justice and the democratisation of the international system. While nonalignment 1.0 defined freedom in terms of the pursuit of global justice, Nonalignment 2.0 defines global justice in terms of the pursuit of freedom. Thus global justice is conceived as negative freedom, an open economic order, free from the regulating tendencies of developed states experiencing economic difficulty. Central to Nonalignment 2.0 is its commitment to liberal economic reforms and its insistence upon the need for India's deeper integration into the global economy. "India's primary strategic interest is to create an open economic order," the report declares: While India has often been accused of being protectionist in the past, current events have left India on the better side of liberalisation arguments. Thus, India might end up becoming one of the more prominent supporters of continued economic liberalisation (primarily trade in goods and services, and possibly finance as well). (Khilnani et. al. 2012: 26) A strategic approach's core objective should be "to enhance India's strategic space and capacity


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for independent agency - which in turn will give it maximum options for its own internal development" (Ibid.: 8). The preconditions for India's internal development - such as the need to secure essential resources such as energy, protect the rights of Indian labour and Indian overseas investments, gain trade access, and maintain open shipping lanes - require that India preserve maximum options in its relations with other states. Thus Nonalignment 2.0 makes use of a negative conception of freedom as the absence of constraints from other powers. This understanding of freedom is consistent with that outlined by Sullivan in her study of the discourse surrounding the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal (Sullivan, 2008). While Nehru understood policy independence as a necessary prerequisite to a more equal international order, Nonalignment 2.0 represents global justice as an absence of economic regulation. While the authors emphasise the need for inclusive economic governance to ensure India's access to forums relevant to its interests (Khilnani et. al.: 35), they also warn against the efforts of developed countries to erect "arbitrary" obstacles to India's growth. "A likely backdoor form of protectionism is going to be environmental standards and labour-related protectionism," the authors predict (Ibid.: 27). Evoking the Nehruvian commitment to the solidarity of the weak, the authors affirm that "[India] will have to build coalitions against arbitrary restrictions that amount to trade protectionism in disguise" (Ibid), particularly as developed countries "may not continue to view globalisation as a non-zero-sum game" (Ibid.: 26). Nonalignment 2.0 also deploys the concept of global justice as a means of constraining a competitor, China. Echoing Nehru's stress on the importance of multilateralism as the best vehicle for international action, the authors advocate multilateral initiatives as a means of guarding against trade restrictions. "India needs to start taking a more active role in bilateral and multilateral forums to ensure that the world economic order remains open" (Ibid.: 26), they affirm. "It is very important that China remains tethered to a fair multilateral system, and a rule-bound international order. In that context, India's own commitments to multilateralism will have an effect of shoring up a rule-bound system" (26-27). While a commitment to economic liberalisation as a means of spurring Indian growth has been a matter of centre-left consensus in India since the 1990s, Nonalignment 2.0 demonstrates the persistence of nonalignment 1.0's legitimating vocabulary in efforts to explain changing policy directions. In identifying freedom from as nonalignment's conceptual core, the authors of Nonalignment 2.0 persuasively advocate for an open economic order in the Nehruvian terms of international justice. India's Exemplary Power Summarizing the objectives of Nonalignment 2.0 in an article for India Abroad, Khilnani draws upon Nehruvian ideals to insist that India "use [its] accruing national power to build a more just and equitable world order" (Khilnani, 2012: A17). To some extent, Nonalignment 2.0's insistence upon moral legitimacy as a source of power–– "the fundamental source of India’s power in the world is going to be the power of its example," the report declares in its introduction (Ibid.: 7)––is consistent with Nehru's conception of justice as emanating from power (Mukherjee, 2010: 261). But while Nehru positioned the Cold War-era powers as the enablers of the ideals of global justice via their roles as impartial arbiters, Nonalignment 2.0 represents these ideals as the source of India's material power. This understanding of the relationship between legitimacy and power has left many readers puzzled, as moral legitimacy does not seem an adequate response to the security threats from China and Pakistan as described by the report. For the authors of Nonalignment 2.0, India's exemplary power will enable its rise on the


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international stage. Its "enormous moral and ideological capital" is derived from its legacy of great moral leaders, such as Gandhi, Nehru, and Ambedkhar, and, in implicit contrast to China, its commitment to a peaceful and democratic growth model (Khilnani, et. al., 2012: 69). The authors set the limits of India's international power and influence in accordance with its ability to uplift its citizens while preserving democratic governance: If India can maintain high growth rates, leverage that growth to enhance the capabilities of all its citizens, and maintain robust democratic traditions and institutions, there are few limits to India’s global role and influence. The foundations of India’s success will, therefore, depend on its developmental model. If our developmental model is successful, it will give us still greater legitimacy in the world—and it will enhance our capacity to act for ourselves, in pursuit of our values and interests, in the international arena. (Ibid.:7; emphasis mine) Moral legitimacy, then, is the source of India's international power and the basis for the pursuit of strategic autonomy. As Ashley Tellis has pointed out, there are number of uncertainties in such an assertion (Tellis, 2012: 35). First, the report offers little indication of what "values and interests" India intends to promote. "Power not backed by the power of ideas can be blind," the authors assert: India "should, as it rises, be clear about what values it stands for" (Khilnani et. al., 2012: 69). Yet, other than insisting upon India's adherance to the highest human and universal values," Nonalignment 2.0 fails to specify what those ideals are exactly (Ibid.: 69). The report's gestures to the Gandhian and Nehruvian legacies of moral legitimacy thus seem rather hollow. Second, the authors of Nonalignment 2.0 do not demonstrate how moral example will achieve physical security or solve the other problems outlined in the report. Tellis puzzles over the report's efforts to identify legitimacy as a source of power needed to address the many challenges delineated in Nonalignment 2.0. For Tellis, it remains unclear how India might leverage moral legitimacy into enhanced security: It is not clear how success here contributes to the enhancement of India’s physical security and decisional autonomy beyond the increases in material capability engendered as a result. If the latter is what finally matters in competitive international relations, the exemplary dimension of Indian success, however important, could end up being relatively less significant. (Tellis, 2012: 36). Legitimacy might indeed result in the accrual of material capabilities: after all, the George W. Bush administration justified the Indo-U.S. civil nuclear agreement at least partially on the basis of India's commitment to democratic governance (Hayes, 2009). However, Nonalignment 2.0 does not pick up this thread, instead falling back on exceptionalist rhetoric envisioning India's "rightful place in the world" (Khilnani et. al., 2012: 69). Nonalignment 2.0's discussion of Indian exceptionalism illustrates the limitations of particular Nehruvian norms to suit changed contexts and new policy directions. Nehru envisioned India's role in achieving global justice in terms of its capacity to act as an advocate for the nonaligned states. Thus India acted in the service of those superpowers that served as international arbiters; it did not use its position to pursue its own national power. Nonalignment 2.0's efforts to identify moral legitimacy as a source of national power thus reflects the anxieties


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of policy elites in the post-Cold War order: in the absence of political consensus on India's strategic trajectory for the coming decades, the authors return to the elements of the existing discourse. Nonalignment 2.0 reveals both the endurance and fatigue of nonalignment 1.0's legitimating vocabulary. On the one hand––despite some observers' insistence upon India's post-Cold War realist turn––policy elites still feel the compulsion to explain their policy recommendations in familiar terms. On the other hand, Nonalignment 2.0 also speaks to the contextual specificity of nonalignment 1.0, formulated in a moment of powerlessness. Today, in a much different context, the conceptual schema that once structured nonalignment discourse must be adapted to India's recent accumulation of material capacities. Conclusion This paper has advanced an approach to Indian foreign policy discourse that seeks the defining structural features of the public discourse on minority rights. The approach outlined here improves upon the efforts of K. Bajpai and Sagar to identify the contending strategic visions that inform public debate and measure their comparative influence at a given politico-historical juncture. Sagar cautions against suggesting that ideas meaningfully inform strategic behaviour in the case of Indian foreign policy (Sagar 2012: 71). However, Sagar and K. Bajpai circumscribe the value of their own analyses by drawing too wide a division between preferences and policy. Careful to restrict the scope of their examinations to the consumers of foreign policy, rather than the producers, they underestimate the extent to which political discourse constrains policymakers in their efforts to 'sell' policy decisions. This paper does not dispute Sagar's distinction between the ideological preferences that vie for influence in public debates and those that inform the ad hoc and opaque policymaking process. While the Government of India's relationship with or involvement in the report's drafting remains largely unclear, a senior source suggests that much of the impetus for the report came from Prime Minister Singh himself, who hoped to spur public debate on foreign policy issues.16

While many of the authors lean centre-left in the direction of Singh's Congress Party, this essay does not presume that the Singh administration in any way dictated the content of the report. Indeed, due to the "hermetically sealed"

The introduction to Nonalignment 2.0 indicates that National Security Advisor Menon and Deputy National Security Advisors Alok Prasad and Latha Reddy attended the authors' meetings, though they were not involved in the drafting of the report and refrained from officially sanctioning it. Still, the calibre of the report's authors and the inclusion of the National Security Advisor at its launch suggested to some that Nonalignment 2.0 is something of a mouthpiece for the Singh administration. The prominent journalist Swapan Dasgupta, for example, read Nonalignment 2.0 as a "quasi-official" document designed to "provide an intellectual foundation for a post-Manmohan Singh approach to foreign policy by the Congress establishment" (Dasgupta, 2012).

17 nature of the Indian foreign policymaking process, it is unclear that the report has had or will have any influence on the execution of foreign policy. A senior official in the Prime Minister's Office confirmed this suggestion, indicating that the report was taken far more seriously outside of South Block than inside.18

16 Personal interview with the author (off the record).

However, the

17 Varun Sahni (Jawaharlal Nehru University), personal interview with the author, 13 June 2013. 18 Personal interview with the author (off the record).


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apparent desire of the Prime Minister's Office to encourage debate is consistent with this essay's assertion that public discourse, at least to a degree, enables and constrains elite political action. Menon, in his address at Nonalignment 2.0's launch, emphasised the need for informed public debate on foreign policy issues: at a time when the world's balance of power is shifting towards Asia, "the need for seeing a national consensus [on foreign policy issues] is strongest" (Remarks by Menon, 2012). Consistent with Menon's emphasis on the need, now more than ever, for a national consensus on India's foreign policy trajectory, External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid attempted to articulate a set of principles to attract broad support at a public lecture in Singapore in July 2013. His comments evidence an understanding of the salience of Nonalignment 1.0's conceptual legacy in today's foreign policy discourse: Frankly, the language that we used during the heyday of the NAM [nonaligned] movement is today translated into a modern-day phrase that we use, which is strategic autonomy. We remain strategically autonomous. Remaining strategically autonomous is, we believe, the right moral thing to do. It may have specific advantages and disadvantages, given the situation in the world, but we do believe that our foreign policy has a huge element of moral principles built into it, and it is consistent with those moral principles that we don’t place ourselves in any group or any alliance that would be inimical to anybody else. (Cited in Suryanarayana 2013: 3-4) Just as many commentators dismissed Nonalignment 2.0's discussions of India's exemplary power as rhetorical fluff, Khurshid's appropriation of NAM-era language, and especially its concern for India's moral standing, might elicit cynicism from Indian observers. While we cannot conclude from Khurshid's statement - or other similar statements by Indian policymakers19

R. Bajpai's approach may also be useful for those who take seriously Khurshid's rhetoric, particularly American observers puzzled by India's apparent devotion to nonalignment. Echoing Tellis's critique of Nonalignment 2.0 (discussed in introduction), American military officials and policymakers have characterised nonalignment as an outdated relic to which India clings, frustrating the potential for a closer Indo-American partnership.

- that a dedication to strategic autonomy as moral conviction has any meaningful bearing on the execution of foreign policy, his comments speak to highest-level policymakers' perception of the wider discursive climate. However, Nonalignment 2.0 and the responses it generated suggest that Khurshid's reliance on the concepts that have traditionally comprised Indian foreign policy's legitimating vocabulary may reflect an overestimation of their resonance on certain issues.

20

19 e.g. "We want strategic autonomy. We don't want to be identified with U.S. policy in Asia, even if we secretly like it." Ambassador T. P. Sreenivasan, retired Indian diplomat and former Permanent Representative for India at the United Nations, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, August 9 2012. http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/14/why_india_is_so_half_hearted_about_the_us_rebalance inevitably place us on parallel, if independent paths.” http://www.firstpost.com/world/partnership-with-india-good-for-us-and-global-peace-pentagon-692938.html?sz=s&rfh=1_towards_asia

The conceptual understanding

20 e.g. Admiral Samuel Locklear, Commander, U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), stated in an April 2013 congressional hearing: "India’s legacy of non-alignment and commitment to a policy of 'strategic autonomy' is often viewed as limiting the relationship. However, our shared values and commitment to democratic principles


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of Indian foreign policy rhetoric advanced in this paper offers a fuller understanding of the Singh administration's frequent appeals to nonalignment. While this approach does not attempt to account foreign policy decisions on this basis, it illuminates some of the context in which policymakers operate - if not at the level of policymaking, then at the level of presentation. As most American commentators are not privy to India's opaque policy formulation processes, a consideration of the justificatory structures that have long directed debates on Indian foreign policy may add nuance to their understandings of India's strategic perspective. This essay has considered the normative vocabularies that characterise Indian foreign policy discourse and, accordingly, enable or constrain elite political action. Drawing from Rochana Bajpai's work on the discourse surrounding the protection of minority rights in India, it sketches the "conceptual constellation" that has traditionally directed public reasoning on foreign policy in order to provide a snapshot of the points of consensus and contention that animate foreign policy discourse today. My assessment of Nonalignment 2.0 and the debates it inspired identifies those issue areas to which recurrent themes in existing discourse have been adapted and those for which traditional justificatory structures appear strained. However, rather than formulate new guiding principles, as Ganguly and Mukherji suggest, new policy directions are justified or criticised in familiar language.


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Appendix: The Authors of Nonalignment 2.0

Sunil Khilnani Professor and director of the King's India Institute, King's College London

Rajiv Kumar Secretary General of the Federation of

Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry

Pratap Bhanu Mehta President of the Centre for Policy

Research, New Delhi

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Prakash Menon Policy Advisor, Indian National Security Council Secretariat

Nandan Nilekani Chairman of the Unique Identification

Authority of India

Srinath Raghavan Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research

Shyam Saran Former Foreign Secretary; senior

fellow at the Centre for Policy Research

Siddharth Varadarajan Editor, The Hindu

Source: Ashley Tellis (2012). Nonalignment Redux: The Perils of Old Wine in New Skins. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: 8.


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References Books and Articles Appadorai, A., ed., 1982. Select Documents on India's Foreign Policy and Relations, 1947-1972. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bajpai, Kanti, 2002. "Indian Strategic Culture." In Chambers (ed.), South Asia in 2020: Future Strategic Balances and Alliances. Strategic Studies Institute. 245-304. Bajpai, Kanti, 2003. "Indian Conceptions of Order and Justice." In Foot, et. al. (eds), Order and Justice in International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 236-261. Bajpai, Rochana, 2011. Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Brar, Bhupinder, 2004. "State, Civil Society, Nation, Nonalignment: Discourses of Freedom and Foreign Policy in India." In Kanti Bajpai and Siddharth Mallavarapu, (eds.), International Relations in India: Theorising the Region and the Nation, Vol. 2. Hyderabad: Orient Longman Private Ltd. Chacko, Priya, 2012. Indian Foreign Policy: The Politics of Postcolonial Identity from 1947-2004. London: Routledge. Freeden, Michael, 1998. Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ganguly, Sumit and Rahul Mukherji, 2011. India Since 1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Kapur, Ashok, 2006. India: From Regional to World Power. New York: Routledge. Khilnani, Sunil, 1999. The Idea of India. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Khilnani, Sunil, et. al., 2012. Nonalignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty-First Century. New Delhi: Centre for Policy Research. Mehrotra, Lakhan Lal, ed., 1989. Vignettes from Nehru. Colombo: Sri Lanka-India Society. Menon, Raja, and Rajiv Kumar, 2010. The Long View from Delhi. Academic Foundation, 2010. Mohan, C. Raja, 2004. Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India's New Foreign Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.


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Dhume, Sadanand, 2012. "Failure 2.0." Foreign Policy, 16 March. Ganguly, Sumit, 2005, "Reorienting Indian Foreign Policy." Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 6:2. 141-144. Hayes, Jarrod, 2009. "Identity and Securitization in the Democratic Peace: The United States and the Divergence of Response to India and Iran's Nuclear Programs." International Studies Quarterly 53. 977-999. "India as a Great Power: Know Your Own Strength," 2013. The Economist, 30 May. "Interview with Indian Foreign Minister Salman Kurshid," 2013. The Straits Times, 5 July. Johnson, Alastair Ian, 1995. "Thinking about Strategic Culture." International Security 19:4. 32-64. Kratochwil, Freidrich V., 2001. "How Do Norms Matter?" In Michael Byers, ed., The Role of Law in International Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 35-86. Khilnani, Sunil, 2012B. "India should aim to be powerful and set new standards." India Abroad, March 30. A17-A18. Krepon, Michael, 2010. "Indian Strategic Culture." Arms Control Wonk, 21 July. < http://krepon.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/2820/indian-strategic-culture> Lantis, Jeffrey S., 2002. "Strategic Culture and National Security Policy." International Studies Review 4:3. 87-113. Lantis, Jeffrey S., 2011. "Redefining the Nonproliferation Norm? Australian Uranium, the NPT, and the Global Nuclear Revival." Australian Journal of Politics and History. 543-561. Latham, Andrew, 1998. "Constructing National Security: Culture and identity in Indian arms control and disarmament practice." Contemporary Security Policy 19:1. 129-158. Markey, Daniel, 2009. "Developing India's Foreign Policy 'Software.' Asia Policy 8. 73-96. Mehta, Pratap Bhanu, 2009. "Still Under Nehru's Shadow? The absence of foreign policy frameworks in India." India Review 8:3. 209-233. Miller, Manjari Chatterjee, 2013. "India's Feeble Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs. May/June. Mohan, C. Raja, 2012. "India's Foreign Policy Transformation," Asia Policy 14. < http://www.nbr.org/publications/element.aspx?id=601> Mukherjee, M., 2010. "'A World of Illusion:' The Legacy of Empire in India's Foreign Relations, 1947-62." The International History Review, 32:2. 253-271.


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Mustafa, Seema, 2012. "Nonalignment 2.0 the need of the hour." DNA, 2 March. Pant, Harsh, 2009. "A Rising India's Search for a Foreign Policy." Orbis, 53 (2009. 250-64. "Partnership with India good for US and global peace: Pentagon," First Post, 10 April 2013. <http://www.firstpost.com/world/partnership-with-india-good-for-us-and-global-peace-pentagon-692938.html?sz=s&rfh=1&utm_source=ref_article> Rana, Swadesh, 1970. "The Changing Indian Diplomacy at the United Nations." International Organization, 24. 48-73. Rao, Rahul, 2012. "Revisiting Cartographic Anxiety." Osgoode Hall Law Journal 49. 575-592. Sagar, Rahul, 2009. "What Kind of Power will India Become?" International Affairs 85:4. 801-816. Saran, Shyam, 2012. "An India Allying With None." Business Standard, 21 March. Sullivan, Kate, 2008. "Discourses on the Nuclear Deal: Persistence of Independence." Economic and Political Weekly 43:3 (Jan 19-25). 73-76. Tanham, George, 1992. "Indian Strategic Culture." Washington Quarterly 15:1. 129-142. Tharoor, Shashi, 2009. "Indian Strategic Power: Soft." Global Brief, 13 May. Tharoor, Shashi, 2012. "In the Ministry of External Affairs." Tharoor.in. <http://tharoor.in/news/4530/> Vasudevan, D., 2010. "Tharoor criticises Nehru's 'moralistic' foreign policy." DNA India, 10 Jan. Verghese, B. G., 2012. "A Twenty First Century Strategic Policy for India." New Indian Express, 4 March. Podcasts Remarks by National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon at the launch of Nonalignment 2.0, New Delhi, India, 28 February 2012. Online. Available at < http://www.cprindia.org/workingpapers/3844-nonalignment-20-foreign-and-strategic-policy-india-twenty-first-century> Interviews Bajpai, K. Shankar, personal interview with the author, 12 June 2013. Bajpai, Kanti (National University of Singapore, Singapore), personal interview with the author, 5 June 2013.

http://www.firstpost.com/world/partnership-with-india-good-for-us-and-global-peace-pentagon-692938.html?sz=s&rfh=1&utm_source=ref_article�

http://www.firstpost.com/world/partnership-with-india-good-for-us-and-global-peace-pentagon-692938.html?sz=s&rfh=1&utm_source=ref_article�


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Karnad, Bharat (Centre for Policy Research), personal interview with the author, 12 June 2013. Khilnani, Sunil (King's College London), personal interview with the author, 23 August 2013. Mallavarapu, Siddharth (Jawaharlal Nehru University), personal interview with the author, 3 June 2013. Menon, Raja (Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies), personal interview with the author, 5 June 2013. Raman, Kalyan (Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi), personal interview with the author, 6 June 2013. Sahni, Varun (Jawaharlal Nehru University), personal interview with the author, 13 July 2013. Singh, Swaran (Jawaharlal Nehru University), personal interview with the author, 13 July 2013. Venkatshamy, Krishnappa (Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses), personal interview with the author, 3 June 2013.


By Sebastian Kratzer

Abstract

In the humanitarian space the agency, discourse and agendas of actors on the ground remain largely absent from mainstream analysis and implementation of humanitarian assistance. This study claims that this negligence is attributable to the very nature of humanitarian actors and the humanitarian system itself, their role in the wider international order and the way both are shaped by dominant global powers.

This argument is supported by exposing the discrepancy between humanitarian theory and reality as well as the underlying rationale of the dominant discourse and its neglect of actors on the ground. Upholding the apolitical nature of the humanitarian space, humanitarians remain incapable of confronting the realities and violence related to that space, and to prevent its capture by other actors. Discourse and agency of aid recipients are disregarded as they do not fit the dominant narrative and institutional demands, and thus endanger the system’s legitimacy. Host governments have been largely absent, despite their growing importance in disaster responses, from humanitarian perspectives. The international system thus seems ill-equipped to deal with the violence within the humanitarian space, leading ultimately to an increased silencing of affected civilians. In this sense, this space presents yet another battlefield of the global power struggle between governments, insurgents, and civil society actors.


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List of acronyms

ALNAP Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action

CoC The Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief’

COIN Counterinsurgency

DAC Development Assistance Committee

HPG Humanitarian Policy Group

ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross

IDRL International disaster response laws, rules and principles

IFRC International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

IHL International Humanitarian Law

IR International Relations

JPO Joint Policy of Operation

MSF Médecins Sans Frontières

(I)NGOs (International) non-governmental Organisations

OCHA Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

ODI Overseas Development Institute

UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

WASH Water, sanitation and hygiene


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Even silence speaks

- Hausa Proverb

Introduction

In the context of the protracted Syrian civil war, voices have been raised – in favour and against – the use of humanitarian assistance in support of Syrian rebels. Proponents of an active US foreign policy complained that humanitarian aid has so far achieved “remarkably little in terms of (…) gaining influence [and that it] should be redesigned as part of a coherent political strategy” (Lynch, 2013:7). Humanitarians have been quick to criticise this, claiming that such politicisation of aid would only hinder effective relief efforts (Goldberg, 2013).

The Syrian civil war thus shows the continued pertinence of the discussion on humanitarian aid, the respect of its principles and the possible consequences of its misuse. What’s more, the conflict sheds light on the roles different actors involved in humanitarian action assume, but also hints at the gaps within this discussion, especially regarding the neglect of the agency and discourse of actors on the ground.

A brief history of the debate

The history of humanitarianism can be drawn throughout centuries and various civilisations. Only after the end of the Cold War, however, did humanitarians find themselves facing a single superpower capable of enforcing its vision of an international order and of assigning them a specific role within this system (Tyler, 1992). As the new global order was shaped through peace and nation-building, politicians looked at humanitarian aid as an integral part of their strategy, menacing its most fundamental values (Paris and Sisk, 2009:5). Then president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Rony Brauman advocated for a ‘humanitarian space’, defined as a physical-operational and conceptual construct in which relief organisations would be able to assess humanitarian needs and deliver their assistance free from political imperatives (Grombach Wagner, 2005:24).

The discussion, nevertheless, wore down after failures of this approach emerged in practice, such as in Somalia1

Questioning lacuna in humanitarian discourse and practice

(Clarke and Herbst, 1996). Only the post-9/11 War on Terror and its offshoots in Iraq and Afghanistan brought the tension between neutral humanitarian assistance and state co-option back in the centre of global attention (Barnett and Zuercher, 2009:23ff).

Much has been written since about humanitarianism and the humanitarian space2

1 Where in 1992, an American-led humanitarian intervention, later handed over to UN control, was launched with the aim of ensuring humanitarian assistance to the Somali population. Being accredited for the saving of the lives of approximately 100 000 people, the mission is nevertheless considered a failure in regard of its aim to rebuild the Somali state.

. The dominant narrative, however, disregards the agency and discourse of different actors located

2 The original definition of the humanitarian space has especially been criticised for disregarding political and historical processes related to it (ODI, 2012).


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in the global South3

This study seeks to help fill this analytical void by asking to what extent the negligence of actors and empirical phenomena on the ground has led to a distortion of humanitarian aid, and further questions the underlying causes of this negligence. I argue that the analytical disregard is attributable to the very nature of humanitarian actors and the humanitarian system itself, their role in the wider international order and the way they are shaped by dominant global powers. This study looks at the following phenomena and their underlying causes to demonstrate the aforementioned argument.

. It further eludes essential dynamics within the humanitarian space and how they relate to (geo)political forces at work in the international system.

Firstly, treating the humanitarian space as an apolitical construction and upholding a universalist discourse of humanity, albeit its certain moral appeal and advantages, disregards cultural and political specificities. Humanitarians remain thus incapable of addressing empirical realities prevailing within the humanitarian space and to confront the existing violence within it. Entering a politically contested space in the name of humanity is by itself already a political act. Moreover, it makes it difficult to prevent the capture of that space by political actors.

Secondly, discourse and agency of aid recipients are disregarded as they do not fit the dominant discourse and institutional demands of the system and would thus endanger the raison d’être of the system.

Thirdly, host governments of disaster-affected countries have been absent, despite the prominence given to them in international law regarding disaster responses and their rise as non-traditional donors, from humanitarian perspectives. They are mostly regarded as incapable or unwilling of delivering aid. This is not to argue that governments of affected states are necessarily more capable in disaster response management than other humanitarian actors. Ignoring or portraying in a simplistic way an actor that inevitably impacts humanitarian assistance, however, will further distort the analysis. Moreover, as part of a global struggle between dominant Northern and rising Southern actors, the humanitarian system is shaped by the needs of the former.

Ultimately, this study proposes that in order to achieve a comprehensive understanding of humanitarianism, the realities on the ground must be accepted by the humanitarian community and the voices of silenced actors included in the analysis and practice of humanitarian action. Furthermore, an international framework is needed that historicises and contextualises the role of all actors involved within an international political system in order to devise effective and meaningful strategies for the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

Methodology, structure and limits

This argument draws from a wide range of academic literature in international relations, geography and post-colonial studies. It further combines this theoretical approach with publications and field reports by practitioners within the humanitarian system, research papers and policy briefs as well as case studies produced by institutions such as ODI’s Humanitarian 3 Throughout this study the terms ‘developing countries’ / ‘South’ are used interchangeably as representations of the ‘global South’ and terms such as ‘developed countries’ / ‘West’ / ‘North’ describe the ‘global North’. The distinction, based on socio-economic as well as political and cultural differences, still being upheld by the literature (Odeh, 2010:340).


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Policy Group (HPG), International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), MSF, and the UN. This study relies on a definition of the often mentioned ‘humanitarian system’ as proposed by the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP). It is hereafter defined as a “network of national and international provider agencies (…) that are functionally connected to each other (…) and that share common overarching goals, norms and principles” (Taylor et al., 2012:8). This research is complemented by an interview with Samir Elhawary, Humanitarian Affairs Officer at OCHA and co-author of “Humanitarian Space: a review of trends and issue” (2012), who provided insights into the humanitarian world from his experience as practitioner and researcher. The interview transcript is reported in the Appendix and is referenced as (Elhawary, 2013).

Chapter Two revisits the standard discussion on humanitarianism between ‘classical’ and ‘new’ humanitarianism and further assesses the contribution of the ‘liberal governance’ theory to the debate. Chapters Three and Four develop the main argument of this paper. Firstly, it is shown to what extent the reality on the ground diverges from the dominant humanitarian narrative. A second analytical phase consists of deconstructing this dominant discourse in order to demonstrate the role of the actors on the ground. This is done by analysing the underlying causes of their absence in the dominant narrative and the consequences thereof. Theoretical aspects are supported by empirical examples to strengthen the argument, often with reference to refugees as they are one of the most important groups receiving international assistance. Chapter Five provides an overall summary and conclusion to this study.

The aim of this study is to give a holistic view of humanitarianism, but due to its limited scope, a few qualifications are in order. The emphasis is put on actors having received the least analytical attention. Hence, already well-researched actors such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), international organisations and traditional donors are not explicitly integrated into this analysis, but serve as a tacit complementation. Moreover, to include all dynamics taking place on the ground lies beyond the possible, therefore the analysis is supported by pertinent examples that aim to generate a comprehensive understanding of the described situation.

Humanitarianism in a changing world

This chapter critiques the debate on humanitarianism and looks at how both aid-ideal visions have influenced humanitarian action, and subsequently analyses the literature perceiving humanitarianism as part of the global liberal governance framework.

Classical humanitarianism

Proponents of ‘classical humanitarianism’4 centre humanitarianism on the need to assist disaster and conflict victims based on four principles: humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality 5

4 Named ‘Dunantists’ after Henry Dunant (Barnett, 2005).

(Macdonald and Valenza, 2012:4). The prevalence of those principles is predicated on the separation of humanitarianism and politics. Accordingly, humanitarian aid

5 These principles have sufficiently been discussed elsewhere, see Pictet (1979), and it is the concept of neutrality that has attracted the greatest controversy and will subsequently be analysed in more detail.


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“is to be focused on morals, not on power…it is to be driven by values, not interests” (Scott-Smith, 2013). This results in its ‘apolitical’ nature disconnecting it from the root causes of human suffering (Barnett and Snyder, 2008:146). It ultimately seeks to limit the role of humanitarians to the neutral provision of relief (Rieff, 2002:334-335).

Those principles were first formalised with the foundation of the ICRC in 1863 and the adoption of the Geneva Conventions in 1949. Initially, their purpose was to protect, inter alia, civilians from armed conflict. This implies the right of humanitarian organisations to provide assistance to people affected by war (Leader, 2012:5).

More recently, those principles were codified to help translate them into action. They specify that the humanitarian imperative comes first and that aid is not to be used to further any particular political standpoint or foreign policy (The Code of Conduct (CoC), 1996; Sphere Project, 1997).

This leads to a vision of humanitarianism being ‘above’ politics, representing ethical values such as ‘humanity’, whereas politics is depicted as the domain of calculated self-interest. Marking politics as a “devil-term” (DeChaine, 2005:359) makes the separation between the humanitarian and the political all the more important (Collinson and Elhawary, 2012:3). Defenders of this approach see humanitarianism in danger as politics will inevitably try to corrupt it (Weiss and Minear, 1991:214).

Two critiques are to be made about this vision of humanitarianism. Firstly, the narrative of an ‘apolitical’ humanitarianism does not translate into practice, as all access to victims is based on compromise in a political context (ODI, 2012). Moreover, even ‘apolitical’ aid will influence a conflict by introducing resources into the contested space (Macrae and Leader, 2001:290; Seybolt, 2007:522). A counterargument is that it is the obligation of political actors to create such a space and the obligation of humanitarians to only provide aid within it (Pilar, 1999:5). This last point is confirmed to a certain degree by International Humanitarian Law (IHL), which obliges belligerents to enable the provision of aid to the civilian population (Mackintosh, 2000). Nevertheless, humanitarians do have to engage with political actors to gain access to people in need, and the provision of aid will inevitably affect the conflict (Dillon and Reid, 2000:120; Anderson, 1999:37ff).

Secondly, the politics-humanitarianism dichotomy based on the assumption of ‘bad’ politics/‘good’ humanitarianism is too simplistic. As Hugo Slim (2003:1) correctly argues, humanitarianism is a political project in a political world. This is not automatically a problem, as ethics and politics are not necessary opposites and ‘good’ politics do exist. Warner (1999) further critics the ‘humanitarian’ definition of politically caused violence as it relieves political actors of their responsibility to resolve such situations. Accordingly, insisting on such a dichotomy risks undermining the ethical basis of humanitarianism which remains the disinterested aid to the suffering.

The rise of a new humanitarianism

The changes within global politics after the Cold War have led to the formulation of a ‘new’ humanitarianism (Mills, 2005). Its proponents6

6 ‘Wilsonians’, after Woodrow Wilson (Barnett, 2005).

see it as a necessary adaptation to the new order. They propose to abandon the politically naïve and morally questionable insistence on


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the separation of politics and humanitarianism. Humanitarians ought to consciously assume a political role in the resolution of the structural problems that put populations at risk (Barnett, 2005:728). It serves thus as the new moral justification for humanitarian action, inherently political and opposes neutrality (Fox, 2001:275-276).

Politics, humanitarianism, and neutrality

According to this view, the end of the Cold War has had important consequences for the relationship between aid and politics, and the concept of neutrality which separates them. The withdrawal of superpowers from the proxy battlefields led to a power vacuum in the world’s periphery (Barnett, 1997). Increased reliance by states on humanitarian actors, realigning political and humanitarian endeavours, transformed humanitarianism into a primary form of political action to fill this void (Macrae and Leader, 2001:290-292). Humanitarian organisations have been incorporated into core components of the West’s foreign policy strategy, aimed at maintaining their political presence in the global fringes (Powell, 2001; Duffield et al., 2001:270).

Moreover, Mary Kaldor’s (1999) supposedly new wars which accompanied the new world order also affected humanitarianism. With the rise of asymmetrical warfare, opposing modern armies with network-like insurgent cells, states integrated humanitarian assistance into their counterinsurgency (COIN) strategies (US Army, 2006; Kilcullen, 2006). In Afghanistan, for instance, the US established Provincial Reconstruction Teams, consisting of military and civilian members, posted around the country to deliver aid and protection. The aim was to convince the population to side with the government and eliminating the insurgents’ areas of retreat (Lopez, 2007:250).

Consequently, both Dunantists and Wilsonians detected a “fatal illness” (Slim, 2004:1) of classical humanitarianism and a shrinking of the humanitarian space, with the mere difference of the former regretting and the latter welcoming it. Given the apparent impossibility of principled humanitarianism, they concluded that the idea of “neutrality [is] a bogus one, and impartiality an abstraction (...) The sooner they are given a decent burial, the sooner we can all move on” (Rieff, 2011:254).

There's life in the old dog yet

The obituary for principled humanitarianism, however, might have been written too early, as the problems of instrumentalising aid became quickly evident, especially in the US-led interventins in Iraq and Afghnanistan (Shannon, 2009). The incorporation of humanitarian aid into Western foreign policy and global stabilization strategies 7 increasingly endangers humanitarians. The distinction between combatants and non-combatants becomes increasingly blurred. In the eyes of those opposing these interventions, humanitarians thus turn into military targets, rendering access to vulnerable populations increasingly dangerous8

Moreover, there is no evidence for the success of ‘humanitarian’ COIN strategies in creating lasting stabilisation let alone acceptance of Western foreign policy. It risks hindering

(Pfanner, 2005; Stoddard, 2012:147).

7 An “attempt by the hegemonic power to (…) maintain the world order and status quo of power relations (...) the stabilization effort is reflected in the practical application of counterinsurgency strategy” (Stoddard, 2012:146). 8 The death toll of aid workers rose from 90 in 2001 to 308 in 2011, with the majority taking place in the places where this strategy was applied (Humanitarian Outcomes, 2012).


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the goal of state building, as continued external intervention reinforces weak statehood (Paris and Sisk, 2009). This confirms that the instrumentalisation of aid for political purposes rarely works, and that the ‘costs’ outweigh the short-term benefits (Williamson, 2011; Donini, 2012:68). Furthermore, the vision of a fundamentally new humanitarianism lacks historical perspective. From the 1870 Franco-Prussian war to today’s (counter)insurgencies, humanitarian action has constantly been shaped, constrained, and used by governments in pursuit of their foreign policy (Davey et al., 2013; Minear, 2012). Accordingly, there “never was a humanitarian golden age [and the] classical model of humanitarianism…was never much more than a model” (Smillie, 2012:18). The type of threat has not fundamentally changed, but the number of, and international responses to disasters and conflict has drastically increased. With it, the familiar struggle between humanitarian independence and co-option became ever more visible. The narrative of a shrinking humanitarian space can thus be disqualified. On the contrary, the growing number of humanitarian organisations and their entry into active conflict zones has led to an increase in humanitarian activity and an expansion of the humanitarian space (Collinson and Elhawary, 2012:5-11).

In this sense, the principles and methods of humanitarian action represent a “concept become space” (Thürer, 2007:49) within a bounded arena of nation-states wherein space cannot be ever-expanding (Warner, 1999:111). Consequently, the growth of the humanitarian space signifies less room for the political. The expansion of the former constitutes an attack on traditional sovereignty, likely to be met with political and sometimes violent resistance (ODI, 2012; DeChaine, 2005:95).

Given this historically flawed vision of humanitarianism, Rieffer-Flanagan (2009) correctly contests the death of classical humanitarianism. The difficulties associated with neutrality are not mere post-Cold War phenomena and thus surmountable if one showed a more historically nuanced understanding. Neutrality was never meant as a moral value by itself, but as an instrument for humanitarians “to continue to enjoy the confidence of all” (ICRC, 1965). The Humanitarian Agenda 2015 report confirms that principled action still “constitutes an essential safety net for people in extremis” (Donini et al., 2008).

A historical analysis shows that no fundamentally different conditions exist now than in the past (Fox, 2013). This allows for a slightly more positive conclusion: humanitarians have always operated in difficult political spaces, but never before have they been as numerous and powerful as in the new millennium. Hence, if something like a golden age of humanitarianism was ever said to exist, it would be found today (Slim, 2004:4).

A broader critique concerns the ‘old-new’ dichotomy within humanitarianism. In this view, this division is due to evolving ideological lenses and the disregard of the complex history of humanitarianism, rather than the existence of profound pre and post-Cold War differences9

From crises arises a new global community

. Fox (2013) argues that it is a misleading division altogether, as humanitarian principles always had the practical purpose of providing ethical and operational guidance for humanitarians.

An alternative view emanates from the perspective of liberal governance. The latter constitutes a complex system of control which is not merely based on direct coercion. The

9 This argument is intellectually inspired by Kalyvas’ (2001) critique on the ‘old-new’ war distinction.


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focus shifts from the sovereign “right to take life or let live” (Foucault, 1976:136) to the production and administration of life and the management of populations (Dillon and Reid, 2001:41ff). Given that much has been written about global governance10

Humanitarians taking over?

, this section will be limited to the role of the humanitarian space within this concept.

As the dynamics of globalisation have led to a “power shift” (Mathews, 1997) within the international system, traditional state sovereignty over a fixed territory and population has constantly been eroded. The increase in NGOs and transnational organisations throughout the 20th century led to the emergence of a ‘global civil society’, providing a “bottom-up liberal critique of the state” (Duffield, 2007:217). The bypassing of established political boundaries thus weakens traditional state structures (Lindenberg and Bryant, 2001:65; DeChaine, 2005:2-5). This development is accompanied by a process of “global deterritorialisation” (Behr, 2008:359), challenging the claim of the nation-state to be the sole purveyor of identity for people and spaces (Cohen, 1973).

According to this idea, disasters and aid are intimately linked to the governance system. The former often take place at the periphery of the international system, where the corrosion of state structures is strongest (Dillon and Reid, 2000:117). In these global ‘borderlands’11

DeChaine (2002) explains how this new borderless global community is framed by the ‘sans frontièrisme’

, humanitarianism can be seen as a tool of power through which the relationship of peoples is reordered (Duffield, 2002:1050). Conventional IR theories and humanitarians tend to see man-made and natural disasters as the erosion of the systematic condition of normality which is to be restored through intervention by the international system. Duffield, however, correctly counters that it is exactly this state of permanent emergency that justifies the expansion of the liberal order. It establishes humanitarians as the “embodiment of liberal governance [and] as an independent sovereign power among the world of peoples” (2007:32-33, 51).

12

Beyond ‘governments vs. governance’

movement. The humanitarian space was initially a zone erected by humanitarian principles to enable free humanitarian action without regard for politics. In the process, however, a reconfiguration of geopolitical and social space is undertaken. This reordering of power relations sets the scene for the rise of the global liberal order marked by reduced state sovereignty and an increased right of intervention on (supposedly) humanitarian grounds as repeatedly seen from Somalia to Haiti (Duffield, 2002:1068; DeChaine, 2002:356ff; 2005:60).

Nevertheless, a few qualifications concerning this approach are necessary. The strengthening of a liberal order does not automatically signify the demise of state power within this system. Rather, the concept goes beyond traditional notions of sovereignty, with

10 See Dillon and Reid (2000, 2001), Deudney and Ikenberry (1999) for a more detailed description of the concept. 11 Duffield (2001:309) clarifies, however, that the notion of ‘borderlands’ is a mere metaphor illustrating an imagined geographical space where, in the eyes of many metropolitan actors and agencies, the characteristics of brutality, excess and breakdown predominate. 12 “Without border-ness” (translation by the author), this expression is inspired by groups such as MSF.


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the growing number of liberal states constituting one of the pillars of the global governance system (Dillon and Reid, 2000:127).

More radically, Selby (2007:336) criticises the emphasis on liberal governance as dangerously misleading. In his view, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan sufficiently confirmed that states still dominate the international system (Duffield, 2005:75). In light of both arguments, the most convincing conclusion to this dilemma seems to regard the fusion of sovereignty and governmentality as the rise of a “hybrid political order” (Dillon and Reid, 2000:128), which combines strategic procedures of both and establishes more fluid inside-outside differentiations than the traditional system (Dillon, 1995).

Creating non-existing borders

Lastly, the notion of a borderless world poses a series of conceptual problems. The expansion of the humanitarian space promotes a vision of today’s world without ideological or political boundaries, and pushes for a reconsideration of the fixed spatial assumptions underlying the state system (DeChaine, 2002:363).

Through a combined reading of the notion of space by Deleuze and Guattari (1987:474ff)13

Two risks, however, are related to this phenomenon. Firstly, such a re-interpretation carries the potential danger that non-humanitarian actors might re-appropriate this space. Debrix (1998:840) gives an example of global media having captured the image of the ‘victim’ to satisfy their demand for headlines. Moreover, this enables states to argue for interventions by relying on the image of a population in need of protection (GPF, 2013). Secondly, the use of the humanitarian space as the basis for a “global village” (McLuhan, 1964) goes far beyond its initially limited definition within humanitarianism. This strategy puts humanitarians up against other actors in the power struggle for geopolitical control. The state might impose its control of that space, as it happened in Sudan when aid organisations were expelled, or they compete with other actors for the allegiance of populations as in Iraq and Afghanistan (DeChaine, 2005:95; Young, 2012:99ff; Staniland, 2012).

and the MSF Charter, Debrix (1998:829ff) argues that the process of de-territorialisation cannot be merely interpreted as a simple abolition of borders and power. Humanitarians do in fact challenge the territorial authority of the state by acting across traditional territorial boundaries. But simultaneously, they (re)establish a physically fixed (humanitarian) space in the form of sanctuaries and refugee camps. Equally, on a conceptual level they challenge the state’s dominance of identity. By re-categorising the people within these areas as ‘victims’, they create new identities and strengthen their own ‘saviour’-representation. This discursive reconfiguration of space leads to a renewed demarcation of national and international space, itself an act of power. Deterritorialisation is thus a simultaneous process of re-territorialisation. This new humanitarian geography re-constructs the newly ‘conquered’ territory in the form of a global community of ‘saviours’ and ‘victims’, inhabited by the latter but governed by the former.

13 One an organised ‘striated’ entity and the other being the opposite, an un-constructed ‘smooth’ space. Both constitute more than a simple binary, but are complementary to one another constantly challenging and replacing each other.


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A view from within the humanitarian space

This study argues that the above discussion is marked by an inherently Eurocentric vision in the sense that only Western actors are considered as active creators of, and participants in the struggle for, the humanitarian space. Only scarce and often undifferentiated attention is paid to non-Western actors and dynamics on the ground (Davey, 2012:3). The rhetorical creation of the humanitarian space by the West is thus distorted as it disregards empirical phenomena related to it. On the ground, the humanitarian space is resisted or accepted, co-opted, or (mis)used by a multitude of different actors. Hence, the limitations of the Western dominant humanitarian concept must be exposed and the idea of its apolitical character revised.

A lot of progress has been made by aid agencies to make aid more transparent to donors and more participative towards recipients (HPG, 2010: Opinion 144). This study argues, however, that actors on the ground ought to be more often considered in the analysis of humanitarian action and space in order to reach comprehensive and well-grounded conclusions, and consequently enable more effective aid delivery. Here the focus will be on non-Western entities related to the humanitarian space, namely belligerents in civil wars, aid recipients within that space and the role of host governments. For instance, mainstream analyses hardly ever focuses on ordinary people and their coping strategies (Autesserre, 2010:43). The following chapter tries to question the underlying causes of this analytical negligence and to deconstruct the dominant Western discourse upholding this belief.

Form humanitarian theories to violent realities

As Debrix (1998:829ff) explains, the activities of humanitarian actors create a geographically tangible space in the form of refugee camps and sanctuaries. The rhetorical creation of this space happens in the sense that its meaning is produced, the identities of its ‘inhabitants’ constituted, and the borders between the ‘political’ and the ‘apolitical’ drawn (Dunne et al., 2007:216). This performative function of discourse thus holds the humanitarian space “above the fray of battle in the name of neutrality” (Duffield, 2007:33) and separates non-combatants from combatants.

In principle, humanitarian assistance is to be delivered solely based on the needs of the victims. Empirical research, shows however that dynamics and actors on the ground are far more complex and, more importantly, infested with contradictions and problems not taken into account by the theory (Barnett and Weiss, 2008; Donini, 2012).

The humanitarian space behind the front line

Refugee camps, as the spatial ‘outgrowth’ of the humanitarian space, often represent the last place people can turn to when hit by disasters or faced with conflicts. They nevertheless unite a series of characteristics undermining their initial humanitarian and apolitical nature. In the previous chapter, this study mentioned the risk of aid affecting conflict dynamics14

14 Emphasis there, however, was on the resources introduced by outsiders, and not the agency of the actors within this space.

. On


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the ground, the resources entering conflict zones through aid agencies are frequently diverted or misused by warring parties in a conflict (Maxwell, 2012:197).

Especially with the end of the Cold War – during which opposing rebels and governments could still count on financing by the superpowers – belligerents had to come up with new ways of sustaining their struggles. A seemingly ever-increasing amount of humanitarian aid flowing into conflict zones from Western powers since the 1990s allowed belligerents to fill this gap, and transformed humanitarian aid into “one of the most reliable sources of funding for belligerents” (LeRiche, 2004:104-105).

Reload your guns in safety

LeRiche (2004) differentiates between the tactical and strategic levels on which humanitarian aid is misused as a tool of war. On the tactical level, resources are either stolen, levied as taxes or the fighters manage to convince the humanitarian community of the rightfulness of their cause and are thus more able to access resources of the aid system.

Strategically, assistance is used to direct population movements according to battle plans. Equally, the (re)location of people is undertaken to influence decisions on where aid is provided. For example, after the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Hutu militias who relied on refugee camps along the border between Rwanda and Zaire, manipulated and withheld news of the Rwandan government’s decision to grant safe return to refugees, and warned instead that refugees would be persecuted if they tried to return to Rwanda.

Another dimension through which belligerents use humanitarian aid is by relying on it as a technique of ‘winning hearts and minds’ to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the population as well as the international community (Lischer, 2005:8). In this sense, humanitarian aid becomes an extension of the political and military struggle, in which the goal is the loyalty of the population in order to gain political control over territory (Das, 2013).

Moreover, humanitarian sanctuaries can serve insurgents either as protective buffer zones for their military bases or as direct safe havens. They can retreat from combat, remain independent based on material assistance and (re)launch military offensives (Terry, 2002). Additionally, belligerents can make use of easy access to resources as a powerful method of forced recruitment of refugees (Adelman, 1998:1). The camps are often found along borders, where state control and international norm-based governance aimed at refugee protection are not always well established (Jacobsen, 2002:578). With a consequently reduced protection, children especially become vulnerable targets to forced recruitment by rebels as well as state militaries15

Connected to the above, it can be argued that the root causes that forced people to become refugees in the first place and the conditions of being refugees push some to become ‘refugee warriors’

(Achvarina and Reich, 2006:132).

16

15 Though numbers are fluctuating, approximately 200,000-300,000 children are currently serving as soldiers in more than 20 conflicts (Spagnoli, 2010, War Child, 2013).

(Adelman, 1998; Harpviken, 2008; Zolberg et al., 1989). Though this study does not discuss this phenomenon in depth, two of its aspects are of importance for this analysis.

16 Defined in the literature as refugees who fled their home country and, based within a camp in another state, take up arms with the goal of overthrowing the regime in their home state or fighting rival groups (Adelman, 1998:2; Ngunjiri, 1999).


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Firstly, the fact that refugees mobilise around ideological convictions and take up arms against their home state counters the conventional narrative depicting refugees as agency-less victims. Aside from restoring their capacity of being active agents, the notion of warring refugees challenges the analytical separation upheld by IHL between refugees – considered unarmed by definition – and armed combatants, demonstrating the lacuna of the international regime to adequately deal with such empirical phenomena (Adelman, 1998:3; Harpviken, 2008:2).

Secondly, when such groups form within refugee camps they further contribute to the escalation of violence and the destabilisation of refugees’ host and home states. For instance, before and during the 1978-79 Uganda-Tanzania war, thousands of Ugandan refugees based in Tanzania played an important role in the relationship between the two countries and supported Tanzanian forces in the eventual overthrow of Idi Amin (Lischer, 2005:12, 113; Adelman, 1998:1).

No place for the innocent

The above mentioned misuse of camps and aid resources aimed at supporting belligerents begs the question of why the humanitarian system, albeit its often positive impacts and well-meaning efforts, allows for such phenomena to persist. This might be due, by no small degree, to the wits of local armed actors and the political agendas of donors. But more importantly, it can be explained by the nature of the humanitarian system itself. Ticktin (2006:35) argues that humanitarianism depoliticises human suffering and transforms it into a moral question. It thus reconstructs political problems as apolitical. Applied to a wider context, this enables humanitarians to uphold the representation of their mission as neutral. Depicting the human suffering caused by violent crises as purely a technical problem, they create procedural and bureaucratic solutions. This is strengthened by the tendency of international politics to rely on humanitarian responses in situations where political solutions come at too high a political price to pay, infusing humanitarians ever deeper into politically complex settings (Smillie, 2012:19).

This is further aggravated by the fact that many humanitarian actors suffer from a lack of local knowledge in ever more complex conflict environments. Their response consists of standardised techniques which often fail to align to the real needs of the people (Young, 2012:97; Perrin, 2009:9; Li, 2007). At the same time, many humanitarian agencies still depend on state funding and thus consider their responsibilities of accountability to be directed more towards donors, as related to the beneficiaries aid is perceived as a self-justifying cause (Dijkzeul and Wakenge, 2010:1140).

Although practitioners try to improve those aspects and perceptions of humanitarianism, the fundamental problem persists (Elhawary, 2013). Entering a politically contested space in the name of humanity is by itself already a political action. The discrepancy between humanitarian self-perception (or deception) and political reality allows the system and its resources to be captured and misused by the most powerful actors on the ground (Hyndman, 2000:1,118).

In the case of refugee camps, those “with guns never go hungry” (LeRiche, 2004:105) as they succeed best in (ab)using the inadequacies of the system. The response of humanitarian actors, such as the Ground-rules' initiative in South Sudan and the Joint Policy of Operation (JPO) in Liberia are a valuable improvement, but essentially fail to address those problems.


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They remain largely in the field of principles, how humanitarian agencies ought to behave as ‘good’ humanitarians. Those principles, however, are not automatically shared by all agencies. Some rely on other belief systems, such as the action of solidarity, and others resist adhering to standards developed in the West and which are perceived as imposed upon the field (Elhawary, 2013). Thus, they are neither capable of taking into account complex empirical phenomena nor of establishing general codes that practically improve the delivery of humanitarian aid (Maxwell, 2012:214).

The humanitarian space as battlefield

But the critique of an apolitical humanitarian space governed by humanitarian principles can be developed even further. The previous arguments describe aid as assisting the cause of belligerents and potentially prolonging conflicts; this study further argues that the spaces that are supposedly protected by humanitarianism are marked by physical and epistemological violence.

Living hell in heaven

Refugee camps form an ever more important part of international disaster responses and have provided often life-saving shelter and protection for those affected by disaster and conflict17

Firstly, camps and its surroundings can become targets of aggression, attracting attacks by governmental and non-governmental armed groups. The military of refugees’ home states aim to eliminate rebels using those camps as sanctuaries and bases for attacks. Secondly, within the camps themselves refugees are exposed to “intimidation, violence, and harassment by a variety of groups and individuals” (Jacobson, 1999:2). Women especially find themselves confronted by sexual assaults and violence. Though this is due to a wide range of factors, the location and physical layout of the camps

. They are at the same time, nevertheless, spaces where violence for the people living within and around their boundaries exist (Jacobson, 1999). This chapter does not aim to discredit the undeniably positive aspects of the humanitarian system, but to bring to the fore the negative ones in order to contribute to a better understanding of humanitarianism.

18

Thirdly, refugee camps often suffer from the absence of law and order. Missing effective law enforcement, organised crime can flourish freely. Lastly, camps have emerged as strategic targets in military strategies aimed at weakening or destabilising opponents, and to enable ethnic cleansing among the assembled population (Jacobson, 1999:3).

strongly aggravate this phenomenon by creating opportunities for rape (Seifert, 1996; Cohen, 2013; The Advocates for Human Rights, 2006).

A telling example of those problems is the 1996 Great Lakes refugee crisis. During and after the 1994 genocide, about two million Rwandans fled their country to the neighbouring countries of the region. Many of the refugee camps, especially in Zaire, were misused by political and military actors as basis for recruitment and attacks against the new regime in Kigali. The situation escalated to the point that Tutsi forces crossed the border into Zaire to chase down Hutu génocidaires in the refugee camps and repatriate the refugees. The ensuing 17 There are over 40 million displaced people, of whom approximately 15 million live in refugee camps that often turn into long-term livelihood options (UNHCR, 2010; MillionSoulsAware, 2008, Dijkzeul and Wakenge, 2010:1141). 18 Generally more adapted to the safety of aid workers rather than refugees actually living there. This further begs the question “whose geography is” (Hyndman, 2000:101) represented on those sites.


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clashes between Rwandan and Congolese troops, and their respective allies, led to the outbreak of the First Congo War and the eventual overthrow of Mobutu Sese Seko by Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s forces which were supported by Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. During this time, a number of unimaginable atrocities and crimes were committed against refugees and the local population by a number of actors (Lischer, 2006:32).

The reasons for these numerous problems associated with refugee camps naturally vary greatly from case to case, but certain commonalities can be drawn. Attacks on camps are not only due to their material utility for belligerents, but must be analysed within a political framework. In Northern Uganda, for example, armed rebel groups attacked camps in order to underline the credibility of their threats, to revenge violence perpetrated against them or to protest actions taken by humanitarians or refugees. More importantly, attacks on those camps posed a clear challenge to the governance exercised by the international system over the affected territory and population, with the aim of regaining political control over them both (Moro, 2002).

In terms of internal camp violence, though numerous factors come into play, this study focuses on the fact that the problems originate from the way the humanitarian system regards and treats the affected population. Camps rarely recreate the social constructs on which the affected people’s communities are built, and rely on standardised assistance approaches. The reassembling of diverse groups makes refugee camps an accumulation of people that do not automatically constitute a social community. As soon as social bonds are disrupted, Hirsch (2012) explains, protection against rape is as well shattered. Despite advances in the field, the standardised aid approach constructed upon universal principles annihilates individual and group’s social identities generating all displaced persons as identical beings with identical needs (Dunn, 2012:7).

Disaster responses thus subsume differences into one single ‘emergency’ framework (Hyndman, 2004:194). This further establishes the camps as spaces where refugees are not only confronted by the negation of their individuality19

Listening to the sounds of the voiceless

, but by a system incapable of taking into account their specific needs and thus unable to offer meaningful help. Although these camps do not necessarily produce physical violence themselves, because of their universalistic nature, and as physical and symbolic representations of the international system, they do attract violence from outside and enable violence by opening up new spaces for it within their boundaries (Hyndman, 2000:61). All this further questions the policy of erecting another set of artificial borders aimed at confining refugees to camps and separating them from politics and society (Moro, 2002:2; Hyndman, 2000:87).

The humanitarian space, however, is not only a physical-operational space. It is a conceptual one, constructed and upheld by humanitarian principles. It is therefore necessary to also analyse the effects of its discursive creation and practices on the representation and life of disaster-affected people. Interpretations of the victims constitute a proper form of action, by themselves as well as through the practical consequences they entail. Creating negative consequences for the objects of those interpretations, by silencing their voices or enabling policies and practices unfavourable to them, they can be qualified as a form of 19 Which becomes problematic in the sense that the act of naming someone is part of the inclusion of individuals into human society, whereas “the unnamed remains [even] less human than the inhuman or sub-human” (Minh-ha, 1989:54 (emphasis added)).


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epistemological violence (Teo, 2010:296). Garbe (2013:2ff) defines the latter as a metaphorical force, different from physical violence, that nevertheless powerfully delegitimises and represses alternative possibilities of knowing and confines people to classificatory spaces.

In the case of disaster victims, the dominant humanitarian discourse constructs an apolitical space inhabited by a supposedly ahistorical, universal humanitarian object – the ‘absolut victim’. Within those boundaries, people cease to be specific individuals and are transformed into a universal humanitarian mass deprived of their agency through the disruption of their normal livelihoods and thus in dire need of assistance by the international community. Seeing emergency this way establishes humanitarian interventions as inevitable and morally necessary. Through this representation, moreover, people are disconnected from their proper political and historical contexts. Their accounts are disqualified as irrelevant, erased and replaced by humanitarian expert comments and situational reports that henceforth qualify as the sole way of knowing about the objects of care (Malkki, 1996; Artur, 2009:8; Hyndman, 2000:118-120).

This “universalizing talk which [mutes] critical aspects of diversity and difference” (Crosby et al., 1996) presents itself in standardised ways of classification and practice. The failure of contextualising different cultural and socio-economic needs, as well as discourses and agency of disaster-affected people leads to distorted analyses and misplaced interventions (Rajaram, 2002:249, Artur, 2009:8).

Once again, the reality on the ground is more complex than that depicted by the reductionist humanitarian narrative and needs to be accepted as such by the wider humanitarian community (Hyndman, 2000:124). Humanitarianism is a field of political tension and power, marked by complex and often invisible interests (Artur, 2009:2).

As the individual human experiences related to emergencies and aid are infinite, so are the ways so-called ‘victims’ react to them. Hereafter, some empirical examples of those reactions are offered in order to show that emergencies do not confine people to states of helplessness. Duffield (1991:29, 1993) describes the case of Sudan where, although the most vulnerable do suffer from crises, more politically powerful actors use emergencies and assistance for the accumulation of wealth and political survival. But neither do ‘ordinary’ people stand idly by as disaster seemingly wrecks their lives. They use crises and aid, within the realms of what is possible, as an opportunity to advance and define themselves.

On a political level, Malkki (1996) describes the Hutu exile population from Burundi living in Tanzania in the aftermath of the 1972 Burundian genocide as regarding their refugee status not as a tragedy, but as a positive experience. The performative function of their discourse lies in the transformation of their victimhood into a “historicising and politicising condition” (Malkki, 1996:383), forging their collective identity and creating a basis for future political action.

On a more material level, crises turn out to be another opportunity of doing business or savings through reliance on humanitarian aid rather than private resources. Artur (2009) shows, through the example of the 2007 floods in Mozambique, that supposedly helpless victims actively interact with emergency interventions. They appropriate and integrate them into their livelihood, social and economic security strategies in ways not foreseen by the intervening actors. They decide, based on their proper assessment when and where they take


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up refuge and use the ‘victimisation’ narrative offered by the humanitarian system, temporarily building their identities around the requirements for aid recipients. They thus obtain further resources and guarantee the long-term continuity, as opposed to the supposedly disruption, of their livelihoods during reoccurring emergencies (Hilhorst and Jansen, 2010:1128). If considered as rational behaviour, as this activity suggests, these strategies and actions then (re)establish the ‘silent victim’-object as a political subject and may contribute to the deconstruction of otherwise subjugating interpretations (Agier, 2010:40).

Saved and silenced by the left hand of empire

Secondarily, it is necessary to show not only how reality and humanitarian theory diverge, but to try and see the underlying causes and dynamics of this process. This study situates the explanatory variables for the disregard of meaningful participation of the ‘victim’ within humanitarianism on the operational-institutional as well as the systemic level.

Humanitarian operations continue to be constructed around the needs (mainly security) of aid workers rather than of the people they are supposed to help. This often leads to a spatial separation between victims and humanitarian personnel on the ground into, for example, refugee camps and guarded compounds or secured and non-secured areas (Duffield, 2012). This physical separation, however, makes it hard for humanitarian agencies to be fully aware of the dynamics taking place around them or to develop a thorough understanding of the local perceptions of their presence (Dijkzeul and Wakenge, 2010:1142). This, by itself, obstructs informed decision-making in emergency settings. For instance, MSF’s difficult discussion and decision in the mid-1990s about leaving the Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire shows the problems of obtaining reliable evidence on the ground. In this case, it took MSF almost a year to conclude that due to those camps being controlled by Hutu génocidaires, humanitarian action ought to be stopped. Even then, the decision was far from unanimous (Le Pape, 2004:211; MSF, 1994).

Furthermore, such a geographic separation leads to difficulties of mutual understanding between humanitarians and recipients, with the former often developing the tendency to rely on top-down analysis and to reject displaced people’s discourse as too ‘messy’ (Malkki, 1996:385). It can be argued, of course, that in a situation of urgency it is difficult to thoroughly listen to victims’ specific needs. Moreover, McDowell (1994:246) raises doubts whether those suffering are truly best positioned to know their own needs and construct their own knowledge. However, once applied in such a way this approach tends to continue even after an emergency has passed and to become a routine hard to break (Rajaram, 2002:254). More importantly still, due to the dependency of humanitarian agencies on public funding and government support, there is no incentive for them to know or make public these realities as this might risk the dis-continuation of their programmes (Hilhorst and Jansen, 2010:1134).

On a more systemic level, ‘victims’ are confined to play a specific role on the international scene, which further frames and limits their possibilities of shaping the aid system. They are not only the object of care by the humanitarian system, but the object through which the international community creates its own identity (Malkki, 1996:378). This ‘absolut victim’ is the raison d'être of the humanitarian system which, in turn, figures as the “left hand of empire” (Agier, 2010:29). It helps construct a world order inhabited by a seemingly uniform humanity, controlled by coercion and care, in which there is no space for opposition or difference. Humanitarianism thus becomes the newest expression of a universalist discourse of humanity which functions as the ideological foundation for contemporary international politics (Taithe,


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2004:149; Malkki, 1996:379). The process of victimisation therefore not only silences the ‘victimised’ on the ground. It serves as an instrument of power robbing people of their political meaning “in order to constitute new forms of sovereignty under the pretext of humanitarian action” (Dunn, 2012:19, Ophir, 2003). According to Agier (2010), then, humanitarianism is part of a broader political process of establishing the international system ruled by a humanitarian government in the form of a globalised network-like apparatus.

It is inside those refugee camps, humanitarian safe havens and sanctuaries as well as through aid delivery by humanitarian agencies that this system develops its “totalitarian sovereignty” (Dunn, 2012:19) and where it possesses the power – in a Foucaultian sense – of life and death over this ‘absolute victim’. Ultimately, within these power dynamics the masses of anonymous people will be granted good and at times lifesaving assistance, but only to discover that their voices have no (political) significance and place within the system (Agier, 2010:33ff). Think only of those making it to the shores of Lampedusa (not to mention the nameless masses who die trying), only to find themselves greeted with indifference, locked up in dire conditions and silenced until a decision as to their future will be taken – for them, not by them.

Host governments and the geopolitics of aid

The analysis of this process and systematic disregard of the agency of the ‘victim’ can be enlarged from the level of individuals to the level of the state system. The “relation of international political power to the geographical setting” (Cohen, 1973:29) at the basis of the victimisation process has so far been given scant attention (Keely, 1996:1046). Though research on the relationship between humanitarians and donor states continues to grow, the role of the disaster-affected state itself has largely been neglected, too simplistic or elementary.

This is not to argue that the governments of affected states are necessarily more capable in disaster response management than other humanitarian actors. Nevertheless, the disregard of an actor that inevitably – be it positively or negatively – affects the disaster management apparatus further disables any empirically sound analysis. This unnecessarily limits the range of possible approaches, resources, and knowledge from which humanitarians can construct effective strategies.

The neglected role of the host government

In practice, the relationship between the humanitarian aid community and host government of disaster-affected states is often defective at best and counterproductive at worst. The standard analysis undertaken by humanitarian agencies simply assumes that host governments of the global South are either too weak or corrupt to manage aid. Furthermore, in situations of conflict the state as part of the conflict seems unable to guarantee neutral aid delivery (Harvey, 2009:1). The logical consequence of this vision is to devise a form of humanitarian aid that largely avoids Southern institutions, leading to an overly simplistic and almost automatically negative representation of the affected state. Therefore the humanitarian system, instead of complementing national capacities tends to undermine them by creating parallel service systems. Humanitarians rely on the principles of independence and neutrality to keep national authorities at a distance instead of enabling principled engagement with them (Harvey, 2009:20ff).


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Although the role of the host government has largely been ignored in the analysis, within the body of international law governing the response to such situations, the host government is the first actor referred to regarding relief efforts on its territory. As such, the fourth Geneva Convention, UN Resolution 46/182 and the growing body of International Disaster Response Laws, Rules and Principles (IDRL) assign the primary responsibility of relief for civilians to the government of the affected territory. If the host government is unwilling or incapable of providing such assistance itself, it is – theoretically at least – required to allow the free passage and delivery of aid by neutral humanitarian agencies (Grombach Wagner, 2005:24). But even in the latter case, the work of international humanitarian actors is dependent upon the request for, consent to, and regulation and coordination of their activities by the affected state (Harvey, 2009:2ff).

Two empirical trends highlight the limited nature of this state-avoidance approach. Firstly, the continued failure of international actors and national authorities to cooperate effectively often leads to highly ineffective disaster responses. As a consequence, disaster-affected countries of the global South increasingly rely on their national institutions to implement, monitor and coordinate disaster responses (Beerli, 2013; Harvey, 2010:1ff). An illustrative example of this is the post-earthquake assistance delivered in Haiti. Though the initial international relief saved many lives, the massive influx of aid agencies20

Secondly, due to the steady growth and economic expansion of many developing countries, there has been a marked increase in South-South cooperation. Increasingly, developing countries emerge as ‘non-DAC’ donors of emergency relief

undermined the already reduced state capacities and obstructed an overall effective disaster response. Within this rather deficient system, Schuller (2012:187ff) shows that the most progress in the containment of the cholera outbreak was made within communities which were not subsumed in the WASH cluster system, but explicitly coordinated by the government in a locally inclusive approach.

21 (Smith, 2011). Aid being part of their mutual bilateral diplomacy, this new wave of aid resources is not governed by traditional humanitarian principles but inspired by the values of independence, sovereignty and non-interference. They mainly direct their assistance towards the governments of disaster-affected states, not international actors, and thus support domestic capacities and traditional state sovereignty (Fuchs and Klann, 2012; Harvey, 2010:18-19). Although there is a certain willingness to cooperate between traditional and new donors, and to include the latter into existing frameworks22

Humanitarian aid in a dominated world

, Elhawary (2013) concludes that there does not seem to be a common vision of how the humanitarian system should work.

The issues of donor-recipient relations are intrinsically, if not overtly, related to questions of power and representation in the international order. Based on a universalist ideology of humanity, the humanitarian aid system guarantees new and continued forms of Western involvement in the global South (Slater and Bell, 2002:350; Taithe, 2004:156). These power dynamics are representative of a historically evolving “struggle for global space” (Chimni,

20 Most of them under rather overt donor influence and in direct competition with one another for resources. 21 In 2010, 127 non-DAC donors reported their activities totalling US$622.5 million to the OCHA Financial Tracking Service. 22 As seen in the 3rd World Conference on Humanitarian Studies, held in October 2013, where the role of new players in the humanitarian arena is discussed.


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1998:359) between a more politically assertive South and the continued discursive and practical domination of the global order by the North.

This struggle also affects the policies and practices of the humanitarian system on the ground. As the decisions to grant humanitarian aid continue to be based on geopolitical reasonings, humanitarian rationales behind emergency relief are further marginalised (Fielden, 1998). The task of humanitarian aid by the North is hence to de-politicise and ‘smooth over’ the international inequalities between the global North and South. The ultimate geopolitical objective is thus to guarantee the preservation of this particular international order by pre-empting any profound political change (Slater and Bell, 2002:354).

To round up this analysis, it is insightful to look at the dynamics of humanitarian assistance for refugees from a postcolonial and historical perspective. The aim here is to deconstruct the dominant Western discourse in which humanitarian aid is located and to bring to the fore the mutually constitutive role between the ‘saviour’ and the ‘saved’ on which the continuation of the global system (secretly) depends (Slater and Bell, 2002:339). As Chimni (1998) shows, the welcoming of refugees on its proper territory made tactical sense for the West in its global campaign against the communist system as it delegitimised this alternative social construct. In the period following the Cold War, however, the population of the global South largely lost its ideological and political value for Western states and was seen as a political and economic burden.

Consequently, the West pushed for the institutionalisation of a ‘non-entrée’-regime in order to contain and control disaster victims within their regions of origins. By representing the North as a ‘filled up’ space23

This shift in geopolitical grand strategy also reflects itself in the policies and practices adopted by humanitarian actors, mainly of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Through the establishment of safe havens and refugee camps in the global South as well as local assistance, protection, and repatriation measures, they operationalised this new vision of ‘containment’ (Chimni, 1998:367). Moreover, the attempt to incorporate new donors into existing structures then reveals itself as a strategy to strengthen and further protect the system against profound change.

and keeping those populations at bay within the global South, the North secured its own territory. Moreover, by constructing the narrative of an ‘absolute victim’ neglected by its own government and in desperate need of international humanitarian assistance, the North assured its entry into ”‘new’ spaces or the subjugation of old spaces” (Chimni, 1998:359).

From this perspective, the assertion of sovereignty in disaster management by developing countries and the rise of non-traditional donors present not just a change in the implementation of humanitarian aid. It entails the possible deconstruction of the Western vision of humanitarianism, and attacks the underlying international order by circumventing its organs of executions and a (re)gaining of a certain freedom of manoeuvre. Especially the Gulf States as well as emerging economies such as China, Russia, Brazil and India have gained greater political clout in the international arena by massively enlarging their aid budgets (IRIN, 2010; Brezhneva and Ukhova, 2013).

23 Whereas in reality, developing countries host 80% of all refugees worldwide and the ones amongst them receiving most refugees host more refugees by themselves as Europe in its totality (UNHCR, 2013).


84

Conclusion

Continuing an unquestioned reliance on humanitarian relief efforts in situations where the humanitarian space is actively (mis)used, and allowing physical and epistemological violence to persist within that space will only serve to further discredit humanitarianism. Equally, replacing the conduct of politics with the provision of humanitarian aid, based on geopolitical motivations, will provide inadequate solutions to politically created crises; they will not end human suffering and only very rarely achieve the politically desired outcomes.

Failing to correctly analyse empirical phenomena within the humanitarian space inevitably leads to misinterpretations of realities on the ground. Those inaccuracies in analysis will further obstruct meaningful humanitarian practice. As long as the political, economic, and military rationales attached to the humanitarian space are not included in the elaboration of humanitarian interventions, the latter will continue to produce perverse side effects (Autesserre, 2012).

All is not lost however. Even in politically difficult times, and facing operational restraints, human compassion and a genuine will to help persist and push humanitarians to venture into disaster and conflict zones to assist those in need. In 2012, 76 million people received humanitarian assistance through the UN system alone and international humanitarian responses totalled $17.9 billion (GHA, 2013).

Improvements within the aid community have been made as well. There is greater recognition that in order to guarantee the assistance and protection of civilians, there needs to be a political solution to existing crises. Humanitarian organisations have begun to incorporate this into their policies. They increasingly promote rights-based and participatory approaches to aid and advocate tackling the root causes of crises in the world’s capitals (Oxfam, 2013). The future challenge that remains, however, is to translate this policy into practice on the ground and into political strategies behind advocacy efforts (Elhawary, 2013).

Such a step must include the recognition of silenced actors through the deconstruction of barriers between the ‘saviour’-subjects and the ‘to-be-saved’-objects (Barnett and Weiss, 2008:46, Garbe, 2013:12). Moreover, it requires the establishment of a new framework for the analysis and delivery of humanitarian aid that contextualises and historicises humanitarianism in a (geo)political world. To truly leave behind those internal and external obstacles, humanitarianism must then “insist on acknowledging…narrative authority, historical agency, and political memory” (Malkki, 1996:398) of those it seeks to help.

Once these unheard voices have been recognised, humanitarianism bears greater potential to meaningfully reduce human suffering. It might then not only save ‘peripheral’ life, but help re-establish it as an active player in the political arena. In the end, assuming a consciously political role might not be a bad thing, as long as it is in the true service of one diverse humanity.


85

Appendix

Interview Transcript, Samir Elhawary, 11.09.2013

Author (A): Have there been improvements in the ways international humanitarian

organisations perceive and possibly integrate the agency of local actors?

Elhawary (E): There is greater recognition that in order to get access and enhance the

protection of civilians, there is a political discussion to be had, and there needs to be a

political effort, a political solution to the conflict, and in the meantime, greater respect for

international humanitarian norms. There is certain recognition that that is the case. Now,

where there is still a challenge, or gap, is in the practice of how to negotiate the way through

different aspects of a crisis. There is no real political strategy behind advocacy efforts. It has

been translated into policy, but not practice. Organisations recognise the need to advocate

with governments granting access, but in practice this is still weak on the ground.

A: Humanitarian guidelines, such as the Code of Conduct or the Sphere Project, are trying to

tackle those problems. In your opinion, having first written about them and now having to

work with them, do they fulfil the expectations?

E: We are doing training with Sphere, and are disseminating them in Arabic as well. There is

a general acceptance that standards are good but not ideal; the reality is that there are different

levels of adherence. Some do not have the capacities or knowledge to do so; others think it is

not necessary, as giving something – the action of solidarity – matters. And others do not

necessarily want to adhere to standards developed in the West and prefer developing their

own. Some Gulf States have set up camps in Jordan, and some are pretty luxuries. Reactions

vary from different organisations. Their goals vary as well, for some the act of solidarity, as

opposed to the outcome, matter. Others feel that it does not matter how far out you reach but

how good the quality of your help is and set up five star camps that do not reach a lot of

people, and others buy into it. That is important to bear in mind.

INGOS and the UN think principles are important and will try to disseminate them, and work

with the organisations that also buy into them.


86

A: Some of those new organisations are doing, as you said, are good job. Do they receive

recognition; are they accommodated in the international system?

E: The reality is that you have an international humanitarian system which is formed by the

UN and INGOs and some national partners and funded by, mostly, OECD donors. They

coordinate relatively well together. Outside of that there are various numbers of NGOs, some

coordinate some do not, it is a patchwork of organisations and there is not a lot of

coordination between the two. Now, that is something everyone will recognise. Though a lot

of effort is made to promote coordination, there is a trust issue, a sense of asking “what’s the

added value of engaging?” and perhaps a push from the international, UN and NGOs, to

coordinate them within but without adapting the system which creates a certain amount of

resentment as well.

A: Some developing countries have experienced important growth and have expanded South

to South cooperation, as well in humanitarian aid. How have Western states reacted to

developing countries being more politically assertive in disaster-response in the 21st century?

E: There is surely an attempt to engage. If you look at the Good Humanitarian Donorship

initiative, there is an attempt to expand the membership to include others such as Turkey and

Brazil. USAID has worked with League of Arab states to improve capacities; there is a

general attempt to engage. You can see a willingness to engage, but there is still a long way to

go. There is going to be a conference in Istanbul (The 3rd World Conference on Humanitarian

Studies, note by the author), to bring together states to see how to bring in emerging countries

who are contributing more.

But there remains a long way to go and there is not necessarily a common vision of how the

humanitarian system should work.


87

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Defining and dangerous? An examination of the Assad regime’s use of the Shabiha militia in the Syrian conflict.

Andrew Chapman

Abstract

This paper examines the origins of the Shabiha militia in criminal gangs associated with powerful Alawite families and traces the development of their role in the Syrian conflict from loosely-organised neighbourhood security networks to a pro-government militia used to suppress demonstrations and support security forces in attacks on civilian areas. It suggests that the Shabiha were used to mobilise the Alawite community and secure its participation in the strategy of repression, to act as a low cost force multiplier and to afford the government some degree of deniability for atrocities. The paper then analyses the International Crisis Group’s claim that the Shabiha phenomenon is the conflict’s ‘most defining and dangerous feature’. It looks at the Shabiha against the backdrop of state terror and the commonplace use of militias globally, regionally and within Syria itself, and argues that the Shabiha, despite its participation in atrocities, has not told us anything new about the regime, its strategy or its preferred tactics, and is largely indistinct in its brutality from the wider security apparatus. This paper concludes that the Shabiha is neither the conflict’s most defining nor dangerous feature.


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Introduction In a 2012 report entitled ‘Syria’s Mutating Conflict’, the International Crisis Group (ICG), an influential organisation that monitors and seeks to resolve conflict around the world, wrote of the Syrian government that it ‘denied wholesale that it had used excessive force. It gave no indication of willingness to address the shabbiha phenomenon, arguably the conflict’s most defining and dangerous feature’ (ICG 2012b:15). It is certainly true that the Shabiha, the shadowy pro-government militia widely accused of complicity in the murder of regime opponents and civilian bystanders, have captured the public imagination. Their alleged involvement in the massacre of entire neighbourhoods has brought to the foreground the regime’s willingness to use appalling violence to maintain its dominance.

This paper is a critical response to the ICG’s assessment of the Shabiha’s significance. Although the Shabiha have featured prominently in the press, there has been little published that goes beyond a summary of their origins or actions. This paper examines the limited primary sources available, such as first-hand accounts by those with direct experience of the Shabiha, and the wider array of secondary sources, including reports by the ICG and other non-governmental organisations, the statements of governments and international organisations, media reports and scholarship on militias.

After a brief review of literature in Chapter One, this paper provides an overview in Chapter Two of the militia’s origins. It will suggest a number of reasons why the regime might have turned to the Shabiha for help. These include the perceived value in having a deniable armed force at its disposal and, crucially, the need to mobilise the Alawite community to gain access to a larger number of potential combatants and lock the community into a shared position with the government. The paper goes on in Chapter Three to examine critically the ICG’s claim for the centrality of the Shabiha in the conflict. The militia was a key element of the regime’s early strategy of suppressing dissent through force, a strategy that turned a provincial revolt against poor governance into a violent uprising. The Shabiha have also helped define the conflict as sectarian and personal, turning neighbours against each other and bringing to the surface decades-old enmities that have been exploited by jihadist groups.

Chapter Four will argue, however, that an appreciation of the global scale of pro-government militias, recognition of approximate regional parallels such as Iran’s Basij militia and Egypt’s baltagiya thugs and an understanding of the role of militias in Syria’s history fatally weakens the ICG claim that the Shabiha is a defining feature of the conflict. The reality is that the Shabiha is far from unique. Its use should not have taken anyone by surprise, given the limited options available to an autocratic regime heavily reliant on its security forces. The claim that the Shabiha is the conflict’s most dangerous feature detaches the militia from an equally sectarian and brutal security apparatus. This paper will conclude that the Shabiha is neither the conflict’s most defining nor dangerous feature. Literature review Despite a large number of references to the Shabiha in press reports, there has been limited engagement with the phenomenon in books, journals and other publications. The ICG refers to the militia in a number of its reports but avoids making an assessment of its significance beyond its claim that the group is the conflict’s ‘most defining and dangerous feature’ (ibid.).


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It does not explain this assessment, other than by placing the group at the centre of the regime’s strategy of repression and attributing numerous atrocities to it.

Other literature accepts implicitly the view that the Shabiha has played a key role in the conflict. A Royal United Services Institute assessment in August 2011 stated that the Shabiha had been ‘crucial over the last four months of repression’ (Joshi 2011) and Stephen Starr, writing for the US military’s Combating Terrorism Center, paints an apocalyptic picture of the opposition overcoming the government, with ‘groups like the shabiha [playing] an increasingly central role in conducting violence as law and order breaks down in the major cities’ (Starr 2012). The US Treasury’s decision to sanction the Shabiha (US Department of the Treasury 2012) and the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria’s accusation that the militia ‘had committed war crimes, gross violations against human rights and crimes against humanity’ (United Nations News Centre 2012) makes clear a hardening international position on their significance.

However, there remains a lacuna in academic writing when it comes to the Shabiha. The fullest examination, Aziz Nakkash’s ‘The Alawite Dilemma in Homs’ (2013), focuses on the existential threat perceived by Alawites and the regime’s exploitation of the community but does not offer a wider assessment of the militia’s significance. This paper addresses this lack of substantive analysis by engaging critically with the ICG’s claim for its centrality to the conflict and proposing a new assessment of the group’s significance. The Shabiha: What, How and Why? The origins of the Shabiha Although the term ‘Shabiha’ is widely believed to have originally referred to ‘the organized crime gangs that ran amok in the Syrian town of Lattakia in the 1980s’ (Noueihed and Warren 2012:229), there is disagreement over its origin. Some argue that it comes from the Arabic word shabah, meaning ghost, and describes the way such gangs ‘operate outside the law, living in the shadows…materializing and vanishing with bewildering speed’ (Salih 2012:2). Others claim it comes from the word shabaha, ‘meaning to rip apart an object or a person, almost to the point of dismemberment’ (Nakkash 2013:8). Yassin Salih suggests that it grew out of the smugglers’ fondness for the model of Mercedes known as al Shabah (the Ghost) (Salih 2012:3), which the smugglers fitted with ‘fake license plates and tinted windows’ (Mohammed D. 2012:7) in order to avoid being identified on their sorties into Lebanon. The car’s key feature was a trunk ‘big enough to hold expensive electronic goods’ (Salih 2012:3) rather than the way it looked. Indeed, Salih notes their frequently ‘battered appearance’, a result of the smugglers’ habit of treating them ‘carelessly, taking a positive pleasure in knocking them around, perhaps because they symbolized a luxury that had been stolen and not earned by work’ (ibid.).

According to some, the Shabiha appeared in the late 1970s, after Syria’s intervention in Lebanon and the subsequent rise in the smuggling of items such as cigarettes, electrical goods and foodstuffs. A personal account entitled ‘The Original Shabiha’ describes the appearance in an Alawite village of the first car that village had seen, driven by a young man named Faysal. The boot of this car was filled with ‘Marlboro cigarettes and a few cans of cooking fat, known as samneh’ (Mohammed D. 2012:2). Despite being a civilian, Faysal dressed in the uniform of the Defence Companies (Sarayah al Difaa’), a military unit headed


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by the president’s brother, in order to evade capture. The soldiers of this unit, which was comprised mostly of Alawites, ‘were notorious for their bad behaviour’ as they ‘intimidated regular citizens and abused their power’ (ibid.).

Faysal and his fellow Shabiha, who were ‘by no means all…Alawites’ (Rosen 2012), became known for behaving in a similarly intimidating manner. By the 1980s they ‘were untouchable and operated with impunity in the coastal city of Latakia’ (Salih 2012:2). Salih writes that the Syrian intellectual Elias Marcos once recalled ‘sitting in a café in Latakia when Shabiha members entered and amused themselves by forcing patrons to lie on the floor beneath their tables’ (ibid.). Salih lists other crimes attributed to the Shabiha:

They killed a young man who objected to their insults; they used threats to obtain property and possessions for reduced prices or for free; their leaders raped attractive young women; and they offered to resolve disputes in exchange for a hefty commission from both sides, ensuring victory for the side that paid the most. (ibid.)

This behaviour resulted in tension between the Shabiha and the authorities. Although Salih describes them as ‘untouchable’ (ibid.) because of their links to influential Alawites, Mohammed D. (2012:6) refers to a period during which Bashar’s brother ‘crushed and jailed elements of the Assad Shabiha who got out of control’. A similar crackdown took place in the early 2000s, under the supervision of Maher al Assad, Bashar’s younger brother (Nakkash 2013:8).

The original Shabiha, then, were ‘organised criminals and smugglers who co-operated with the security forces’ (Rosen 2012) rather than a tool of the state. Carsten Wieland suggests that they were ‘founded as the armed wing of the “welfare organization” al-Murtada’ (Wieland 2012:35), an organisation that sought to convert Syrians to the Alawite faith. This may have been the point at which they were first used to further the aims of the ruling group beyond the straightforward accumulation of profit. But Wieland’s use of the word ‘founded’ ignores the shadowy origins of the Shabiha in smuggling and extortion. These origins are key to understanding the Shabiha today, as the characteristics of the militia we see impacting so significantly upon the Syrian conflict are there in the early accounts: a network that is sectarian but not exclusively so, that cooperates with state security but is not controlled by it and that seeks to gain financially from intimidatory tactics. The emergence of the Shabiha in the uprising The beginnings of the conflict were inauspicious: police and military vehicles were set on fire in January 2011, a ‘Day of Rage’ demonstration was held in February and in March footage of a demonstration in Damascus was broadcast live by satellite channels, the first time such an event had been seen by most Syrians. The collapse of the Tunisian regime in mid-January and the resignation of Mubarak in mid-February had alarmed insiders in the Syrian government but the belief prevailed that Syria was in a different position, due to its strategic posture towards Israel and the relative popularity of its president (ICG 2011a:4). The country had also witnessed the effects of civil war on two of its neighbours, Lebanon and Iraq, and a feeling was abroad that the moderate Sunni majority would baulk at the overthrow of an Alawite-dominated regime. This judgement perhaps reflected the regime’s focus on Damascus at the expense of the provinces, which had less to lose after decades of neglect. Indeed, at the beginning ‘the protest movement [was] a revolt against poor governance in provinces that the regime has long left adrift’ (ibid.). It follows from this that a defining episode in the early stages of the conflict, the arrest and alleged torture of children and the


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regime’s use of violence in suppressing the demonstrations that followed, should have happened not in Damascus but in Deraa, a city in south-western Syria (see Macleod 2011).

An early feature of the regime’s ‘security solution’ (ICG 2012a:1) was the fostering of sectarian tensions. This began with the formation of Popular Committees (lijan sha’abiya) in Alawite neighbourhoods to provide security for residents. These consisted of young men, ‘initially armed with sticks’ and ‘posted at checkpoints strategically located throughout residential neighbourhoods. Their main duty was to control vehicles entering the area and to report to the Mukhabarat [secret police] any individual that they found suspicious’ (Nakkash 2013:9). It was not long before the members of these committees were being used to suppress demonstrations, and by autumn 2011, according to Nakkash (ibid.):

collaboration between the committees and the secret service had grown so strong that vigilante groups began to accompany the army and the secret service to fight in neighbourhoods held by the opposition. Having begun as popular committees, the groups gradually became the Shabiha.

How have the Shabiha featured in the conflict? It was in April and May 2011 that references to this new phenomenon began to appear in the media1

and in 2012 that they were accused of being responsible for atrocities. Two incidents stand out. The first of these took place in March 2012 when pro-regime militias were suspected of entering the Sunni district of Karam Zeitoun near Homs following military operations in the area and carrying out ‘the savage massacres of entire families, including young children whose heads appeared to have been crushed with a heavy blunt object’ (ICG 2012a:4). Other accounts confirm that Shabiha would frequently act ‘in the bow wave of regular troops. When the army soldiers had subdued a neighbourhood, the shabiha spread out to loot and murder’ (Wieland 2012:35).

A Syrian official from Homs said that local Alawite militias had perpetrated the attack ‘in retaliation for violence to which they had been subjected’ (ICG 2012b:15). Speaking of such militias, the official said:

[They are] more or less under control, but because of all their losses, some among them are using the same techniques as the armed opposition groups… For example, if the government tries to send security forces to recover stolen goods, they try to block the roads and cause a lot of shooting. (ibid.)

The Shabiha were also accused of complicity in a massacre in the towns of Houla and Taldou, which took place just 2 months later. According to media reports, militia members entered the towns after a three-hour bombardment and carried out killings with small arms and knives (Chulov and Mahmood 2012). 108 people were killed, including entire families and large numbers of children. Syrian diplomats were expelled from a number of western capitals as a result, and the UN Human Rights Council condemned ‘in the strongest terms the massacre of the village of Al-Houla near Homs, where the forces of the Government of Syria and members of the Shabbiha were found…to be the perpetrators of outrageous and heinous crimes’ (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights 2012).

1 On 18 April 2011, the NY Times referred to a ‘criminal gang’ called the Shabiha; on 19 April Beirut’s Daily Star described the use of ‘pro-regime thugs’; and on 17 May a BBC article described an ‘armed gang’ loyal to the president.


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Human Rights Watch have recorded accounts of the Shabiha’s alleged involvement in

sexual crimes. Some of this has taken place in detention facilities – witnesses described an ‘ad hoc shabiha facility in Latakia’ (Human Rights Watch 2012) – but the majority occurred during home raids and ground operations. In five cases, they said that:

all of the interviewees described the attackers as shabiha. Descriptions and characterizations of shabiha forces varied, but in four out of five cases witnesses described them as armed men in civilian clothing operating alongside Syrian government forces, though official forces were not always present during the sexual assaults (ibid.).

The report concludes that ‘no action has been taken to investigate or punish government forces and shabiha who commit acts of sexual violence or to prevent them from committing such acts in the future’ (ibid.). Why have the Shabiha been used? There are a number of reasons why the Syrian regime might have encouraged the Shabiha. Nakkash quotes a local as saying that ‘“From the very beginning…the security forces worked to mobilize Alawites, especially the young who were out of work”’ (Nakkash 2013:6), which served to increase the array of operational tools at the regime’s disposal. There must have been some doubt in official circles over whether the ordinary soldier could be relied upon to defend the regime against his fellow Syrians, especially if he was Sunni. The loyalty of Alawites in official positions was also far from guaranteed. An intelligence officer ‘estimated that three quarters of his colleagues felt some sympathy for the protestors’ (ICG 2011a:27). Indeed, even Alawites had reason to hold grievances against the regime. As the ICG explains:

the regime did not privilege the community as a whole. The Alawite countryside remains strikingly underdeveloped; many join the army for lack of an alternative; members of the security services are overworked and underpaid. Ordinary Alawites rarely benefited from high-level corruption, least of all under Bashar. (ICG 2012b:27)

The Syrian regime may therefore have understood that it needed a security element within the Alawite community that could suppress dissent while also broadening its militarised base in case extra forces were needed. Known as the ‘force substitute’ incentive (Butler et al 2009:6), this involved arming those sections of the Alawite community that could be persuaded to see the conflict in terms of survival or annihilation.

Nakkash points out that increasing the number of individuals engaged in violence on behalf of the government has had the added effect of increasing support for the government. A Shabiha member told him that ‘“I didn’t go for Bashar; I went for my brothers who are working in the army and are currently fighting in Idlib and the suburbs of Damascus’” (Nakkash 2012:8). As Nakkash explains:

Virtually every family has at least one family member or a neighbour working for one or several of these establishments [the army, secret service or paramilitary units]. This signifies that the Alawite community as a whole operates under a burden of constraints which implicates them directly or indirectly in the current conflict. (ibid. 11.)

The regime undoubtedly also judged that using the Shabiha would give them an

element of deniability. As Butler explains, governments ‘deliberately attempt to obfuscate and


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conceal the nature of the relationship with such irregular forces to avoid accountability for strategically useful violence’ (Butler et al 2009:7). A key element of the Syrian government’s early rhetoric was to claim that the West was waging an information war by attributing acts carried out by ‘terrorists’ to the Syrian authorities. A senior official said in April 2012 that the presence of shabiha had been ‘highly exaggerated. The foreign media have blown this completely out of proportion’ (ICG 2012b:15). The use of a civilian militia allowed the government to confuse the issue, particularly given the absence of media organisations on the ground. A Syrian colonel recounted asking his superiors in the early days of the conflict if he could mobilise young Alawites to help the army only to be told that they ‘“were not enthusiastic about the idea of having militias directly linked to the army”’ since, according to Nakkash ‘the regime’s initial strategy was to maintain distinct divisions between the army, the militias and the secret service’ (Nakkash 2013:6).

Civilian militias also have the advantage of ‘providing additional forces at low or even no direct cost to the government’, sometimes referred to as the ‘force multiplier’ incentive’ (Butler et al 2009:6). Mahmoud Hamad, a former Syrian Ministry of Defence auditor who has since fled to Egypt, claimed that individual Shabiha cost the equivalent of $100 per day (although this includes the cost of housing, food etc.) (Channel 4 News 2012). Salih suggests a sliding pay scale, with members earning ‘between 7000 lira (about $100) and 10,000 lira (about $140) for working on Fridays and at least 2,000 lira (about $35) for the other days of the week’ (Salih 2012:6). A Shabiha member claimed that he was paid 30,000 lira (around $280) per month and an extra 10,000 ($95) for each person that he captured or killed (Sherlock 2012). Nakkash (2013:10) puts the true figure at around $200 per month. The variation between these figures may reflect differences between regions or ranks, or even different periods in the conflict, as some accounts claim that ‘in July 2011 the Shabiha went on strike because their wages fell’ (Salih 2012:6). Numerous accounts suggest that militia members supplement their income with ‘whatever [they] can get during the attacks: TVs, video players, electronics’ (Macleod and Flamand 2012). Exploring the Shabiha’s significance The conflict’s most dangerous feature? According to the ICG, the scale of the conflict today is attributable to the regime’s response to the uprising in its earliest phase. As we have seen, the ICG characterised the initial discontent as ‘a revolt against poor governance’ (ICG 2011a:13). A senior official said that the protestors ‘essentially are people who resent having been treated like second-hand citizens. They want genuine development. They want to own their land, rather than see Gulf investors buy it up’ (ibid. 16). Faced with what many would characterise as a legitimate grievance, the regime responded by making a number of superficial concessions on the political level while using force to crack down on protesters. As demonstrations picked up pace, the regime implemented in the summer of 2011 its ‘security solution’, which involved giving ‘security services a freer hand to contain and roll back the popular movement…through a network of checkpoints; stimulating sectarianism to strengthen communal divisions; and using scare tactics to reinstate the wall of fear’ (ICG 2012a:3). This was followed by the move to a ‘military solution’ (ICG 2012b:3) in January 2012, which involved prolonged shelling of opposition-held neighbourhoods.


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This claim that the government response led to the current conflict is supported by a study of death squads in El Salvador by Mason and Krane. In it they point out that ‘mass revolts occur far less often than do those syndromes of “underlying conditions” which one or another theory of revolution has posited as being conducive to revolution’ (Mason and Krane 1989:176). What is required, they argue, to ‘convert normally risk-averse peasants into revolutionary soldiers is a high level of indiscriminately targeted repressive violence’ (ibid.). This type of violence is crucial as it forces neutral non-elites to realise that they are not immune from regime violence and encourages them to identify with the opposition. ‘Carefully targeted repressive violence’, in contrast, can have the opposite effect of reducing ‘the level of active popular support for the opposition’ (ibid. 175), at least in the short term, as it provides an incentive for individuals to remain politically inactive and so avoid repression.

It is notable that the Shabiha were a key feature of both the security and military solutions. They were used in the uprising’s early stages to suppress demonstrations alongside security officers and in later stages to enter unruly neighbourhoods after conventional military assaults to loot and murder. The Shabiha, therefore, were at the core of the government strategy that led directly to the current conflict.

Compounding this is the fact that the Shabiha are motivated by a number of factors, from long-standing familial grudges to financial gain. This makes them an unreliable instrument.

To the degree that agents charged with carrying out repression engage in hidden actions for strategic or private gain, be it revenge, violence for its own sake, or violence or the threat of violence for the sake of bribes and financial gain, then the level and nature of human rights violations will exceed that intended by the government. (Butler et al 2009:8)

The reasons for this include militias being ‘less selective in their recruitment procedures than the military or the police’, with the result that those recruited have a ‘less developed awareness of “combat morality,” either for reasons of fanaticism or opportunism’ (ibid. 9). Militia members, with their ‘internalized systems of ethics’, are also ‘more likely to make the most of opportunities to seek private goods, either in the enjoyment of violence for its own sake or for other material benefits’ (ibid.). As a US official suggested in early 2011, ‘Much of what has happened was due to indiscipline, security forces not knowing how to handle this kind of situation’ (ICG 2011b:3). This is supported by accounts that suggest the regime made some attempts to track down the perpetrators of massacres (see ICG 2012b:15).

More dangerous, I would argue, than the tactical use of the Shabiha as a supplement to Syria’s already sizeable security and military apparatus, which is undoubtedly responsible for the majority of those killed, is what the Shabiha has come to represent, and what this has engendered. What it has come to represent is the regime itself. We should not take this to mean that the Shabiha has evolved to the point that people identify its motives, fears and ambitions with those of the government. The reverse is more likely to be true - that the regime has come to resemble the Shabiha. It is easy to see how high-level defections, the assassination of senior figures and near-complete international condemnation might strip the regime of its diplomatic polish and reduce it to something busy killing endless numbers of people in order to survive. At this point it becomes difficult to distinguish between the regime and the Shabiha. In the words of a government insider, ‘This is a regime that speaks like a state but acts like a militia’ (ibid. 6).


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It is important to try to understand what this means in human terms. When the Shabiha enter a house in a Sunni neighbourhood, they enter not just as a death squad but as an extension of the regime, and they look and sound like your neighbours. ‘According to Ali Sayed, the sole survivor of a rampage that killed his family, the militiamen asked for all the men in his family by name. “They spoke with an Alawite accent… They said they were from Foulah”’ (Chulov and Mahmood 2012). This is different to brutality carried out by state security officials. In a study of the psychological effect of state-sponsored terror in Guatemala, Judith Zur writes that the ‘sense of exposure and vulnerability was heightened after the village massacres by the fact that the killers continued to live in close proximity’ (Zur 1994:15). The use of the Shabiha, therefore, has had an impact on the conflict and on Syrian society far beyond the numbers of people killed. ‘Witnessing of the killing of innocent kin by a known person meant that the murder became an “intimate truth”. This differed from the killing of men by an unknown soldier’ (ibid.).

Alawites may have been driven to engage in such barbaric behaviour by fears of their own. Even as far back as 2007, according to Torstein Worren, many Alawites would describe their ‘relationship to the Sunnis as one where they are hated by them’ (Worren 2007:83). He suggests that ‘the focal point of Alawi identity has been the threat they feel to their community from the majority Sunnis in Syria’ (ibid. 84) and quotes a Alawite resident of Lattakia as saying ‘she is convinced that the extremists will gain power at some point in the future. When that happens, she says, the Alawis will experience massacres rivalling those that took place under the Ottoman Empire’ (ibid. 92). The current state of sectarian relations is predictably bad. The ICG reports that ‘anti-Alawite and anti-Shiite rhetoric have reached frightening levels’ (ICG 2012b:17). An opposition fighter said in May 2012 that there were ‘many killings of Alawites now, not just shabbiha and security but any Alawite’ (ibid. 17-18).

It is possible to see the increasing role played by international jihadis as a reaction to the regime’s strategy of inflaming and militarising sectarian divisions, exemplified by their use of the Shabiha. A French official said that ‘“In all those years of Afghanistan, we tallied around 20 French citizens going there to fight. Over a decade in Iraq we came to a similar number. After one year of jihadi activity in Syria, we already have 200”’ (ICG 2013:8). The Times has reported that over 100 Britons are ‘either in Syria fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime or have returned home already’ (Savage and Ford 2013).

There are several reasons why these numbers might be so high. Firstly, the Arab Spring has established a powerful narrative of suppressed peoples rising up across the region, from Tunisia to Libya to Egypt. The Syrian conflict fits into this broader narrative, and has a sense of justice, momentum and history that is extremely compelling. Secondly, Syria is far more accessible and geographically hospitable than recent war zones, such as Afghanistan. Europeans can travel to Turkey without arousing suspicion and cross into Syria, the northern border of which is controlled by anti-regime forces. Thirdly, other potential destinations for foreign fighters, such as Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen, have been subject to domestic military pressure and US drone programmes that may have tarnished their appeal to young jihadis.

It is surely significant too that in reaching out to mobilise fighters, Al Qaida and its affiliates have been able to frame the battle as one against a ‘criminal Alawite regime’, in the words of Ayman Al Zawahiri (quoted by Freeman 2013). This has been made easier by the role played in the conflict by the Shabiha, a role highlighted by the Al Nusra Front in the statement it issued on 23 January 2012 to announce its formation: ‘We promise to protect the


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lives of civilians and their possessions from security and the shabihah militia. We are a people who will either gain victory or die’ (quoted by Roggio 2012). In other words, the use of the Shabiha in the conflict has brought to the foreground not just the criminal nature of the regime but also the sectarian fault lines that divide it from the majority of the people. While far from being the sole catalyst for groups like the Al Nusra Front, the Shabiha has, I would argue, played some role in characterising the regime’s actions as being an expression of its anti-Sunni nature. The conflict’s most defining feature? It is worth examining what the ICG might mean by the word ‘defining’. In one respect, the Shabiha might define the conflict by being an expression of its essential nature, by embodying the chaotic, sectarian and violent characteristics that give the conflict its meaning. In simple terms, it explains what the conflict is about. But to define something is also to say what it is not. To define ‘a rifle’ is to describe what makes something a rifle but also to describe what makes it different from ‘a pistol’ or ‘a rocket’. In this respect, therefore, the claim that the Shabiha is the conflict’s ‘most defining feature’ is a claim that there is something distinctive about the Shabiha – that the Shabiha make the conflict different from other conflicts. You might say that the use of nuclear weapons was a ‘defining feature’ of World War II; it would be hard to imagine the same claim made for the use of artillery, or aircraft.

This claim for distinctiveness on the part of the Shabiha merits closer examination. For it to stand, it must be shown that the use by states of militias, in the region and beyond, is not the norm. After all, if the use of militias is commonplace, how can the Shabiha be considered a defining feature of the conflict? It must also be shown that the Syrian regime’s use of the Shabiha was, for want of a better term, a policy choice selected from an array of possible policy choices. It must be shown that the regime could have dealt with the uprising a number of ways but decided to use the Shabiha and in so doing defined the conflict in a certain way. How can a single repressive feature of a regime (such as the Shabiha) be considered defining if it is the inevitable product of a system configured to produce repressive outcomes? If, as I hope to demonstrate, the use of the Shabiha was a reflexive act carried out by a government with no other options, the emergence of a militia was predictable, unsurprising and far from defining. State terror and the use of militias It is important to take a step back from the Syrian conflict and place the Shabiha within the larger phenomenon of state terror. State terror is often obscured by anti-state terrorism, such as that practised by groups like Al Qaida and the IRA. There are a number of reasons for this, not least because of what Chomsky and Herman called ‘the propaganda model’, according to which ‘the media serve the ends of a dominant elite’ (Herman and Chomsky 1994:1) and in doing so obscure accounts of repression that might damage their interests. This distinction between state terror and terrorism is, according to Sluka, arbitrary. Indeed, he writes that:

The only compelling reasons to distinguish between terror and terrorism are that the function of one is to maintain the status quo while that of the other is to achieve political change, and because there is a huge difference in scale between them. (Sluka 2000:1)

This question of scale is key. ‘The really massive and significant growth of terrorism since World War II has been that carried out by states’ (Herman 1982:83), something that has been


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‘evidenced by the re-emergence of torture as a serious world problem, the rising tide of death squad murders and the use of direct state violence to intimidate millions of people’ (Sluka 2000:3).

State terror, therefore, is extremely common, as is the use of death squads to enact that terror. We should not shy away from using this term to describe the Shabiha. Mason and Krane define death squads as ‘those military, paramilitary, and irregular units that engage in violent acts against a population in order to deter them from lending support to the opposition’ (Mason and Krane 1989:178). They go on to suggest that the ‘most critical defining feature’ of such squads is that their ‘violence [is] sanctioned by the regime, either explicitly through policy pronouncements or implicitly through lack of effort to curtail such acts’ (ibid.). Butler, Carey and Mitchell acknowledge that ‘militias’, ‘paramilitary groups’, ‘irregular forces’ and ‘vigilantes’ are all commonly used terms for what they call Pro-Government Armed Groups (PGAGs) (Butler et al 2009:13). In their study of PGAGs, they found an upward trend through the 1980s and 1990s, with a spike in 1999 when the number reached 95. As of the last date included in their study, the number of PGAGs was in the low 50s (ibid. 16). The use of militias in the region In May 2012, a US State Department spokeswoman drew a direct comparison between the Shabiha and Iran’s Basij militia, claiming that the Shabiha ‘very much models the Iranian Basij model, where they hire young guys to indiscriminately wreak vengeance and do this kind of hand-to-hand violence’ (US Department of State 2012).

The Basij militia was established in 1979 as an independent people’s army that would defend Iran against internal and external enemies, most notably the USA. It was subordinated to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) during the war with Iraq and now undertakes, according to Saied Golkar, ‘four main roles in controlling Iran’s society: (1) engaging in local defence, (2) conducting surveillance, (3) policing society, and (4) suppressing dissidents’ (Golkar 2012:457). It does this through a ‘cluster network’ encompassing 40,000 resistance bases throughout Iran that have a range of responsibilities, from morality policing, intelligence operations and rescue and relief to cultural propaganda (ibid. 459). The last fifteen years have seen the Basij transformed into ‘a conservative tool for suppressing pro-reform social groups’ (ibid. 463). They were instrumental in suppressing a student uprising in 1999 and attacked female activists during a rally on Women’s Day in 2004; ‘they also undertake actions the Army and IRGC believe beneath them or refuse to do, such as firing on fellow Iranians during riots in Qazvin’ (Western 2006).

There are similarities to the Shabiha beyond the role of the Basij in suppressing dissent. Butler suggests that the Iranian government’s use of the Basij is an example of ‘the force substitute incentive’ (Butler et al 2009:6), and Western explains that in the event of any large-scale military mobilization the Basij would almost certainly be called up, as ‘the Basij acts as a reserve component to fill out the “main combat” brigades of the IRGC in wartime’ (Western 2006). The Basij is also a cost-effective security solution for a government struggling with economic problems, as its members are technically volunteers, funded through donations from local mosques and the revenue from fines and confiscations imposed by Basij members (ibid. 38).


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Comparisons have been drawn between the Basij and groups of armed regime supporters known as baltagiya who were active in the final days of Egypt’s Mubarak regime. Gregory McGee, for example, has commented on the ‘unnerving similarity’ (McGee 2011:38) between the two groups, both of which enjoy strong state backing and have been used to suppress dissent. Many of those among the baltagiya are alleged to have had criminal pasts. McGee claims that Mubarak’s ruling party would offer ‘to drop charges for men in jail if they beat and sometimes kill[ed] opposition candidates and voters, especially during election seasons’ (ibid.), and Paul Amar describes a process by which the baltagiya were brought under informal state control, from an initial position in the 1990s when they were seen as ‘terrorist enemies of the security state’ (Amar 2011:308). These ‘state sponsored gangs’ (Lawson 2012:13) were used alongside uniformed police following the beginning of protests in January 2011, in a period that saw the death of over 300 protestors. Syria and militias There is a long history of suspicion and enmity between Syria’s Alawite and Sunni communities. In 1978, an offshoot of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood published a clandestine newsletter in which they claimed responsibility for the assassination of several Ba’athist leaders. In the newsletter they wrote that ‘modern history has never before witnessed such despotism and intellectual and administrative immorality as that which it witnesses today in the shadow of the regime of Hafiz Asad and his reckless gang’ and bemoaned the way that ‘the psychological and military destruction of the armed forces was planned [and] the sectarian party militia were allowed to take the place of the regular armed forces’ (quoted in Van Dam 2011:90). Soon after this, on 16 June 1979, thirty-two military cadets, the majority of whom were Alawite, were murdered at the Aleppo artillery school.

The regime responded to this in a number of ways. Around five hundred Muslim

Brotherhood inmates in Palmyra prison were killed in their cells by Rifa’at Al Assad’s Defence Companies. Dozens of males over the age of fourteen were rounded up in Aleppo and Hama and shot. A Muslim Brotherhood report claims that in 1981 ‘death squads of the Defence Companies reportedly executed more than 200 people, including whole families, in various quarters of Hama’ (ibid. 112). But ‘the real innovation’, according to Patrick Seale, ‘was the arming of the party and its sympathisers. In every city, citizen militias were formed and weapons distributed to Ba’th-affiliated Popular Organizations’ (Seale 1988:327). As Van Dam explains, from this point onwards ‘not only the armed forces but also the civilian party apparatus, equipped with arms, participated in crushing any armed opposition’ (Van Dam 2011:105).

The battle for Hama, prompted by the ambush of an army unit on patrol, lasted for most of February 1982. On the side of the regime were, among others, units of Special Forces, Military Intelligence units and ‘armed Ba’th Party units’ (ibid. 112); on the other side were hundreds of the Brotherhood’s fighters, who killed around seventy leading Ba’thists in the first night of the conflict and declared the city liberated. Government forces spent the subsequent week regaining control of the city from the Islamists and the two after that hunting them down. ‘After heavy shelling, commandos and party irregulars supported by tanks moved in to subdue the acres of mud-and-wattle houses whose interconnecting roof-tops and courtyards were the guerrillas’ habitat’ (Seale 1988:333). Many civilians were killed even after the army regained full control of the city; somewhere between five and ten thousand people are believed to have died. Putting the Shabiha in context


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The ordinariness of militias It is hard to see how the ICG’s claim that the Shabiha phenomenon is the conflict’s most defining feature stands up under examination. As I have argued, for a feature to be defining it must not just illuminate the core characteristic of a conflict but explain how that conflict is different from others; it must show that feature to be distinctive, unexpected – in this case, particular to Syria. But the use of pro-government militias to suppress dissent is commonplace, regionally and globally. ‘Armed groups that are allied with the government but are not part of the regular armed forces are surprisingly common,’ writes Butler, ‘despite the likely reputational and control costs they pose for governments’ (Butler et al 2009:5). Egypt’s baltagiya and Iran’s Basij do not offer exact parallels, certainly. The baltagiya were not drawn from a particular religious or ethnic group and did not engage in repression on the same scale, or with the same ferocity, as the Shabiha; and the Basij is subject to far greater organisation and engaged in a much wider range of activities, including religious instruction and distributing aid. But in both instances we find, as we do in Syria, a state supplementing its official security apparatus with a non-state group comprised largely of volunteers who suppress popular dissent with force, thereby assisting the regime in its efforts to maintain control over people and territory.

The use of pro-government militias is also commonplace within Syria itself. In response to Muslim Brotherhood actions, the regime armed Ba’ath Party members, creating a civilian branch to the state’s security apparatus, in a move that contributed to the defeat of the Brotherhood in Hama. There is a clear line that connects the Ba’ath Party militias of the 1980s to the Shabiha. A former Syrian officer explained that in March 2011, just as the uprising was gathering pace, ‘the regime tried to revive the [Baath Party] militias, but there were just not enough young members anymore and the party base was too pluralistic’ (Nakkash 2013:11). The Shabiha, then, is what the regime turned to as a substitute for the Ba’ath Party militias that had served them so well in past conflicts. The line that connects Ba’ath militias to the Shabiha extends even further into the present day. Media reports suggest that the regime has ‘reorganized, trained and transformed’ the Shabiha into ‘a volunteer reserve army’ called The National Defence Force (NDF) (Reuters 2013). A military commander said that the NDF had started ‘as popular committees patrolling their neighbourhoods… [and] in late 2012 were legitimized under the name National Defence Forces’ (ibid.). Iran’s IRGC commander Mohammed Jafari is reported to have stated that the NDF is modelled on the Basij Militia (Paraszczuk 2012).

The genealogy can be traced, then, from Ba’ath party militias to the Shabiha and on to the NDF. In light of this it is hard to argue that there is anything unusual or distinctive about the Shabiha. Indeed, given that the Syrian government had successfully used a militia before to suppress dissent, and in a region populated by autocratic states struggling to control their people, it would have been more unusual and distinctive, more ‘defining’, if Assad had not mobilized a militia.

This assertion is true not just because there are examples of Syria and its regional counterparts using militias in the past, as I have shown. It is true because Assad had no other choice; repression was the only option available to him. As Mason and Krane explain, autocratic regimes are:


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without the institutional machinery, economic resources or political will to address opposition challenges through more accommodative programs of reform. Thus, escalating repression is perpetrated not because it has a high probability of success but because the weakness of the state precludes its resort to less violent alternatives. (Mason and Krane 1989:175)

They go on to suggest that such regimes find themselves stuck for options in the face of dissent because ‘the character of the authoritarian alliance between the military, the economic oligarchy, and their external supporters makes such regimes generally resistant to reforms that would redistribute wealth or political power at the expense of this alliance’ (ibid. 183). Instead,

regimes that have been successful in the past in suppressing opposition through violent repression are likely to resort to such tactics in the future, regardless of the character of the opposition organizations and their demands. Coercion is the response for which the requisite institutional machinery (i.e., the security forces) is the most extensive and well-established in the authoritarian state. (ibid. 184)

In other words, Assad and his government reacted to the uprising in the only way they were institutionally capable of, which was to deploy their repressive security apparatus. There was no other policy option on the table. They were not equipped to redistribute wealth, or eliminate corruption, or open up the economy significantly to outside influence. Their decision to use a militia to confront the opposition was a predictable one, given their success in doing so before and the fact that the demonstrators were such a formidable force, emboldened by the toppling of Mubarak, Gaddafi and Ben Ali. That the militia was the Shabiha rather than Ba’ath Party members or the National Defence Force was a matter of historical exigencies. The use of the Shabiha, therefore, was not a ‘defining’ feature of the conflict. Rather, it was the reflexive action of a system that could only do one thing when put under pressure. It was a routine, unimaginative commonplace, familiar to those who had lived through Hama and recognisable in the baltagiya of Egypt and the Basij of Iran. The inconsequentiality of the Shabiha As we have seen, the argument that the Shabiha is the most dangerous feature of the conflict is based on a number of factors. Firstly, that the current conflict was caused by the regime’s early, disproportionate response, of which the Shabiha was a prominent part; this response forced neutral parties to side with the opposition. Secondly, that the regime’s use of the Shabiha characterised the conflict as brutal, sectarian and personal. It made negotiation impossible, a return to the status quo unthinkable. The Shabiha were not under control in the same way that regular forces were and so may have behaved more viciously than intended. The move to mobilise one religious group against their neighbours has caused profound damage to the national fabric. Thirdly, the Shabiha have shown the regime to be militia-like. They have defined Assad’s government, in the eyes of the international community, as a profoundly unsuitable partner for negotiation. Fourthly, the overwhelmingly Alawite character of the Shabiha has allowed Sunni extremist groups to grow in size and strength on the back of claims that the regime’s actions are motivated by sectarian enmity, that this is a war against Sunnis by a minority sect of Islam.

This is a compelling argument. But it requires that we see the Shabiha in isolation from the wider state apparatus and, indeed, recent Syrian history. It requires that we detach the Shabiha from the secret police, from the Defence Companies, from the Ba’ath militias,


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whereas, I would argue, the Shabiha has done nothing to change the regime’s intentions or its willingness to use brutality to suppress the population. Amnesty International wrote in 1983 that there had been ‘reports of torture, ‘disappearances’ and extra-judicial killings carried out by the security forces’ (Amnesty International 1983). In 1995 Human Rights Watch claimed that the Syrian security apparatus had ‘for decades…arrested, detained, and interrogated under torture thousands in Syria without any form of judicial oversight’ (Human Rights Watch 1995). The Syrian regime, therefore, was already doing the things that it asked the Shabiha to do, and it had already used militias to suppress dissent and act as a force multiplier when under threat.

Indeed, many strands of the argument that the Shabiha is the conflict’s most dangerous feature unravel upon closer examination. The earliest demonstrations against the regime, for instance, were prompted by the arrest and torture of children by the secret police, and were suppressed by the military and security forces rather than the Shabiha. Although the Shabiha were used in the months following that incident, they were an element within the wider crackdown rather than the only tool used.

More crucially, it did not take the Shabiha to define the conflict as sectarian. Key military units and posts had always been dominated by Alawites, as had the ranks of the secret police. In as far back as 1979, the Syrian Communist Party had commented that the ‘sectarian method of the regime seems to constitute one of the greatest dangers to the country’ (quoted in Van Dam 2011:98). Worren’s 1997 study of Alawites revealed a community that feared it would ‘experience massacres rivalling those that took place under the Ottoman Empire’ (Worren 2007:92). In short, the national fabric was already strained. The Muslim Brotherhood had mobilised its members in the 1980s by denouncing the Alawites as kuffar (unbelievers) and mushrikun (idolaters) (Van Dam 2011:107); it is unlikely that the Al Nusra Front and other jihadist groups would have struggled to attract volunteers without the presence of the Shabiha, although the existence of the militia and accounts of its actions undoubtedly captured the public imagination and served as a convenient shorthand for the brutality of the regime.

How, then, can we call the Shabiha the conflict’s most dangerous feature? Its significance, surely, is that it has shown how far the regime is prepared to go to maintain its grip on power. It has revealed the regime to be a kind of militia. It has exposed it as ruthless and self-interested, as willing to kill to maintain an uneven status quo. It has demonstrated that in times of crisis the Syrian government does not concern itself with economic policy or political reform but with killing entire families and turning neighbours against each other. But the Shabiha is no more dangerous than the rest of the security apparatus, and the country is not more damaged or divided than it would have been had the militia not existed. Indeed, had it not existed some other facet of the state security apparatus would arguably have taken its place. The Shabiha is almost indistinguishable from the secret police or elements of the military, both of which it worked alongside in suppressing dissent and both of which could be described as having behaved in Shabiha-like ways at different points. The Shabiha, therefore, has brought nothing unique to Syria. It has been not the most dangerous feature of the conflict but rather the temporary recourse of a government desperate to suppress dissent and a community fearful of being overrun by a hostile majority.


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Conclusion The reasons that Assad’s regime might have turned to the Shabiha are hopefully clear. The Ba’ath paramilitaries that the president’s father had used in Hama were no longer available, but the lesson had been learned that a militia could serve as a powerful force multiplier. The regime had also calculated that it needed to ensure the Alawite community was invested in its strategy of repression. This was a regime that had some degree of self-knowledge; it understood how precarious its position was, how delicately it was placed amid the wave of revolutions shaking the region; and it knew that its priority was to secure its power base.

The Shabiha did what the regime asked of them. They suppressed demonstrations and terrorised neighbourhoods, and in doing so ensured that their own communities had little choice but to side with the government. Their brutality shocked the international community and turned a protest movement into an uprising. They made political settlement impossible. Media accounts of anti-Sunni death squads captured the popular imagination and arguably played some part in broadening the conflict to include international jihadists.

This paper has tried to answer two questions about the Shabiha. Firstly, is there anything distinctive about the group, anything that would justify the ICG’s claim that it is the defining feature of the war; and, secondly, is it the most dangerous thing about the conflict? This paper argues that the ICG’s claims are weakened by the ubiquity of militias globally and regionally. A characteristic of repressive governments in the region has been their tendency to suppress popular dissent with civilian militias. This paper has been limited to a cursory examination of Iran’s Basij and Egypt’s baltagiya; a fuller assessment might encompass Yemen’s balatija and Sudan’s janjaweed. It has also been limited by the fact that this is an evolving subject. At the time of writing, the international community is considering its response to a possible use of chemical weapons – an attack that will if proved lay strong claim to the terms ‘defining’ and ‘dangerous’.

The regime’s use of the Shabiha should not have come as a surprise to those familiar with Syria. Assad’s government knew that it could not reform to the extent demanded and continue to exist. The only option available was to repress, an option that had worked in the past and that it had the necessary apparatus to pursue. Its recourse to a militia was unsurprising, as was the level of violence used by that militia. The Syrian security forces have been using appalling levels of brutality for decades. Indeed, the uprising was triggered by the torture of children by state officials, not militia members. How, then, can it be claimed that the Shabiha brought new levels of brutality to the conflict? The Shabiha have not used any tactics that were unfamiliar to the Syrian people, and their narrow sectarian make-up is identical to that which dominates the secret police and key military units. The Shabiha, while showing us just how desperate the regime was, does not deserve the distinction of being called either the most defining or dangerous feature of the conflict.


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Marco Giovannetti

Abstract

Advocates say Shale gas has shifted the prospects of the United States (U.S.) from becoming a major natural gas importer to low cost self-sufficiency and that it can fuel a low carbon transition. Sceptics point to the climate impact of fugitive emissions to argue a polluting fossil fuel is being green-washed. A third view is that strictly enforced regulation to protect the environment will address public concerns allowing Shale gas to fulfil its potential. This paper asks how Cultural Theory can explain these contradictory positions and help us to understand shifting paradigms in energy policy. It argues that an apparent abundance of Shale gas together with mainstream acceptance that climate change is real is fracturing the current polarised U.S. energy policy paradigm, discrediting Cornucopian vs. Neo-Malthusians debates. Cultural Theory shows that tolerance for diverse ideas and conflicting worldviews is essential to optimise energy policy because it enables structural risks to be recognised and mitigated. A shale gas case study illustrates the merits of Cultural Theory as a foundation for energy policy. The case study shows retaining a polarised approach is the greatest obstacle to a paradigm shift in energy policy creating a risk of adverse consequences.


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Paradigm shifts in policy typically require a change in the [historical] context and a change in ideas in response. (Helm 2007:9)

Proponents call it an abundant, clean energy source that will reignite the economy. Opponents see it as little more than another dangerous fossil fuel, whose development is capable of poisoning our drinking water. Regardless of where you sit on the issue, the fact is that shale gas is fundamentally changing our energy future. (WRI 2011)

Introduction The current U.S. energy policy paradigm (henceforth ‘the current paradigm’) was forged in the post-war period, during the cold war and particularly by the shock of the 1973 oil crisis. In that historical context it is unsurprising that it is characterised by two polarised and antagonistic positions. They are referred to as conventional and alternative in this paper since they do not always directly align with particular political parties or institutions. Proponents of both identify energy security, environmental impact and economic development as the drivers of energy policy (IEA 2013) but they recommend different policies because they perceive different risks as significant. The question we ask in this paper is can Cultural Theory explain shifting paradigms in energy policy and the contradictory risk perceptions we observe. Cultural Theory argues that underlying worldviews drive risk perceptions (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:110) and this idea is a unifying strand explored throughout this paper.

Worldviews are lenses through which the world is understood thus determining the particular risks that are selected. The conventional view arises from a Cornucopian lens that sees the worlds’ resources as essentially limitless due to the human ability to adapt to scarcity. The alternative view adopts a Neo-Malthusian lens that sees the world as subject to limits on growth due to finite resource reserves and the bounded capacity of the earth’s natural systems to cope with pollution and environmental degradation. Julian Simon and Norman Myers wrote a book of their debate entitled “Scarcity or Abundance?” typifying this clash in 1994. These beliefs are partly defined by their opposition to each other and the belief that one will be proved correct is part of the current paradigm “Humankind does not know whether Simon is right or Myers. We must come to know” (Ruggie 1994:xiv). The current paradigm and its limitations are examined in section two.

This paper argues this antagonistic duality places blinkers on policy makers and makes the case for Cultural Theory as a preferable framework because it recognises that a number of different worldviews coexist simultaneously and argues that, “despite their fundamental incompatibility, each is still valid under certain circumstances” (Schwarz & Thompson 1990:139). The origin of Cultural Theory and its relevance to energy policy are explained in section three. The case for Cultural Theory rests not just on the idea that different worldviews are valid given their assumptions but that “the practical challenge lies not in choosing one or the other but in learning to discriminate between circumstances so as to know when to apply which” (Ibid).


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These two aspects are examined using Shale gas as a case study in sections four and five. The idea that shale gas is acting as a catalyst for a paradigm shift in energy policy is a second unifying strand examined in this paper “Shale gas, the biggest energy innovation since the start of the new century” (Yergin 2011:6). The innovation is ‘fracking’ an extraction technology that has enabled the production of commercial volumes of natural gas from shale rock formations. Advocates point to rising output and falling prices as delivering permanent benefits to the U.S. economy “By late 2011...with natural gas below three dollars an apparent reality...something fundamental had changed” (Levi 2013:23) and that “a gas and renewables combination represents the most logical, politically acceptable, and economically feasible low-carbon energy pathway for the United States” (DB CCA 2011:3). Sceptics argue that risks of drinking water contamination justify calls for “precautionary measures – including moratoriums on fracking” (Postel 2013) and that its description as a transition fuel amounts to greenwashing without adequate research on the climate impact of shale gas over its lifecycle (Stephenson et al, 2012:458). A third view is that strictly enforced regulation is essential to protect the environment and by addressing public concerns can enable the shale gas industry to fulfil its potential (IEA 2012:9).

Even this brief review shows that shale gas has sparked considerable controversy. This paper argues the controversy can be explained in terms of different opinions about risks and these risk perceptions differ based on which worldview is used as a lens to appraise shale gas. In this way the two strands of worldviews and shale gas are woven together. The case study examining shale gas debates and policy is used to make the case that Cultural Theory provides a better foundation for energy policy than the polarising Neo-Malthusian and Cornucopian worldviews of the current paradigm.

By undermining the peak oil and gas narrative typical of the Neo-Malthusian worldview rising shale gas production is fracturing the current paradigm, “we are awash with fossil fuels; we have too much, not too little... the chances of running out before the predicted dangerous climate change occurs are quite low” (Helm 2011:79). Similarly the growing acceptance of climate change since the 4th IPCC Report in 2007 undermines the Cornucopian belief in nature as an unbounded horn of plenty. In 2008 both presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain accepted the reality of climate change supporting the reduction of CO2 emissions (Brahic 2008). A key finding of this paper in section five is that a new generation of Republican Party leaders are holding on to the antagonistic positions of the current paradigm. If this obstructs a shift in policy it may prevent significant risks being addressed with adverse consequences for the U.S. Section two examines the current paradigm its origins and limitations.


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The Current U.S. Energy Policy Paradigm

Thomas Kuhn popularised the term paradigm using it to mean a set of guiding principles, traditions, heuristics and working practices used to resolve problems and paradigm shift as the “transition from one paradigm to another by revolution” (Kuhn 1962:12). The current paradigm can be visualised as a risk matrix with two columns and three rows (Attachment 1). The columns represent the two sides in an ongoing antagonistic debate over the correct energy path to follow that are underpinned by two conflicting worldviews. A worldview is a framework of ideas and beliefs imparted by society, which “appears to the individual as the natural way of looking at the world” (Berger and Luckmann 1966:20). The rows represent the three generally agreed energy policy drivers of energy security, environmental impact and economic development.

Overview

In this section the ongoing debate and the polarising worldviews that are its foundation are examined. For each policy driver the origins of the two sides of the debate are explained focussing on which risks selected as significant. Then the key limitations of the current paradigm are identified arguing that a battle over which worldview is correct has dominated the debate. Consequently some significant risks have not been properly addressed fracturing the legitimacy of the current paradigm. This suggests Cultural Theory would be a better foundation for energy policy with its emphasis on “which [worldview] is appropriate to the task at hand” (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:13). This idea is explored in section three and tested using shale gas as a case study in sections four and five.

In a seminal article on energy strategy by Lovins published in 1976 the case was made that U.S. energy policy makers faced a choice between two strategic paths that were “mutually exclusive” (Lovins 1976:65). The first path of existing policy was a “rapid expansion of centralised high technologies [fossil and nuclear] to increase supplies of energy” (Ibid) and the second alternative path was “a prompt and serious commitment to efficient use of energy, rapid development of renewable energy sources... and special transitional fossil-fuel technologies” (Ibid). Those two alternatives remain recognisable in energy policy three decades later “The Energy Policy Act of 2005 reconfirmed a continuous reliance on fossil fuels, with the aim that energy efficiency and long-term transition to renewable energy sources would secure continued economic growth” (Bang 2010:1646). The debate has remained locked on attempting to make a choice between two mutually exclusive alternatives each based on a distinct worldview.

The Policy Debate: Cornucopians vs. Neo-Malthusians

The worldviews traditionally adopted in U.S. energy policy are known as Cornucopian and Neo-Malthusian. The Cornucopian perspective is that natural resources are abundant due to the human ability to adapt to a particular shortage in a variety of ways including discovering new natural deposits, developing new technologies and finding suitable substitutes. Conversely the Neo-Malthusian perspective is that there are severe limits to


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growth and resource availability that are exacerbated by pollution and resource degradation (Chenoweth and Feitelson 2004:52).

Lovins article exemplifies the Neo-Malthusian worldview. He defines existing energy policy as a hard path characterised by serious environmental risks, unproven high technologies with large capital costs implying a risk of scarce capital, and a brittle infrastructure that risks catastrophic failure if its requirements are not continuously met (Lovins, 1976:88). The alternative he calls a soft path with technologies that are “flexible, resilient, sustainable and benign” (Ibid:77).

A contemporary Cornucopian worldview of which risks are significant implies different policy recommendations. In his controversial book the Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg writes that there is no need to worry about running out of fossil fuels as, “the total energy share of our budget–even if we continue to depend solely on fossil fuels–will be dropping” (Lomborg 2001:128). He suggests cost efficiency is the primary reason that nuclear power is not more widespread (Ibid:129) and similarly concludes that “renewable energy actually has to drop somewhat in price before it will be competitive, even including social costs [pollution and global warming]” (Ibid:132). The overall conclusion on dependence on fossil fuels is that “the evidence clearly shows that we are not headed for a major energy crisis” (Ibid:135).

Importantly what separates the two sides of this debate are not the twenty-five years between Lovins article and Lomborg’s book. Contemporary advocates on each side of the debate can easily be found, Cornucopians like Julian Simon in the 1970s/80s or Neo-Malthusians like Julian Deffeyes in the 2000s. It is the differences in the risks they pay attention to that differentiate the opposing sides of the policy debate. This paper now turns to examine them for each of the policy drivers.

With respect to energy security the conventional view is that a disruption to supply and an accompanying price shock are the principal risks (Yergin 2006:75). The alternative view is that depletion of fossil fuel reserves is the gravest threat and “presents modern human societies with an unprecedented challenge” (Mulligan 2010:80). These different fears have a common point of origin. Conventional energy security thinking in the U.S. arose in response to the oil crisis of 1973. The U.S. supported Israel in the Yom Kippur war. In response the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries boycotted oil exports to the U.S. causing crude prices to rise from $3 per barrel to $12 by 1974 (McAllister 2011), until then “Americans... took the presence of cheap and abundant energy for granted” (Halber 2011).

Energy Security

The conventional view was adopted by major institutions and political figures involved in defining U.S. energy policy. The IEA, U.S. Energy Information Administration and Department of Energy were created between 1974 and 1977 in direct response to the oil crisis, so the issues of affordability and security of supply are locked into their institutional DNA, “the IEA’s initial role was to help countries co-ordinate a collective response to major disruptions in oil supply... this continues to be a key aspect of its work” (IEA 2013). In his


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policy response President Nixon famously declared, “...our independence will depend on maintaining and achieving self-sufficiency in energy” (Nixon 1973). Although the perceived threats have changed insecurity of supply remains the key risk for a conventional conception of energy security, “Energy security concerns in the U.S. are mainly related to the fact that strategically important energy sources like oil and gas are imported from economically and politically unstable regions” (Bang 2009:1647).

The alternative viewpoint frequently put forward is that the critical energy security risk is the depletion of world oil and gas reserves, “conversion from petroleum to other sources of energy is not a distant problem. It is a problem that we and our children will face” (Smith 2002:58). Shell geologist M. King Hubbert developed a quantitative method for forecasting oil production and in 1956 predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970 and then decline. Hubbert’s prediction although initially ignored was observed to come true in the early 1970s drawing much attention in the midst of the oil crisis. This work has been extrapolated to conclude that a global oil and gas peak is imminent and production “will be soon starting a permanent drop” (Deffeyes 2006:34). From resource depletion we turn to ideas about the environmental impact of energy policy.

The conventional view of the environmental impact of the energy industry is that only the manageable financial costs of addressing reversible trends are at risk (Myers and Simon 1994:19). The alternative view is that the risk is of catastrophic damage to the world “we are at a watershed in human history because of the grand-scale environmental degradation that is overtaking our planet” (Ibid:125), these opposed views date back to the end of World War Two (WW2).

Environmental Impact

Harry S Truman espoused the conventional view in his inaugural address in 1949, “Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace...the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge” (Truman 1949) and “resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible” (Ibid). This Cornucopian outlook is founded on the idea of inexhaustible human ingenuity’s ability to transform the environment to our advantage. That idea persists today turning Neo-Malthusian overpopulation fears on their head, “energy solutions for the twenty-first century will be found in the minds of people around the world. And that resource base is growing” (Yergin 2011:717).

In the decades after WW2 support for conserving the natural world transformed into an environmental movement. A number of best selling books raised public awareness and crystallising the alternative view. In 1948 Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt’s Road to Survival drew together “thinking about population growth, carrying capacity, limits, and consumption developed by biologists during the interwar years” (Robertson 2012:339). Osborn and Vogt opposed continuous growth seeing over-population and over-consumption “that was undermining the planet’s carrying capacity” (Ibid:351).


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The debate has evolved “with the focus shifting from a debate largely about the adequacy of natural resources for meeting human needs to a focus on the ability of the biosphere to cope with growing human impacts” (Chenoweth and Feitelson 2004:53). Climate change has become the central environmental concern, described as “a global public bad” (Helm 2007:2), and compared in scale to the “conversion of peace time to war economies between the 1930s and 1940s” (Ibid). Cornucopians remain focussed on cost estimating for climate change that total costs could be “about $5 trillion” but that it is “a limited and manageable problem” (Lomborg 2001:322-323). These risk perspectives tie in closely to worldviews on economics that we look at next.

For economic development the conventional view is that price is the essential driver of energy policy and that the risk is government intervention will result either in inflated prices or subsidies and underinvestment. This concern started with the 1973 oil crisis prior to which there had been low stable oil prices throughout the twentieth century (US EIA 2013). President Carter’s proposed energy policy focused on energy efficiency, expanding domestic energy sources and that “prices should generally reflect the true replacement costs of energy” (Carter 1977). Neo-classical economics teaches that supply and demand are equalised at a price where the market clears and this along with low prices drove the policy in the 1980s and 1990s “to treat energy as just another commodity, which could be left to market forces” (Helm 2007:1). A tightening in supply conditions after the year 2000 saw higher prices drive the view that the major risk was from inefficient markets and a lack of investment in energy infrastructure with a conclusion that, “the energy policy concerns of the 1970s are returning” (Ibid:5). Price risk is perceived as the key throughout.

Economic Development

Proponents of the alternative view argue using ecological and systems models that the risk is of an overshoot. “Overshoot comes from the combination of rapid change, limits or barriers to that change, and imperfections in the signals about or response to those limits” (Meadows et al 1992:3). The consequence of the pressure placed on natural resources and biological systems by consumption and pollution is forecast to be “systemic collapse (of structures, economies, and human populations)” (Mulligan 2010:81). The alternative view was made famous by a 1972 report to the Club of Rome entitled Limits to Growth. It led to the Global 2000 report produced for President Carter to assess the problems humanity was likely to face in future. Global 2000 forecast “stresses relating to the interaction between population, resources and environment, with life for many people being more precarious as a result.” (Chenoweth and Feitelson 2004:52) Next we consider how accurate these forecasts and risk assessments have been and hence the limitations of the current paradigm.

Having scrutinised the current paradigm’s origins and risk perceptions we look at its limitations. The overarching limitation of the current paradigm is its dualism that requires a choice between scarcity and abundance. The insistence on concluding a complex debate with one right and one wrong answer creates three main weaknesses. First it ignores the possibility that each worldview may be identifying the gravest risk on one policy driver but not on

Limitations of the Current Paradigm


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another. Rather than there being a need to decide between worldviews Cultural Theory argues “there is a need not to.” (Thompson et al 1990:21) The peak oil and climate change debates illustrate this point.

Neo-Malthusian proponents of the peak oil hypothesis argue the only route to energy independence is a switch away from fossil fuels (Smith 2002:52), despite mounting evidence to the contrary. A 1990s geological study concluded “The global fossil resource base is abundant...sufficient to fuel the world economy through the twenty-first century” (Rogner 1997:257-258) an opinion supported by U.S. crude oil production returning to a peak in May 2013 last seen in March 1992 (US EIA 2013). Given unconventional oil and gas production there is little compelling evidence to support peak hypotheses (Helm 2011:90).

Cornucopians initially denied climate change was a real problem “global warming will simply be another transient concern” (Myers and Simon 1994:55) and then downplayed its impact “the total cost of managing global warming ad infinitum would be the same as deferring the growth curve by less than a year” (Lomborg 2001:323). However, the scientific evidence for significant adverse effects has become overwhelming predicting air and ocean temperature rises, melting snow and ice and rising sea levels (IPCC 2007:2). The latest widely leaked IPCC report concludes scientists are “99% sure that man's emissions are responsible” (Hickman 2012).

A second weakness is that there may be complex connections between phenomena that can only be appreciated by adopting different perspectives “dualisms often have the unfortunate result of obscuring extensive inter-dependences” (Thompson et al 1990:21). The role of shale gas in green house gas (GHG) emissions illustrates this perfectly. Electricity generated by burning natural gas is widely estimated to produce half the GHG emissions of coal and on the latest estimates new conventional gas generation in the U.S. will be a third cheaper than the coal equivalent on a levellised basis (US EIA 2013:4). There is significant scope to replace ageing coal fired power stations with gas ones in the U.S. (DB CCA 2010:42) reducing CO2 emissions, enabling renewables by addressing intermittency and thus supporting a transition to a low carbon economy. However research on unintended releases of shale gas during extraction show its full lifecycle GHG emissions may be higher than coal (Howarth 2011).

A third weakness may point the way forward. The current paradigm implicitly assumes there are only two viewpoints excluding other opinions without evaluation. Cultural Theory acknowledges multiple worldviews asserting that their persistence suggests for each, “there must be something in it; it must be effective in certain circumstances...Each, therefore, has something to contribute” (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:120). These limitations indicate the current paradigm is inadequate to meet the complex energy policy challenges the U.S. faces today. The case for Cultural Theory is made in the next section and evaluated using shale gas as a case study in sections four and five.


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Cultural Theory as a Foundation for Energy Policy

Having looked at Cornucopian and Neo-Malthusian worldviews we now turn to Cultural Theory as an alternative explanation for contradictory risk perceptions by different groups in societies. By explaining risk perceptions based on a plurality of worldviews Cultural Theory may provide a stronger foundation for energy policy. The genesis of cultural theory lies with the anthropological studies of Mary Douglas.

Overview

In Purity and Danger Douglas focuses on concepts of moral pollution, taboo and boundary setting. Considering biblical dietary proscriptions she disagrees with traditional interpretations that their function was to enforce discipline or be metaphors for virtue and vice. Instead she argues their purpose was to reinforce a central religious concept “that holiness is exemplified by completeness” (Douglas 1966:54). Her thesis is that the typology of animals that are permitted or prohibited as food is built using this concept so “the dietary laws would have been like signs which at every turn inspired meditation on the oneness, purity and completeness of God” (Ibid:58).

Having identified similar patterns in other societies this was generalised into an important insight of Cultural Theory that “Whatever objective dangers may exist in the world, social organizations will emphasise those that reinforce the moral, political, or religious order that holds that group together” (Rayner 1992:87). Douglas went on to systematise her insights on risk selection creating a typology of social structure and worldviews known as Group and Grid that is the foundation of the cultural analysis of risk perception (Ibid). It is a theory of the risk biases of groups and institutions that influence individual risk perceptions.

This provides a generic theoretical framework “about technology and environmental risk” (Ibid:98). Some areas are particularly useful to considering energy policy. First are extensions of Grid and Group that explain different perceptions of the environment known as “myths of nature” (Thompson et al 1990:26) and approaches to resource management. Second is a polythetic definition of risk that recognises a difference in attitudes to low probability high impact risks from technology. Cultural Theory argues that in these circumstances “acceptability is always a political issue” (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982:4) and “risk should be seen as a joint product of knowledge about the future and consent about the most desired prospects” (Ibid:5). The third topic is the idea of Cultural Regimes that looks at the “dynamic interactions of diverse cultural factions to create (often implicitly) risk management regimes” (Rayner 1992:96). Critics of Cultural Theory like Sjoberg focus mainly on its prediction of individual risk perceptions (Sjoberg 2002:667). Those critiques are not relevant to this paper and so excluded from scope. The following sections look at each area in turn in the context of energy policy and lastly the implications for policy making are also considered in preparation for the shale gas case study.


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Grid and Group has been described as the “point of departure” for cultural theory (Thompson et al 1990:5). The group dimension describes whether there is a strong or a weak boundary with the outside world, whether there is a sense of ‘us and them’. The grid dimension describes whether there are rigid conventions about how people can behave and the roles they fulfil or alternatively an absence of constraints on individual behaviour (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982:138). The combination of strong or weak on each dimension gives rise to “four cultural orientations - individualist, egalitarian, hierarchical and fatalist” (Rayner 2010:89). Individualists pursue their own self-interest; Egalitarians seek fairness through individual equality; Hierarchists like rules and structures and Fatalists are untrusting lacking any sense of agency

The Grid and Group Model

1

This typology can be extended by a synthesis with ecology. Ecologists have identified four different approaches to ecosystem management applied by institutions. They determined that the behaviour of institutions was not best explained by differences in facts but by identifying which one of four primary ‘myths of nature’ the institution subscribes to, “Nature Benign, Nature Ephemeral, Nature Perverse/Tolerant, Nature Capricious” (Thompson et al 1990:26). These can be mapped onto the four cultural orientations. A third strand that can be incorporated into the model is an approach to resource management. Cultural Theory argues that people manage their needs and resources “in such a way that the strategy they use to make ends meet supports their cultural bias and hence sustains their way of life” (Ibid:39) The synthesis of these different influences gives rise to a “Political Culture” (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:61). Next we look at the characteristics of each of these political cultures and the implications for energy policy.

(Attachment 2).

“American entrepreneurs” (Rayner 1992:88) are often given as an example of an Individualist political culture. They are low grid and low group, unbounded by group or social constraints on their behaviour. Individualists prefer laissez-faire forms of governance and see nature as benign providing abundant resources and so have no concerns about energy shortages in the future. (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:67) It follows that Individualist believe they can manage their needs and their resources upwards in a spiral of exuberant growth in a free market economy (Thompson et al 1990:47). The solution to pollution is “a sharpening of market incentives” (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:8).

The Egalitarian ethic is low grid and high group giving rise to an emphasis on the equality of individuals and a strong group identity. Encroaching hierarchies or competitive individualism threaten these values. Consequently there is often “a shared and strident criticism of what goes on outside the group” (Schwartz and Thompson 1990:7). Egalitarians believe nature is ephemeral and “the least jolt may cause [the worlds] catastrophic collapse” (Ibid:5). It follows that the appropriate response to polluting products is “an outright ban” (Ibid:10). From this perspective resources are seen as depleting and subject to fixed limits and

1 Henceforth these terms are capitalised to differentiate them from ordinary usage.


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“a need reducing strategy” is the only way to manage resources (Thompson et al 1990:44). A tendency to support decentralised micro-generation energy solutions naturally follows.

Hierarchists in contrast are high grid and high group, for example state bureaucracies (Rayner 1992:88). They are characterised by stratified social structures. Hierarchists subscribe to the myth of nature perverse/tolerant. In this worldview there are strict limits within which exist a natural “zone of equilibrium” (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:10). Consequently the approach to pollution is to ensure strict regulation and to solicit expert opinions with a tendency towards large-scale high technology energy solutions (Ibid). This emphasises centralised energy infrastructures that require hierarchy and regulatory bureaucracy to control them. Hierarchists view resources as scarce a risk selection that supports their approach to resource management and look to technological solutions for energy problems (Thompson et al 1990:62). They seek to maintain differentials between social groups and in adversity resort to rationing systems.

The last political culture is Fatalist and characterised as high grid and low group. This describes people that have many restrictions and boundaries placed upon them by society but are excluded from group membership (Thompson et al 1990:7). They can be described as “marginal members of society” (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:8) whose lack of agency results in their worldview. Fatalists view nature as capricious and life as an unpredictable lottery. They are seen as a passive political culture “the silent majority that does not become actively involved in public debates” (Rayner 1992:90). For this reason the Fatalist worldview is excluded from the scope of the case study analysis. Having described the political cultures next we consider how to define risk.

A definition of risk is needed to avoid any confusion between semantic and perceptual differences. There appears to be a general consensus that, “the essence of risk consists of the probability of an adverse event and the magnitude of its consequences” (Rayner 1992:93). This approach flows from an engineering perspective that assumes we have consensus about which risks are a priority and sufficient knowledge to estimate the probability of their occurrence (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982:5). Where “the problems are just technical then what we have is the familiar decision making under uncertainty” (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:139) and this approach is valid. This can be defined as technical risk requiring a quantitative approach.

A Polythetic Definition of Risk

However many of the risks entailed in energy policy fit another category where there is insufficient knowledge of the probability of occurrence and a lack of consensus about how to prioritise them (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982:6). Two types of risks illustrate this involuntary risks and irreversible risks. Involuntary risks are ones where people may find the environment is “laden with risks unbeknown to them” (Ibid:17), for example potential industrial contamination of drinking water. Irreversible risks occur when, “the environment is so altered it can never return to its original state” (Ibid:21), as predicted with climate change. These can be defined as structural risks where the challenge is “decision making under


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contradictory certainties” (Schwarz & Thompson 1990:140). In these circumstances a qualitative approach is required.

Where structural risk is being dealt with cultural theory argues that there are three factors needed to achieve satisfactory risk management, “trust, liability and consent” (TLC) (Rayner 1992:95). Trust in the competence of regulatory institutions to manage and regulate technology appropriately, agreement on a procedure for apportioning consequential liability for adverse events and collective consent from those who will bear the consequences if an event occurs. Thus polythetic risk is the combination of the technical risks and the structural risks (Ibid). A study of environmental hazard incidents concluded this differentiation is “at the root” of understanding different risk perceptions (Krimsky and Plough 1988:302).

However the grid and group model shows that each political culture selects risks in different ways, “each of which appears irrational from the perspective of any other” (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:5). So if the risk selection of each political culture is “valid under certain circumstances” (Ibid:139) then the challenge for energy policy is selecting the political culture appropriate to the structural risks faced. Next we look at how cultural regimes can help address this challenge.

The concept of cultural regimes is that groups and institutions from different political cultures each contribute a unique expertise based on the risks they select and the knowledge they develop based on their particular concerns. Looking at technology development hierarchies are biased towards “large scale, high technology approaches” (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:11) while Egalitarians desire for equality “drives them towards small-scale environmentally benign technology” either low tech or using energy saving microelectronics (Ibid). Each bias will drive development down different innovation paths.

Cultural Regimes

Looking at the focus of organisations during the development of a product or technology hierarchies are biased internally towards product and process specialisation improving efficiency, Individualists are customer focussed driven by their market bias to please the consumer and egalitarians will look at the impact on equal treatment across society or on the environment. From this it can be seen that “The three active rationalities...structure the world in different and (in the right circumstances) complementary ways” (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:12).

So the concept of cultural regimes recasts “cultural bias in risk perception not as constraints but as particular forms of expertise that together and in competition contribute to resilient solutions to risk management problems” (Rayner 1992:96). However there is no guarantee of optimal or efficient outcomes. The process that emerges is one of continuous assessment where “technological development is an inherently hit-and-miss affair” (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:144).

As well as interaction generating innovative solutions no single rationality could have produced the result can be a homogenous approach where one or two political cultures dominate. The current paradigm can be understood as a cultural regime where Hierarchists


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and Individualists through a shared commitment to large scale centralised infrastructure and economic growth marginalise the Egalitarian worldview (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:147). Encapsulated as the “centre and border are structured by mutual opposition” (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982:174). Now we turn to consider what guidance Cultural Theory can give for policymaking.

The first guideline that cultural theory recommends is that policymakers should avoid the process “being captured by just a single cultural perspective” (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:147) or a political culture being excluded. Conventional analysis of the U.S. is critiqued as not taking into account peoples’ different convictions about how the world operates (Thompson 1997:206). In practical terms, “always address three audiences: governments, businesses, and activist groups.” (Ibid:209) This acknowledges each political culture’s risk perceptions as rational and potentially relevant.

Guidelines for Policymaking

A second consideration is that “traditional policy making is appropriate only to noncomplex systems.” (Thompson 1997:208) Complex systems like those encountered in energy policy frequently suffer from insufficient knowledge about the risks and a lack of consensus about which risks are most important. In the face of this uncertainty “diversity and flexibility may be the best defences” (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982:197). The risks of failing to adopt this approach are illustrated by the costs Japan is suffering from its dependence on nuclear power following the Fukeshima disaster.

A third insight is that consensus is not required in order to achieve innovative technological design solutions. It is asserted that by the interaction of the different political cultures and their “contradictory certainties” in conjunction with exogenous empirical facts “inter-institutional decision making” takes place (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:15). This reinforces the importance of all worldviews being actively recognised in the policy process.

Lastly there is a strong recommendation to avoid dualism. Cultural Theory argues that simplifying debates by adopting opposed dualisms can result in “obscuring complex interdependencies between phenomena” (Thompson et al 1990:21) and often results in “needless controversies” (Ibid). This was illustrated earlier by the limitations of the current paradigm. Having outlined the policymaking guidance Cultural Theory offers we turn to consider the shale gas case study.

A case study can be defined as the detailed examination of an event to test or develop a theoretical explanation that may be widely applicable (George and Bennett 2005:5). Cultural Theory is an example of a typological theory that employs a deductive approach. This can be defined as specifying independent variables broken into categories to provide a logical structure that is then used to study a case (Ibid:234-235). Cultural Theory is used in this paper as a tool to explain the role of shale gas in U.S. energy policy, assess whether a paradigm shift in energy policy is occurring and thus validate the usefulness of Cultural Theory guidelines for energy policymaking. This paper does not use Cultural Theory to make predictions or

Case Study Methodology


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identify causal relationships. Therefore the main strength of the case study approach here is its “potential for achieving high conceptual validity” (Ibid:19). Shale gas extraction is controversial and politicised generating wide debate and a range of materials including speeches, books, articles and research papers. Given the risk of unintentional bias by the researcher (Ibid:101) care has been taken to include materials representing all sides of the debate and to assess them against the theoretical criteria established. Having explained the methodological approach adopted we turn to the shale gas case study itself.

Contending Visions: Shale Gas through a Cultural Lens

Shale gas is natural gas held in low porosity shale formations that historically was uneconomic to extract. The innovation used to extract it today is known as fracking. Fracking combines a number of techniques including, horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and seismic imaging. Each technique has multiple components, for example hydraulic fracturing has been used since the 1940s (Zoback 2010:4) but it is the development of new water based fluids that enabled the release of shale gas. So fracking is a complex and evolving technology capable of further innovation. This makes it an ideal subject for a case study to evaluate Cultural Theory.

Overview: A Definition of Shale Gas

In this section three key shale gas debates are examined to see how the contending visions of different actors can be understood through the lens of Cultural Theory. The environmental debate on water pollution is excluded to give balance across the three policy drivers and because fugitive emissions are more topical and contentious. In the next section we see how these visions translate into the policy positions of key actors in the energy policy debate, first we turn to energy security.

Individualists will point to large geological estimates of shale gas reserves to argue there is a plentiful supply. A recent study shows enough technically recoverable reserves (TRR) for 38 years at current U.S. usage levels

Energy Security: How Abundant is Shale Gas?

2

2 Derived from Table 1

(U.S. EIA 2011), and an optimistic view of their extractability. George Mitchell who pioneered the extraction of shale gas in the 1990s best represents this worldview. When asked if he ever considered giving up he replied, “We invested approximately $6m over a ten-year period in the 1980s and 1990s to make fracturing an economically viable process. I never considered giving up, even when everyone was saying, ‘George, you’re wasting your money’” (Economist 2013). He sold Mitchell Energy for US$ 3.1 billion in 2001. His optimism is now widely reflected in conclusions like, “the arrival of unconventional gas portends low prices and abundant supplies for many decades or even a century or more” (Yergin 2011:415) and “For North America, TRR is...several hundred years of gas supply, assuming the public wants to pay for development” (Holditch


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2013:4). Whether the public is willing to pay is a key point for Egalitarians as we see next, but for Individualists it is just a matter for the market.

With a worldview that resources are depleting due to fixed limits and a predisposition against centralised high technologies scepticism is to be expected from Egalitarians. Their argument is that shale gas production will soon become uneconomic due to a faster reduction in well productivity compared to conventional gas wells and the higher costs of drilling comparatively more wells, “in three major shale formations...less than 20 percent of the area heralded by companies as productive is emerging as likely to be profitable” (Urbina 2011). Shale gas development has been compared to a giant ponzi scheme (Ibid). Egalitarians point to technical research showing conventional linear extrapolation “leads to significant overestimation of gas in place/reserves” (Currie et al 2010:1) and recommending continuous reserve estimation using hyperbolic functions.

The Hierarchist worldview is well represented by bureaucracies like the U.S. EIA and the IEA. A predisposition to view natural resources as scarce and the natural world as stable within limits is consistent with their cautious endorsement of shale gas; “the estimate of technically and economically recoverable shale gas resources has skyrocketed. However, the increases in recoverable shale gas resources embody many assumptions that might prove to be incorrect over the long term” (US EIA 2011) and “Are we entering a golden age of gas?” (IEA 2011), the answer given can be simplified to ‘maybe’. It seems clear that relying on shale gas abundance entails structural risks and Cultural Theory provides a solid foundation for understanding the plural rationalities employed in providing contradictory answers. Next we look at the climate impact.

The most contentious environmental debate over shale gas concerns its carbon footprint. The debate was triggered by an academic paper arguing that, “Compared to coal, the [carbon] footprint of shale gas is at least 20% greater” (Howarth et al 2011:1). The paper concludes that, “The large GHG footprint of shale gas undercuts the logic of its use as a bridging fuel over coming decades, if the goal is to reduce global warming” (Ibid). The dispute is not about GHG emissions from combustion, it concerns the impact of venting, flaring and fugitive emissions. Venting is the planned release of natural gas into the atmosphere, flaring is its controlled burning and fugitive emissions are unintended releases. These atmospheric releases are significant because natural gas has a far greater global warming potential than carbon dioxide due to its methane content (Ibid). This analysis, widely quoted by environmental campaigners, provides a typically Egalitarian critique. The ephemeral myth of nature sees the environment as fragile an idea reflected in the climate’s methane sensitivity. Anthony Ingraffea co-authored the report and is a Director of PSE an environmental NGO. He argues that shale gas extraction should stop because “It is too high risk” (Howarth & Ingraffea 2011:271) coinciding with the Egalitarian preference for outright bans.

Environmental Impact: How Polluting is Shale Gas?

Academic colleagues at Cornell University have published a strong rebuttal. The lead author Lawrence Cathles spent several years at Chevron Oil Field Research Laboratory and the article is prominently quoted by gas lobbyists America’s Natural Gas Alliance. It asserts


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that fugitive emission levels appear to be over-estimated by a factor of 10 and are not credible for economic reasons (Cathles et al 2012). The article argues the unconventional use of a twenty rather than a hundred year time horizon exaggerates methane’s impact (Ibid). The authors highlight flaring rather than venting would materially reduce the GHG impact of any planned emissions and argue current technology can significantly reduce methane losses (Ibid). These arguments fit well with the Individualist view of nature as benign and capable of absorbing the lower impact of flaring or venting in the long run. Arguing venting estimates are implausible for economic reasons is an example of Individualist market based logic.

An article written by researchers from Canmet Energy reflects the Hierarchist worldview. Canmet is a Canadian government energy research institution and effectively part of the federal bureaucracy. Cultural Theory predicts an endorsement of centralised high technology solutions, a preference for regulation and a perception that natural resources are scarce. The paper endorses regulation as a solution to methane emissions, “With the recently proposed regulations by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)...that require reduction of methane emissions (EPA, 2011b), the level of methane emissions is expected to drop soon” (Wang et al 2011:8197). It recommends Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as a way to minimise GHG emissions, “CCS is the principle means for controlling CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel fired power plants, and an important component of GHG reduction strategies” (Ibid). The central issue is structural uncertainty over releases of methane and the political cultures lack consensus on a policy response. The seminal paper in the debate confirmed this, “the uncertainty in the magnitude of fugitive emissions is large” (Howarth et al 2011) and Cultural Theory accurately predicts the risk biases of each worldview. The last driver is economics.

The business community’s economic perspective on shale gas is that fracking represents a profitable innovation, “U.S. natural gas is in plentiful supply at low prices” (Terzic 2012:10). It has the opportunity to play an increasing role in electricity generation profitably replacing ageing coal power stations (DB Climate Change Advisors 2010:42) and has enabled a nascent export industry “The U.S. became a net exporter of fuel in 2011 for the first time in two decades, as rising exports combined with slower imports” (Polti 2013:1). Plentiful cheap gas also supports “a new role-as the enabler of renewables, which are not always available when one wants them” (Yergin 2011:415). This overall perception fits well with Individualist expectations of exuberant growth and lack of concern about future energy shortages.

Economic Development: How Innovative is Shale Gas?

The Egalitarian perspective can be expected to be markedly different and to focus on the economic impact of shale gas based on environmental fragility and limits to resource availability. The Post Carbon Institute’s recent report argues that shale gas is at best a “temporary reprieve” (Hughes 2013:iv) to finite fossil resources as high capital intensity makes its extraction uneconomic in the long run (Ibid:157). The preferred Egalitarian resource management approach of reducing needs aligns with their recommendation that “maximising conservation and efficiency is clearly a crucial first step” (Ibid) in response to


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the expected decline in shale gas. For egalitarians fracking is just a way to eke out the last of the fossil fuel reserves.

In contrast major institutions like the IEA reflect Hierarchist attitudes. In particular a belief that scarce resources mean regulation is essential to maintain equilibrium between strict limits and avoid shortages. One example is the forecast made within the IEA’s recent report Golden Rules for a Golden Age of Gas where it argues, “assumptions about the regulatory environment have a marked impact” (IEA 2012:106). The IEA outlines two scenarios the Golden Rules case where its regulatory recommendations are adopted and the Low Unconventional case where they are not. With regulation the shale gas share of U.S. natural gas production rises from 23% in 2010 to 45% by 2035, without it production goes into decline after 2017 falling back to 2010 levels (Ibid). The key assumption is that without effective regulation a lack of public acceptance will prevent access for continuing U.S. shale gas development (Ibid:63). This view reflects the polythetic definition of risk. When structural risks are faced TLC is essential to public acceptance. Next we turn to look at the policy positions of some key actors.


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Contesting Visions: Shale Gas Policy in Practise

The previous section validated that shale gas debates can be explained by a plurality of risk perceptions. In this section the shale gas policy positions of key actors (Attachment 3) are analysed in two stages. First their political culture is inferred, we look for the polarisation of the current paradigm and we see if their approach shows signs of a paradigm shift in policymaking. Second the potential opportunities from applying Cultural Theory guidelines and the avoidable consequences of a polarised approach are identified.

Shale Gas Policy Positions

In Young Guns Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor set out their vision for the future direction of Republican policy. On energy they hold an Individualist perspective, “We need to protect our national security by developing American sources of energy like our clean natural gas and our abundant coal from shale” (Cantor et al 2010:61). Their concern over national security is a narrative from the current paradigm. No reference is made to the impact of shale gas on global warming or climate change, terms missing from the book’s index. They ignore concerns about pollution and argue that, “the best thing a nation can do for its environment is to generate wealth and prosperity” (Ibid). No value is attached to alternative risk perceptions in their vision of American energy policy.

However some business leaders take a different approach. The former CEO of British Petroleum and a senior Accenture executive argue that, “We live in an era of energy abundance. Polemics about resource scarcity or peak oil are wrong, and divert attention away from the real questions” (Browne & Ollagnier 2013). These are typically Individualist perspectives. The questions they identify are therefore surprising. First they ask how to provide storage for wind and solar generated electricity and address load variability. Second is how to win the argument for a low carbon future that remains “an environmental necessity” even if fossil fuels generate cheaper electricity than renewables. Third is how to make the impact of developing energy resources acceptable to local communities (Ibid). Their answers unsurprisingly favour fossil fuels on the first two questions but call for regulation on the third. Most importantly they recognise as significant typically Egalitarian risk perceptions and are prepared to endorse regulation a Hierarchist preference. Their recognition that corporations “will have to work hard to convince concerned communities” (Ibid) is consistent with the polythetic definition of risk. These are clear signs of a shift away from polarised positions.

President Obama summarises his energy policy as, “We can’t have an energy strategy for the last century that traps us in the past. We need an energy strategy for the future – an all-of-the-above strategy for the 21st century that develops every source of American-made energy” (Whitehouse 2011). The call to move away from 20th century strategy signals a break with the oil crisis preoccupations of the current paradigm. On shale gas he has called for speeding up the granting of new gas permits and encouraged research and development (R&D) to make natural gas combustion cleaner and to protect air and water (Obama 2013). Obama recognises the energy security benefits of a boom in domestic oil and shale gas production (Ibid). Simultaneously he calls on politicians to “act before it’s too late” on the


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“the overwhelming judgement of science” that climate change is real and transition to renewable energy (Ibid). The emphasis on scientific expertise, and a belief in technology solutions indicate a Hierarchist worldview. He also endorses both Individualist and Egalitarian risk concerns. This combination is a new approach to energy policy.

Michael Levi a fellow at leading think tank the Council on Foreign Relations endorses Obama’s approach. He argues the U.S. is in the throes of two energy revolutions one in shale gas the other renewable energy (Levi 2013:195). Levi strongly advocates “a strategy that pushes forward on multiple fronts” arguing there is an opportunity to strengthen the economy, improve energy security and confront climate change simultaneously (Ibid:198). He asserts that opponents “need not coalesce around a common vision of what is good for the country to strike a deal” (Ibid:209). These proposals are a clear departure from the current paradigm.

The Worldwatch Institute was founded in 1974 by Lester Brown a prominent campaigner on environmental issues. Its work supporting sustainability and a transition to renewable energy reflects an Egalitarian worldview. A special Worldwatch report identified significant concerns about the environmental impact of fracking. However it argued that with industry best practices and stronger fully enforced government regulation shale gas could, “contribute its full potential to help build a low-carbon economy in the years ahead” (Zoback 2010:1). The issue of fugitive emissions remains fundamental, “There are still major gaps in quantifying...fugitive emissions from shale gas production” (Stephenson et al 2012:458). This has led to calls for research to establish the lifecycle climate impact of shale gas and find methods to minimize emissions, “Shale gas has the potential to provide clear economic opportunities and energy security benefits if developed in the right way. That’s a big if” (WRI 2011). Influential environmental activists are adopting a constructive approach. Perhaps reflecting a belief that highlighting risks can result in innovative technical solutions even without consensus. With the exception of the Republican vision there are significant signs that a paradigm shift in US energy policymaking is occurring. Finally this paper makes some policy recommendations and identifies the potential consequences if structural risks are ignored.

This case study highlights the two most significant structural risks arising from shale gas development are uncertainty over whether reserves will be economically recoverable (Urbina 2011) and its lifecycle impact on climate change (Stephenson et al 2012:458). The best way to mitigate these risks is to ensure diversified investment including renewable generation and that natural gas is utilised as a transition not a destination fuel. Shale gas generating cheaper electricity than renewable sources would be a significant obstacle to a low carbon transition. One solution is the application of carbon taxes or government subsidies to support renewables (Helm 2011:89).

Potential Opportunities & Avoidable Consequences

With regard to fugitive emissions it is clear that further detailed study is urgently required to define the lifecycle emissions of shale gas, quantify their contribution to GHG emissions and to ensure they are minimised (WRI 2011). Shale gas should not be inaccurately characterised as climate friendly or a transition fuel (Stephenson et al 2012:458). Regulation


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can play a significant role to ensure appropriate environmental safeguards are in place. The polythetic definition of risk shows us public confidence is essential and requires “a continuous drive from governments and industry to improve performance” (IEA 2012:9). It is equally important not to ignore the potential upside, “Shale gas, the biggest energy innovation since the start of the new century, has turned what was an imminent shortage in the United States into what may be a hundred year supply and may do the same elsewhere in the world” (Yergin 2011:6). Shale gas may create a new export industry for the U.S. with significant economic benefits and increase global energy security by diversifying sources of supply. It may provide climate benefits by replacing coal if fugitive emission concerns are resolved.

For such policies to be implemented requires a Cultural Regime where each political culture can influence policy. The most significant obstacle to this appears to be the Republican Party due to its significant political power combined with the retention of an antagonistic policy approach, “Republicans advocated accelerated exploration, drilling and development.” (Cantor et al 2010:167). This case study shows other key actors adhere to the risk perceptions of their political culture but show a willingness to engage with perceptual differences.


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Conclusion

The overarching limitation of the current paradigm is its dualism that was largely initiated by the shock of the 1973 oil crisis. US energy policy has been trapped in a polarised debate between Cornucopians and Neo-Malthusians for several decades. This is the kind of duality Cultural Theory warns against because it can obscure complexity and lead to one side being downplayed in favour of the other. The peak oil and climate change debates illustrate these pitfalls. Many in the environmental movement have argued that the depletion of fossil fuels will force a transition to renewable energy, “world oil production flattened out around 1998. It will soon be starting a permanent drop” (Deffeyes 2005:34). However the rapid growth in U.S. domestic shale gas production along with other unconventional resources has undermined the peak oil hypotheses. This has created the spectre of dealing with climate change in a world where “we are awash with fossil fuels; we have too much, not too little” (Helm 2011:79). At the same time there is general acceptance that climate change is real based on “the overwhelming judgment of science” (Obama 2013). In combination these factors are fracturing the current paradigm, “Everything we once knew about American energy seems to be changing” (Levi 2013:6).

One explanation for this inertia has been an inability to build a policy consensus (Bang 2010:1646). Cultural Theory offers a different analysis. It argues that groups will select as most important risks that reinforce their values. This cultural bias is based on fundamentally different worldviews. The result is a plurality of incompatible risk selections. This explanation is validated by the review of key debates about shale gas. It is clear that contradictory assessments are reached on shale gas in terms of abundance, pollution and technical innovation. These are not disagreements based on facts but on underlying beliefs about the world. For example, there is general agreement that, “the uncertainty in the magnitude of fugitive emissions is large” (Howarth et al 2011). However there is no consensus to act on this uncertainty because of different assumptions about what it implies.

Cultural Theory counsels that each worldview will be valid under certain circumstances and so the practical challenge is to learn when to prioritise which risk selection (Schwarz and Thompson 1990:139). The complexity of energy policy means risks may crystallise that none of the political cultures have prioritised. This adds weight to the recommendation that ensuring diversity and flexibility in energy sources is one of the best ways to mitigate the structural risks faced (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982:197). One way to do this is to ensure diversification into renewable sources of energy forms a significant part of the infrastructure via carbon taxation (Helm 2011:87). The best way to capture a full set of perceived risks is to ensure a broad range of perspectives is fed into policymaking, “governments, businesses, and activist groups” (Thompson 1997:209). Cultural Theory can explain the fracture in the current paradigm as being catalysed by shale gas and climate change. The realisation that climate change is real and the undermining of the peak oil hypothesis are provoking a paradigm shift by confronting policy actors with the legitimacy of a plurality of risk perceptions. Let us consider then what the shale gas case study tells us about current policymaking.


141

There are two significant structural risks that require mitigation. First the uncertainty over fugitive emissions (Howarth et al 2011:1) and second the potential for economically recoverable reserves to be lower than expected (Urbina 2011). The case study shows a number of key policy actors are recognising as legitimate the risk selections of other political cultures. The notable exception is the Republican Party leadership’s adherence to a polarised policy perspective.

If shale gas development proceeds without these structural risks being addressed there will be unpredictable and potentially adverse results. First for energy security if long-term shale gas recovery is less than expected, second for the environment if fugitive emissions accelerate climate change and ultimately for the world economy if significant costs are the result. Therefore this paper recommends all policy actors recognise the legitimacy of diverse risk perceptions in energy policy and seek to mitigate structural risks in the best interest of America and the world.


142

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Attachment 1 – Current Paradigm Risk Matrix

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Attachment 2 – Grid & Group Typology


Michaela Rhode

Abstract

Over the past decade, the world has experienced steadily increasing food prices. With pressure on resources set to rise in the future in line with population growth, there is a consensus that more investment must be made in developing agricultural land to achieve maximum output globally. Preventing food prices from continuing to rise will be crucial to the future fight against global poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the last frontiers for agricultural development. Two competing models of agricultural production have been proposed as development options. The first is that of large scale commercial agriculture based on the Brazilian model. The second is that of smallholder commercial production based on the South East Asian model. This dissertation criticises the World Bank’s policy proposals thus far and argues that more support should be given to the development of large-scale commercial agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa.


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Introduction The 2008 world food crisis marked a symbolic turning point for the global food production system. Since the early 20th century, the world has enjoyed a trend of steadily decreasing food prices. Rapid technological advances in the developed world have resulted in food supply far outstripping population growth (FAO STAT). However, the era of cheap food may be over. In recent years population pressures, rising incomes and scarce resources have led to growing fears of global food insecurity. This has led to a paradigm shift in international development. Since the trade liberalization reforms of the 1980s, developing countries have been encouraged to import cheap food from high-productivity, developed countries as a more economical alternative to domestic production. The result is an immense yield gap between production in the developed and developing worlds. Yields in Africa rose by about 72 percent from the 1960s, whereas other regions were able to increase yields by more than 150 percent (Kariuki 2011: 4). In an era of cheap, plentiful food the international community did not perceive this discrepancy as a source of concern. In 2008 the true consequences of this policy became clear when, over the course of just a few months, the price of rice tripled (McMahon 2013: 48), causing food shortages and political instability across the developing world (Wachman 2008). Since that initial crisis the FAO food price index indicates that there have been regular spikes in food prices over the last five years, reflecting a general trend towards steadily increasing prices. The World Bank (WB)’s decision to focus its 2008 World Development Report on agriculture reflects a growing concern that steadily increasing food prices are bringing us into an era of permanent food crisis. Agriculture is now firmly at the centre of the development agenda. Of most concern is the state of Sub-Saharan African (SSA) production. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that global food production will need to increase by 70% to meet projected demand (FAO 2009: 8). SSA has the highest yield gap in the world; no SSA country is achieving more than 30 percent of the potential yield on currently cultivated areas (WB 2011: Overview). The result is that, despite having a relative abundance of agricultural land, SSA is a net food importer. SSA also has one of the highest rates of population growth in the world. Unless the region dramatically increases productivity, it will become increasingly reliant on food imports. In a time of rising food prices, this is a matter of grave concern. What does this shift from a world of plenty to a world of scarcity signify for global agribusiness? The first point to note is that an increase in food prices signifies an increase in the returns to investment on agriculture. For the first time in nearly a century, agriculture has become an attractive investment opportunity. The UNCTAD World Investment Report highlighted a surge in interest from transnational corporations in agricultural investment: “FDI flows in agricultural production tripled to $3 billion annually between 1990 and 2007” (UNCTAD 2009: 18). A 2011 WB Report points to an increase in investments in agricultural land as a sign of rising interest from international investors: “compared to an average annual expansion of global agricultural land of less than 4 million hectares before 2008, approximately 56 million hectares worth of large-scale farmland deals were announced before the end of 2009” (WB 2011: Overview).


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Africa is the focus of much of this investor interest. According to the WB, 70% of the demand for farmland has been in Africa (WB 2011: Overview). Such interest should be heralded as welcome news. The FAO estimates that net annual investments of approximately $11 billion will need to be made in African agriculture if the region is to address its food security concerns by 2050 (FAO October 2009). However, weak institutional capacity and poorly defined land rights in many SSA countries have prompted fears that international investment in agricultural land could result in the exploitation of resources and have an overall negative impact on local communities. In 2009 the WB published a report entitled “Awakening Africa’s Sleeping Giant”, which explored the options for agricultural development in the Guinea Savannah zone of SSA. The zone covers 600 million hectares, of which 400 million hectares are suitable for agriculture, and of which less than 10 percent are cropped making the region the largest underused agricultural land reserve in the world (WB 2009: 2). The zone stretches across the continent, touching on nearly all SSA countries. Reports on agricultural potential in the Guinea Savannah zone have generated significant interest from international investors (Agri-Money 2013; Africa Investor. 2011). The WB report argues against large-scale commercial farming, making the case instead for a development strategy based on increasing smallholder-farming productivity. A subsequent 2011 report confirms this position: “one of the highest development priorities in the world must be to improve smallholder agricultural productivity, especially in Africa. Smallholder productivity is essential for reducing poverty and hunger” (2011: Overview). This dissertation will examine the merit of such a strategy by considering the ongoing debate surrounding the smallholder versus large-scale commercial farming models. The analysis will focus on which model is most suited to the conditions found in the Guinea Savannah zone of SSA. A literature review of the smallholder model versus large scale farming debate will provide the theoretical framework for this analysis. Two case studies will then be considered: the Cerrado region of Brazil and the Northeast Region of Thailand. The final part of the dissertation will address the particular challenges to agricultural development faced by the SSA economies. The theoretical and historical evidence presented in the first two sections will then be applied to determine which is the most appropriate model for the region to adopt. This dissertation will argue that there is a strong theoretical and historical case in favour in smallholder farming. However, the WB’s position will be criticised for failing to take full account of the specific factor endowments common to many countries in SSA, which differentiate it from the Asian economies, and which will pose significant challenges to a wholly smallholder- focused strategy. This has the potential to jeopardise the successful development of the region to its full potential. It will also be argued that the single biggest challenge to successful agricultural development in SSA is land tenure reform.


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The Conceptual Framework Defining Commercial Agriculture Poulton, a WB economist, defines “commercial” agriculture as “production primarily for market” (2008:9). It is therefore not dependent on scale of production or crop produced. There is clearly a huge variety in the models of farming that this definition could cover. This dissertation will focus on two such models around which there has been considerable debate. The first model is that of large-scale capital-intensive farming, which has come to be most closely associated with the Cerrado region of Brazil. According to Deininger, “the median farm size in the Cerrado is more than 1,000ha and many companies operate more than 100,000ha of crop land” (2011:5). Such large-scale farms are most often operated by transnational agribusiness corporations. The second model is that of smallholder-based commercial farming. Collier and Dercon state that “the vast majority of farms in Africa are below two hectares, with median farm size near one hectare in most countries” (2009:4). Farms are owner-operated. The transition from subsistence farming to higher-productivity commercial farming normally entails a steady increase in farm size and in the use of machinery. Commercial farming based on intensive smallholder production is most closely associated with the Green Revolution in the 1960s, in which yield-improving technology was a driving factor behind high agricultural growth rates in Asia and across the developing world. Defining Which Commodities The following discussion focuses on low-value, food staple markets. In Africa smallholder farmers, most of whom produce on a subsistence basis, account for 70-90% of food staple production (Poulton et al 2008:67). A study by Hazell and Poulton projects that Africa’s demand for food staples is set to double by 2020 (Poulton et al 2008:66). Capturing a good share of this growth by moving from subsistence to commercial production would make a significant contribution to growth and poverty reduction on the continent. Food staple production is key to successful development because it brings down food prices and increases the productivity of staples, thereby releasing land, water and labour for the production of other cash and export crops (Poulton et al 2008:66). Efficiency Argument In his landmark book Transforming Traditional Agriculture, Schultz argued that, “there are comparatively few significant inefficiencies in the allocation of the factors of production in traditional agriculture” (1964:37). A defining characteristic of agriculture is that it obeys constant returns to scale. The lack of economies of scale in agricultural production forms the basis of the smallholder efficiency argument. The Russian economist Chayanov (1926) argued that there are in fact diseconomies of scale in large farming operations, creating an inverse productivity scale; small farms are more efficient in terms of output per hectare than large farms. Diseconomies of scale exist as a result of the following factors. Firstly, family workers have more incentive to work hard than wage workers who require costly supervision. Secondly, owner-operators have greater knowledge of local agroclimatic conditions, which gives them greater flexibility in adapting to seasonal or market conditions. Finally, family farms have flexibility in adjusting labour supply to suit variability in climate and output (WB 2011: 11).


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Keith Griffith (2002) examines the efficiency question from the perspective of factor endowments. He begins by examining the different incentives faced by small peasant farmers and by large landowners. Small farmers have difficulty in accessing credit and have a scarcity of land relative to labour. Conversely, large farmers have access to commercial banks and cheap credit and an abundance of land relative to labour. The result is that smallholders will tend to economize on capital by cultivating the land more intensely and generating more employment per unit of land, whereas large landowners will economize on labour by cultivating their land more extensively (2002:286). Griffith draws two implications from this analysis: the first is that output per unit of land often is higher on small farms than on large, and the second is that labour productivity tends to increase with farm size. In deciding which ratio a country should attempt to maximize, Griffith argues, “one should attempt to maximize total factor productivity i.e. value added or net income divided by the sum of all factors of production correctly valued at their social opportunity costs. Given that labour is abundant (and hence has a low opportunity cost) and land and capital are scarce (and hence have relatively high opportunity costs), small farms have a higher total factor productivity than large and hence utilize resources more efficiently” (2002:287). The conclusion drawn here is that in conditions where labour is abundant relative to capital, smallholder farming will result in a more efficient allocation of national resources. Counter-Argument: The smallholder efficiency view has been challenged by critics who argue that the conditions of the 21st-century global food system, and the advances made in technology, undermine the validity of the inverse productivity argument. Three principal points are made to uphold this criticism. The first is that difficulty in accessing capital can counteract any efficiency gains that smallholders may achieve. Smallholders are often denied access to commercial banks due to insecure land rights and other factors, which are deemed to make them un-creditworthy. In comparison, large organisations have access to cheap finance in global credit markets. Deininger argues that, “unless ways are found to provide small farmers with access to finance, their inability to obtain financing may outweigh any supervision cost advantages they have and improve efficiency of large farms” (2011: 13). The reason access to finance is considered such a pivotal concern is connected to the second counter argument. Without access to finance, smallholder farmers cannot capitalize on new yield-enhancing technologies or gain access to high-quality inputs such as fertilisers. Critics of the smallholder system, such as Paul Collier, argue that since modern-day success in commercial agriculture depends on the rapid adoption of new technology, smallholder farmers will not be able to adapt to innovation fast enough to remain competitive (Collier 2008:4). Furthermore, it is contended that new technologies reduce or eliminate the diseconomies of scale traditionally associated with large-scale farming. Firstly, improved technologies make it easier to supervise labour; private operators in Argentina and Ukraine assert that, with modern technology, good managers can effectively supervise units of 10,000 to 15,000ha for grain and oilseeds (Deininger et al 2011:14). Secondly, improvements in technology may reduce the need for local knowledge by allowing the remote sensing of field conditions (Idem:14). The final key argument undermining the validity of the smallholder efficiency theory is that trade liberalization and globalization have tilted the playing field significantly in favour of global agribusiness corporations. Diao argues that, “the small farmer is increasingly being


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asked to compete in markets that are much more demanding in terms of quality and food safety, more concentrated and integrated, and much more open to international competition” (2007:16). A study by Reardon highlights the role supermarkets play in controlling access to retail markets. The demanding cost and quality requirements imposed by supermarkets have led to, “a relatively rapid exclusion of small processing and food manufacturing firms in supermarket procurement systems in developing countries” (Reardon 2008: 204). The expansion of certification, introduced to improve product traceability, poses further difficulties for smallholders since obtaining certification entails a high fixed cost, which gives large operating units with integrated supply chains an added advantage (WB 2011:14, Kariuki 2011:14) Economies of scale further exist in the storage, transport and marketing of products. Chronic lack of investment in rural infrastructure has made the cost of overcoming such market failures dauntingly high for smallholders in many developing countries, particularly in Africa. As the discussion above emphasizes, there is significant scepticism as to whether the inverse productivity argument can be upheld in the context of 21st-century globalization and free trade. On a pure efficiency basis, the case for smallholder superiority has been undermined by the increasing importance of access to finance and technology, and by the modern emphasis on integrated supply chains. The WB recognises these issues. Its position is that smallholder agriculture can continue to be an efficient model so long as the market failures outlined above are overcome through policy reform (2009). Poverty Reduction Argument A cornerstone of economic theory is that successful economic development depends on achieving a structural transformation of the economy. Low-income countries are typically dominated by a low-productivity agricultural sector resulting in low growth rates and high poverty rates. To reverse this trend, a transition must be made to a diversified economy with a high-productivity industrial sector capable of driving significant GDP growth. Developmental economists have therefore been concerned with how best to achieve this transition. The WB’s view is that agricultural growth is a prerequisite to successful industrialization (WDR 2008). Mellor captures this argument best: “the faster agriculture grows, the faster its relative size declines” (1995:1). This section will first briefly consider why agricultural development is considered to be so critical to successful economic development, before examining the core argument that smallholder-based agriculture is more pro-poor than large-scale commercial agriculture. The first point to note is the immense size of the agricultural sector in underdeveloped economies, where it typically accounts for about 80 per cent of the labour force and 50 percent of the gross national product (Mellor 1995: 7). This sheer bulk means that agricultural growth, as opposed to growth in general, is typically found to be the primary source of poverty reduction. Cross-country estimates show that GDP growth originating in agriculture is at least twice as effective at reducing poverty as GDP growth originating outside agriculture (World Development Report 2008:30). This is despite the fact that non-agricultural growth is found to have a greater impact on overall growth (Diao et al 2007:5). One of the key ways in which growth in agricultural productivity impacts on poverty reduction is through falling food prices. In low-income countries 50-60 percent of total consumption expenditure is devoted to food, compared with 20-30 percent in developed


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countries (Johnston and Mellor 1961:573). Johnston and Mellor explain the effect this has on development: “if food supplies fail to expand in pace with the growth of demand the result is likely to be a substantial rise in food prices leading to political discontent and pressure on wage rates with consequence adverse effects on industrial profits, investment and economic growth” (1961:573). Increased productivity - and the consequent decrease in food prices - will therefore have an impact on the incomes of the poor, regardless of whether it originates from small or large-scale farming. The fact that most of the poor live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their incomes forms the basis of the argument that smallholder-based growth, which increases the incomes of rural farmers, will have wider poverty reduction effects than large-scale commercial farming. Both Diao (2007:11) and Hazell (2009: 29) make the point that one of the principal reasons for smallholder-based agricultural growth being pro-poor is its direct effect on employment. Agriculture is the largest employer in developing countries, engaging more than half of the labour force (Johnston and Mellor 1961:566). Increasing production generates both agricultural and non-agricultural employment that can benefit the poorest sections of society. Griffith elaborates on this point by examining the consequences of high land concentration on rural poverty. He argues that agricultural growth achieved through a high degree of land concentration has a negative effect on wage rates and employment levels. Griffith claims that agricultural policy has been dominated by a “landlord bias”, which has been used as an instrument of labour control. Concentrated land ownership gives large landowners monopsony power in labour markets (2002:288). Griffith claims that this monopsony power enables exploitation, and therefore lies at the root of rural underemployment and depressed wage rates. This has implications for urban poverty: “the incomes of the rural poor set a floor for urban wages, since no one will migrate from countryside to the city unless they expect to be at least as well off as before migration. Higher rural incomes will therefore raise the ‘reservation wage’ of the urban poor and this will help to reduce urban poverty” (Griffith 2002: 292). Griffith’s primary argument is that smallholder-based agricultural growth results in a more equitable distribution of income and wealth than agricultural growth based on concentrated land ownership. Diao (2007:12) points to the Green Revolution in Asia as evidence of the potential of the agricultural sector to be a pro-poor growth sector. Empirical evidence from a cross-section of developing countries for the period 1960 to 1990 found that agricultural growth accounted for 54 percent of GDP growth (Gollin, Parente and Rogerson 2002 cited in Diao et al 2007:5). Another study by Rosegrant and Hazell finds significant evidence to support the contention that smallholder-led agricultural growth in Asia led to significant poverty reduction effects: “in 1975, one out of every two Asians lived in poverty. By 1995 this ratio fell to one in four. The incidence of rural poverty also decreased, from one in two to one in three between 1975 and 1995, and the total number of rural poor fell by 7 percent despite a substantial increase in population” (2001:1). The economist Mellor examined the impact of increasing incomes among the rural poor on the non-agricultural sector of the economy. He argued that agricultural growth created production and consumption linkages, which stimulated growth in the non-agricultural sector (1995). It is the consumption linkages that are most relevant to the smallholder debate.


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Mellor argues that any increase in the incomes of the rural poor can serve as a powerful stimulus to demand in other sectors of the economy: “ the savings rate of rural people receiving increments to their incomes tends to be high but rarely exceeds 30 percent. Thus they will spend at least 70 percent of their incremental income on consumption goods” (1995:13). The growth effects of such consumption are augmented by the expenditure patterns of the rural poor. “who spend higher shares of their incremental income on rural non-traded goods than do large-scale farmers, thereby generating greater demand for locally produced labour-intensive goods and services” (Diao et al 2007:7). It is further argued that in stimulating domestic consumption, agricultural growth creates the necessary demand conditions upon which to build successful export platforms. Without an increase in the consumption levels of the rural poor, who form the majority of the population, there is an insufficient domestic base from which to build industry up to an internationally competitive level (Nurkse 1959:41). Thus a convincing argument in favour of smallholder-based growth is that, as well as having a direct impact on poverty reduction, it can also be a powerful stimulant to industrial growth due to the consumption linkages that it creates. Counter-Argument The argument that agricultural growth is a precondition for industrialization and that it is best achieved through a pro-poor smallholder-based model has garnered broad consensus. It is on this basis that the WB (2008, 2009) gives unconditional support to smallholder-based agricultural development. Paul Collier is one of the few voices to criticize this approach. He opposes both the argument that agriculture is necessary to successful development and the contention that agricultural development is best achieved through smallholder farmers (2010). In opposing agriculture-led growth, Collier bases his argument on a critique of Mellor’s “linkage” theory. Collier contends that the modern-day context of globalization and trade liberalization weakens the relevance of the argument by significantly reducing any linkage effects produced by agricultural growth (Collier and Dercon 2009:8). This includes a weakening of any growth impact resulting from lower domestic food prices. Collier corroborates this analysis, using Dercon’s examination of how the impact of agricultural growth on non-agricultural growth may differ in a closed and an open economy. Using the Eswaran and Kotwal model of a two-sector economy, Dercon shows that, whereas in a closed economy linkage effects ensure that agricultural growth is a prerequisite to industrial growth, in an open economy “poverty reduction can be achieved by any source of domestic competitiveness relative to the rest of the world” (2009:10). Since linkages are much weaker in an open economy, Collier opposes the view that development strategies should focus on agricultural growth. Instead he advocates that certain countries “bypass” this phase, and seek instead to take advantage of trade liberalization to develop new industries according to their comparative advantages. Cheap food imports would compensate for any food deficit an industry-oriented growth strategy may produce (2010). This is effectively an argument against a one-size-fits-all development approach based on smallholder farming. As well as expressing scepticism as to the necessity of agriculture-led growth, Collier also criticizes an exclusively smallholder-based model of agricultural development. Although he accepts that there is a strong poverty-based case for trying to assist smallholder farmers, he is sceptical as to the ability of smallholders to increase productivity to the levels required to generate economic growth.


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To justify this viewpoint, he points to the dismal record of African smallholder labour productivity thus far: “FAOSTAT data suggests that by 2005, it was still below $500 US per worker for the vast majority of African countries.” Collier argues in favour of introducing large-scale commercial agriculture as the primary means of increasing the global food supply in the medium term, an objective he perceives to be of the utmost importance to reducing world poverty since it ensures lower global food prices (Collier 2010:219). Diao counters Collier’s argument by pointing out that “most African countries possess a small and inefficient industrial base with an unimpressive growth performance. Turning this performance around in an open trade environment is a daunting task” (2007:14). Diao also points out that Collier fails to address the fact that agriculture is the main source of employment in most low income countries; “even if the performance of the industrial sector were to improve dramatically and grew at the rates observed in many of Asia’s ‘tiger’ economies during their golden years, it would still take decades before a large enough share of the labour force could be pulled out of agriculture to lead to a serious reduction in poverty” (2007:14) Thus, while Collier makes valid points, he fails to explain how countries that “bypass” the agricultural development phase will tackle the issues of rising food costs and high urban under-employment that are likely to result from insulated industrial growth. Case Studies The 2009 WB report examines the cases of the Brazilian Cerrado and the Northeast Region of Thailand as two potential models of agricultural development for SSA to follow. Both cases are particularly relevant to the current discussion, since both experienced rapid agricultural growth amid challenging agroclimatic conditions and low levels of infrastructure, similar to the conditions currently present in large parts of the Guinea Savannah zone. Furthermore, both regions achieved initial success through the export of staple commodities: soybeans in Brazil and cassava in Thailand. Both regions therefore have important lessons to offer in how to achieve successful agricultural development in challenging circumstances. However, the regions differ significantly in the manner in which they achieved productivity gains. As has already been outlined, Brazil has become the paradigm example of success in the rapid development of large-scale commercial agriculture, whereas Thailand is used as proof that smallholder farmers continue to have an important role to play in modern-day agriculture. The empirical evidence presented in both cases is largely drawn from the background papers prepared for the 2009 WB report. Taken from the official government records of the two countries, this is the most reliable data set available. Brazil Political support for a major land reform program in Brazil gained ground in the 1960s in response to escalating food costs. The real cost of food rose by more than 20% in the 1950s and then by another 20% in the early 1960s, putting pressure on industrial wages and causing social unrest (CCAA 2007:19). The government responded by adopting a strategy of import substitution with the objective of transforming Brazil into an industrialized economy. Agricultural development was targeted as a means of bringing down the cost of food and providing much-needed foreign currency through exports.


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The Cerrado region was the last frontier of agricultural expansion in Brazil. Its nutrient-poor, acidic soil and lack of infrastructure had historically made it an unattractive option for cultivation. A vast tropical savannah covering 18.8% of Brazil’s national territory, it was considered to be “empty space” (CCAA 2007:116). Targeted government policies, technological innovation and high levels of investment transformed the region into one of the world’s most productive agricultural zones. Success was largely built on the export of soybeans; since 1990 soybean output has risen from 15 million tonnes to over 60 million output (The Economist 2010). Today Brazil accounts for about a third of the world’s soybean exports and the Cerrado region provides 70% of Brazil’s output (Idem). In Brazil as a whole, total factor productivity in agriculture increased by 72% over the 1994/2005 period (CCAA 2007:13). This section will look at how this transformation was achieved, before examining the social and economic impact such development has had on the Cerrado region and on Brazil in general. Development Key to success in the Cerrado was technological innovation. Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (EMBRAPA) is a state-owned research centre set up in 1973. As compensation for cutting its agricultural subsidies in the 1970s, the Brazilian government invested in agricultural research. In the 1990s this bore fruit: EMBRAPA developed the technology necessary to successfully cultivate soybeans in the Cerrado, including a range of high-yielding “tropical” soybean varieties adapted to the region’s many microenvironments (WB 2009:44). However, technology alone would not have been enough; a supply of skilled labour was needed for the region’s potential to be realized. The government developed a policy aimed at attracting experienced farmers from the South, who would provide the capital and expertise needed for development. As a result farmers came in droves, attracted by cheap land and a favourable investment climate. From the 1960s to the early 1990s, the state provided huge amounts of public support to farmers through a subsidized rural credit system. The aims were to stimulate demand for new technology and to compensate the agricultural sector for the low prices resulting from the macroeconomic import substitution strategy. Subsidies included state-supported commodity purchasing programs to guarantee profits for farmers (CCAA 2007:13). It was only due to this massive state intervention, and the flow of cheap credit that it provided, that farms achieved minimum profitability during this period. The government also invested heavily in infrastructure in the region. These schemes favoured large-scale farmers who already had supplies of capital and expertise. Cheap credit, combined with the subsidization of machinery and a high cost of labour, resulted in an increasing concentration of land ownership and capital-intensive production. Local smallholder farmers could not compete; they were forced off their land, in some cases under threats of violence and without adequate compensation (CCAA 2007:11). Impact The development of the Cerrado has been widely hailed as a huge economic success (The Economist 2010). In the thirty-year period prior to 2005, the price of food declined by a total of 80 per cent, leading to the most significant reduction in poverty in Brazil’s history (WB 2009:138). The agricultural sector has also been the principal contributor to Brazil’s large


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trade surplus, attaining $10 billion in the 1990s and rocketing up to $40 billion during the early 2000s (WB 2009:139). This was of critical importance to the nation’s economic solvency during the financial crises of the 1990s. How did this success affect the Cerrado region itself? Between 1960 and 2000, the region experienced a demographic boom: its population grew by 46% - almost double the national rate (CCAA 2007:130). Since 1970 the Cerrado has been one of the fastest-growing economies in Brazil, resulting in a doubling of its share of the country’s GDP (Idem:132). At the same time agriculture has declined as a share of regional GDP; from a high of 57% in 1950, it now accounts for only 13% of the region’s wealth (Idem:132). This suggests that high growth rates can be partly attributed to successful growth in the non-agricultural sector. High rates of growth in both sectors have led to substantial investments in health and education infrastructure. The region’s share of health facilities reached 7 percent in 2000, commensurate with its share of the nation’s population; meanwhile the literacy rate rose from 56 percent in 1970 to 87 percent in 2000, bringing the region well above the national average (WB 2009:139). However, there have been costs as well as benefits. Increasing land concentration and increased use of capital-intensive production methods led to a significant decline in the region’s agricultural employment; between 1980 and 1995 the number of farm workers fell by 25%, despite sharp increases in the region’s population (CCAA 2007:128). This resulted in rapid urbanization and led to increasing levels of inequality. A study by the Brazilian economist Hoffmann shows that inequality in agriculture has increased more than in any other sector. The average income of Brazil’s agricultural workers doubled between 1970 and 1980, while the Gini index moved from 0.424 to 0.554 (1994:237). During the 1980s average income in the state of Goiás grew by 37%, yet at the same time the poverty ratio rose from 57% to 60% (CCAA 2007:136). Hoffmann identifies access to land as a key factor in explaining the growing income disparity (1994:239). Today 3% of the population own two thirds of Brazil’s land (McMahon 2013:239). In conclusion, “the miracle of the Cerrado” (The Economist 2010) brought indisputable benefits to Brazil. Low food prices and a large trade surplus both played a crucial role in helping the country make the transition to the modern industrialized nation it is today. However, the benefits of that growth and success have not translated into development opportunities for the native population of the Cerrado, who were forced off their land and into urban slums. In keeping with Griffith’s theory, increasing levels of land concentration have correlated with increasing levels of inequality in the region. Thailand The Northeast of Thailand is the country’s largest region, accounting for a third of both the country’s landmass and population (CCAA Thailand 2007: 17) It has historically been considered an economically backward area, due to its poor agricultural conditions and lack of infrastructure. It remains even today one of Thailand’s poorest regions (WB 2005: Preface). In the 1960s, fears about security galvanized the government to put the neglected region at the forefront of development plans. A policy strategy based on promoting export-driven commercial farming was implemented. This has been hugely successful; since 1970 the region has experienced an average per capita growth rate of 3.3%, making it one of the fastest growing economies in the world (WB 2005: Executive Summary). In contrast to the Brazilian closed-economy model, the Thai government has historically


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adopted a free-market orientation. Development strategies concentrated on the export promotion of commodities. The Sixth National Development Plan (1987-1991) emphasized the development of commercial agriculture for export as a key priority. The Northeast was one of the main beneficiaries of the plan. Agricultural development in the Northeast has resulted in a diversified range of profitable crops including rice, maize, cassava and sugarcane. This discussion will concentrate on cassava, which was crucial to kick-starting the growth process. Introduced in the late 1960s, cassava has had immense success as a cash crop for export. Production reached one million hectares in 1988 (CCAA Thailand 2007:63), and today Thailand is the world’s largest exporter of cassava products, accounting for about 90 percent of world trade in 2004 (The Agricultural Futures Exchange of Thailand, 2006). This success is built on a smallholder-farming model; 68 percent of cassava farmers have farm sizes ranging from 1.0 to 5.75 hectares (CCAA Thailand 2007:65) This section will examine how this transformation was achieved, before examining the social and economic impact such development has had on Thailand and the Northeast Region in particular. Development Successful development of the Northeast can be attributed first and foremost to the comprehensive set of policies, implemented in the period 1961-1981, that were aimed at supporting the commercialization of smallholder farming. These included investment in infrastructure, the creation of an effective rural credit system and the implementation of land reforms. From 1961 onwards the Thai government, supported by international donor organisations, has invested heavily in rural roads and inter-provincial highways, thus enabling farmers to gain better access to markets and information (CCAA Thailand 2007:95). This has led to a reduction in transportation and transaction costs for farmers, making them more competitive in global markets. Regional success led to a considerable amount of immigration. The current population density of the Northeast is 129 persons per kilometre - higher than the national average (WB 2009: 47). This ensured an abundance of cheap labour, which was a crucial factor in ensuring productivity gains in agriculture and in fuelling the growth of the non-agricultural sector. In 1966 the government created the Bank of Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) with the mandate to provide credit to farmers. Under government regulations, commercial banks in the country are obliged to provide a quota of agricultural credit either directly or through the BAAC. In 1986, 13% of all credit provided was invested in agriculture (CCAA Thailand 2007:23). As well as ensuring that a significant proportion of the country’s wealth was used to propel agricultural growth, the BAAC was instrumental in ensuring that this vital support was equitably distributed so that small farmers, who would normally be deemed un-creditworthy, could also benefit. The biggest obstacle to the inclusion of poor smallholders in the credit system is the need for collateral requirements. This was overcome through innovative schemes such as the group borrowing scheme and the One Million Baht Village Fund, both of which allow farmers with little collateral to borrow on the basis of peer guarantees (CCAA Thailand 2007:24). Such programs have been key to boosting the productivity of small farmers through investment in


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higher-quality inputs and machinery. As has been mentioned, lack of collateral poses a major problem for small farmers since it impedes their ability to invest in and develop their land. Insecure land rights among smallholder farmers was a common characteristic of smallholder farming in the Northeast. This was addressed by the government in 1975 through an agricultural land reform program, which aimed to redistribute land to landless farmers and to provide title deeds to squatters on public land. Between 1975 and 2005, 8.2 million hectares of land were declared as reform area, benefitting 1.52 million households. Half of the land allocated was concentrated in the Northeast (CCAA Thailand 2007:25). Secure land rights enable farmers to obtain credit, and provide an incentive to invest in the land and increase productivity. The private sector also played an important role in the development of the Northeast. In a free market-oriented economy, the private sector has been instrumental in creating backward and forward linkages for agricultural products through the development of inputs, machinery and processing. The WB report highlights that “unlike in Brazil, enterprises did not have access to highly subsidized credit, so they avoided labour displacing technology and consequently generated large numbers of jobs” (WB 2009:140). The final factor contributing to success has been extensive research and development targeted at increasing yields on smallholder farms. This research has mainly resulted from public private partnerships and has been key to increasing productivity. Impact What was the economic and social impact of this success? The fact that Thailand was an open economy meant that increases in productivity did not lead to the dramatic decreases in food prices that Brazil experienced (WB 2009:141). However, the commercialization of farming did have a hugely beneficial impact on the Northeast itself. Strong growth rates led to a tripling of per capita income since the 1970s, and a steep fall in poverty from 48 per cent in 1988 to 18 per cent in 2002 (WB 2005: Executive Summary). The minimum wage rate in the Northeast substantially increased from a nominal rate of 19 baht per day in 1977 to 134 baht per day in 2001 (CCAA Thailand 2007:125). These gains were brought about during a process of decreasing land ownership concentration. Due to land reforms, total agricultural land in the Northeast increased to almost 9.1 million ha in 2001. However, average farm size decreased from 4.5 ha per household in 1975 to 3.5 ha per household in 2001. In absolute terms, this meant that more smallholders were able to access land in the period 1970-2001 (CCAA Thailand 2007:132). A key effect of such growth was improved education standards in the region. Increased incomes mean that farmers can better afford to send their children to school and buy the materials necessary for learning. The share of Northeast workers with at least primary education has increased by almost 20 percent since the early 1990s (WB 2005:Executive Summary). The next generation will have better access to information and technology and be more empowered to participate in the political process. As in Brazil, agricultural growth was successful in stimulating the non-agricultural sector. The share of the agricultural sector as part of regional GDP has declined from 27 percent in the late 1980s to 19 percent in 2004 (CCAA Thailand 2007:7). During the same period, the share of the non-agricultural sector increased from 18 percent to 28 percent (Idem:8). Industry


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had been mainly based on agro-processing infrastructure, such as rice mills and cassava-baling factories. However, since the 1990s this has expanded to include labour-intensive sectors such as apparel and food processing. A key factor in attracting such investment was the abundant supply of cheap labour that had been released from agriculture due to increases in productivity. The number of industrial factories increased 22 times over the period 1975-1995. This has been a significant source of employment in the region. In the year 2000, factories generated over 300,000 jobs (CCAA Thailand 2007:133). Increased incomes and employment opportunities have had a major impact on poverty reduction in the region. The head-count ratio of the Northeast poor significantly declined from 56 per cent in 1988 to 17.2 per cent in 2004 (WB 2009:140). Despite a small increase in the Gini coefficient for the Northeast from 0.474 in 1980 to 0.527 in 2002, income distribution within agriculture has become more equitable; the agricultural sector has seen a decrease in its Gini value from 0.416 in 1980 to 0.396 in 2002 (CCAA Thailand 2007:125). Finally, the WB emphasizes that this process is self-reinforcing, as with successful growth comes political empowerment. The Thai government has been successful in encouraging the emergence of farmer organizations, which are then able to lobby for policies and investments that can sustain the commercialization process (WB 2009:141). In conclusion, the Northeast Region of Thailand has successfully achieved a transition from subsistence farming to high-productivity commercial farming whilst retaining the smallholder model. This has resulted in rising income levels for farmers, and has contributed to significant poverty reduction in the region. It has also stimulated the growth of the non-agricultural sector, ensuring that the economy moves towards a diversified, industrial model. Success was the result of high levels of sustained investment in both infrastructure and research. It was also due to a comprehensive set of policies that aimed to correct all the market failures that could put smallholders at a disadvantage. The Northeast further benefited from a high population density, which lowered the price of labour and so gave added stimulus to the industrial sector. All these factors came together to create the circumstances necessary for success in intensive smallholder production.


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Applied Analysis In both Brazil and Thailand the agricultural development of a particular region became a national priority. Both countries committed substantial amounts of the nation’s resources to investment in infrastructure, research and subsidies. On the key issues of rural credit schemes and land tenure reform, the two countries had different strategies. The difference in outcome holds key lessons for SSA. The discussion thus far suggests that there is a powerful argument in favour of smallholder farming, based on its poverty reduction effects and the associated consequences of growth stimulation in the non-agricultural sector. Theoretical and historical evidence suggests that for these reasons the smallholder model is preferable to large-scale commercial farming. As has been established, this is the consensus opinion promoted by the WB. However, the above analysis has also indicated that for such a strategy to be successful, a comprehensive set of policies and factor endowments must be in place. It will now be considered to what extent the theoretical and historical lessons explored above are applicable to the vast expanses of underdeveloped cultivable land identified in SSA. This section will first examine the history of agricultural development in SSA, before considering which model is most appropriate to the conditions found there today. History of Agriculture in SSA The agricultural revolutions that transformed Asia and Latin America mostly skipped SSA. The FAO reports that cereal yields in SSA are about 1.2 tonnes of grain per hectare, compared to an average yield of 3 tonnes across the developing world (2009: 3). Food production has not kept pace with population growth, making the region a net food importer since the 1970s (FAO 2011). This makes the region particularly vulnerable to increases in food prices, which have the power to hamper the development of industry and impede economic growth. Why has this come about? There are two main strands of thought on this issue. The first attributes lack of growth to policy distortions, whilst the second argues that policy errors were only of limited importance and that the real problem lay with factor endowments. The two positions have differing implications for what policies should be applied today. It is well recognized that up to the 1980s most SSA countries operated policy regimes, which strongly discriminated against agriculture. Policy often had an urban bias, which led to services and prices consistently favouring urban populations (Lipton 1977). Despite the high levels of taxation on agriculture, this urban bias led to a lack of investment in rural infrastructure and services (WB 2011: Overview). Ellis argues that a further problem was posed by trade and exchange rate policy, “which depressed import and export parity prices via overvalued exchange rates and over-taxing export commodities to the further detriment of producers” (2005: 4). Highly centralized government control of the sector compounded the problem. During this period output markets in most African countries were controlled by centralized marketing boards (WB 1994), and in more than 60% of African countries governments reserved full control of the procurement and distribution of fertilizer and seeds (WB 1981). Marketing boards were infamously unreliable; farmers never knew if, when or how much they would be paid (Ellis 2005: 5), and fertiliser subsidies often benefited only a small portion of the rural elite whilst imposing a huge fiscal burden on the country (Binswanger and Townsend 2000: 1077). Smallholder farmers did not therefore get adequate support, and there were few incentives to investment in agriculture. The sector consequently stagnated.


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The structural adjustment programs of the 1990s aimed to correct this urban/ rural imbalance by eliminating subsidies, disbanding parastatals, reducing export crop taxes and import barriers, devaluing currencies and encouraging competitive private trade in rural areas (Ellis 2005: 5). However, the adverse side effects of these measures, such as spiralling inflation and subsequent monetary tightening, meant that the situation of farmers was worsened in the short term (Ellis 2005:5). It was believed that the private sector would step in to fill the gap left by the removal of state bodies. When this intervention failed to materialize, African farmers were left without any state support or outside investment. Using econometric modelling, Sachs and Warner have estimated that had Africa adopted policies similar to those in East Asia, it could have achieved a per capita growth of 4.3% per annum, as opposed to the actual 0.8% (1998:358). The implication of this is that, despite the recent history of failure, with the correct policy prescription SSA could emulate the East Asian model of smallholder-based growth. It is on this basis that the WB identifies Thailand as a relevant economic model for SSA. However, an alternative viewpoint holds that Thailand and Asia’s Green Revolution can only ever be of limited relevance in SSA, due to fundamental differences between the two countries. Policies that worked in the Asian context will not be successful in SSA; a different strategy altogether is required. Karshenas (2000) presents a comparative study of the role of agriculture in economic development in SSA and Asia, in which he rejects the policy distortions hypothesis. He argues instead that fundamental differences in rural population densities are key to understanding the variation in growth trajectories between the two regions. Asian economies generally have high population densities, and this has ensured that rural wages remain well below the average product of labour in the initial phase of development (Karshenas 2000:6). By contrast, SSA is characterized by an abundance of land and a highly dispersed labour force. The consequence of this is that, despite an apparent abundance of cheap labour in urban centres, rural areas of SSA are often labour-constrained (Karshenas 2000: 10). This has several implications for development. Hayami and Platteau (1997) argue that low population densities impeded agricultural growth in SSA by raising the costs of transportation and transactions and by making it more difficult for competitive markets to emerge in outputs and inputs, as low volumes make it unprofitable for sufficient traders to enter and so create a competitive environment (Binswanger and Townsend 2000: 1076). A key problem therefore was that the higher costs incurred from operating across vast areas with low population densities meant that the investment requirements relative to the resource base were higher in Africa than in Asia. This weakened the effectiveness of government subsidies and impeded the growth of the sector. Karshenas develops this argument to take account of the impact of labour constraints on industrial growth: “in the case of Asian countries, the existence of an abundant supply of labour in agriculture allowed fast rates of industrial growth to take place at low and competitive wages… In the case of SSA economies, however, with limited supply of labour and relative abundance of cultivable land, the non-agricultural sectors faced relatively high


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and steep wage curves” (2000:22). In both Brazil and Thailand, stimulating growth in the non-agricultural sector was a primary objective of the agricultural development strategy, and both benefited from a cheap labour supply. Karshenas’ argument suggests that this would be more difficult to achieve under the current conditions in SSA. This analysis is in keeping with the theoretical arguments examined in Section One. In particular it supports Griffith’s conclusion that smallholder farming is the most efficient mode of production in conditions where labour is abundant relative to capital. Where such conditions do not exist, the efficiency argument in favour of small farms is weakened. Without satisfying the prerequisite conditions of high population density and well-developed infrastructure, intensive farming in the Asian mould cannot be replicated. In all three SSA case studies selected by the WB (2009), low population densities and weak infrastructure are the defining characteristics of a large proportion of the available underdeveloped land. Which model to follow? Karshenas argues in favour of the smallholder model, so long as there are efforts made “to concentrate the scarce investible resources within a more limited area, in areas with the highest growth potential, and to encourage the populations of the remoter, less hospitable regions to migrate for work to such growth poles” (2000:24). There are significant political and logistical obstacles to migration strategies, as evidenced by the example of the Brazilian Cerrado. Furthermore, assuming that such a strategy could be achieved peacefully and generate the desired outcome, this would still leave the issue of how to best develop the “remoter, less hospitable regions” of the Guinea Savannah. For, as the 2009 WB report outlines, these regions have high potential for agricultural development at a time of increased pressure on agricultural resources. SSA has some of the fastest growing populations in the world and is a net importer of food at a time of rising food prices. If agricultural productivity is not improved, this could pose serious food security risks in the future and impede successful development. Brazil is proof of the importance of low food prices to industrial growth and poverty reduction. To achieve this, it will be necessary to find a way of making the vast swathes of under populated, cultivable land in the Guinea Savannah zone productive. It is over the issue of how to develop under populated, cultivable land that the WB’s position is misleading. Whilst arguing consistently in favour of smallholder production, it includes the caveat that large-scale farming may be the stronger model “when relatively fertile land must be developed in very low population density areas (which include vast tracts of Guinea Savannah land)” (WB 2009: 150). The report does not dwell on this issue and does not list factor endowments among its concluding list of challenges faced by SSA countries. It therefore fails to fully account for one of the key reasons why smallholder farming has failed in SSA up to this point. The basic contention of the WB is that “there is little to suggest that the large-scale farming model is either necessary or even particularly promising for Africa” (2009:148). In support of this view, it points to a study by Hazell (2007) which shows that “over the past 15 years more rapid growth in agriculture has not been positively correlated with large scale farming models. Over this period, Brazil’s agricultural growth rate of about 4 percent has been exceeded by those of China, Vietnam and no less than eight SSA countries, all of which feature agricultural sectors dominated by small scale farming” (WB 2009: 145). In making this point, the report fails to address the fact that all of the countries cited as successful examples of


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smallholder growth did so in regions with high population densities. Of that list, Brazil is the only country to have achieved comparable agricultural growth in a low population density region, and it achieved this through large-scale capital-intensive production. Both theoretical and historical evidence makes a strong case for promoting smallholder-based growth, and increasing smallholder productivity should be a cornerstone of any development plan in SSA. However, the specificity of the SSA context may very well mean that a smallholder-focused strategy will not suffice to fully capitalize on currently underdeveloped resources. Unless there is a high level of state intervention to correct formidable market failures - a strategy not supported by the WB - SSA may well find that large-scale commercial agriculture is both ‘necessary’ and ‘promising’ to fully exploit its agricultural potential. Other theorists are equally critical of discrepancies in the WB’s position. Havnevik criticises the 2008 World Development Report for arguing in favour of smallholder farming whilst only allowing a minimal role for the state, and therefore creating unrealistic growth assumptions; “there is no evidence provided to suggest that the broad masses of African small-scale peasant farmers will experience anything other than continuing difficulties in meeting the rigours of global commodity market chains with their highly regulated standards and time schedules” (2007:11). He concludes that “the WDR 2008 suffers from a logical inconsistency between its acclaimed goal of poverty alleviation for African smallholder farmers and its conviction that large-scale commercial farming is the inevitable future of farming” (2007:57). Implications What are the implications of the WB’s position? One of the key points the report emphasizes is that contrary to what its proponents often argue, large-scale farming is not an easier development option than smallholder farming, and it cannot be achieved successfully without high levels of state support (WB 2009: 147). The failure of large-scale farming in Africa thus far is well documented (Eicher and Baker 1992). Oft-cited examples are mechanized sorghum and sesame production in Sudan in the 1970s and mechanized rainfed wheat in Tanzania (Deininger et al 2011:8). Both projects suffered from low levels of investment, resulting in low yields and subsequent unprofitability. The WB states that “many of the firms that have recently begun to express interest in launching large-scale agribusiness ventures in Africa… are looking for government support in the form of free or low cost land, tax privileges, concessional financing, and supporting infrastructure such as access roads and port facilities. Where such support has not been forthcoming…the ventures have often failed, and the farmers have withdrawn” (WB 2009: 147). This suggests that, unless they are backed by political and financial support, large-scale commercial ventures will not be successful. This is corroborated by the Brazilian example, in which state subsidies played a pivotal role in the initial stages of development. The contradictory position of the WB, which both rejects the large-scale model as necessary to growth and acknowledges that it may be the only viable development option for large areas of the Guinea Savannah zone, reduces the likelihood of gaining sufficient state support to make any large-scale projects politically viable. This dissertation supports Kariuki’s view that “a scenario where a green revolution targets small-scale farmers is likely to reduce poverty but not necessarily result in large scale economic transformation” (2011:30). It is therefore worrying that the WB does not commit itself to an agenda which includes support for large-scale commercial farming under certain circumstances.


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Successful large-scale production of staple foods in carefully selected areas suffering from underpopulation and underdevelopment could provide both revenue and food security. Such gains could then be put towards the implementation of credit schemes, infrastructure and marketing systems for smallholder farmers in areas with high population densities and strong growth potential. Generating the level of support needed for smallholders to be successful across the whole of the Guinea Savannah zone will require a level of state investment and support that is not compatible with today’s development consensus, and which will not be possible given the resource constraints of SSA. A dual strategy is therefore a more realistic development route. Challenges The greatest challenge in any agricultural development strategy in SSA will be land tenure reform. Clearly defined land rights and adequate compensation for land will be key to ensuring that underdeveloped land can be acquired by those who will use it most productively, and in a way that still benefits the indigenous populations. The experience of Brazil shows the danger of badly managed land reform, which can pose a significant threat to the local population. Tenure insecurity has been one of the principal reasons for the failure of large-scale projects in SSA thus far. Conflict with local populations, and uncertainty over whether leasing contracts will be respected in the future, dissuade investors from committing the large amounts of capital required for projects to be successful. Kariuki suggests that one solution would be to have public-private partnerships in which the government, as the major landowner, would grant land and perhaps loan guarantees, in return for which the private sector would contribute expertise and capital (2011:24). Such reforms will be politically difficult to carry out, particularly in countries with weak institutional capacity. Without support from the WB, such schemes are unlikely to get off the ground. As was explored in Section One, lack of investment in agriculture over the past fifty years has resulted in significant challenges to smallholder farmers, which are only compounded by the difficulties posed by a globalized food system. To overcome the market failures tilting the playing field against smallholders, substantial investment will need to be made in infrastructure and agricultural research. The lesson drawn from Thailand’s success is that for a strategy to work it must be comprehensive; even a single market failure will limit the effectiveness of other investments.


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Conclusion In conclusion, successful agricultural development will be crucial to future economic success in SSA. Theoretical and historical arguments indicate that smallholder farming has a far-reaching poverty reduction impact, and can be a powerful stimulating force for the rest of the economy. For this reason gains in smallholder productivity should form an essential part of any development strategy. However, a smallholder-focused strategy will not in itself suffice to achieve economic transformation, as the specific conditions found in SSA pose immense challenges. In sparsely populated regions with poor infrastructure, a different approach will be required. Large-scale capital-intensive farming can turn low-productivity areas into agricultural powerhouses. At the same time, the resources generated from such success can be used to promote smallholder productivity gains in more densely populated regions. The World Bank’s unconditional support for smallholder farming is overly simplistic and does not account for the specific challenges posed by factor endowments and under-investment in SSA. By not providing the political architecture necessary for the emergence of large-scale farming, the WB is potentially impeding the successful agricultural development of the region. In not committing itself to the position that some large-scale farming may be necessary in order for there to be successful smallholder growth elsewhere, the organization detracts from the credibility of its development plan.


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Labor Exploitation in the Global Garment Industry: Who is to Blame?

Tigist Ketema

Abstract

This paper critiques the shallow and misguided debate on labor exploitation in the global garment industry. Due to the resurgence of sweatshops in garment production in the last 30 years, the various actors of the industry have descended into a blame game, each accusing the other of causing and sustaining the problem. However, labor abuse is not exclusively the result of retailer or supplier misbehavior, rather, it is the consequence of the neoliberal organization of the global value chain (GVC) in garment manufacturing. Yet, since the discussion surrounding labor rights issues does not recognize the failures of the economic structure that sustains the GVC, the solutions the discourse produces are market oriented and do more to sustain the exploitative system rather than dismantle it.


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Introduction On the 25th of March 1911, one hundred forty-one factory workers lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City as a result of inefficient fire escapes and poor working conditions. Due to the magnitude of this tragedy and the public outcry for labor regulation reform that followed, labor unions finally succeeded in pressuring the United States government to pass and enforce strict labor laws that would protect the rights of garment workers just as unions in the United Kingdom had done with the Factory Acts in the previous century (The National Archives, 2013). Despite these victories, a century later working conditions in garment production have significantly deteriorated. Accidents and fires far worse than the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire are commonplace in garment factories in developing countries such as Bangladesh, where in April of 2013, 1200 garment workers were killed when the structurally unsound and illegally constructed Rana Plaza garment factory collapsed (The Economist, 2013; Rosen, 2002:1).

In response to the resurgence of sweatshop1

conditions in garment manufacturing, the various actors of the global garment industry are in agreement that action must be taken against this significant and pervasive problem. However, not all parties share the same opinion on what or who the cause of this problem is. Lead firms, the multinational brands and retailers that control the global value chain in garment production (hereafter GVC), blame the unorganized and uncouth behavior of their foreign manufacturers and their host countries, who in their greed to capture more profit are constantly cutting corners by over-working and under-paying their employees. On the other hand, foreign manufacturers blame lead firms for their aggressive purchasing behavior. The shrinking lead times and cheaper costs these buying firms continuously demand renders suppliers unable to produce the orders while adhering to proper labor standards. Similarly nongovernmental institutions (NGOs) hold the garment corporations responsible but after years of unfruitful attempts to encourage better behavior from these companies, NGOs are now pressurizing governments and international institutions to pass and enforce tougher labor laws that punish exploitative behavior.

This debate attributes labor abuses in the GVC to the irresponsible behavior of particular actors. However, this discussion is misguided as it does not consider the structural failures of the pro-market economic system that supports the GVC - neoliberalism. Beginning in the 1980s, the global proliferation of neoliberal economics liberalized world trade by promoting the export-oriented industrialization (EOI) of developing countries. Concurrently, the rise of lean retailing put increasing pressure on garment retailers and producers to locate low-wage production sites in order to provide cheap garments with shorter production cycles. In order to remain competitive in this market, lead firms in developed states have fragmented labor into an elite core in developed sites and a mass and disposable periphery in the developing world in order to take advantage of the low labor standards in these countries (Abernath, 1999). This organization of the GVC on neoliberal principals of competition and cost minimization is what sustains labor exploitation. The logic of the system is to attain higher profits by competitively cutting costs in order to offer inexpensive clothes at a higher variety to customers. This business model is only possible if labor is exploited.

As the labor exploitation discourse in the GVC does not acknowledge these systematic issues, the solutions that the debate produces are market-oriented and do more to forward the

1 Sweatshops are defined as garment production sites that have wages and working conditions that are considerably below what is legally mandated (Rosen, 2002:2).


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interests of transnational capital than they do to promote the rights of oppressed labor. The majority of the responses have come in the form of private governance solutions where garment multinationals police their own supply chains through corporate social responsibility programs (CSR) or where they collaborate with NGOs and private auditors, among others, through multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI) to involve third party oversight into their monitoring practices. Even the involvement of state and international institutions in these solutions produce results that are equally ineffective, having only had a marginal impact on labor exploitation (Luce, 2005). I begin this paper by outlining the history and organization of the modern GVC in section two. In the third section, I argue that labor exploitation exists in garment manufacturing because of the neoliberal organization of the GVC. While in the fourth section I present the misguided debates on labor issues that miss these structural failures of the economic system that supports the GVC and instead attribute the problem to the reckless behavior of individuals. In the fifth section, I present the resulting deficient solutions that do not challenge the exploitative neoliberal arrangement of global garment production but actually support it. I conclude by discussing the latest developments in the GVC and by reiterating the need for the structural reformation of the current economic system. Garment Production: The Global Value Chain Until the 1980s, the garment business was a supplier-driven industry that was concentrated in the developed world, particularly in the United States and Europe. Manufacturers set the pace of production and retail buyers worked around their availability and capacity. The industry was governed by a “ready-to-wear” delivery calendar that had retailers order from their suppliers once per season and early each season as producers gave discounts for early orders and longer lead times2

(Abernath, 1999:42). Toward the latter half of the 20th century, however, this schedule proved to be unsustainable as market saturation, retail overcapacity “and the constant pressure to provide lower prices to consumers created an unforgiving competitive environment for retailers” (Abernath, 1999:47). Since consumers were spending less on clothes and product offerings were continuing to skyrocket in every category in an attempt to attract more customers, the resulting demand uncertainty and inventory overstocking and understocking problems became increasingly costly for retailers (Abernath, 1999:44; Nordas, 2004). In addition, the arrival of fast-fashion brands like Zara and H&M in the 1980s and 1990s further intensified the competition as these firms had “rapid fire supply chains” with deliveries as frequent as twice a week, beating traditional retailers to market and out-performing them financially (Tokatli et al., 2008:267). In order to remain competitive, traditional retailers also started to demand cheaper prices and faster turnaround times on deliveries from their suppliers (Gereffi, 1994:103; Nordas, 2004; Tokatli et al., 2008:23).

As a result of these new market dynamics, the majority of the global garment industry, especially at the mass-market level, has shifted from the traditional ready-to-wear production calendar, with deliveries up to four times a year, to a demanding lean retailing schedule with semi-weekly deliveries. Lean retailing is a production process which minimizes production cycle time by transmitting critical point of sale information from retailers to various divisions

2 For a complete history of the garment retailing industry see Abernath, 1999.


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of manufacturing3

(Abernath, 1999:57; Collins, 2003:41). While the proliferation and development of information technology facilitates the responsiveness of lean retailing, it is also a burden to the system as technological advancement also means retailers have to keep up with the communication of faster trend waves among consumers (Nordas 2004:2; Tokatli et al, 2008). Further, this ease of communication has also made the place of production less relevant than the cost of labor as according to one American manufacturer “There’s no difference manufacturing in North Carolina or El Salvador; it’s the same everything except the cost of labor” (Collins, 2003:41). Stock market pressures further intensify the search for ever-decreasing labor costs and standards as the financialization of many large brands means that they have to consistently generate high profits in order to keep their shareholders happy and keep investment lucrative within the industry (Collins, 2003:3; Rosen, 2002:9; Tokatli et al., 2008:23).

Suppliers now have much shorter lead times and more frequent and varied deliveries to fill accurately in order to keep their buyers from competitors and secure future contracts (Abernath, 1999:72; Gereffi, 1994:103). To cope with these demanding variables, an increasing amount of garment production has been outsourced from developed countries to low-wage nations in Asia, Latin America, East Europe and Africa (Abernath, 1999:44; Locke et al, 2007:7; Tokalti, 2008:264). Thus, the once ‘producer-driven’ garment industry has transformed into a captive global value chain, where buyers - retailers and brand-name merchandisers - control the organization and the schedule of the supply chain (Barrientos and Smith, 2007: 716; Gereffi, 2013:2; Sum and Ngai, 2005; Vijay, 2009:92). This buyer-driven industry has lead firms that usually do not have their own production facilities but centralize high value added activities which generate the principal profits (such as finance, marketing, and design) in their head offices in developed countries, while orchestrating production needs across decentralized networks in different low wage exporting countries in the developing world (Abernath, 1999:238; Gereffi, 1994:99; Fernandez-Stark, et al., 2011: 188). Similarly, labor is organized into a high-skilled and semi-permanent worker base in core activity areas and a low-skilled, disposable labor force in the periphery across manufacturing sites in developing countries4

(Abernath, 1999:238; Cox, 1987:245,322; Gereffi, 1994:188). “Based on their ownership of brand names and trademarks and their expertise in both design and manipulation of consumer tastes through advertising,” lead firms capture the majority of the profits produced by extracting monopoly rent from the non-core, manufacturing segments of the supply chain (Gereffi, 1994:188; Gereffi, 2013; Nordas, 2004; Vijay, 2009:91).

The lean retailing-oriented organization of the GVC promotes a brutal competitive cost-cutting environment among garment firms and also among producers (Gereffi, 2013; Rosen, 2002:21). To stay in business amidst the pressures of lean retailing, manufacturers in developing countries demand more overtime from their employees while cutting their pay. What manufacturers cannot fill, they outsource to sub-contractors and home-workers who produce the order in even more onerous working conditions as many of these production sites are in the informal economy (Gereffi, 1994:103; Hale, 2000; Nordas, 2004; Sanyal and Bhattacharyya, 2009; Tokatli et al, 2008). While there are many different definitions of the

3 Point of sale information includes data on the size, color, and type of products that sell well and on those that do not sell well. For further information on lean retailing technology see Abernath, 1999 and Collins, 2003. 4 While in many cases much of the core is located in developed sites, some parts of it are transplanted to developing countries that have the capacity to offer higher-value inputs such as design and development. Similarly while the majority of the peripheral labor force is located in fragmented locations in the developing world, there is a small percentage that is located in impoverished regions of developed countries as well (Rosen, 2002).


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informal economy, the consensus supports that the informal economy is made up of wage-workers and the self-employed, who “are not recognized or protected under the legal and the regulatory framework” of the formal labor force and as such “experience a high level of vulnerability” (International Labor Organization, 2002 in Luce, 2005). While labor standards, such as minimum wage and quality control are loosely enforced in the formal economy in many garment-producing countries, these standards are non-existent in the informal economy (Sanyal and Bhattacharyya, 2009:37).

This breaking up of labor has considerably destabilized the once mighty labor unions that were responsible for the passing of labor regulation in the West and it has also resulted in the outright barring of labor unions in the developing world, allowing for the viral reproduction of sweatshops in regions such as Asia, Latin America and North Africa (Collins, 2003:34; Rosen, 2002:4). As a result, the inhumane working conditions that the garment industry believed were ancient history have once again become common in the GVC, but in an even more pernicious form in developing countries. In the next section, I will discuss the political and economic dynamics that have facilitated the resurgence of labor exploitation in the GVC. Why is There Labor Exploitation in the GVC?

Neoliberalism and The Washington Conesus Model

Neoliberalism is an economic theory, which asserts that “the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms” and the liberalization of trade provide the optimal conditions for the democratic development of any nation (Harvey, 2007:22). Under this framework, the market is neutral and comprised of self-interested consumers and producers whose interactions produce an economic climate that is mutually beneficial for all actors involved. The state is not to intervene in the dynamics of the free market, but should instead facilitate a “market friendly” environment by limiting its involvement to protecting private property and enforcing contracts (Gereffi, 2013; Harvey, 2007:24; Thomas, 1999).

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have used this economic ideology, also dubbed the Washington Conesus model, to liberalize the world economy using structural adjustment programs that promote the export-oriented industrialization of developing economies5

(Barrientos and Smith, 2007:715; Gereffi, 2013; Rosen, 2002:5, 23; Sum and Ngai, 2005). This has resulted in the destruction of the welfare state in many countries and has led to a global paradigm shift from an international economy model, where the state’s primary concern is protecting the interests of the domestic economy from external harm, to an internationalization of the state model, where the state promotes international cooperation and is more responsive to external developments (Cox, 1987:253; Wissen and Brand, 2010). As such, neoliberalism has become the commonsensical way of organizing economic life throughout much of the world and many governments are now not primarily concerned with looking after the social welfare of their people but are focused on creating an ideal environment for business to thrive (Chimini, 2004:9; Cox, 1987:7; Harvey, 2007:31; Levi Faur, 2005:24).

5 For a detailed analysis of the rise of neoliberalism and the role of international financial institutions in trade liberalization, see Harvey, 2007 and Levi Faur, 2007.


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According to the Washington Consensus paradigm, developing nations have a ‘comparative advantage’ in cheap labor and since garment production heavily relies on labor as a factor of production, it provides means for a relatively easy entry into the global market (Abernath, 1999:224; Collins, 2003:14; Fernandez-Stark et al., 2011; Mayer and Gereffi, 2010:4; Rosen, 2002:20; Tokatli et al., 2008). In the short term, entry to the global market will provide well-paying jobs (relative to non-export industries) to the most vulnerable segments of society (especially to women) in the basic cut-make-trim (CMT) functions (Collins, 2003:14; Rosen, 2002:5). In the long term, economic integration will provide highly skilled and better paying jobs as the country will inherit the technology and knowledge from its developed country trading partners that will allow it to offer higher value input activities, such as designing and marketing, in addition to the basic sewing and assembly needs. The ultimate goal of this economic upgrade is to reach the Original Brand Manufacture (OBM) stage where the developing country can house the entire GVC, or at least the high-value portions, and is able to brand and sell its own products (Fernandez-Stark et al., 2011:3). However, as will be discussed shortly, industrial upgrading does not translate into sustainable social development but rather contributes to the denigration of social cohesion and stability, particularly for those left in the informal sector.

Race to the Bottom

Economic integration through trade liberalization has played a key role in facilitating the extraction of labor from the peripheral workforce in the GVC. In addition to the global dissemination of the Washington Consensus development model, the removal of trade barriers imposed by the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA)6

policy regime in 2005 has given transnational retailers free reign to move wherever there is cheap labor and lax regulation (Abernath, 1999:227; Applebaum et al, 2005; Gereffi, 1999; Nordas, 2004:13; Rosen, 2002:21). To attract all of this free roaming capital, developing countries have descended into a merciless “race to the bottom” by continuously lowering labor wages and standards - stripping workers even in the formal economy of their basic labor rights - in order to remove economic “barriers” for foreign direct investment (FDI) (Balakrishan, 2002:30; Bulut and Lane, 2011; Vijay, 2009:89). Further, upon entering the world economy, developing states create economic processing zones (EPZs) which offer investors a deregulated labor market and other special economic incentives such as tariff reductions for export production (Fernandez-Stark, et al., 2011:14; Gereffi, 1994:100). The absence of a proper legal and regulatory framework coupled with the global fragmentation of labor has pitted garment workers across the world against each other, each tolerating increasingly inhumane working conditions for fear of losing his or her job (Collins, 2003:11,34; Hale, 2000; Rosen, 2002:4).

Governments in developing states play a crucial role in arranging the transnational organization of the garment GVC. While it is true that developing countries are under pressure from international financial institutions and developed states to liberalize their economies, these states can still choose to be uncooperative by raising transaction costs and political red tape in order to make doing business within their borders difficult. States may

6 The Multifibre Act (MFA) was a policy regime that placed import restrictions on garment producing developing countries in order to protect the textile and garment industries of developed countries from international competition. The act was terminated due to the efforts of developing countries in the Uruguay rounds in the early 1990’s and also due to criticism from economists that the MFA was not only hurting trade (especially for developing countries) but also consumers who had to pay higher prices as a result of the import quotas and tariffs. See Abernath, 1999; Applebaum et al, 2005; Rosen, 2002 for further details.


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have lost some autonomy due to the expansion of industry led globalization, however “this erosion of sovereignty does not signify that they have all become dysfunctional or obsolete” (Cohen, 2007:241). Even before the modern globalization phenomenon, for the last 350 years states have willingly entered into international agreements and commitments, such as regional blocs, in order to politically and economically benefit from these associations. In the same way, states are choosing to accommodate transnational capital by sacrificing some autonomy in order to reap what they expect will be great financial and material benefits. The state’s cooperation, whether developing or developed, is crucial because “the nation-state is still the only universally recognized way of organizing political life” (Cohen, 2007:241: Gus Van Harteen, 2005:609). States provide legitimacy and play an active role in establishing free market economics as a fixed paradigm (Bruff, 2010; Harvey, 2007; Peck, et al., 2009).

The state is on the side of transnational capital in the developing world and supports the core of the GVC in exploiting labor by suppressing and outlawing trade unions and urbanizing societies. In the absence of independent unions, the state allows for the fragmentation of labor through what Collins (2003:157) calls “primitive taylorization” of work, which removes the intellectual or creative challenges of work and reduces it to a simplified and mechanical task to be carried out in a sweatshop setting. The localized uprisings or attempts to unionize that ensue as a result of the deregulation of the labor market are suppressed violently by state-sanctioned military action. This ensures that a “market-friendly” environment is maintained where competitive cost cutting can ensue without pesky interruptions (Castree, 2009; Chimni, 2004:23; Harvey, 2007; Pugh, 2007). The violent unraveling of any challenges to the neoliberal way is justified as “creative destruction” – necessary growing pains that societies have to go through in order to reap the benefits of trade liberalization down the line. Yet, these pains do not promote growth, rather as externalities of the neoliberal GVC, they stunt the flourishing of developing markets and their societies.

Despite the state’s non-interventionist role in the market, it continues to intervene on the behalf of capital instead of social welfare, spending more of the state’s funds on private enterprise development and military expenditures rather than on social welfare programs (Navarro, 2009:7; Peck et al, 2009:109; Van Harten, 2010). The deterioration of social services and legal protections of workers that results expands the “low wage precarious employment benefit systems” that fuel labor exploitation both in the formal and informal economy (Cox, 1987:347). Although neoliberal proponents preach a small state, what they want is a state small enough to stay out of the way of commercial interests but big enough to promote the interests of capital.

In fact, developing countries are loath to pass any binding regulation that would enforce labor standards, as they believe this will weaken their comparative advantage of abundant cheap labor (Luce, 2005). This is a free market impediment that they cannot afford as new and fragile entrants to the global economy. Since transnational retail capital follows cheap labor, if developing countries pass laws that protect the rights of their labor market they will lose FDI to other countries. Consequently, upholding labor standards will result in the loss of low-skill jobs to competing markets, punishing those most vulnerable in developing societies who rely heavily on these low-skilled jobs for sustenance.

Developed states also facilitate the outsourcing of labor and responsibility to developing states through company law. Company law holds that the ultimate goal of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value. In this vein, if management pursues any other goal than the one that legally maximizes profits, shareholders can claim breach of contract and can file suit


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(Muchlinski, 2007). If large publicly traded garment retailers and brands in developed countries do not outsource production to cheaper sites, while their competitors are, they stand to not only lose business but also face legal action from their shareholders. Furthermore, due to jurisdiction limitations and the limited liability concept of company law, developed states do not regulate overseas labor violations related to the activities of their garment multinational enterprises (MNEs) (Kinley and Tadaki, 2004; Muchlinski, 2007; Muchlinski, 2012). Even when countries such as the United States and Australia attempt to pass regulation that integrates corporate responsibility into company law, they are met with resistance. Corporate Codes of Conduct bills in both countries died in 2000 because of a lack of political oxygen from governmental and business communities who held that mandating these bills would hurt the competitiveness of corporations within the respective nations (Kinley and Tadaki, 2012:942; Muchlinski, 2007; Ruggie, 2011 in Ketema, 2013). As with the developing states, developed states place priority in protecting private property rights over communal rights and economic freedom over social welfare (Peck et al., 2009). In the name of economic freedom and growth, developed states also support the dismantling of labor unions and the forceful removal of social resistance to the neoliberal economy (Harvey, 2007). Through its economic policies and institutions, the neoliberal state promotes the idea that what is good for transnational capital is what is good for society.

Everyone is Complicit

While states play a crucial role in normalizing the neoliberal economic system, the blame for labor exploitation cannot be solely placed on them as all actors in the GVC are also equally complicit in sustaining this extractive paradigm (Bulut and Lane, 2011:55; Hughes, 2011:64). Rather than attempt to increase the productive capacity of existing factors in order to raise profits, the neoliberal business model encourages ruthless cost cutting. Labor is treated as a commodity and human worth is measured in terms of market value (Cox, 1987:332; Vijay, 2009:87). Following this logic, lead firms in the GVC cut costs in order to attract more consumers and remain competitive, their suppliers provide those lower costs in an effort to retain their contracts and garment workers compete with one another to fill orders by working longer hours for less as they know their employment is highly disposable due to the plethora of low-skilled labor that is available in developing countries, while the state supports this infrastructure through “market-friendly” economic policies. Therefore, the neoliberal logic of competition naturally lends itself to labor exploitation as the ever rising pressures of lean retailing to cut costs and lead times continues to deteriorate labor conditions in the GVC with the workers at the lower end of the value chain carrying the brunt of this burden (Gereffi, 1994:103). Yet, the debate surrounding labor exploitation in the GVC overlooks this point and instead attributes the abuse to the selfish behavior of the actors in the supply chain, with each member of the global value chain blaming the other in order to avoid responsibility for the problem. The following section will cover the discourse on labor exploitation among key actors of the GVC and the deficient, market-oriented solutions that have emerged from this erroneous debate.


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Shallow Debates and Failed Solutions

Lead Firms

The resurgence of sweatshops in the garment industry was initially brought to public attention by NGO and activist led anti-corporate movements and university based anti-sweatshop campaigns in the early 1990s (Gereffi et al., 2001:58). While these movements had limited success in lobbying governments to change company law, through naming and shaming they were able to tarnish the reputations of major brands like Nike and Levi Strauss, finally convincing these lead firms to use their power over the GVC to promote fair labor standards (Herman, 2013; Hughes, 2011; Gereffi et al., 2001; Mayer and Gereffi, 2010:5; Sadler and Lloyd, 2009). This did not come without some resistance from corporations, however, as they initially held that they were not to blame for the labor exploitation.

While multinational brands and retailers have taken steps toward monitoring labor conditions in their supply chains, they still hold others in the GVC responsible for labor abuse in garment production. These lead firms claim that, especially during times of economic contraction, consumers are not willing to pay more for clothes. Consequently, in order to stay in business and remain profitable, the firms are “forced” to put undue pressure on suppliers in order to offer consumers a greater variety of garments at a lower cost (Abernath, 1999; Nordas, 2004). However, brands and retailers manipulate customer tastes through advertising and, therefore, are responsible for setting consumers’ expectations. If the consumer has become more tyrannical in the last 30 years, it is due to the neoliberal business climate that allows retailers to compete ruthlessly for the customer’s loyalty through cost reduction and increased product differentiation. On the other hand, lead firms also blame the uncivilized and inefficient behavior of manufacturers, as well as, the poor regulatory oversight of their governments in developing countries for rampant labor abuses (De Neve, 2009:69). Corporate-led multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI), such as the United Kingdom’s Ethical Trading Initiative, are using the events around the Rana Plaza Factory collapse, as a model of what they say is the norm among untrustworthy and mischievous manufacturers. The managers of the factory forced workers to go into the building and work, despite protests from the employees that they felt unsafe inside the structurally unsound building. The Bangladeshi government did not provide any support to the workers as the majority of parliament is made up of garment industry tycoons who own most of the factories in the country and thus, have a conflict of interest in strictly enforcing the labor laws that are in the books (The Economist, 2013; Tripathi, 2013). In fact, the government has allowed the illegal construction of 5000 new buildings since 2008, including Rana Plaza, despite having given out only six occupancy certificates in that time span (Crawford, 2013; Smith, 2013). Lead firms point to these kinds of producer-country dynamics and claim that there simply is not a “culture of health and safety” in Bangladesh and other manufacturing countries (Crawford, 2013; Welsh, 2013:13).

Corporate Social Responsibility

In order to civilize manufacturers and their governments, lead firms have responded with a “code rush” – a code of conduct regime that monitors and trains suppliers to better labor practices (Locke et al, 2007:4; Luce, 2005; Mayer and Gereffi, 2010:6). These codes are administered through corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs and cover a wide range


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of labor rights from minimum wage standards to restrictions on child labor, discrimination, and unsafe working conditions (Gereffi et al., 2001:58; Hughes, 2001). Codes are enforced using efficiency programs that aim to reduce supply chain costs in a way that also eases the burden on garment workers. For instance, Tesco has developed the Bangladesh Apparel Skills Foundation in order to “improve productivity, efficiency and organizational behavior” of mid to lower level factory management. Managers who have gone through this program have praised it for equipping them with the organizational skills they need to increase productivity (by 43%), reduce absenteeism and improve working conditions and relations overall. Wal-Mart’s efficiency program has received similar praise in China, as one Chinese food-packaging manufacturer commented: “We have learned from Wal-Mart how to become a company with a social conscience” (Webb, 2012). Reports such as these confirm to garment corporations that manufacturers lack production etiquette and require guidance from lead firms on ethical labor practices.

According to Webb, founder of the London based CSR consulting company Ethical Corporation, “accidents are inefficiencies.” Therefore, he advises: “If you want to cut forced overtime for workers - increase productivity, reduce accidents, increase profits and lower environmental emissions and impacts, that’s all about smarter business” (Webb, 2012). The idea is to improve supply chain efficiency - through teaching factory employees better organizational and managerial strategies - so that the resulting cost savings can then be used to improve working conditions. In the long run, this investment in labor will prevent the accidents and fires that have become so commonplace in the garment industry (Steiner, 2012). Corporations and other proponents of the free market promote the code solution as being mutually beneficial to all in the GVC, as the application and enforcement of the programs cut costs for the corporation, improves its reputation and also improves labor standards for the factory workers (Sum and Ngai, 2005: 186).

In addition to training, garment MNEs administer codes through monitoring and policing schemes. Nike uses an army of 90 compliance officers in 21 countries to monitor and intimidate suppliers into following the company’s code of conduct (Locke et al, 2007:9). Similarly, one buyer from a British childrenswear retailer discusses how her company does random and unannounced inspections to inspire fear in factory managers, whom she assumes are always looking for ways to cut corners: “We are really tough but they have to realize that these things are important” (De Neve, 2009:68). While buyers and supply chain auditors from developed countries speak of partnerships in CSR governance, the auditing process is quite condescending. Lead firms barely consult the factories in the CSR programs that are designed and rolled out to all factories, irrespective of the particular needs of each factory (De Neve, 2009:64).

Manufacturers

Manufacturers regard CSR as a patronizing and hypocritical exercise. Lead firms demand compliance with codes but have production expectations that cannot possibly be met without the producing companies exploiting labor for surplus value (Barrientos and Smith, 2007: 725; Sum and Ngai, 2005: 195). According to one supplier in the Tiruppur garment manufacturing cluster of Southern India:

Look, there are two methods of production: a clean method and a short-cut method. The consumer wants cheaper and cheaper clothes at the same time


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better produced goods. In the past we produced a T-shirt for £ 2-3 and it was sold for £15. Today the same T-shirt is sold for £5. The consumer is too powerful . . . you can’t produce in a clean manner for free (De Neve, 2009:66).

Retailers and consumers in the developed world demand ethically produced garments that they are not willing to pay for. Manufacturers who assume the burden of the time and money-consuming process of bringing their factories up to code standards - including those who go the extra mile to attain certification from industry recognized social auditors, such as Social Accountability 8000 (SA 8000) and Worldwide Responsibility Apparel Production Certification (WRAP) - are not rewarded by lead firms with financial assistance or with steady orders. In fact, complying suppliers are punished as they lose most of their business to less expensive non-complying manufacturers in the long run (De Neve, 2009; Hughes, 2011:43; Ruwanpura and Wrigley, 2010; Tokalti, 2008:272).

As CSR is primarily a reputational risk management exercise, lead firms in the buyer-driven GVC typically only use a handful of compliant factories and publicize those for the sake of promoting their reputations but do the majority of their sourcing from non-certified factories that can give them cheap prices. Even the fast fashion retailer Zara, who is known in the industry for being a rebel as it is purported to keep the majority of its production in developed countries like Spain and Portugal, follows this sourcing strategy. Spain and Portugal have the lowest paid workers in Western Europe, with each nation having an expansive informal economy. Despite this, Zara still outsources an increasing amount of its production to low wage nations in the developing world. However, in order to protect its image as one that is dedicated to domestic sourcing and production, Zara is very discrete about its overseas manufacturing while it openly advertises its production sites in developed countries (Cox, 1987:325, 345; Tokatli et al., 2008:32).

Another factory owner in Tiruppur concurs what many manufacturers in the global South are deeply aware of:

At the end of the day, if we fulfill all codes and standards and then we ask 5 % more, the company will simply go elsewhere, the cheapest deal is what they are ultimately after. Western buyers are not interested in Indian workers, and we should not expect them to look after our workers either . . .they are only concerned about their own reputation among consumers (De Neve, 2009:67).

It is true that the cost of compliance is very minimal; as the ethical sourcing consulting firm, Instead confirms that bringing violating manufacturers up to standards would only add an extra four percent to costs (Tripathi, 2013). This is irrelevant to buyers and producers in the GVC as the competitive nature of the neoliberal climate disallows them to make any concessions in their race to achieve higher profits through cost cutting.

Manufacturers are right to complain about their predicament, as CSR has not empirically proven to be effective in eradicating labor exploitation in the GVC. Its efficiency programs, even where effective in marginally increasing wages in a few factories, are not scalable as large buyers have tens of thousands of suppliers and subcontractors. Applying these programs at all of these sites is financially and logistically unsustainable (Bulut and Lane, 2011; Hale, 2000). As per the complaint of manufacturers, since CSR is optional it is only taken up when


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beneficial to the company and sloppily enforced so that the majority of the peripheral labor involved in garment production is not protected by codes.

Codes are set among western brands and then monitored by their own inspectors (De Neve, 2009:65). The results are kept confidential and the garment corporation has no obligation to inform either the government or the workers about the findings. As a result, even factories that have been inspected and approved still have gone to provide very unsafe conditions for workers. Most of the building collapses and fires, in countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Vietnam, that were responsible for the death of over 1300 people in 2012 alone were inspected and approved factories (Crawford, 2013; Herman, 2013). Therefore, CSR is a “box ticking” exercise that lead firms in the GVC use as a public relations tool to manage reputational risk (Herman, 2013; Locke et al, 2007:5; Pearson and Seyfang, 2001).

CSR is a market-based solution that primarily shifts the majority of inventory risk to suppliers who have to then resort to subcontracting into the informal economy in order to deliver on demanding orders (Barrientos and Smith, 2007: 724; De Neve, 2009:70; Mayer and Gereffi, 2010:14; Sadler and Lloyd, 2009:616; Tokatli et al, 2008:275). In fact, codes are primarily geared toward efficiency and cost savings for the corporation, not toward securing a safe working environment for precarious workers in the bottom of the GVC. Even corporate responsibility initiatives that provide philanthropic contributions above and beyond the direct impact area of production activities - whether it is giving away supplies to local schools or opening local nurseries for working mothers, as one large British retailer has done in an Indian town it produces in - do little to make up for the externalities the multinational brands release into those communities (De Neve, 2009:69). Corporate charity is not a give away but a license to operate in impoverished communities in a manner that assuages the sins of corporations and puts them in a favorable light in the areas they operate in. In short, CSR works within the confines of the neoliberal rationale and does more to help corporate interests than exploited labor.

Multi-stakeholder Initiatives

Yet the response to the deficiency of CSR is not attributed to the neoliberal principles it is based on but to the need for it to be more inclusive of other actors in the GVC. To quail the complaints of manufacturers who feel excluded, corporations are entering into multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs), partnering with consultancies, NGOs, think tanks and even international and national institutions, in order to design and administer codes in a democratic way (Hughes, 2001; Webb, 2012). Since CSR auditing has largely been ineffective in improving labor conditions in garment factories, Locke et al, (2007) suggest that a “systemic approach” is more appropriate than the corporate policing and monitoring method. This means engaging “external countervailing pressure” from states, NGOs and social auditing consultancies in order to keep code programs more accountable (Locke et al, 2007:4). For example, the British retailer, New Look’s efficiency and organizational behavior classes for their factory managers in Bangladesh is administered through its partnerships with governmental agencies such as the UK’s Department For International Development (DFID), international institutions such as the International Finance Corporation and sustainable production consultancies, such as Impactt. As this approach has reduced the pressure on labor while cutting production costs in a handful of factories, New Look has been the recipient of praise from the garment and social auditing industries for its approach, which has served as a


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model for others in the industry as well (New Look Annual Report and Accounts, 2012; Webb, 2012).

Despite the anecdotal success of New Look in Bangladesh, the MSI solution is not any more democratic or labor-focused than the CSR approach as it continues to be a means of masking power differentials between the garment corporation and the exploited labor in the GVC. MSIs are dominated by corporate interests and are not equally representative of all stakeholders, especially of the actors that need the representation most – garment workers in the peripheral labor force (Mayer and Gereffi, 2010:19; Peck et al, 2009:112). The voices that represent the interests of exploited workers in developing countries are NGOs and think tanks from developed countries, which do not properly consult or involve the labor they are representing. The treatment of workers as victims in need of technocratic policy prescriptions undermines the role workers can play in designing their own protection regimes. There are few groups that justly represent the interests of exploited labor in the GVC, as labor unions have either been dismantled or outlawed by countries with developing garment industries in an attempt to remain a competitive destination for FDI. The representatives of labor that do exist in these countries are controlled by the government or factory management and, therefore, promote the interests of transnational capital rather than labor (Hale, 2000:354; Merk, 2009:605; Sum and Ngai, 2005: 193).

The involvement of third party oversight in MSIs has not made corporate responsibility initiatives more accountable than in-house CSR programs. Furthermore, external auditors that have been certified by MSIs, such as Fair Labor Association and Fair Wear, are bias as they produce reports that are pleasing to the brands that are paying their bills (Locke et al, 2007:5; Luce, 2005; The Economist, 2013). These partial audits suffer from the same scalability problems that CSR has, as they are only performed on a five percent representative sample of factories and do not even reach the full range of contractors and sub-contractors in the formal economy let alone in the informal economy (Barrientos and Smith, 2007:722; Locke et al, 2007:9; Merk, 2009:606).

Further, the quality of the audits is not consistent as auditors base their judgment of acceptable standards relative to the country they are inspecting - what a social auditor would not allow in a Sri Lankan factory they would allow in a Bangladeshi factory because labor standards are lower in Bangladesh than they are in Sri Lanka (Barrientos and Smith, 2007). This inconsistency has left suppliers in “compliance limbo” between the standards and expectations of different social auditors (Locke et al, 2007:6; Sadler and Lloyd, 2009; Pearson and Seyfang, 2001).

Code programs, whether implemented via CSR or MSI have only improved outcome (measurable) standards, such as the reduction of child labor and overtime in visible sites of production, while they have done very little to improve process or enabling rights, such as the right to associate or bargain collectively, which are “intrinsic principles of social justice” (Barrientos and Smith, 2007:720). Even these outcome standards are only afforded to regular employees of factories and do not cover the multitude in the informal economy (Barrientos and Smith, 2007:722; Merk, 2009:606). Despite the existence of corporate code schemes for the past 15 years, their impact on alleviating labor exploitation in the GVC has been very restricted as limited liability company law and the liberalization-led fragmentation of production continues to shield garment corporations from the consequences of poor working conditions associated with their activities (Barrientos and Smith, 2007; Muchlinski: 2012). As will be discussed in the following section, since private governance solutions are market-


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based, they do not challenge the “embedded commercial practices” of the neoliberal GVC, but rather support it - exacerbating labor exploitation rather than ending it (Barrientos and Smith, 2007:715). The Shortcomings of Market-Oriented Solutions

Private Governance

The aim of private governance is for garment retailers and brands to self-regulate their way to better labor standards in the GVC. The outcomes, however, have not helped eradicate labor exploitation but have only further strengthened the extractive neoliberal structure of the GVC by creating market-oriented solutions that promote the economic interests of garment corporations over the needs of labor (Castree, 2009; Levi-Faur, 2005). The privatization of regulation has also supported the free market-based framework by creating a burgeoning auditing and non-profit industry that is growing faster than the business and government sectors (Buffet, 2013; Sadler and Lloyd, 2009). The rise of the auditing society was born out of the need to build trust in a deregulated economic environment. It is not by chance that the two biggest MSI initiatives in the world are based in the two countries that are the strongest proponents of neoliberalism – Ethical Trading Initiative in the United Kingdom and Social Accountability International in the United States (Barrientos and Smith, 2007:717; Levi Faur, 2005; Ruggie, 2004).

Even states and international institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations throw their weight behind private governance solutions instead of appealing for structural reformation of global trade. The World Bank uses the ‘Aid by Trade’ initiative to encourage lead firms to use their economic and political clout to develop the trading capacity of developing countries (Gereffi, 2013:19). While in 2000, the UN passed the Global Compact - a voluntary instrument that encourages corporate responsibility and serves as a forum for corporations to exchange ideas on better corporate practices. The Compact is a mere ‘blue washing’ of a corporate agenda as, despite its 2000 signatories, the instrument continues to be unsuccessful in changing corporate behavior in a meaningful way (Sadler and Lloyd, 2009). State regulation also treats responsibility in business and the GVC as voluntary. The UK’s 2006 Company Act only requires corporations to report social and environmental impacts that they feel are significant (Sadler and Lloyd, 2009). This type of regulation just plays lip service to corporate responsibility and avoids providing a significant solution to labor exploitation. Code-based private governance and voluntary corporate responsibility instruments divert attention away from the need for state regulation (Gereffi et al., 2001:57). According to Friends of the Earth:

I think the problem with CSR is that it is a convenient distraction away from the need to reform the company law structure, because it creates the impression that you are doing something when the reality is that it doesn’t actually change the playing field much at all (Sadler and Lloyd, 2009:618).

That is, code programs are used by corporations to actually “mask the impact” of corporate externalities on labor and to avoid or delay binding regulation of international corporate activities (Sadler and Lloyd, 2009). Through code regimes, garment corporations are giving


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back with their left hand a small portion of what they snatched with their right hand, in effect hiding the economic exploitation that is inherent to neoliberalism with a “humanitarian mask” (Zizek, 2006).

The New NGO Approach

While the CSR and MSI boom occurred due to surmounting NGO pressure on garment corporations to take responsibility for the mistreatment of labor in the GVC, an increasing number of NGOs are now pulling their support from these initiatives as it has become increasingly evident that their support was furthering corporate interests while undermining workers’ rights (Sadler and Lloyd, 2009:618). As a result, NGOs are withdrawing from MSIs and forming their own initiatives, such as the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), in order to better represent labor without being restricted by corporate fetters (Gereffi et al., 2001:62; Sum and Ngai, 2005:191). Through these new initiatives, NGOs vigorously lobby states and international institutions to pass and enforce regulation that punishes labor exploitation. Yet as with the code solution, even this approach does very little to alleviate the systematic failures of the GVC as it also takes for granted that labor exploitation is exclusively the result of irresponsible behavior of some actors in the garment supply chain.

As NGOs are now galvanizing behind international regulation, among the strongest calls has been one to the WTO to include a social clause in its trade agreements and treaties in order to force signatory countries to follow proper labor standards that guarantee both outcome and process standards. However, using the WTO or any other international institutions, such as the World Bank and even the UN, remains futile as these institutions are not democratic but are dominated by the interests of developed countries, especially the United States (Chimni, 2004; Luce, 2005). Thus, weaker developing countries will be more adversely affected by these measures not only because they have less regulatory capacity and resources to satisfy these regulations but also because developed states can use these instruments as protectionist tools against developing countries. For instance, in 2004 the US ignored a WTO ruling against its anti-dumping laws but despite not following WTO rules the super power continues to impose market-liberalizing laws on other nations (Luce, 2005). This is precisely why during the establishment of the WTO in the Uruguay Rounds, developing states opposed a social clause that would protect labor rights in the GVC, claiming that developed nations would use it as a protectionist measure against them (Cohen, 2007:243; Sum and Ngai, 2005).

Using international financial institutions like the WTO to protect the rights of exploited labor in the GVC is useless because the WTO’s main objective is to protect the interests of capital and investment. Social welfare issues are outside the purview of its mandate. Job creation and social justice are not primary goals of the trade agreements that the WTO brokers, instead the purpose of these deals is to allow rich members access to investment in lucrative markets (Luce, 2005). Under the neoliberal framework, forwarding the priorities of capital means suppressing the rights of labor, as the relationship between the two is not symbiotic but antagonistic. Where NGOs are lobbying governments, they are persuading developed countries, where the buying firms are based, to threaten punitive measures against labor rights offending manufacturers and countries. While the governments of developing nations may be complicit in the labor abuse practiced by their suppliers, trade sanctions do more to hurt the overall welfare of citizens in those countries rather than the suppliers. Furthermore, NGOs demand


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that the developed countries and lead firms support the developing countries and their manufacturers in building labor regulation enforcement capacity (The Economist, 2013). However, even developed nations do not have their house in order when it comes to labor rights enforcement. Despite being a pioneer in strong labor regulations in the early 20th century, the US today has labor laws that are deficient and not properly enforced as American employers routinely violate safety and health codes while suppressing the rights of their workers to unionize (Luce, 2005). The same neoliberal ideology that has destabilized labor and communal rights in developing countries has also done the same in the developed world. No amount of capacity building or supply chain policing by social auditors can completely eradicate labor exploitation in the garment GVC as long the neoliberal cornerstone is left in place.

Yet NGOs continue to push for regulatory enforcement of labor laws because a stable legal environment makes corporate code of conduct programs more effective in achieving labor compliance (Gereffi et al., 2001; Locke et al, 2007:15). However, all this will do is guarantee proper labor standards in visible places of production where only a small portion of the low-skilled labor is situated while leaving the expanding informal and inconspicuous production sector unprotected. In fact, tougher regulation of the formal economy will only increase the GVC’s reliance on the informal economy to meet orders. As it is, a large portion of garment production is done in the informal economy, so much so that the lines between the formal and informal economy are quite blurred (Luce, 2005). The expansion of the informal garment-producing sector would benefit the neoliberal GVC as this will lead to even cheaper production costs and, therefore, cheaper prices for consumers with higher profit margins for garment corporations.

Even employees in the formal economy would also have limited protection under mandatory labor standards because they have short shelf-lives (Peck et al., 2009). Manufacturers prefer to hire young, “nimble fingered” and unmarried women because they can be paid less than men and also because they tend to be more submissive to management. As soon as these women get older or start families they are pushed out of the formal economy and are forced to go into the informal economy to make a living (Luce, 2005). Hence, even while these women are under the protection of regulated factories, they do not evoke their rights since they know their employment is precarious.

Tougher regulation on bad behavior, even if it comes from the state, continues to ignore the systematic nature of labor extraction in the GVC. While NGOs have redirected their labor rights campaigns back towards states and international institutions, in a well-intentioned attempt to tackle the structural failures of poorly enforced labor regulation, they have not stood far back enough to see the larger malfunctioning configuration of neoliberalism that these laws sit in. As long as this pro-market ideology persists and remains engrained in the common sense of political, economic and social actors affected by the GVC, labor exploitation will only continue to accelerate.

Failures of the Washington Consensus Model

While neoliberalism has become the commonsensical way of organizing economic life, it continues to fail large portions of society as it supports the extraction of value and money from many for the benefit of the few. Though trade liberalization has increased the output of the formal economy it has not increased employment in the formal labor segment but has in


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fact decreased it, while increasing precarious employment in the informal sector (Sanyal and Bhattacharyya, 2009:36). A market democracy does not automatically lead to sustainable economic development, as even the countries that were a positive example of this assumption - the East Asian miracle countries and Argentina - were devastated by sobering financial crises in the 1990s after their dizzying economic growth (Collins, 2003:3; Jahn, 2007; Luce, 2005; Rosen, 2002:25). Market liberalization has not equally benefited everyone in developed countries and the same is true for developing countries as in both cases only the elite have profited while large segments of society have been thrown the crumbs that fall off the master’s table - what neoliberalism calls trickle down economics.

In the instance of international garment production, the Washington Consensus development model - the liberalization of developing garment industries through export orientated industrialization and the creation of export process zones (EPZ)- has not produced the economic and social benefits it has promised. The neoliberal push for economic upgrading has resulted in job losses in the formal economy due to competition with cheap imports and has led to an overall “social downgrading” in developing countries (Arnold and Pickles, 2011; Gereffi, 2013:9; Harvey, 2007; Thomas, 1999).

The Washington Consensus model has especially hurt small and least developed countries as hastily joining the global economy through the lower assembly portion of the GVC has not created sustainable economic growth nor has it improved knowledge and technology capacity (Gereffi, 2013:10). The success of economic upgrading depends on the quality of state institutions and how much foreign corporations are willing to invest to assist in capacity building. Lead firms only support industrial upgrading where infrastructure capabilities already exist, however, small or least developed countries that lack this capacity, such as Nicaragua and Lesotho, are left in the basic cut-and-assembly stage of the GVC. The mere creation of an EPZ does not guarantee economic advancement and in many cases actually results in the economic and social denigration of those that are employed in and around these zones.

Despite these gross failings of the neoliberal development model, the pervasive failures of the system are blamed on individual or cultural deficiencies of those it failed (Castree, 2009; Chimni, 2004:23; Harvey, 2007:24-34; Jahn, 2007). “Consequently, failure just confirms liberalism’s basic assumptions- of its own superiority; of its right, competence, and transplanting Western models of social, political, and economic organization and lead logically to the pursuing of the already failed policies with renewed vigor and conviction” (Jahn, 2007:226). Since the neoliberal paradigm is taken for granted, the solutions that emerge from it attempt to correct behavioral shortcomings of GVC actors, whether it is through code initiatives or state regulation. As these responses neglect the structural failures of the market economy, they continue to directly and indirectly promote neoliberalism and its reproduction of labor rights violations in garment production. Conclusion Labor exploitation in the global garment industry is a systemic problem and cannot at all be attributed to the irresponsible behavior of any one economic actor in the GVC. Since the current discourse surrounding the issue is excluding this key point; the solutions that emerge from these debates are largely ineffective in stopping labor extraction. The public call for the behavioral changes of those working within the garment supply chain is futile without


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demands for the structural reformation of the economic system they operate in (Buffet, 2013; Navarro, 2009; Stillwaggon, 2003; Stillwaggon, 2008). Corporate social programs that keep garment retailers more “accountable” or instruct manufacturers on ethical efficiency are useless in the fight against labor exploitation, not only because these programs are not logistically or financially scalable across the entire supply chain, but also because they are short term solutions that delay the overhaul of the abusive economic paradigm that promotes the unequal development of societies (Castree, 2009). Free market proponents are beginning to realize the pervasive nature of labor abuse in the GVC under the Washington Consensus model and the need for a new development approach. The WTO and IMF as well as bilateral donors, USAID and the UK’s DFID, are now supporting a more heterodox development framework in order to balance the need for equity, income generation and economic output. These historically neoliberal institutions are engaging with social and cultural organizations in order to explicitly pursue ‘social upgrading’ initiatives along with economic upgrading schemes, using market-led models of development that take into account ‘competitiveness and equity issues’ (Gereffi, 2013:15,18). But this approach, like all the others, is attempting to solve the problems neoliberalism created with more neoliberalism. This solution deceivingly looks like it is departing from the conventional private governance response to labor exploitation, however, it has not overcome the path dependency of neoliberal solutions. While this maybe a more holistic approach, social and cultural organizations are still making deals with powerful bodies that will ultimately dominate the discourse as has been the case with lead firms in MSIs (Bruff, 2010; Gereffi, 2013:18).

Yet, the dynamics of the GVC are slowly starting to change, as there is currently a gradual power shift back to the supplier in an industry that has been buyer-led for the last 30 years. The supremacy of developed world actors is weakening in the GVC as a result of depressed consumer confidence in the global North post the 2008-09 financial crisis, waning US hegemony and the increasing production and consumption capacity of developing countries (Gereffi, 2013). Further, large developing countries, such as China and India, have benefited from the gradual concentration of production capacity in their countries as a result of the GVC orientation toward cheap and plentiful labor for assembly functions (Gereffi, 2013). Therefore, supplier capabilities have grown increasingly more sophisticated in developing countries and due to the economic slow down in the developed world, buyers are opting for a few vertically integrated suppliers located in strategic locations instead of smaller and more dispersed manufacturers. Location has once again become relevant in garment production because producers are looking to other Southern markets in order to find new outlets for their output as economic growth in the South continues to outpace that of the North’s – thus, proximity to these emerging markets is essential (Gereffi, 2013:8).

Despite the shift in the power structures of the GVC, the newly empowered suppliers in the developing world still operate according to the basic neoliberal principles of competition and cost-cutting that champion the interests of capital over labor. In order to match the lower income of consumers in the South, exporters will have to provide cheaper prices to developing markets than they offer to developed markets. Consequently labor exploitation will expand further, as production cost cutting will have to be more vicious in order to meet tighter price margins (Gereffi, 2013). Despite most developing countries abandoning a pure Washington Consensus development path for a more inward looking industrialization plan; neoliberal principles remain engrained in the GVC and the organization of global economic life.


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The problem remains that corporate, societal and governmental stakeholders of the GVC are attempting to solve the problem of labor exploitation with the ‘same mind-set that created it’ (Albert Einstein in Buffet, 2013). What is needed is a rooting out of the neoliberal logic from the economic and socio-political system that governs the global garment industry. With the neoliberal pillars left in place, whether the GVC is buyer-driven or supplier-driven, the pervasive exploitation of labor will continue to expand.


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Implementing the UN "Protect, Respect and Remedy" Framework: How Human Rights Due Diligence in Practice has Theoretical

Implications on Governance Systems

Alexandra Portoff

Abstract

Business and human rights have been prevalent on the global agenda due to emblematic cases of corporate involvement in human rights abuses. To close an existing governance gap, international efforts have produced the UN “"Protect, Respect and Remedy" Framework giving corporations the responsibility to respect human rights. Corporations can consider human rights issues within their operations by implementing human rights due diligence. Incorporating this responsibility into corporate activities has practical and theoretical implications. In this dissertation, it is argued that the two existing distinct forms of impact assessments have the same aim which is for corporations to respect human rights. Therefore implementing human rights due diligence has a theoretical impact on governance systems as the consideration for human rights by corporations cannot be adequately explained by the traditional shareholder primacy model. Taking a stakeholder perspective allows to explain recent developments within the business and human rights discourse. By choosing this approach, implications on governance systems are being discussed.

Implementing the UN "Protect, Respect and Remedy" Framework

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Introduction

With an increasing amount of multinational enterprises operating across various socio-political, corporations are faced with governance gaps which have created permissive settings for human rights abuses (Ruggie, 2013). International efforts have therefore addressed the predicament of business and human rights to hold multinational enterprises responsible for their human rights impacts. The UN ‘protect, respect, remedy’ Framework and UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights offer a basis for corporations to realise this responsibility (UN Framework, 2008; UN Guiding Principles, 2011). The process of human rights due diligence has been suggested to implement human rights considerations in corporate activities. The introduction of the concept of corporate responsibility to respect human rights and human rights due diligence has practical and theoretical implications (Muchlinski, 2012). The implementation of the UN Framework can bring about a practical dilemma for corporations as with little guidance of the UN Guiding Principles, companies have to choose from various impact assessment instruments. Nevertheless, these tools essentially follow the same goal which is for corporations to respect human rights. Establishing human rights considerations into corporate activities however goes against the traditional shareholder primacy model first introduced by Friedman (1962). Ultimately, this raises the question whether this shareholder approach can adequately explain the existence of human rights due diligence. This issue has not yet been fully acknowledged in the literature when one follows an examination of the practical implications of human rights due diligence. It is therefore essential to investigate these further in the scope of this dissertation. This will be done in four chapters. Chapter 1 describes the evolution of business and human rights. In the first section, business and human rights have been put on the global agenda by emblematic cases. International efforts to resolve this governance gap were brought forward by the UN when drafting the UN Norms. The second section outlines how the apparent failure of the UN Norms has led to the creation of the UN Framework and Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The third section describes the second pillar of the UN Framework and illustrates how the corporate responsibility to respect human rights should be implemented. The last section portrays the implications of the UN Framework and Guiding Principles had on the convergence of international standards and initiatives. Chapter 2 illustrates the notion of human rights due diligence as suggested by the UN Guiding Principles and presents two types of impact assessments to consider human rights issues. The first section introduces the concept of corporate due diligence and demonstrates the connection to human rights due diligence. In the second section, the two human rights due diligence instruments, namely the integrated and dedicated approach, are examined separately. A case for both tools respectively demonstrates how each can be implemented in practice. Scholars however are in disagreement whether these two instruments are distinct from one another or whether the dedicated approach stems from the integrated tool. Chapter 3 therefore investigates the practical implications of the implementation of human rights due diligence for corporations. The first section addresses the discourse of whether the two instruments are distinct of one another. Arguing that these two forms of human rights due diligence have to be viewed separate, the second section attends to the dilemma corporations


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face. The UN Guiding Principles refrain from explicitly defining the form human rights due diligence should take and companies are left to themselves to choose an appropriate approach. The final section therefore presents the benefits and challenges of each tool. It concludes that ultimately both approaches follow the same aim: for corporations to respect human rights. The discussion therefore has to move on. In chapter 4, the theoretical implications of the implementation of human rights due diligence are hence being discussed. The first section questions why companies should implement human rights due diligence in the first place. Shifts within the legal requirements are mentioned but further a change of the expectations of corporations to behave ethically is described. The second section investigates whether the traditional shareholder primacy model still holds and infers that a stakeholder approach is more adequate to explain the existence of corporate responsible behaviour. The last section describes the implications on existing governance models if a stakeholder approach is taken. Finally, the conclusion summarises the findings of this dissertation and suggests topics requiring further investigation. For the purpose of this dissertation, the application of the references to the term ‘human rights’ should be apprehended as how the UN Guiding Principles define human rights (UN Guiding Principles, 2011:14) in addition to any other rights incorporated in international human rights tools which could have an adverse impact on human rights due to corporate activities or indirect complicity. The Evolution of Business and Human Rights The following chapter depicts the evolution of business and human rights. The first section outlines that emblematic cases have brought business and human rights on the global agenda and brought about the subsequent focus of the UN on this topic by drafting the UN Norms. The next section describes how the unsuccessful UN Norms have led to the development of the endorsements of the UN Framework and Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights. In the third section, the second pillar of the UN Framework is outlined. The last section describes the implications of the UN efforts on converging international standards and initiatives. Emblematic Cases and the Development of the UN Norms Discussions around business and human rights emerged in the 1980s and have since become a prominent feature on the international agenda (Cragg et al., 2012). Emblematic cases around the world (e.g. Nike's abusive working conditions in South East Asian factories (Burns, 2000) or Shell's alleged complicity in the executions of nine men from Ogoniland in Nigeria (Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 2013)) have further ensured the prevalence of business and human rights on the global agenda. At that time, it seemed that neither governments nor businesses were prepared for the surge of corporate globalisation and that governance gaps in international law have created permissive environments where corporate-related human rights abuses are possible (Ruggie, 2013:33-34). To breach this gap, these occurrences led to an upsurge of corporations


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formulating voluntary ethical codes (e.g. Nike's SHAPE initiative (Sage, 1999)). Major international efforts to address business and human rights can be traced back to two initiatives. First, the creation of the UN Global Compact which was officially launched in 2000 now boosts over 10,000 participating companies and other stakeholders from over 130 countries. It comprises of ten principles with the first two addressing human rights (UN Global Compact, 2013a). Nearly simultaneously, a working group on the topic of business and human rights was established by the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (UN OHCHR, 2001). As a result, the Draft Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights (“Norms”) were published in 2003 (UN Norms, 2003). Even though the Norms were the “first non-voluntary initiative accepted at the international level” (Weissbrodt & Kruger, 2003:903), significant opposition by business and several states led to the UN Commission on Human Rights declaring that the Norms had “no legal standing” (UN OHCHR, 2004:1). UN Framework and Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights Even though the Norms on governing business in relation to human rights were unsuccessful, they led to a series of recommendations which eventually brought about the endorsement of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (“GPs”) in 2011 (UN Guiding Principles, 2011). These were drafted by the former UN Secretary General's Special Representative on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations, Ruggie, who was tasked in 2005 to “identify and clarify standards of corporate responsibility and accountability for transnational corporations and other business enterprises with regard to human rights” (UN SRSG Mandate, 2005:1). By 2007, Ruggie advised the Human Rights Council that “that there is no single silver bullet solution to bridging these gaps in the business and human rights domain” (Ruggie, 2010) pleading for a polycentric governance system which would require a normative framework and authoritative policy guidance (Ruggie, 2013). This time, Ruggie suggested to go down the route of a voluntary approach to human rights for businesses to follow “without foreclosing further development of international law” (Ruggie, 2008b:43). In 2008, Ruggie put forward the UN “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework (“Framework”) which rests on three pillars: “1) the state duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business; 2) the corporate responsibility to respect human rights; and 3) greater access by victims to effective remedy, both judicial and non-judicial” (UN Framework, 2008). Ruggie addressed with the first pillar what lies at the core of the human rights regime, the second pillar relates to the expectations which society has of corporations in regards to human rights and the final pillar promotes access to remedy as even the most concentrated efforts cannot prevent infringement and abuse of human rights (Ruggie, 2013). Contrary to the UN Norms, the Framework differentiates between responsibilities of states and corporations in regards to human rights as well as includes all human rights to be relevant to corporations and not only a 'core' set. In 2011, Ruggie presented the GPs providing guidance amongst others to corporations on how to implement the Framework. Even though the responses were overall positive with governments and business supporting the GPs, civil society groups still raised that they failed to “address the governance gaps created by globalisation” and represented a “lack of clear recommendations consistent with international standards” (FIAN International, 2011:1).


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The Second Pillar: the Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights With nearly half of the GPs being addressed at businesses, the second pillar defines the corporate responsibility to respect human rights as to avoid “infringing on the human rights of others” and “address adverse human rights impacts with which they are involved” (UN Guiding Principles, 2011:13). They outline the commitment for all corporations regardless of their “size, sector, operational context, ownership and structure” (UN Guiding Principle, 2011:15) to 'knowing and showing' their responsibilities (Ruggie, 2013). In particular, five of these principles concern the issue of human rights due diligence directly which ultimately underline the whole Framework (Harrison, 2012). In detail, the GPs demand for corporations should formulate a policy commitment and have processes in place to “identify, prevent, mitigate and account” for the way the enterprise addresses their human rights impacts (UN Guiding Principles, 2011:15f). The process is described as “assessing actual and potential human rights impacts, integrating and acting upon the findings, tracking responses, and communicating how impacts are addressed” (UN Guiding Principles, 2011:17). Human rights due diligence should be effectively integrated into corporate activities and companies need to demonstrate how impacts are being addressed (UN Guiding Principles, 2011:20f). Mechanisms for tracking the effectiveness of the responses should further be put in place by enterprises (UN Guiding Principles, 2011:21). In addition, corporations should be able to identify when they have “caused or contributed to adverse impacts” and should provide or cooperate in their remediation through legitimate processes and are expected to report on these (UN Guiding Principles, 2011:23f). Implications on International Developments and Global Initiatives A variety of other global initiatives and international developments addressing the need to govern business and human rights have shown convergence of international efforts (Kemp & Vanclay, 2013, Ruggie, 2013). A reduction of competing standards leads therefore to greater clarity for businesses and other stakeholders. Furthermore, some of these standard-setting agents have capabilities which the UN lacks (Ruggie, 2013). Some of the recent revisions to voluntary measures have been influenced by the Framework and GPs like for example the 2011 Edition of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. These now include a chapter on human rights and the introduction of National Contact Points where complaints about non-compliant MNEs can be brought forward (OECD, 2011). The standard-setting body ISO launched ISO 26000, a social responsibility standard to “provide guidance on how businesses and organisations can operate in a socially responsible way” (ISO 26000, 2010), which also includes a chapter on human rights closely linked to the GPs (Ruggie, 2013). Within the Global Reporting Initiative, a section also relating to the GPs covers the “extent to which processes have been implemented, incidents of human rights violations, and changes in stakeholders’ ability to enjoy and exercise their human rights” (GRI, 2013). The European Union has called as part of its CSR strategy all EU member states to submit national actions plans on the implementation of the GPs (EC, 2011). With voluntary standards converging, there are some developments of voluntary efforts being integrated into national legal systems. In the US for example, s. 1502 on Conflict Minerals of the


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Dodd-Frank Act intends to make financial interests which support armed troupes in the Democratic Republic of Congo area transparent to minimise the risk of serious human rights abuses (Dodd-Frank Act, 2010). More generally, tendencies to phrase fiduciary duties of company directors more inclusively are becoming more prevalent to incorporate the impact of businesses on their environment as seen for example in the revision in the UK of s.172 of Companies Act 2006 (UK Companies Act, 2006). In this chapter the evolution of business and human rights was described. Emblematic cases around the world have put this issue firmly on the global agenda. This has amongst others concentrated efforts by the UN to tackle this issue which has led to a convergence of international standards and initiatives. To fully grasp the practical and theoretical implications of the strategy proposed by the second pillar of the Framework, the next chapter analyses the current discourse around human rights due diligence and impact assessments. Human Rights Due Diligence and Impact Assessments This Chapter investigates the notion of human rights due diligence and presents types of impact assessments currently developed. First, the concept of corporate due diligence is being introduced and linked to human rights due diligence. The second section presents the two forms of impact assessments in human rights due diligence: integrated and dedicated. Each instrument is analysed separately supplemented by a case to illustrate how each is being implemented in practice. Due Diligence in Human Rights The concept of due diligence is usually associated with traditional commercial transactions, such as capital market transactions or assessments of a possible business partner (Muchlinski, 2012). Originally, due diligence stems from US Securities Act 1933 and was first applied to illustrate a procedure concerning “civil liabilities on account of false registration statement” where “persons [are] exempt from liability upon proof of issues” (US Securities Act, 1933:s.11(b)(3); Muchlinski 2012:156). Due diligence can be seen as the “process of enquiry and investigation made by a prospective purchaser in order to confirm that it is buying what it thinks it is buying” (Howson 2003:4). Fundamentally, it is “a process of discovery that is relevant in key business transactions as well as operational activities” (Spedding, 2009:3). In the context of business activities, due diligence therefore offers corporations a means to reduce, mitigate and manage risks through the process of thorough investigation aiming to ease their business risk profiles (Graetz & Franks, 2013). Human rights risks cannot only be categorised as ethical concerns but also as business risks (Muchlinski, 2012). The prevention and mitigation of these risks are a central component of human rights due diligence (Morrison & Vermijs, 2011). A process is therefore required that focuses not solely on the business entity but puts an equivalent focus on the human rights of stakeholders affected by businesses’ activities or relationships (Kemp & Vanclay, 2013:89). Human rights and due diligence first appeared as a standard which could be tested against a state’s behaviour. This was first raised during the Velásquez-Rodríguez v. Honduras (1988) case. In the 1990s, the concept of human rights due diligence then appeared in the Commentary to the


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Norms where corporations were called upon as having “the responsibility to use due diligence in ensuring that their activities do not contribute directly or indirectly to human abuses” (UN ECOSOC, 2003:4). The Framework finally established the concept of human rights due diligence in Principles 17-22 (UN Framework, 2008). Ruggie interpreted the meaning of due diligence according to Black’s US Law Dictionary:

“Such a measure of prudence, activity, or assiduity, as is properly to be expected from, and ordinarily exercised by, a reasonable and prudent man under the particular circumstances; not measured by any absolute standard, but depending on the relative facts of the special case” (US Black's Law Dictionary, 2013)

With the Framework and GPs, Ruggie proposed a four-part process: “(1) a corporate policy statement on human rights; (2) a human rights risk assessment; (3) integration of policies and assessment protocols into corporate governance systems; and (4) on-going tracking and reporting of performance” (Graetz & Franks, 2013:100). With this strategy, businesses should undertake ex-ante impact assessments as well as frequent ex-post audits which are crucial for corporations to respect human rights. Human rights due diligence therefore turns traditional due diligence into a dynamic activity where any new activity, relationship, key decisions or operational changes could prompt the necessity for re-examination. Currently, only a small number of companies conduct human rights due diligence as the UN Global Compact’s Annual Review in 2011 illustrated in Figure 1. Figure 1: Human rights actions taken by UN Global Compact members

Source: UN Global Compact, 2011:14 Often though, the few corporations which report systematically on sustainability issues and on human rights in particular, publish anecdotes of unique endeavours and pure philanthropic actions rather than how their core strategy and activities impact issues related to human rights (Harrison, 2012). It is therefore essential to fully comprehend what is involved in human rights due diligence and in particular in impact assessments considering human rights concerns. Types of Impact Assessments in Human Rights Due Diligence When Ruggie proposed the Framework and considered human rights due diligence as a mechanism for corporations to respect human rights, the variety of the range and depth of the due diligence processes was available highlighted (UN Framework, 2008:17). Human rights due


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diligence take on different forms considering the different factors such as amongst others corporation size and industry sector, impact assessments in the context of (Harrison, 2011). As they have various origins and utilisations, it is essential to understand the approaches corporations choose to assess human rights impacts. Kemp and Vanclay (2013) identified different forms which have “implications for scope, resourcing, expertise and methodology” (Kemp & Vanclay, 2013:91). Here, two of these procedures will be reviewed, namely the integrated and dedicated approach. As the evolution of business and human rights has shown, the last decade was about establishing that corporations have the duty to respect human rights. Simultaneously, impact assessments such as social impact assessments further improved and human rights impact assessments evolved into internationally recognised tools. During the coming years the enactment of the new principles into corporation’s processes will play a central role (Ganesan, 2013). As Ruggie put it: “it remains to be seen how effectively it gets ‘internalised’ and implemented” (Ruggie, 2013:168). Human rights due diligence has only been described schematically by the GPs. This lack of concise definition gives rise to conceptual questions and challenges how human rights due diligence should be implemented in practice (Hamm & Scheper, 2012). Initiatives such as the Shift Project and Global Business Initiative on Human Rights offer intra-industry sector advice to advance human rights in a corporate context and help put the GPs into practice. To showcase the implementation of the integrated and dedicated approaches in practice, two cases will be presented here. To showcase the integrated form, the financial sector has been chosen as a case. The dedicated approach is being illustrated by describing the example of GoldCorp’s human rights impact assessment. All the information gathered has been extracted from secondary sources. Hereby, internal (e.g. company's CSR reports) and external (e.g. interviews with relevant employees) data were used. A critical distance to these sources will therefore be taken. A qualitative method will be applied which allows to put emphasis on the understanding and objective presentation of the human rights processes. Integrated Approach: Environmental and Social Impact Assessments Environmental and social impact assessments (“ESIA”) have established themselves as relatively well-recognised assessment mechanisms applied across industry sectors. The development of environmental impact assessment and social impact assessment should be looked at separately even though many corporations now conduct them as one process. Environmental impact assessments (“EIA”) are the “valuation of the effects likely to arise from a major project [...] significantly affecting the environment […] [and] supply decision-makers with an indication of the likely environmental consequences of their actions” (Jay et al., 2007:287). The origins of EIAs can be found in the 1970s, when corporations became active in countries with less elaborate laws to assess the impacts of the business's projects (Wood, 2003). The first manifestation in national law, the US National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (“NEPA”), initiated the inception of similar provisions in many other mainly developed countries (Hamm & Scheper 2012). The success of EIAs often depends on the legal requirement for systematic implementation which should be integrated into every step of the project cycle (Hamm & Scheper, 2012). Frequently however, the legal requirements in less developed countries are still regarded as relatively inadequate and therefore influence the effectiveness on the environment


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(Wood, 2003). The quality of EIAs though has improved with design alterations, the involvement of stakeholders and learning by institutions (Jay et al. 2007). The World Bank for example has further developed the application of EIAs by establishing the 'Strategic Environmental Assessment' which rather than being project-specific, has the ability to analyse policies, strategic plans and investment programs (Ahmed et al., 2005). Social impact assessments (“SIA”) have not enjoyed the same entrenchment into legal frameworks. Still, SIAs demonstrate a level of professionalism due to the development of international principles governing their utilisation by the Interorganisational Committee on Guidelines and Principles for SIAs (Vanclay, 2003; Harrison, 2011; Maassarani et al. 2007). Fundamentally, social impacts incorporate “all […] consequences to a human population […] that are the ways in which people live, work, play, relate to one another, organise to meet their needs and generally cope as members of society” (Burgde & Vanclay, 1995). SIAs therefore present the assessment of the potential impacts which governmental or corporate activities have on certain groups of people. The usage of SIA was formalised during the inception of NEPA as evidence mounted that changes to the environment has effects on the social organisation of human populations. SIAs therefore quickly developed into an essential part of EIAs (Burgde & Vanclay 1995; Maassarani et al., 2007). The International Principles for SIAs set out the methodology of SIAs as including the processes of analysing, managing and monitoring the intended as well as unintended social consequences of planned interventions or any social change caused by these activities (Vanclay, 2003). Even though human rights, for example, have generally been considered in the SIAs process, in practice, human rights impacts are seldom systematically integrated in the SIA mechanism (Maassarani et al., 2007). Both EIAs and SIAs represent proactive and structured mechanisms allowing for objective information to be gathered producing clear and concise impact statements. Scholars nevertheless argue that SIAs remain subsumed within the environmental policy framework which set out the EIAs process (Maassarani et al., 2007). This might be because of the narrow way SIAs are thought of to be used for which can entice stakeholder dissatisfaction or because of an inability to predict all possible impacts (Vanclay & Esteves, 2011; Graetz & Franks, 2013). Implementing the Integrated Approach in Practice: Financial Services Industry Advocacy groups have scrutinised the finance sector for playing a role in financing projects which are connected with human rights abuses (F&C & KPMG, 2004). Banks have in the past been linked to human rights abuses beyond project funding (Missbach, 2007; UNHRC, 2007). The most risky human rights issues can be summarised as following: “1) operating responsibly and consistently in high-risk environments; 2) support for inclusive economic development in emerging and recovering markets, linked to this; 3) access to banking; 4) corruption prevention; 5) gender diversity within the workforce” (Harding, 2012:7). Focus has been put on the financial services industry through the sectoral consultation of the UNHRC entitled “Human rights and the financial sector” in 2006 (UNHRC, 2007) and the OECD's review of the current approaches and practices to human rights issues in the financial industry (OECD, 2013). Several principles specifically for the financial sector have been developed, like the Equator Principles, UN Principles for Responsible Investment (“UN PRI”), G20 The Financial Stability Board and the working groups of UNEP FI. The Thun Group of Banks1

1

was further established as a financial


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sector initiative by ten European private financial institutions to collaborate with the Competence Centre for Human Rights of the University of Zurich to find ways to implement the GPs in their sector. This group acknowledged that the GPs bring more clarification on human rights and offer a mechanism for corporations to show how these respect human rights but still are still in need of further clarification (Thun Group, 2011). A new guide is due to be published in the second half of 2013 (Ramer, 2013). Looking at the leaders of the Thun Group, namely Barclays, Credit Suisse, UBS and UniCredit, these universal banks have already began to integrate human rights considerations into their internal management processes (Barclays, 2010; Credit Suisse, 2012; UBS, 2013; UniCredit, 2011). They acknowledge broadly the same key stakeholders (employees, suppliers, customers and communities) on which they have potential adverse direct and indirect human rights impacts. Policy statements reiterate their commitment towards human rights. The banks have integrated human rights into their ESIAs processes and/or refer to other already existing policies such as Health and Safety and Diversity and Inclusion policies for example. Credit Suisse specifically have developed an internal Reputational Risk Review Process (“RRRP”) which is being utilised if a potential risk is being recognised and can result in the rejection of any transaction not adhering to Credit Suisse’s policies as outlined in Figure 2. Figure 2: Assessment of sustainability risks within Credit Suisse’s RRRP

Source: Credit Suisse, 2012:14 Among the banks, the sustainability department is responsible for the monitoring and tracking though little information is offered how exactly this is implemented. Dedicated Approach: Human Rights Impact Assessments Human rights impact assessments (“HRIAs”) measure systematically the impact of projects,

Barclays, BBVA, BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, ING, ROBS, UBS, UniCredit and

WestLB


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policies, interventions and programmes on human rights of a human population (Human Rights Impact, 2013). HRIAs provide a “process to ensure the integration of human rights aspects in decision-making” (Radstaak & de Vries, 2004:1). This type of impact assessment originates from international human rights instruments, which take a common standard of global norms as their foundation. It further applies this set of norms to be benchmarked against when evaluating the implications of activities (Graetz & Franks, 2013). The development and employment of HRIAs began in the late 1990s (Bakker et al., 2009: 438). During this time, the UN put greater emphasis on human rights throughout its system and with the development of the Norms came the suggestion that HRIAs should play a central role in meeting human rights obligations as described in Chapter 1. In 2005, the UN High Commission of Human Rights (“UNHCHR”), the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights and the UN Global Compact jointly published the “Guide to Integrating Human Rights in Business Practice”, which restated the need for a consistent HRIA framework as mentioned later also in the Framework. Furthermore, HRIAs began to be employed by a different set of actors such as governments and corporations, first as an expansion of SIAs (De Beco, 2009:141). Additionally, the use of HRIAs was proposed in other fields such as health care policies to employ them as an instrument for monitoring and improving activities (Gostin et al., 1994). The design of HRIA is very closely linked to other more comprehensive mechanisms of due diligence (Hamm & Scheper, 2012). HRIAs should include eight core methodological steps against which other due diligence processes can be assessed against: 1) screening; 2) scoping; 3) evidence gathering; 4) consultation; 5) analysis; 6) conclusion and recommendations; 7) publication; and 8) monitoring and reviewing (Harrison, 2011). On the one hand, the impacts being measured by HRIAs can be distinguished as direct and indirect (Landman, 2005:126ff). On the other hand, HRIAs are designed as ex-ante, measuring the potential influence of an intervention on human rights, and ex-post, examining the actual impact of an activity on human rights (Human Rights Impact, 2013). Hamm and Scheper argue that “carrying […] out [HRIAs] successfully calls for a comprehensive engagement with human rights and embedding this concern in strategies to implement due diligence as such” (Hamm & Scheper 2012:13). Since the first HRIAs in the 1990s, different sets of instruments have now been developed for companies to utilise. Various actors have advanced these instruments which display different strengths and weaknesses. The most comprehensive tools include the ‘Human Rights Compliance Assessment’ (“HRCA”) developed by The Danish Institute for Human Rights (“DIHR”), ‘Human Rights Matrix’ promoted by the Business Leaders Initiative for Human Rights and ‘Methodology for Human Rights Impact Assessment’ produced by NomoGaia Foundation (for a review see Roling & Koenen, 2012:14). As the majority of these approaches are still new, experience will show which instrument will be most appropriate for what purpose. In practice, a few corporations have adopted HRIAs as a tool for handling human rights concerns. Many of the proposed methodologies should be tailor-made to the specific operational intervention, as these processes have been developed on a trial and error basis (IHRB, 2011). The evolution of HRIAs reflects the trend within human rights due diligence to construct a stand-alone framework to provide communities and companies with powers by disclosing any possible human rights risks and impacts and to emphasise the opportunities for these actors to respect stakeholders' human rights by enabling constructive dialogue between corporations and the affected human population (Graetz & Franks, 2013). A one-size-fits-all approach will not be the answer to the design of HRIA as differences across industry sectors will have to be taken into


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account and profoundly transform the requirements (Harrison, 2011). Implementing the Dedicated Approach in Practice: Extractive Industry The extractive industry has been exposed to numerous high-profile human rights abuse cases around the world such as Shell's alleged complicity in the executions of nine men from Ogoniland in Nigeria (Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 2013). National and international standard-setting bodies and organisations have been formed and have developed industry-specific guidelines like the International Council on Mining and Metals, Extractive Industries Transparencies Initiative, International Cyanide Management Code and Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights to name a few. The European Commission further recently published an “Oil and Gas Sector Guide on Implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Right” which was developed by the Institute for Human Rights and Business and Shift Project (EC, 2013). Within this sector the key stakeholders which the extractive industry may impact upon have been identified as employees, supply chain workers, affected communities, vulnerable or marginalised groups and any other relevant groups (EC, 2013). One of the most prominent and well-documented HRIAs has been conducted within the extractive industry (On Common Ground, 2010). In 2008, a shareholder proposal was put forward by a group of institutional investors to encourage the Canadian gold mining corporation, Goldcorp, to commission a HRIA of their Guatemalan Marlin Mine. Goldcorp hired external consultants to conduct the HRIA and committed to responding to the results globally. This assessment was looking especially at Goldcorp’s subsidiary Montana’s responsibility as the owner and operator of the Marlin Mine. Its findings were produced to evaluate how the company’s policies and procedures affected human rights. The HRIA was organised around the issues relating to the concerns of all stakeholders. It has to be noted that neither the people of the community nor the local authorities were sufficiently represented which however was mentioned in the final report. The methodology for this HRIA was looking to perform a participatory impact assessment. Even though the external consultant was mandated to apply the HRCA instrument developed by DIHR, many questions and indicators were amended for the purpose of this exercise. The scope of this HRIA was to cover the period of from when the owner became the operator, the present time to looking forward to the closure and even post-closure while recognising the varying spheres of influence. The process of the HIRA was divided into five steps: 1) preparation; 2) initiation of the participatory process; 3) implementation of revised assessment process; 4) analysis and assessment of results; and 5) report production. The results of the HRIA report showed that there was no comprehensive human rights policy in place which followed international human rights standards at Goldcorp or its operating subsidiary. GoldCorp overhauled its processes and included on-going human rights due diligence into their risk assessment systems. This chapter introduced the notion of human rights due diligence and presented the two types of impact assessments. Both the integrated and dedicated approach were reviewed respectively and each was accompanied by a case to illustrate the implementation in practice. Scholars are in disagreement whether SIAs and HRIAs are actually distinct from one another. It is therefore essential to investigate this matter and explore the implications for corporations.


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Practical Implications of Implementing Human Rights Due Diligence for Corporations In this chapter, the practical implications of human rights due diligence for corporations are being considered. The first section, it is being acknowledge that HRIAs are actually distinct from SIAs. In the second section, the dilemma corporations now face is being attended to. Due to the limited guidance by the GPs to which form human rights due diligence should take, corporations are left to themselves to decide which approach to choose. The final section analyses the benefits and challenges of each approach and concludes that in the end, both approaches seek the same goal: for corporations to respect human rights. Is HRIA an Extension or Distinct of SIA? Business activities are very complex and their societal impact often obscured. As the cases in Chapter 2 have shown, corporations comprehend their impacts within their 'spheres of influence' which often incorporate direct and indirect human rights impacts on stakeholders. It is therefore essential to understand how businesses can incorporate considerations for human rights impacts into their operations. As in Chapter 2 outlined, two mechanisms have evolved which are being utilised in the human rights due diligence process. Differing hypotheses have been put forward by scholars whether these instruments are actually distinct from one another or one simply an extension of the other. Discussion around whether HRIA is an extension of the SIA approach or whether HRIA is a distinct impact assessment method from SIA are being picked out as a fundamental theme (Kemp & Vanclay, 2013). There are some practitioners who claim that dedicated HRIAs are simply falling back on SIAs (MacNaughton & Hunt, 2011). They argue that the core values of SIAs acknowledge human rights due to the assumption that “fundamental human rights […] are shared equally across cultures” (Vanclay, 2003:9). SIAs are concerned with the aims and processes of policy making whole seeing respecting human rights as a result of this policy making just like the concerns of HRIAs have developed into (MacNaughton & Hunt, 2011). HRIAs however should rather be seen as distinct from SIAs. Maassarani and colleagues have argued that SIAs have historically underrepresented human rights impacts in the assessment reports and rather have focused on human rights issues such as culture, safety, health, working conditions and environment (Maassarani et al., 2007). HRIAs owe their development from this perceived failure to respond to potential human rights impacts in business in contrast to simply being an extension of SIAs. HRIAs therefore commence from a distinct starting point guided by internationally recognised rights (Kemp & Vanclay, 2013). This represents the approach which was taken by the impact assessment conducted for the Marlin Mine as presented in Chapter 2. Intrinsic to HRIAs instruments are hence the consideration of all human rights. They therefore do not leave any possibility out for only considering a selected few human rights when performing impact assessments. This is rather the case with SIAs. Due to the nomination of key issues by stakeholders when conducting SIAs, the focus of SIAs rather lies in comprehending local norms, needs and desires than assessing human rights impacts (Graetz & Franks, 2013). The key issues in SIAs selected might rather stem from experiences of comparable cases and conceptual understanding overall (Kemp & Vanclay, 2013). Considering these fundamentally different methodologies, HRIA and SIAs should be seen as distinct from one another.


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Integrated or Dedicated Approach: A dilemma for Corporations? While businesses are increasingly accepting their responsibility to respect human rights, implementation of human rights considerations has proven to be slow as the recently published UN Global Compact sustainability report illustrates (UN Global Compact, 2013b). About one fifth of participating corporates integrate human rights into their risk systems whereas only 13% of its members indicate to have dedicated impact assessments for human rights in place (UN Global Compact, 2013b:8). Corporations find themselves in a dilemma as to which approach to choose: integrated or stand-alone impact assessments. As the GPs do not explicitly state which form the human rights due diligence process should take, corporates are left with deciding for themselves the best suited approach. Ruggie already identified this dilemma during his mandate as mentioned in Chapter 1 (Ruggie, 2010). This therefore often raises important conceptual questions and challenges when implementing the GPs in practice (Hamm & Scheper, 2012). Academic scholars however have interpreted the form suggested by the GPs as dedicated human rights due diligence (e.g. Deva, 2012). Many corporates nevertheless specify that creating a dedicated HRIA will raise costs and duplicate elements which are already covered within their existing risk management systems, such as SIAs, ESIAs, Health Impact Assessments, Labour Audits, Country Assessments, Security Risk Assessments etc. (IFC, 2010). As shown in the financial services industry cases in Chapter 2, banks have mainly addressed human rights issues by referring to existing policies (e.g. UniCredit’s Human Rights Commitment (UniCredit, 2011)). When companies choose an integrated process, corporations should consider factors such as the development phase of the corporate activity, the nature of this endeavour as well as the financial and human resources available for this business activity (IFC, 2010). Furthermore, to ensure human rights considerations are appropriately integrated, questions such as raised by Graetz and Franks (2013:103) should be answered by corporations to ensure the applicability of the integrated risk management process to human rights impacts. Benefits and Challenges of Integrated and Dedicated Impact Assessment Approaches Without the guidance provided by the GPs to which form human rights due diligence should take, businesses are left to themselves to implement human rights considerations into their strategy and operations. With integrated and dedicated impact assessments to be viewed as distinct from one another, corporations have to be aware of the benefits and challenges of each of the approaches. These will be discussed below separately. So far, corporations have more leaned towards integrating human rights considerations into their existing risk management processes, as shown in the financial industry in Chapter 2. Integrating these considerations as part of SIAs tools promotes broad-based consultations and relevant contribution by stakeholders due to its already established professional nature (Esteves et al., 2012). It is common practice for the assessment findings to be published, may it be within the corporate sustainability reports or elsewhere and therefore encourages transparency. Furthermore, integrating human rights considerations into already established processes within a corporation requires little revision of the existing risk management systems. From a cost management perspective this approach therefore is often preferred by corporations. In addition, proponents of integrated approaches further claim that businesses are already familiar with the language used in SIAs and therefore the knowledge and language discourse of human rights can easily be made accessible to all stakeholders (Kemp & Vanclay, 2013). Nevertheless, communicating human rights within SIAs and therefore applying familiar language might however alleviate the


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importance of these specific considerations and inhibit acceptance of those ‘newly’ integrated ideas. This could further lead for human rights to fight for space within this impact assessment tool (Kemp & Vanclay, 2013). To ensure a full integration, businesses need to set a plan in place to raise the expertise among the general practitioners of SIAs. This should further lead to an incorporation of the full range of human rights. SIAs have often been criticised for an incomprehensive and unsystematic way in regards to human rights considerations which could lead to significant human rights risks for the corporation and stakeholders (IFC, 2010). It has also been claimed that SIAs further neither fully investigate the duties of corporations to respect human rights neither do they examine the remedies appropriately which rightsholders can seek (NomoGaia, 2011). There are some companies which have chosen to implement human rights considerations via the dedicated approach and to conduct HRIAs. Publically, there are however only few examples available; one of them being the Marlin Mine HRIA presented in Chapter 2, suggesting that the outcomes of HRIAs are rather treated confidential than transparent. With HRIAs being still a very recent concept (Gostin et al., 1994), their theory and thoroughness of methodologies have often been criticised. The possible duplication of efforts, the absence of appropriate indicators and policy-making procedures have often been raised as issues still requiring development (Bakker et al. 2009; Harrison 2011; MacNaughton & Hunt, 2011). Furthermore, there is currently no legal standing of HRIAs reports compared to the ones produced for by EIAs and as the case may be ESIAs for example. It is therefore essential to ensure that HRIAs remain meaningful and that the language used is accessible to all stakeholders to facilitate uptake. HRIAs might therefore apply mainstream business language when presenting results, such as cost, benefit and risk. HRIAs practitioners are usually external experts who only hold informal authority and are less familiar with the context and organisational dynamics (Kemp & Vanclay, 2013). External assessors nevertheless offer certain independence and expertise to the enquiry as required by the GPs (UN Guiding Principles, 2011:19). Companies should look into the employability of HRIAs when mandating assessors and decide when these are most appropriate (e.g. Yahoo! find HRIAs especially valuable as a starting point for on-going review of human rights impacts and for their business plans when entering a new market or launching a novel product (Yahoo!, 2013)). HRIAs therefore become a means to improve policy outcomes and simultaneously allow for consideration of the full range of human rights based on international standards which stakeholders are impacted by. The process of HRIAs further permits for corporations to put into place a set of mechanisms to manage, mitigate and reduce any human rights impacts (Harrison, 2011; Bakker et al., 2009). Whether a corporation however chooses to go down the route of an integrated or dedicated approach will very much depend on various factors as already mentioned in Chapter 2 (Harrison, 2011). Both human rights due diligence instrument nevertheless seek the same end means, namely for businesses to respect human rights as outlined in Principle 11 of the GPs (UN Guiding Principles, 2011:13). Kemp and Vanclay call for the discussion to move on whether an integrated or dedicated approach should apply (Kemp & Vanclay, 2013:93f). This chapter provided an overview of the practical implications of human rights due diligence which companies face. As HRIAs are distinct from SIAs and the GPs provide little guidance on which form human rights due diligence should take, companies face a dilemma to solve for themselves. In the end however, scholars have argued that the discussion about whether


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corporations should choose an integrated or dedicated approach should move on. In the end, both instruments seek for the corporation to respect human rights. Theoretical Implications of the Implementation of Human Rights Due Diligence In this chapter, the theoretical implications of the implementation of human rights due diligence are being discussed. The first section investigates why corporations should implement human rights due diligence. Not only trends within legal requirements are noted but further shifts of the expectations of corporations to behave ethically are described. The next section looks into whether the traditional shareholder primacy model still holds and concludes that a stakeholder approach should be taken to explain the existence of corporate responsible behaviour. In the last section implications on existing governance models are elaborated on. Why should Corporations Implement Human Rights Due Diligence? The human rights due diligence strategy put forward in Ruggie’s framework assumes that this process is voluntary and acts as a self-regulatory mechanism (UN Framework, 2008). Why should corporations then implement human rights considerations into their risk management systems when businesses will incur costs to put the processes in place and as the case may be might reject a profitable transaction? Corporations might have to implement human rights due diligence due to shifts seen in legal requirements. Developments within legal frameworks can be noted which could blur the line between the voluntary approach and mandatory requirement. Muchlinski argues that corporations performing human rights “due diligence for the purpose of ensuring that they meet their responsibility to respect human rights will lead to the evolution of legally binding duties under both national and international law” (Cragg & Muchlinski, 2012:5). Thoroughly performed due diligence should give shareholders of corporations protection against mismanagement. It should further provide businesses with proof that they have followed a robust mechanism to avoid any contribution to a human rights violation (Muchlinski, 2012). In the UK for example, changes made to the legislation under s. 172 of Companies Act 2006 to include the “duty to promote the success of the company” now advocate more inclusively the impact of corporations on their environment (UK Companies Act, 2006). Furthermore, some scholars have argued that a business case for corporations to apply human rights due diligence has developed which is not solely caused by the changing legal environment as described above. Maasarani and colleagues have put it as bluntly as stating that corporations have two pragmatic justifications for following the human rights due diligence strategy: for the business’s reputation and its long-term returns (Maassarani et al., 2007). In our current times, a corporation’s reputation becomes more relevant to its long-term returns (Allen & Overy, 2013) and as large corporations are very sensitive to the societal image they have created, they need to handle the global interest in businesses to deal with the newly emerged “expectations of ‘corporate citizenship’” (Maassarani et al., 2007:159). As former UNHCHR Mary Robison put it:

“Doing business […] without knowing the risks, and taking action to mitigate these


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risks in the longer term, will it be sustainable? This is the essence of the 'Business Case for Human Rights': going beyond the question of businesses protecting their reputation - while not ignoring the potential cost of a damaged reputation - and looking at the other, both positive and negative reasons, for business corporations to care about human rights.” (Robinson, 1998)

Concerns have been raised however that the voluntary requirement to implement human rights due diligence could simply turn into a “’tick-box’ exercise” to keep the corporation’s public image intact (Muchlinski, 2012:156). Generally, when discussing the business case for implementing human rights due diligence, parallels can be drawn to the discussions of a business case for corporate social responsibility (“CSR”). Some scholars have argued that one can see the rationale for implementing CSR initiatives as four-fold: 1) decreasing costs and risks; 2) reinforcing legitimacy and strengthening reputation; 3) developing and maintaining competitive advantage; and 4) creating mutually enticing value creations (Kurucz et al., 2008). It is more practical and further less costly for a corporation to be pro-active than simply re-active (Carroll & Buchholtz, 2009). The focus of the business case for human rights due diligence and in the broader sense CSR on the alleged positive economic effect on a corporation’s financial performance brings to attention the relationship between these two elements. In the last 30 years of scholars investigating the relationship between the two, some argue however that there is no apparent causal link between implementing CSR and attaining increased financial profits (Vogel, 2005). Furthermore, the impact of CSR might not always be favourable on corporations' profits (Kurucz et al., 2008) as what is good for society is not necessarily profitable for the business (Lee, 2008). For example, 428 transactions were assessed in 2012 as part of Credit Suisse’s RRRP described in Chapter 2. Of these transactions around 10% were rejected or not pursued due to potential adverse environmental and human rights impacts (Credit Suisse, 2012:14). This type of responsible and respectful behaviour has been argued to rather fall upon governments than businesses (Friedman, 1962). Friedman states that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it […] engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud” (Friedman, 1962:133). Furthermore, CSR simply dilutes a corporate's primary purpose because by adopting CSR strategies a company enters into activities which are unrelated to its primary goal (Hayek, 1969). Therefore, pursuing CSR would make a corporation less competitive in the global market. As shown in the cases presented in Chapter 2, corporations however are showing efforts to actively pursue responsible behaviour even if in the traditional sense this activity is not part of their primary goal. An ethical foundation of CSR and human rights considerations has been put forward to explain the existence of these types of activities (e.g. Cragg, 2012). In the twenty-first century, the public has moved away from the premise that businesses are only in pursuits of profit maximisation. According to the public, corporations have simultaneously the responsibility to respect other stakeholders in addition to the shareholders. The public accepts that this respectful behaviour can come at a price and believes that corporations can sacrifice some of their profits for this responsible behaviour (Bernstein, 2000). If this type of respectful behaviour is based on moral standards, it should become integral for a corporation to obtaining a ‘social licence to operate’ (Cragg, 2012). Without this licence, corporations will find themselves in difficulties to build a sustainable business in the long-term during times of high public awareness and strong


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advocacy pressures (Porter & Kramer, 2006). Does the Shareholder Primacy Model Still Hold? The discussion above shows that there are moves away from the traditional view of the shareholder primacy model as originally put forward by Friedman (1962) and others. According to this approach, scholars have argued that shareholder of businesses can be seen as residual claimants whose interest it is to maximise shareholder value (Fama & Jensen, 1983). The existence of CSR and the responsibility of corporations to respect human rights therefore suggest that this shareholder primacy model has become inadequate in explaining the shifts seen within organisational governance systems (Hasnas et al., 2010). Scholars have therefore suggested taking on a more stakeholder oriented approach to understand the existence of corporate responsibility to respect human rights (Heath, 2009). The stakeholder approach implies that not only internal stakeholders such as employees, managers and shareholders but also external stakeholder such as suppliers, contractors and communities additionally to involuntary creditors are being considered in the decision-making mechanism of corporations (Freeman et al., 2010). Corporations therefore have to accept that all stakeholders have an even moral standing which needs to be considered in all actions. This perspective allows for corporate activities to be based on moral status (Cragg, 2002; 2012). Businesses therefore have to provide simultaneous consideration to all legitimate interests of the stakeholders and manage to keep them in balance (Garriga & Melé, 2004). Considering this approach, stakeholder theory is able to provide an explanation for the evolution of business and human rights and with the advancements of human rights due diligence as described in the previous chapters (Muchlinski, 2012). Firstly, Freeman (1984) has argued that managers of corporations do not only bear fiduciary duties towards their shareholders but fundamentally to all stakeholders. This can explain the recent shift seen in legal frameworks as observed in the revision of s.172 of UK's Companies Act 2006 (UK Companies Act, 2006). Secondly, the two types of impact assessments which have emerged out of the evolution of business and human rights as reviewed in Chapter 2 confirm the assertion taken by the stakeholder perspective that corporations need to include all stakeholders in their decision-making processes. Both methodologies of SIAs and HRIAs include considerations of all stakeholders who have a claim in the relevant firm (Freeman, 1984). The financial institutions analysed in Chapter 2 for example view their employees, suppliers, customers and communities as stakeholders on which their activities can impact on. Furthermore, the external consultants performing the Marlin Mine HRIA listed amongst others local authorities, workers, vulnerable groups and land users as stakeholders (On Common Ground, 2010:11). Implications for the Further Development of Governance Systems The current approach to human rights, CSR and sustainability in the business context more generally therefore shows that the current shift in governance systems is difficult to be explained by the traditional view of the shareholder primacy model. The implications could be far reaching and existing governance systems could further develop as some already have (Muchlinski 2007). Within the corporate governance models common in continental Europe, increased employee presence within matters of corporate affairs or co-determination laws like in Germany could increase the consideration of stakeholders' interests (German Co-Determination Act, 1976). With the European notion of sustainability, triple bottom line accounting - financial, environmental and


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social - could become more prevalent not only in Europe but also in Anglo-American governance systems (EC, 2002). In the latter models, the appointment of appropriate non-executive managers to the board could further ensure that a broader range of stakeholder interests are paid attention to. Generally, requirements for corporations to act responsibly and respectfully towards a wider spectrum of stakeholder could also originate from the shareholders themselves. Recent shifts seen in shareholder activism to pressure corporations to act responsibly imply that shareholders are also taking a stakeholder approach when financially investing in corporations. Initiatives like the UN PRI provide platforms where institutional investors can pool resources to influence the behaviour of corporations (UN Principles of Responsible Investment, 2013). In some jurisdictions, this shareholder activism is already enshrined in the law, like in Canada where shareholders of GoldCorp opted for a shareholder proposal leading to the conduction of the Marlin Mine HRIA described in Chapter 2 (CBCA, 1985:s. 137). Even Jensen (2002) with his ‘enlightened shareholder model’ would argue that shareholders are looking to maximize the value of the firm in the long run, going beyond this perspective allows for ethical considerations to be included when taking the stakeholder approach. The chapter described the theoretical implications of the implementation of human rights due diligence. For corporations to consider human rights issues goes beyond the established view that a business case is required. Ethical behaviour by businesses implies that the traditional view of the stakeholder primacy model is inadequate to explain the existence of this type of behaviour. Taking a stakeholder perspective can imply a shift in governance systems as caused by the implementation of human rights due diligence. Conclusion This dissertation investigated how implementing the human rights due diligence process in practice has theoretical implications on governance systems. This discussion was arranged in four chapters. In Chapter 1, the evolution of business and human rights was described. Following emblematic cases of human rights abuses by corporations, international efforts have produced the Framework and GPs to provide corporations with guidance to implement human rights due diligence. Chapter 2 illustrated the instruments available to corporations in order for them to respect human rights. Both SIAs and HRIAs were examined by providing cases of practical implementation in the finance sector and extractive industry respectively. In Chapter 3 led the discussion to the practical implications of implementing human rights due diligence for corporations. Due to the lack of guidance from the GPs, companies have to choose which impact assessment to implement. Even though they are distinct processes, the end means are the same: for corporations to respect human rights. Chapter 4 therefore addressed the theoretical implications of the implementation of human rights due diligence. The traditional view of stakeholder primacy model is rather inadequate when explaining the existence of responsible behaviour whereas the stakeholder approach offers a comprehensive clarification on why corporations choose to implement human rights due diligence. As already suggested in the last section of the concluding chapter of this dissertation, rejecting the traditional shareholder primacy model and taking a stakeholder perspective has implications on how existing governance systems can further develop. Popular governance models such as the


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continental European or Anglo-American system already incorporates aspects of the stakeholder approach. In the European governance models, co-determination and workers involvement in corporate affairs are already established methods. In the Anglo-American governance systems, the appointments of independent non-executive directors to the board of directors is further already common practice. Some of these existing mechanisms are already enshrined in national legal frameworks. In Germany, co-determination is required by the ‘Mitbestimmungsgesetz’ (German Co-Determination Act, 1976). In the US, for corporations to be listed on the NYSE, the board of directors has to include independent directors who have no financial stake in the company (NYSE, 2003). I believe more mechanisms will be put into place, may it be on a voluntary or mandatory basis, which will consider a sensible range of stakeholders. With shareholders putting more emphasis on corporations to consider a wider range of stakeholders who have a claim in the company apart from financial ones, will further assist this development. Future research into the implementation of human rights due diligence as suggested by the GPs developed by Ruggie should incorporate the impacts it has on the enhancement of governance systems in the wider sense as outlined in this dissertation. It would therefore be of interest how such a governance system would look like and whether a convergence of the two governance models mentioned in this dissertation might occur.


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Erin Bishop

Abstract

The rationality of ‘risk’ has come to shape our world and pervade our daily lives, producing subjects, practices, and particular forms of conduct. This neoliberal ‘governmentalising’ of life continues to generate risk-based hierarchies and inequalities within and across states. It also produces, is undermined and simultaneously reinforced by sites of resistance. I argue that the literature on risk, however, largely does not look at or take this seriously, with the exception of its post-structuralist variants, which are also limited. Yet there is resistance to governmentality through risk by those who refuse to be governed ‘thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’ (Foucault, 2007: 75), and who consequently conduct themselves in ways that appropriate, subvert, or even challenge, ordering by risk. I will focus on an empirical and analytical elaboration of resistance to the ‘risk of terrorism’, illustrating my central thesis by applying Foucault’s concept of counter-conducts to two exploratory case studies: the first looking at resistance to the UK government’s counter-terrorist Channel/Prevent strategy, and the second analysing incidences of resistance to the US National Security Agency’s counter-terrorism surveillance programme PRISM.


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Introduction

The rationality of ‘risk’ has come to shape our world and pervade our daily lives, producing subjects, practices, and particular forms of conduct. Across the Global South and (especially) in the Global North we are all governed through the dispositif of risk as informed by the rationality of neoliberalism - the social order currently being advanced (Foucault, 2004: 108). This form of governmentality creates a strategic ordering of society that extends the neoliberal project by intervening in ‘failed’ or illiberal states, and is concerned with the management and control of ‘risk originators’ through a security architecture geared to monitor, categorise, and target groups and individuals with attributed ‘risk identities’ (Clapton, 2009: 20). This neoliberal ‘governmentalising’ of life has fundamentally altered the underlying constitution of international society by generating anti-pluralist trends and risk-based hierarchies within and across states (Clapton, 2009). It also continues to produce, be undermined and simultaneously reinforced by sites of resistance. I argue that the literature on risk, however, largely does not look at or take this seriously, with the exception of its post-structuralist variants, which are also limited. Yet there is resistance to governmentality through risk by those who refuse to be governed ‘thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’, (Foucault, 2007b: 75) and who consequently conduct themselves in ways that appropriate, subvert, or even challenge, ordering by risk: a type of resistance Foucault has termed ‘counter-conduct’ (Foucault, 2004). The existing risk literature has a top-down focus on those actors and processes involved in devising the strategies and mechanisms through which to govern populations, while the incidence of resistance to risk-based neoliberal governmentality is an area which remains strikingly under-examined in the International Relations scholarship. Currently, there is little to challenge the perception that an over-bearing security architecture only encounters a modicum of resistance. This is due, in part, to the fact that insufficient agency has been attributed to those who are resisting processes of ‘riskisation’ through counter-conducts. Meanwhile, the scholarship that has addressed resistance to neoliberal governmentality through risk is overwhelmingly limited to the field of health (Alaszewski, 2011; Armstrong & Murphy, 2012; Brown, 2013; Harrison, 2011; McGovern & McGovern, 2011). This literature provides some valuable insights into the nuanced and heterogeneous ways in which resistance manifests itself, and how it can feed back into domineering power; observations which are transferable to the study of other areas of resistance. However, this scholarship only looks at resistance to neoliberal health governance through risk as a bio-political rationality, while resistance to the governance of other ‘risky’ issues such as terrorism, migration, and climate change remain neglected in the International Relations scholarship. I maintain that literature is constitutive of reality as it has the power to shape discourse, policy and analysis, and to influence the dominant narratives deployed in society. For instance, Laffey and Barkawi highlight how the inherent Euro-centrism of the Security Studies literature has generated dominant colonial narratives and discriminative international policy responses which marginalise subaltern states, leading to “a distorted view of Europe and the West in world politics.” (Barkawi & Laffey, 2006: 329). With this in mind, I argue that the existing risk literature is distorting policy and analysis, as it too has left out the social reality by failing to acknowledge the prevalence of resistance. Top-down accounts of neoliberal governmentality through risk have become hegemonic in the post-structuralist International Relations scholarship, obscuring the evidence of widespread resistance to governance through risk taking place on a daily basis; from those who refuse to comply with anti-terrorism legislation, to those choosing to support asylum seekers from ‘problem’ states, and teaching staff who have refrained from marking attendance registers which may be passed on to the UK Border Agency. This lacuna in the scholarship is all the more surprising given that Foucault emphasises how, “the analysis of types of


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governmentality is inseparable from analysis of corresponding forms of resistance, or ‘counter-conducts.’” (Foucault, 2004: 389).

Why is it important that scholars of International Relations focus on those resisting neoliberal governmentality through risk? Because, as Hollander and Einwohner sum up; “creating a dichotomy between the powerful and powerless is problematic… Studying resistance may help restore the balance between oppression and agency.” (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004: 550) IR scholars writing about risk have tended to create a dichotomy between those governing through risk and the subjects of this governance, depicting the former as powerful and the latter as powerless, thereby distorting the balance between oppression and agency. Because those resisting ordering by risk are markedly underrepresented in the literature, their voices and narratives have been effectively silenced, whereas practices of governing through risk remain the focus of extensive analysis. In the absence of an analytics of resistance, the existing risk literature implicitly accepts that neoliberal governmentality is an incontestable reality, reinforcing it as the status quo. Thus, through the reproduction of hegemonic governmentality narratives, both critical realists and post-structuralist scholars have inadvertently contributed to the neoliberal discourse. By engaging with this significant lacuna in the knowledge, and employing Foucault’s counter-conducts approach, which allows for analysis of the close interrelationship between practices of governance and resistance, I argue that post-structuralists can advance the risk literature in three key ways: Namely, by restoring the balance between oppression and agency, shedding light on previously unobserved subjectivities, identities and networks of power being generated by counter conducts, and by producing a counter-discourse to challenge the scholarship taking for granted that within the context of neoliberal globalisation, the establishment of concurrent risk-based regimes is inevitable, making any resistance inherently futile.

I will defend my central thesis through an empirical and analytical elaboration of resistance to governance through the risk of terrorism. The remainder of this paper will proceed as follows: Firstly, I discuss theoretical approaches to the concepts of governmentality, resistance and counter-conduct. I then provide a critique of the existing IR literature on governmentality through the risk of terrorism in relation to the theme of resistance, underlining implications for the scholarship and resistance itself. Finally, I will elaborate on my two exploratory case studies by employing Foucault’s notion of ‘counter-conducts’, as elaborated upon by Carl Death, to show how resistance to governance through the terrorist ‘risk’ can both undermine and simultaneously reinforce domineering power (Death, 2010). The first exploratory case study comprises an analysis of resistance to the UK government’s counter-terrorist Channel/Prevent strategy, and the second looks at resistance to the National Security Agency’s counter-terrorism surveillance programme PRISM. I have purposefully selected these case studies as the first is illustrative of resistance to neoliberal governmentality through the risk of terrorism within a state, while the second is illustrative of transnational resistance.

Theoretical Approach

I adhere to the governmentality approach which asserts that risk and neoliberal globalisation are strategies, methodologies and techniques through which populations are governed. (Joseph, 2012: 14) According to Foucault, governmentality is a specific and complex form of power, which “has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.” (Foucault, 2003: 244). Therefore, in the current climate it is the political economy of global neoliberal governance


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that informs regimes of governmentality. Unlike the critical-realist International Relations scholarship on risk pioneered by Beck and Giddens, a governmentality approach contends that, “There is no such thing as risk in reality” (Dean, 1999: 177). Consequently, as Joseph points out, “A strength of the governmentality approach is that it does not buy into the ontological aspects of the things it describes.” Rather than being preoccupied with the obsolescent ontological debate which grapples with the question ‘Is risk really out there?’, a Foucauldian approach goes a step further in its analysis to reveal how risk acts as a ‘dispositif’ through which the rationality of neoliberalism shapes modern life, regimenting our conduct, and legitimising a wide-reaching security architecture with its epicentre in the Global North geared to survey, categorise and target entire populations by governing them ‘at arms-length’. Viewed through this Foucauldian lens, the dispositif of risk is instrumental in producing a strategic ordering of society whereby ‘risk identities’ are attributed to individuals, groups and ‘failed’ or illiberal states necessitating targeted interventions which extend the neoliberal project (Clapton & Hameiri, 2011). This explains why security issues pertinent to the core, such as terrorism and HIV/AIDS are socially constructed as universally de-bounded ‘risks’ which merit more urgent international policy responses than peripheral problems such as curable disease and famine. This kind of strategic ordering produces risk-based hierarchies which privilege certain forms of life over others, protecting the core from risks accumulating in the ‘illiberal’ periphery (Clapton & Hameiri, 2011). For this reason, Clapton and Hameiri caution that, “It is not a solidarist international society that is emerging, but rather one characterised by the existence of new hierarchical relationships” (Clapton & Hameiri, 2011: 60). Within the context of neoliberal governmentality, whereby, “‘homo economicus is manipulable man’, a subject who should be forever open to and responsive to signals: from the markets, from risks and dangers, from opportunities”, (Harisson et al., 2011: 482) my argument follows that there is a need to explore the ways in which people are able to resist being assimilated into these risk-based hierarchies by conducting themselves in ways which subvert the “homo economicus” archetype.

The Concept of Resistance

What do I mean by resistance? I understand resistance to be a heterogeneous, highly sophisticated and socially contested concept. There is general agreement in the literature that resistance comprises some kind of oppositional action, and can manifest itself in diverse ways; for example in the form of protests at international summits, hunger strikes, or simply through observed silence (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004: 544). However, whether overt, covert or unwitting it is futile to attempt to provide a finite definition of resistance, as Armstrong and Murphy emphasise, stating; “We do not believe it is helpful, or indeed perhaps even possible, to offer a definitive definition of resistance. Rather, what is crucial is to recognize its heterogeneity and context specificity” (Armstrong & Murphy, 2012: 323). Past studies have understood resistance as directly opposing powers of domination, dichotomising dissent and collaboration (Aronowitz & Gautney, 2003; Della Porta & Tarrow, 2005; Bond & Desai, 2008). Yet, as Carl Death highlights in his Foucauldian analytics of protest, power and resistance are not mutually exclusive but mutually constitutive, invalidating the quest for a ‘pure’ emancipatory form of resistance (Death, 2010). Through Death’s analysis it is clear that subscribing to classic binaries of political thought will mean that complex power relations are overlooked. In search of a more comprehensive approach to resistance, Death makes a strong case for Foucault’s concept of ‘counter-conduct’ advocating that, “A counter-conducts approach is not an attempt to undermine the actual struggles of activists and movements… it aims at the opposite: the introduction of a serious focus upon dissent and protest into the governmentality literature” (Death, 2010: 248). Like Death, I argue that Foucault’s counter-


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conducts approach to resistance has much to offer scholars of governmentality. Indeed, I consider that it provides a useful starting-point from which to embark on a more in-depth and variegated analysis of resistance to neoliberal governance through risk.

Foucault first mentions the notion of counter-conduct in his March 1 1978 lecture at the College de France, defining it as; “resistance to forms of power that do not exercise sovereignty and do not exploit, but ‘conduct’” (Foucault, 2004: 200). He illustrates the concept with examples of the laity’s revolts of conduct against the Christian pastorate (Foucault, 2004: 198). Significantly, rather than dichotomising those doing the governing and those being governed, a counter-conducts approach understands that, “those who command… know that the general system of obedience envelops them just as much as those over whom they exercise their power” (Foucault, 2004: 201). By focussing both on those resisting regimes of governmentality and those doing the governing, the balance between oppression and agency is not distorted by this approach. Furthermore, a counter-conducts approach it illuminates the mutually constitutive relationship between the practices of governance and resistance, showing how resistance can simultaneously disrupt and reinforce dominant power (Death, 2010: 235). For this reason, I argue that by deploying Foucault’s concept of counter-conducts and dedicating due analysis to the role that resistance has to play in subverting, reproducing and appropriating oppressive power, post-structuralist scholars of risk can produce a more balanced account of reality.

Risk and Resistance in IR

I argue that resistance to neoliberal governance through risk is an area ripe for further study in International Relations. If this is the case, then what has the existing risk literature left out? And does it provide legitimate analysis? Thus far, three different theoretical approaches to risk have dominated the International Relations scholarship: Namely, critical-realist, constructivist and post-structuralist or Foucauldian (Clapton, 2011). Due to spatial limitations I will only provide a brief outline of these approaches. The critical-realist perspective pioneered by Beck and Giddens contends that risks are objectively real and found ‘out there’, but are socially constructed during processes of interpretation (Beck, 1990; Giddens, 1999). This scholarship takes a problem-solving rather than a critical approach, so is primarily concerned with the management and control of risks, rather than their utility as a tool of governance. Contrastingly, constructivist scholars such as Furedi and Gusterson maintain that risk is not ontologically real, but an entirely socially constructed entity (Furedi, 2006; Gusterson, 1999). They explore how the discourse of risk is deployed in society and investigate its concomitant effects, such as the ‘culture of fear’ that it creates (Furedi, 2006). Post-structuralists also assert that there is no reality of risk, but go a step further in their analysis to see risk as a dispositif through which populations can be governed (Aradau & Van Munster, 2007; Elbe, 2008; Mythen & Walklate, 2008; Wee-Kiat Lim, 2011). This body of literature is valuable as it provides us with insights into the ontology and epistemology of risk. Yet there remain a number of lacunae in IR’s understanding of risk which need to be addressed, including resistance. Clapton writes, “The literature on risk, risk management and IR is still comparatively small and there is still significant scope for the theorisation of these concepts in an IR context.” (Clapton, 2011: 280). Lund Peterson has also emphasised the need for risk scholarship in IR to pursue new lines of enquiry, as a preoccupation with Beck’s ‘world risk society’ thesis and the ontological nature of risk has caused it to grow stale (Lund Peterson, 2012). The stagnation of the debate between these three theoretical approaches has meant that thus far there has been virtually no exploration of resistance to neoliberal governmentality through risk. Clapton concurs that, “The post-structuralist literature has not


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engaged… rigorously with the issue of resistance to the practices and technologies associated with governing through risk” (Clapton, 2011: 286). Through a critical review of some of the key contributions of IR scholarship on the risk of terrorism, I will show that the resistance of those who reject governance through risk by engaging in practices and relations of ‘solidarity’ and counter conducts has been broadly neglected.

Critical Realist Scholarship, Terrorist Risk and Resistance

Beck’s path-breaking ‘world risk society’ thesis traces a transition from industrial society (the production of global goods), to risk society or ‘reflexive modernity’ (the production of global bads), identifying a paradigm shift from “I am hungry” to “I am afraid” (Rasborg, 2012). According to Beck, terrorism represents one of the ‘risks’ of our own creation that we now confront (Beck, 2002: 43). He constructs the risk of terrorism as an imminent, universally de-bounded risk, which “suddenly broke upon us on September 11th.” (Beck, 2002: 41). Beck’s amplification of this ‘global risk’ can be observed in his comment, “Every advance from gene technology to nanotechnology opens a ‘Pandora’s box’ that could be used as a terrorist’s toolkit.” (Beck, 2002: 46). His thesis also contends that the existence of this ‘new’ risk will give way to state and cosmopolitan political solutions (Beck, 2002). Beck characterises the terrorist risk:

“(bad) intention replaces accident, active trust becomes active mistrust, the context of individual risk is replaced by the context of systemic risks, private insurance is (partly) replaced by state insurance, the power of definition of experts has been replaced by that of states and intelligence agencies.” (Beck, 2002: 45)

Beck’s understanding of the terrorist risk has been deconstructed and discredited by post-structuralist scholars Krahmann, Mythen, Walklate and Van Munster, among others, who have demonstrated his ‘world risk society’ thesis to be fundamentally flawed. Mythen and Walklate point out that terrorism itself is not a new phenomenon, and that its practices do not rely on cutting-edge technologies, but on crude weapons that have been used in the past by terrorist groups such as ETA and the IRA. They add that, “Beck’s theory… muddies the waters between the possible and the probable degree of threat” (Mythen & Walklate, 2008: 232) emphasising that terrorist attacks are not an imminent risk, but an extremely low probability. In fact, it was even highlighted this year that Americans are more likely to be killed by a toddler than by a terrorist (Becker, I.J. Review, 2013). Meanwhile, Krahmann disproves Beck’s claim that private insurance and expertise will be replaced by state insurance and cosmopolitan political solutions. She highlights that within the context of neoliberalism, privatisation, individualisation, and ‘responsibilitisation’ of risk has allowed the private security industry to multiply its profits through the provision of solutions to the constructed risk of global terrorism (Krahmann, 2011).

Resistance to neoliberal governmentality does not feature in Beck’s analysis of the terrorist risk, as he takes a top-down problem-solving approach which has the management and control of ‘global risks’ as its main focus (Lund Peterson, 2012). In other words, Beck is primarily concerned with how the terrorist ‘risk’ itself can be resisted - which he understands to be an ontologically real entity, rather than how people can resist being governed through it. The inhabitants of Beck’s ‘world risk society’ are characterised by a crippling lack of agency. He writes, “People feel like the helpless hostages of this process [risk management].” (Beck, 2002: 42). In his theorisation of risk there is no concept that people can employ their agency to resist such processes. Indeed, by scrutinising Beck’s thesis it becomes clear that he deems


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resistance to neoliberal globalisation, and by extension neoliberal governmentality, to be inherently futile. He writes, “The perceived risk of global terrorism… has pushed us into a new phase of globalization… Once more, the rule has been confirmed that resistance to globalization only accelerates it.” (Beck, 2002: 4). Drawing a causal link between the terrorist risk and the acceleration of globalisation, Beck effectively implies that we are all powerless to resist the ‘forces’ of neoliberalism. As Joseph points out, Beck deploys a received wisdom of neoliberal globalisation in his analysis, reinforcing the status quo rather than critiquing it (Joseph, 2012: 172). For example, he harnesses the discourse of the terrorist risk to legitimise the advance of the neoliberal order, stating:

“Since September 11th, the gulf between the world of those who profit from globalization and the world of those who feel threatened by it has been closed. Helping those who have been excluded is no longer a humanitarian task. It is in the West’s own interest: the key to its security. The West can no longer ignore the black-holes of collapsed states and situations of despair.” (Beck, 2002: 48)

Thus, Beck justifies neoliberal interventions in illiberal states as a form of ‘duty’ through the discourse of the ‘new’ terrorist risk, and evidences how risk-based hierarchies are principally designed to serve the security requirements of the core. Furthermore, he reserves agency for the governors of risk in ‘the West’. In sum, Beck’s critical realist approach to the risk of terrorism broadly overlooks the theme of resistance, denies agency to the subjects of governmentality, and reinforces the hegemonic interests of neoliberalism.

Post-structuralist Scholarship, Terrorist Risk and Resistance

Krahmann, Mythen, Walklate, Aradau and Van Munster all adopt a post-structuralist approach to examine the ways in which terrorism is governed through the dispositif of risk, yet all fail to systematically engage with evidence of resistance to these strategies of neoliberal governmentality. Elke Krahmann contributes to the specialist literature on risk, critically analysing the role of the private security industry in governance through the risk of terrorism and crime (Krahmann, 2011). She analyses the ways in which this industry creates and perpetuates a demand for private risk management solutions, disproving Beck’s claim that, “in times of crises, neoliberalism has no solutions to offer.” (Beck, 2002: 48). However, despite providing these valuable insights a key limitation of Krahmann’s argument is that she does not create a space for resistance in her analysis. Indeed, not only does she fail to acknowledge resistance to governance through the risk of terrorism, but she dichotomises, “those who profit from the production and management of risks and those who suffer the consequences.” (Krahmann, 2011: 353). Here, she conveys the existence of a clear-cut division between the powerful and the powerless, and in doing so she effectively disempowers the targets of neoliberal governmentality by denying them sufficient agency. Krahmann thereby distorts the balance between oppression and agency. What is more, in her analysis, she only considers governments (in particular democratic governments) and private security companies as the potential beneficiaries of governance through the risk of terrorism. She fails to entertain the possibility that the subjects of neoliberal governmentality and even those resisting this form of governance through counter-conducts may also benefit directly or indirectly through the appropriation or subversion of resources intended for anti-terrorism purposes. For example, a number of mosques in the North of England have reportedly used funding from the UK government’s anti-terrorism Channel/Prevent programme to enhance their facilities, while certain Muslim community groups in the same region have benefitted from this funding while simultaneously seeking to resist and change the programme from within (Kundnani, 2009: 25).


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Krahmann criticises Beck for neglecting, “how the discourse and practices of risk are changing the public perception of these and other dangers.” (Krahmann, 2011: 354). Yet, while she does discuss how a risk-induced ‘culture of fear’ influences the public’s perception, she fails to explore alternative perceptions. For instance, she does not consider that a different public perception of neoliberal governance through risk may be that the strategies and technologies deployed to manage the risk of terrorism present more of a ‘danger’ than the perceived risks themselves, leading some to reject this form of governmentality. Krahmann links public fear to the growing demand for private security solutions to risk in her statement, “Extensive security arrangements such as pervasive monitoring and increased patrols can create the image of a dangerous environment making people feel unsafe in the first place. The demand for assurance, thus, becomes self-perpetuating.” (Krahmann, 2011: 368). However, in her account of reflexive public fear no mention is made of those who have chosen to actively resist an increase in monitoring and surveillance. Take for instance the public backlash provoked by the deployment of a large number of CCTV cameras in the West Midlands as part of anti-terrorist Project Champion in 2010, whereby local campaigners, civil liberties organisations and human rights groups succeeded in getting many of the cameras removed by the police (Independent Online, 2010). Krahmann does not discuss the failures of risk management, but takes for granted that private and individualised solutions will inevitably prevail, encountering little or no resistance as a result of or during their widespread implementation. Furthermore, she factors out resistance writing, “There is no way of challenging the risk assessments of experts who inform the public of unknown and unknown-unknown risks.” (Krahmann, 2011: 356). This claim is refutable if we take into account the public backlash that ensued when Weapons of Mass Destruction were not discovered in Iraq following Tony Blair’s announcement that they presented a genuine ‘risk’ (ISN, 2010). In Krahmann’s analysis, resistance is conspicuous by its absence. She takes for granted that conformity and passive acceptance of the strategies and technologies of neoliberal governmentality are the norm, thereby reinforcing the status quo and denying agency to those conducting themselves in ways that counter governance through the risk of terrorism.

Aradau and Van Munster employ a Foucauldian perspective to show how precautionary risk has emerged in the dispositif of risk being deployed to govern terrorism (Aradau & Van Munster, 2007). They argue that the ‘war on terror’ is “a new form of governmentality that imbricates knowledge and decision at the limit of knowledge, war and strategies of surveillance, injunctions to integration and drastic policies against anti-social behaviour.” (2007: 91) They take a top-down approach, as the primary focus of their analysis is how state and non-state actors govern populations through the risk of terrorism. Notably, they explain that, “A governmental analysis of risk is able to expose how the world and existing problematizations are made into risks, and what effects this form of ordering entails upon populations” (Aradau & Van Munster, 2007: 97). Yet they fail to discuss how one of the major ‘effects’ of this strategic ordering of society upon populations is resistance. While they talk about the ‘conduct of conduct’, Aradau and Van Munster only succeed in producing a one-sided account as they fail to explore corresponding ‘counter-conducts’. They discuss the strategies and methodologies of governance through the risk of terrorism, such as the targeting of Muslim communities by police ‘fishing’ trips, CCTV cameras and stop and search policies (Aradau & Van Munster, 2007). However, they stop short of analysing the agency being actively exercised by these target communities in their resistance to neoliberal governmentality through the risk of terrorism. Like Krahmann, Aradau and Van Munster describe the roll out of surveillance programmes as smooth and uncontested, with, “everybody… regimented into technologies of vigilance and prudentialism.” (2007: 108) Again, there is no implication that this reality is contestable, it is simply taken for granted.


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Consequently, their scholarship serves to reinforce and reproduces hegemonic neoliberal discourse. They go on to write that, “Technologies of intervening upon the future are always failing; their failure is, however, part of governmentality, the very motor of the continuous requirement for new technologies and more knowledge.”(Aradau & Van Munster, 2007: 108). Aradau and Van Munster do not contemplate why regimes of governmentality continue to fail, or that these failures may be attributable to the incidence of counter conducts. This is because resistance is entirely excluded from their analysis.

Mythen and Walklate also look at the risk of terrorism from a post-structuralist perspective (Mythen & Walklate, 2008). In their analysis they outline the ways in which governance through the dispositif of the terrorist risk advances the neoliberal state through targeted interventions, and discuss how in the UK, strategies and technologies of governmentality have been used to target the Muslim community in particular (2008: 228). For example they report that, “The incitement to self-surveillance is… typified by the establishment of Muslim Contact Units designed to proactively seek out intelligence about suspicious activity.” (2008: 231). Notably, Mythen and Walklate touch on the theme of resistance, writing, “Widespread concerns have been raised in the UK by civil rights campaigners, academics and journalists about the effects of anti-terrorism legislation on fundamental democratic freedoms and liberties.” (2008: 230). However, their article is essentially another top-down analysis of neoliberal governmentality through the risk of terrorism. Mythen, Walklate and Khan take steps towards a more bottom-up approach in a more recent study by examining the effects of counter-terrorism measures on a group of young Pakistani Muslims through a series of interviews (Mythen, Walklate & Khan, 2013). However, resistance remains an afterthought. While the study transcends previous scholarship on governmentality through the terrorist risk by attributing agency to participants from this targeted ‘risk group’, its primary focus remains the strategies and methodologies of governance, and the corresponding ‘conduct of conduct’ invoked by “risk subjectification” such as ‘hushing’, self-censorship and self-surveillance (Mythen, Walklate & Khan, 2013). In the study, there is only one reference made to a form of counter-conduct: Namely, resistance through style of dress. They write, “While many participants had become inured to monitoring and modifying sartorial styles, others argued that their choice of clothing was an important statement of identity and an active marker of resistance.” (Mythen, Walklate & Khan, 2013: 392). They fail to produce an in-depth analysis of this, or any other counter-conducts practiced by the participants, but encouragingly, their study succeeds in producing a more balanced account of oppression and agency.

Implications for the Scholarship and Resistance

I have argued that in the existing IR literature on the risk of terrorism, resistance to neoliberal governmentality only features as an after-thought, if at all. This neglect of resistance limits analysis of governance through risk both in terms of the specialist literature, and more generally for a number of reasons. Significantly, it means that the relationship between power and resistance cannot be adequately explored, and there can be no elucidation of how resistance feeds back into domineering power (Death, 2010). What is more, by factoring out resistance, any discussion of the effects that neoliberal governmentality has on target populations (or the toll it takes) and the behaviours it produces will be severely restricted. In the literature, oppressive power is currently construed as disproportionately greater than that of agency. Consequently, there can only be limited analysis of the role of agency in general, and of those who leverage their agency to counter regimes of neoliberal governmentality, or to shape them (Clapton, 2011: 286). This narrow scope of analysis is conducive to an over-


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simplified and inaccurate depiction of neoliberal governmentality that is top-down in focus. IR scholars will only strengthen their grasp of neoliberal governmentality through risk and how people respond to its related strategies and technologies by scrutinising the role that resistance and counter conducts have to play in its operation.

The implications for the scholarship are that it currently fails to illuminate the close interrelationship between the governors and the governed, oppression and agency, therefore implying that regimes of neoliberal governance through risk necessarily entail the collapse of agency. By overlooking the incidence of resistance, the scholarship also insinuates that the strategies and technologies deployed to govern the terrorist risk are universally accepted as the status quo (Joseph, 2012). By neglecting to analyse the friction, failures, and sites of contestation resulting from the roll out of risk-based security architectures, the scholarship takes for granted the hegemony of neoliberal governmentality. As Joseph explains, this serves to reinforce the school of thought endorsing, “the unstoppable nature of [neoliberal] globalisation and the view that we have lost control of macro forces.” (2012: 172). These inadvertent assumptions underlie the critical realist scholarship in particular, as Joseph points out, writing, “instead of providing a clear analysis of risk, approaches such as those of Giddens and Beck effectively contribute to the discourse of the very thing they are meant to analyse and in doing so reproduce a governmentality of risk” (2012: 172). In this sense, the IR scholarship currently reinforces existing risk-based hierarchies and the neoliberal order.

Another serious implication of this lacuna in the knowledge is that narratives of resistance to neoliberal governmentality through risk are being silenced or side-lined by the scholarship. I maintain that resistance has the potential to develop forms of accountability that impose limits on the practices and technologies of neoliberal governmentality. However, it seems clear that while it continues to be obscured by the scholarship, this eventuality remains less tenable. Given that literature is constitutive of reality, without the production of knowledge which specifically highlights resistance to neoliberal governmentality through risk those doing the ‘governing’ are less likely to critically address the failures, shortcomings, and negative ramifications of the strategies and technologies that they continue to devise, rendering the resistance itself less effectual. The implications are that resistance may instead slip under the radar of policy makers, or be perceived as inconsequential and extraneous to regimes of neoliberal governmentality through risk.

Resistance to Neoliberal Governmentality in the Health Discourse: What Knowledge Can Be Transferred?

Foucault informs us that counter-conducts have historically been observed in the field of health. He writes, “We can say that medicine… has given rise to a whole series of revolts of conduct… from the end of the eighteenth century and still today.” (Foucault, 2004: 199) This may explain why scholarship on resistance to neoliberal governmentality through risk has already been pioneered in the health discourse (Armstrong & Murphy, 2012; Brown et al., 2013; Harrison et al., 2011; McGovern & McGovern, 2011). Past studies have cited examples of counter-conducts resisting governance through a plethora of ‘risky’ health issues, including HIV/AIDS, cervical cancer, and breastfeeding, among others. I contend that this body of literature offers some valuable insights which can be transferred to the analysis of resistance to neoliberal governmentality through risk in International Relations. While there is not space here for an extensive analysis of this literature, I will deduce some key observations from select studies in order to illustrate its potential utility for post-structuralist scholars.


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Armstrong and Murphy provide an in-depth analysis of how and to what extent people are able to resist neoliberal governmentality through public health, and their findings make a strong case for employing a counter-conducts approach. They take a Foucauldian perspective, maintaining that, “Just as power is diffuse and dispersed, present within all social interactions, so resistance can also be thought of in such terms” (Armstrong & Murphy, 2012: 326) and advocating that the interrelationship between power and resistance should not be neglected. In their study, they demonstrate that resistance to governance through risk is heterogeneous, manifesting itself “in subtle and nuanced ways.” (Armstrong & Murphy, 2012: 314). They also problematise common understandings of resistance, disproving “the simplistic assumptions… that resistance necessarily involves the rejection of advice and interventions.” (Armstrong & Murphy, 2012: 314). In this last respect, they evidence that counter-conducts can be practiced by patients who consent to medical advice and the administering of treatments, while simultaneously resisting the discourse behind these targeted interventions on moral, ethical, or personal grounds, through a process of ‘self-positioning’ (Armstrong & Murphy, 2012). Armstrong illustrates this particular form of counter-conduct in her analysis of women’s resistance to information outlining the risk of cervical cancer. She reports that, “women respond to the presentation of risk in diverse and dynamic ways, and engage in a process of ‘self-positioning’ that individualises cervical cancer risk and makes it relevant to them as individuals.” (Armstrong, 2005: 161). According to Armstrong and Murphy, this form of counter-conduct involving a process of internally rejecting or subverting the medicalised discourse of neoliberal governmentality is commonly practiced by patients.

Harrison et al. also look at cases of resistance to neoliberal governance through risk in health (Harrison et al., 2011). They investigate how Australians aged 18-24 were found to be resisting risk communications from the National Health and Medical Research Council in Australia (NHMRC) regarding ‘low-risk’ alcohol consumption. Like Armstrong and Murphy, Harrison et al. observe counter-conducts in the form of ‘self-positioning’, whereby instead of internalising neoliberal public health messaging these young people, “saw the consumption of alcohol as pleasurable and socially desirable” socially constructing themselves as, “engaging in ‘controlled drunkenness’”, rather than being over the recommended limit of alcohol (Harrison el al., 2011). Significantly, Harrison et al. emphasise that this is in spite of the discourse of ‘pleasure’ being entirely omitted from neoliberal health messaging. It is also notable that the findings of this study provide evidence that incidences of counter-conduct to neoliberal governance through risk can occur in settings as generic as regular social gatherings. Also demonstrating an alternative perspective to the ‘powerless addict’ depicted in the mainstream health discourse, McGovern and McGovern’s study of counter-conduct and crack cocaine provides an interesting account of drug users negotiating at the boundaries of risk (McGovern & McGovern, 2011). They report that, “By orientating themselves against other ‘out of control’ users, participants are also able to ‘neutralise’ their own interaction with risk” (2011: 497). Their findings reveal that, by undertaking a process of ‘self-positioning’, even those on the margins of society are able to actively employ their agency to contravene ways of regimenting human behaviour (2011: 487).

To summarise: Manifestations of resistance to neoliberal governance through risk are subtle, diffuse and complex. Counter-conducts can be observed in processes of ‘self-positioning’ characterised by an internal rejection or subversion of neoliberal risk discourse. This form of counter-conduct should not be considered anomalous, but understood as a common mode of human behaviour practised in people’s daily lives. Finally, even those on the margins of society often depicted as ‘powerless’ are capable of actively employing their agency to


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conduct themselves in ways which counter the patterns of behaviour promoted by regimes of neoliberal governmentality through risk. This list of transferable observations is not intended to be exhaustive, but to indicate that there remains significant scope for further mining of the health literature on resistance to neoliberal governmentality through risk.

Case Studies

The purpose of these exploratory case studies is to evidence the existence of resistance to neoliberal governmentality through risk, to attribute agency to those countering this form of governance, and to illustrate that oppressive power and resistance are mutually constitutive, so should be studied in conjunction with each other. I will adopt Foucault’s counter-conducts approach to analyse instances of resistance to neoliberal governance through the risk of terrorism by looking at the UK government’s Channel/Prevent strategy and the US NSA’s PRISM programme.

Resistance to the Channel/Prevent Strategy

What is Channel/Prevent?

The UK government’s anti-terrorism programme ‘Channel’ was launched in partnership with the Department for Communities and Local Government in April 2007 in the wake of the 7/7 London terrorist attacks in 2005 (Kundnani, 2009: 10). Channel forms a multi-agency approach within the UK government’s Prevent initiative, which is one of the four main work-streams of the wider ‘CONTEST’ strategy aimed at countering international terrorism. Its purpose is to prevent people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. After being revised in 2011, it now has three key objectives: challenging ideology that supports terrorism, protecting vulnerable individuals and supporting sectors and institutions where there is a risk of radicalisation (Peters, 2012: 4). Siobhan Peters, Director of Prevent at the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism states that, “To reduce the risk from terrorism we need not only to stop terrorist attacks but also to prevent people becoming terrorists.” (Peters, 2012: 3). In Prevent’s pilot year 2005/2006 only five people were referred to Channel. However, in 2012 a significantly larger total of 748 people were targeted following the roll out of the programme on a national scale across England and Wales (Telegraph Online, 2013).

How does Channel/Prevent exemplify governance through the risk of terrorism?

Risk is a core tenet of Channel/Prevent. The programme outline states, “Risk is a theme that runs through the entire Channel process: risk to the individual; risk to the public; and risk to statutory partners and any intervention providers” (Peters, 2012: 19). Channel/Prevent is a clear example of neoliberal governmentality through the terrorist risk as it allows the state to take a step back by actively encouraging communities to govern each other, and to act as the “front line” against terrorism, by surveilling, categorising and informing on potential terrorists, or anyone perceived as vulnerable to ‘radicalisation’ (Peters, 2012: 11). For this reason, IR scholar Gutkowski has related the Prevent agenda to Foucault’s work on ‘pastoral governance’, writing that, “British government attention to its Muslim population has resembled the kinds of rationalities and technologies identified by Foucault in his genealogical exploration of modern governance.” (Gutkowski, 2011: 357). Within Channel/Prevent people are categorised under three ‘vulnerability indicators’ which include; engagement with a group, cause or ideology, intent to cause harm, and capability to cause harm. Targeted interventions are then carried out on those referred to the programme (Peters,


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2012). The programme can be understood as operating through a dispositif of precautionary risk, as elucidated by Aradau and Van Munster in their theorisation of governmentality through the terrorist risk. This precautionary element is evident in the programme’s strong emphasis on early intervention, which stipulates that even children deemed ‘at risk’ should be targeted (Peters, 2012: 3).

How has resistance to Channel/Prevent manifested itself?

There has been widespread resistance to Channel/Prevent. In a critical response to the programme, Rachel Robinson of the human rights organisation Liberty writes, “Since its inception Prevent has met with much resistance, particularly from amongst the Muslim community.” (Robinson, 2010: 4) Significantly, it was instances of resistance that led the Channel/Prevent strategy to be revised and re-focussed in June 2011 (Peters, 2012: 3). I will show that resistance to Channel/Prevent has been dispersed, variegated and heterogeneous through an analysis of resistance by schools, teachers, and Muslim community groups. In my analysis I will draw on Foucault’s concept of counter-conducts to reveal how, paradoxically, resistance feeds back into domineering power.

Resistance by schools and teachers

Since its inception, Channel/Prevent has actively targeted primary, secondary and tertiary education establishments, recruiting teaching practitioners as ‘governors’ as part of its strategy to manage and mitigate the risk of terrorism. However, in 2011 it was reported that, “Fears about the "anti-Islamic" ethos of the project” led to a large number of the 7,500 schools enlisted by the programme opting out (Travis, Guardian Online, 2011). Viewed through a Foucauldian lens, this form of counter-conduct entailed education professionals activating “technologies of the self” (Foucault, 2003: 145) through processes of ‘self-positioning’ in order to reject and resist what they perceived to be a discriminatory discourse behind this neoliberal governmentality. The refusal of these teachers and schools to be governed ‘thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’ (Foucault, 2007: 75) represented an open challenge to governance through the terrorist risk, and succeeded in undermining the Prevent initiative by highlighting its detrimental effects, and prompting MPs to criticise it publically for, “triggering accusations about teachers and community leaders being asked to spy on Muslim youths.” (Travis, Guardian Online, 2011). Yet, paradoxically, while the counter-conduct of schools and teachers succeeded in challenging the legitimacy of Prevent, it simultaneously fed back into domineering power by giving rise to a review of the strategy aimed at ‘improving’ it. This resulted in the redoubling of efforts to make Prevent a strategic success, and in 2011 - the same year that this resistance was manifested - the strategy’s focus on educational institutions was reinvigorated and broadened in scope (Independent Online, 2011). Kundnani highlights how this resistance only led to the strategy’s intensification, writing, “The new strategy has… widened the definition of extremism from support for violence to any rejection of ‘British values’; this is likely to mean a wider range of individuals are identified as potential radicals.” (Kundnani, 2011). This outcome serves to evidence the mutually constitutive relationship between counter-conducts and regimes of neoliberal governmentality through risk.

Resistance by Muslim community groups

Arun Kundnani unearths further evidence of resistance to Prevent based on a series of interviews with Muslim community groups in the North of England (Kundnani, 2009).


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Although he reports that some organisations have taken advantage of Prevent funding, he stresses that resistance to this strategy of governance through the terrorist risk is building, stating, “There is a growing trend for organisations in the community and voluntary sector to reject Prevent funding as a matter of principle.” (Kundnani, 2009). Kundnani outlines the power struggle between those governing through Prevent and those attempting to resist its strategies of governance. He writes, “Different groups wrestle with the issue of whether to engage with the programme, often in the face of strong pressure from local authorities to accept money and strong pressure from the community to refuse it.” (Kundnani, 2009: 25). The resistance to Channel/Prevent identified in Kundnani’s study is nuanced and heterogeneous. A number of groups and individuals resist Prevent based on what they perceive as the discriminatory ideology behind its discourse; for instance the leader of one voluntary organisation states, “We decided not to apply for Prevent funding as the whole philosophy is against that of our organisation. Our objectives are connecting people for improved community relations, not to focus on the Muslim community, which we feel would have a negative impact on relations.” Another explains that, “Young Muslims… aren’t interested in getting involved with the buying of Muslims to work against Muslims.” (Kundnani, 2009: 26). Evidence of counter-conduct through the process of ‘self-positioning’ can be identified in one Muslim community volunteer’s words; “Those who have not engaged with Prevent projects are… advocates, like myself, of listening to each other, challenging each other’s beliefs and opinions, talking about what we feel is right and wrong and then being free to practice as we wish” (Kundnani, 2009, 26). An additional form of counter-conduct characterises the actions of community members who reported that, “by engaging with Prevent, they had a voice within the system and could try to change it from within” (2009, 26). This last form of resistance is paradoxical, as by partaking in Prevent these members of the community reinforce oppressive power, yet by simultaneously seeking to change the strategy from within, they undermine the objectives that it was originally intended to fulfil. This covert form of counter-conduct illustrates that power is constantly being negotiated between the practices of governance and resistance.

Resistance to the US National Security Agency’s PRISM Programme

What is PRISM?

My second exploratory case study looks at resistance to the US National Security Agency’s counter-terrorism surveillance programme PRISM. PRISM (Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronisation and Management) in operation since 2007, is a wide-reaching electronic data-mining government surveillance programme which allows American intelligence operatives to gain access to private information online across the US and internationally, including audio, video, photos, emails and other files held by companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Apple (Wired UK, 2013). On 6th June 2013 NSA intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked reports to The Guardian and the Washington Post exposing this programme to the public (Guardian Online, 2013). Public knowledge of PRISM has since sparked a debate about the balance between privacy and liberty worldwide, potentially giving rise to new sites of resistance to neoliberal governmentality through the risk of terrorism.

How does PRISM exemplify governance through the risk of terrorism?

PRISM is a tangible example of the “insatiable quest for knowledge” (Aradau & Van Munster, 2007: 91) which has come to characterise neoliberal governance through the risk of


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terrorism. As a single terrorist profile does not exist, everyone presents a potential terrorist risk, and this necessarily entails the surveillance of entire populations. (Mythen & Walklate, 2008) As critics of PRISM have pointed out, even data from people who are not linked to the risk of terrorist ideologies or organisations can be swept into NSA’s wide net (Stopwatching.us, 2013). PRISM is a tool providing a technical means of governmentality to the US Government. It governs the terrorist risk through a complex security apparatus with global reach geared to survey, monitor, and categorise US and international communications ‘at arm’s length’ in order to target potential terror suspects. The UK Government’s intelligence agency GCHQ, and numerous internet companies worldwide have also colluded to act as ‘governors’ of the terrorist risk through PRISM. Like Prevent, PRISM is characterised by an underlying rationality of precautionary risk, as it aims to intervene before terrorists get the chance to carry out atrocities. According to NSA's director Gen Keith Alexander, PRISM’s counterterrorism programmes have pre-emptively, “thwarted more than 50 attacks since 9/11.” (BBC, 2013).

How has resistance to PRISM manifested itself?

While those who subscribe to the ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ argument have described PRISM as, “a justified and effective effort to head off the threat of terrorist attacks”, (BBC News, 2013) others have rejected and resisted it. I will show that resistance to PRISM by those who refuse to be governed ‘thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’ (Foucault, 2007: 75) has both undermined and reinforced oppressive power. I will show this through the analysis of three different instances of resistance to PRISM: Namely, Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing, resistance by civil liberties organisations, and the ‘Restore the Fourth’ protests.

The ‘whistle-blower’

Intelligence contractor Edward Snowden was the first to publicly resist the PRISM programme by leaking information about it to the media. Snowden explained his actions stating: "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things [surveillance of its citizens]... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded... My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.” (Guardian Online, 09/06/2013) Snowden’s act of whistle-blowing was a clear form of counter-conduct, as it involved him resisting regimentation by PRISM through his rejection of its principles, its proponents, and the price of its clandestine operation – the infringement of fundamental human rights to privacy and liberty worldwide. Significantly, Snowden’s actions illustrate that resistance can come from within the security architecture of neoliberal governmentality: He was a ‘governor’, yet he defected to become a ‘resistor’ of governance through the risk of terrorism. However, while Snowden’s manifestation of resistance created a scandal around PRISM, galvanising further resistance to its strategies and technologies of governance, it simultaneously reinforced the programme’s oppressive power by triggering a tirade of responses from politicians and media sources denouncing Snowden’s actions. For instance, American politician Dick Cheney labelled Snowden a “traitor”, while Russian President Vladimir Putin aimed to normalise PRISM by claiming that this kind of surveillance was "becoming a global phenomenon", and a practical way to fight terrorism (BBC News Online, 2013). What is more, the harsh treatment that Snowden has received has undoubtedly fortified efforts to dissuade others from conducting themselves in ways which counter oppressive power. Notably, this interplay between dominant power and resistance was crystallised in the ‘Edward Snowden: Hero or Traitor?’ debate (Telegraph Online, 2013).


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Resistance by civil liberties organisations

Since PRISM’s disclosure, a coalition of 86 civil liberties organisations and internet companies including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, reddit, Mozilla, FreedomWorks, and the American Civil Liberties Union has openly opposed the surveillance programme (Wired UK, 2013). This coalition launched the aptly-named petition Stop Watching Us demanding that the US Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA's ‘spying’ programmes (stopwatching.us, 2013). The coalition addressed an open letter to Congress stating, “We are calling on Congress to take immediate action to halt this surveillance and provide a full public accounting of the NSA's and the FBI's data collection programs” and calling for specific legal reforms, including an appeal to “Enact reform… to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the US is prohibited by law.” (stopwatching.us, 2013). To examine the paradoxical nature of this resistance, while the Stop Watching Us coalition manifested overt resistance to PRISM by starting a petition against it and actively encouraging others to join them, at the same time it reinforced the surveillance programme by openly acknowledging its oppressive power and having no choice but to operate within the parameters of US law in its bid to affect change. The actions of this coalition exemplify the close interrelationship between neoliberal governmentality and the practices of resistance, and can be seen as negotiating at the margins of domineering power.

‘Restore the Fourth’ Protests

On Independence Day July 2013, the ‘Restore the Fourth’ resistance movement succeeded in galvanising protests against PRISM in over 100 American cities including New York, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Memphis, and Miami, as well as in international cities including London and Munich (venturebeat.com, 2013). The ‘Restore the Fourth’ movement refers to the constitutionally guaranteed Fourth Amendment upholding that, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” (restorethefourth.net, 2013). The protests can be understood as a form of counter-conduct to neoliberal governmentality through the terrorist risk because, rather than demanding a total rejection of government, they ask, “not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles… and by means of such procedures.” (Foucault, 2007: 44). Drawing on Death’s Foucauldian analytics of protest and counter-conduct, it is possible to see how the ‘Restore the Fourth’ protests are, “produced and shaped by the forms of government they confront.” (Death, 2010: 241). For instance, it is paradoxical that the majority of these protests were organised on Facebook, one of the companies that they actively oppose for agreeing to comply with PRISM’s information sharing request (https://en-gb.facebook.com/RestoreTheFourth, 2013). Furthermore, it is significant that many of the protests were staged outside US government buildings. As Death points out, this practice of counter-conduct implies that protestors unquestioningly accept that the state is where the power lies, effectively reinforcing the status quo (Death, 2011). Indeed, the name ‘Restore the Fourth’ itself is even a direct appeal to the US government’s domineering power. Another conceivable contradiction and irony is the likelihood that, in spite of their resistance, a large number of the protestors themselves will continue to use popular websites such as Google and Yahoo, and to covet or purchase Apple products, regardless of these companies’ collaboration with PRISM. These protests represent another clear example of resistance to neoliberal governmentality through the risk of terrorism.


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Paradoxical Resistance

It is evident from these exploratory case studies that resistance to neoliberal governmentality through risk manifests itself in diverse and heterogeneous ways. I have identified examples of overt resistance, defined by Hollander and Einwohner as, “behaviour that is visible and readily recognised by both targets and observers as resistance, and, further, is intended to be recognised as such.” (2004: 545). The protests staged against PRISM, the Stop Watching Us petition, and the refusal of schools and Muslim community groups in the UK to join Prevent all fall under into this category. I also have also identified covert resistance, defined as, “acts that are intentional yet go unnoticed (and, therefore, unpunished) by their targets, although they are recognised as resistance by other, culturally aware observers.” (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004: 545). Such examples of resistance include the Muslim community members seeking to reform Prevent from within, and those making negative comments about the programme in private. It is likely that there are also unreported cases of ‘attempted resistance’ to neoliberal governmentality through risk, whereby, “an actor’s intentional act goes unnoticed by both targets and observers alike.” (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004: 546). Furthermore, I have found that counter-conducts can be observed at an individual level – in the case of teachers and members of the Muslim community groups resisting Prevent through a process of ‘self-positioning’, and collectively – in the case of the Stop Watching Us coalition and the ‘Restore the Fourth’ protests countering PRISM. The complex nature of resistance makes it all the more important that IR scholars map its mutually constitutive relationship with the practices of neoliberal governance, examining the knowledges invoked, techniques adopted and identities produced.

The nature of resistance to neoliberal governmentality through risk can be described as paradoxical, given that it feeds back into domineering power. How does this occur? Whether by appropriating the language or resources of those governing through risk, or simply by acknowledging their oppressive power and being forced to work within the parameters and the boundaries that they set, resistance that aims to subvert, prevent or challenge neoliberal governmentality through risk continues to simultaneously reinforce it. As Foucault and Mitchell Dean elaborate, power and resistance are inextricably linked, meaning that so-called ‘pure’ or emancipatory resistance to governance through risk can never exist, and there will never be a complete ‘triumph’ of one over the other (Dean, 1999). Resistance therefore feeds back into the production of risk-based hierarchies, either by reinforcing the status quo or by provoking the reinvigoration of strategies and technologies of neoliberal governance, keeping those issues and actors deemed ‘risky’ (predominantly located in the periphery) from those deemed ‘secure’ (predominantly located in the core) (Clapton & Hameiri, 2011).

Conclusion

This article has argued for the inclusion of the study of resistance to neoliberal governmentality through risk in the IR literature. Resistance to governance through risk represents a significant lacuna in the knowledge which must be mined if the post-structuralist scholarship is to enhance its understanding of regimes of governmentality. The existing governmentality literature drawing on Foucault’s work is extensive, yet in spite of Foucault’s assertion that, “where there is power there is resistance”, (Foucault, 2004) thus far, the IR scholarship has given a skewed impression of reality by focussing primarily on the strategies and technologies of neoliberalism through which populations are governed, rather than the effects and outcomes that such regimes of governmentality produce. This has given the impression that those being governed are passive subjects characterised by a lack of agency,


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and with no choice but to accept the status quo. The literature thereby misrepresents the balance between oppressive power and agency, and reinforces the neoliberal order currently being advanced by depicting the roll-out of regimes of governmentality through risk as both inevitable and seamless. This has led many to accept neoliberal governance through risk as a received wisdom, and a reality that is not contestable, when in fact such regimes of governance engender recurring failures and widespread resistance on a daily basis. This distorted depiction of reality is likely to influence policy and analysis by causing resistance, and the diverse ways in which people respond to being governed through risk, to be broadly overlooked. In this instance, I have recommended that Foucault’s concept of counter-conducts, as elaborated by Carl Death, offers a useful way for post-structuralist IR scholars to approach the analysis of resistance to governmentality through risk. This is because, a counter-conducts approach does not limit interpretations of resistance to binaries of power which dichotomise actors into the powerful and the powerless, oversimplifying complex power relations. Instead, it allows for an in-depth and variegated understanding of the close interrelationship between the strategies and techniques of neoliberal governance and concomitant practices of resistance, and thus can be employed to elucidate the mutually constitutive relationship between neoliberal governmentality, the governors and the governed. For this reason, I maintain that the existing health scholarship discussing counter-conducts to neoliberal governmentality through risk should be further exploited by post-structuralist IR scholars. By deploying the concept of counter-conducts in two exploratory case studies, I have provided evidence that there is widespread resistance to neoliberal governance through the risk of terrorism, and that this resistance is heterogeneous and complex, encompassing both overt and covert forms of counter-conduct. Notably, these case studies show that it is not only members of ‘risk groups’ who are resisting neoliberal governmentality through risk by refusing to be governed, ‘thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’, (Foucault, 2007: 75) but also members of society who are not attributed risk identities – such as teachers, internet users, and members of civil liberties groups. I have shown that, paradoxically, their manifestations of resistance simultaneously reinforce and undermine oppressive power and the means of neoliberal governance employed to tackle terrorism. In conclusion, resistance will continue to feed into domineering power, and risk-based hierarchies will continue to be produced. However, by voicing marginalised narratives of resistance and presenting regimes of neoliberal governmentality as contestable, it may be possible to convey a more accurate picture of reality, and to counterbalance discourses reproducing oppressive power. I propose that there is a need for further research to be conducted on resistance to neoliberal governance through the risk of terrorism, in addition to other ‘risky’ issues such as climate change, migration, and crime within the field of International Relations. Post-structuralist scholarship that is produced on resistance to neoliberal governmentality through risk has the potential to form part of a wider discourse of transnational resistance to the hegemony of neoliberal globalisation.

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