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MANAGING DISRUPTIVE TRANSITIONS

IDEAS, INSTITUTIONS & IDIOMS 12 – 21 JANUARY, NEW DELHI

WADHAWAN GROUP

Published by Observer Research Foundation 2018 © All Rights Reserved The information contained is this booklet is confidential. It is intended for the personal use of the Forum participants. Unauthorized use or distribution of this information is prohibited. No part of this publication may be reproduced, altered, printed, copied or transmited in any form—physical or digital—without prior permission in writing from Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.

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CONTENTS 1.

The collapse of the Liberal World Order Stephen M. Walt, 2016

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Currents of disruption: Not just a new world order, but a new world Samir Saran and Ashok Malik, 2017

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The future of liberalism The Economist, 2016

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S ATU R DAY, JA NU A RY 13, 2 0 1 8 THEME ADDRESS: MANAGING DISRUPTIVE TRANSITIONS: IDEAS, INSTITUTIONS, AND IDIOMS

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The New World Order - The Rise Of Post-Liberalism And What It Means For 2017 Aritha Wickramasinghe, 2017

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5.

The rise of illiberal democracy?

Fareed Zakaria, 1997

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6.

The end of the Global Liberal Order?

Mauro F. Guillen, 2017

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EXPERT SPEAK: DIVIDED CAMPUS: CHALLENGES TO ACADEMIA IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD

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On free speech and Academic Freedom Joan W. Scott, 2017

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How should universities confront a post-truth world?

Ole Petter Otterse, 2016

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Yes, the truth still matters David Shribman, 2017

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SU NDAY, JA NU A RY 14, 20 1 8 ISLAMOPHOBIA OR JIHAD APOLOGISTS? RESPONDING TO RELENTLESS TERROR

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Dear Liberals: Being Critical of Islam Is Not Racism Shawn Moksvold, 2017

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Does ISIS really have nothing to do with Islam? Islamic apologetics carry serious risks. 46 Shadi Hamid, 2015

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The inner workings of the apologist mindset Ali A. Rizvi, 2014

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13.

An atheist Muslim on what the Left and Right get wrong about Islam Sean Illing, 2017

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MO NDAY, JA NU A RY 15, 2 0 1 8 WOMEN ENTREPRENEURSHIP: UNLEASHING LATENT VALUE OF HALF THE HUMAN KIND

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The Silent Rise of the Female Driven Economy Danielle Kayembe, 2017

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Women entrepreneurs: The changemakers of a better world | News | Eco-Business | Asia Pacific 71 Hannah Koh, 2017

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Women and the Vision Thing Herminia Ibarra and Otilia Obodaru, 2009

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Women and ICT in Africa and the Middle East Ineke Buskens and Anne Webbe, 2015

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18.

The Role of Women Entrepreneurs in Establishing Sustainable Development in Developing Nations Kalpana R. Ambepitiya, 2016

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EXPERT SPEAK: AMERICA IN RETREAT: TRUMP’S FOREIGN POLICY

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Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Is a Black Box Ian Bremmer, 2016

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Donald Trump Might Set a Record—for the Biggest Decline of American Power in History Tom Engelhardt, 2017

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The New Geopolitics Bruce Jones, 2017

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TU E S DAY, J A N U A RY 16, 2018 MEDIA AND HACKING DEMOCRACY – NEW ETHOS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Do social media threaten democracy?

The Economist, 2017

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When is it Ethical to Publish Stolen Data?

Helen Lewis, 2015

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Hacking India’s Election Vinayak Dalmia, 2017

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PAX SINICA: CONTOURS OF A WORLD LED BY CHINA

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The Chinese World Order Andrew J. Nathan, 2017

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How China Sees World Order Richard Fontaine, 2016

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China Sees Opening Left by Trump in Europe, and Quietly Steps In Steven Erlanger, 2017

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‘Sinification’ of EU: Salami Slicing and the Chinese quest for the heart of Europe

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An Era of Authoritarian Influence?

Thorsten Benner, 2017

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Can China Supplant the U.S. in Europe?

Phillip Le Corre, 2017

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Redefining Europe, and Europeans Carl Bildt, 2017

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Engaging with the Indian Ocean Garima Mohan, 2017

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M ON DAY, J A N U A RY 21, 2018 “WE THINK”: POPULISM AND RADICALIZATION

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The great liberal fallacy Samir Saran and Jaibal Naduvath, 2017

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Globalism, radicalism, populism on Raisina Hill Samir Saran, 2017

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Brexit, Trump, and Five (Wrong) Lessons About ‘The Populist Challenge’ Prof. Cas Mudde, 2017

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The Collapse of the Liberal World Order Stephen M. Walt, 2016 The world is entering a period where once‐robust democracies have grown fragile. Now is the time to figure out where we went wrong.

Once upon a time — that is, back in the 1990s — a lot of smart and serious people believed liberal political orders were the wave of the future and would inevitably encompass most of the globe. The United States and its democratic allies had defeated fascism and then communism, supposedly leaving humankind at “the end of history.” The European Union seemed like a bold experiment in shared sovereignty that had banished war from most of Europe. Indeed, many Europeans believed its unique combination of democratic institutions, integrated markets, the rule of law, and open borders made Europe’s “civilian power” an equal if not superior counterpart to the crude “hard power” of the United States. For its part, the United States committed itself to “enlarging the sphere of democratic rule, getting rid of pesky autocrats, solidifying the “democratic peace,” and thereby ushering in a benevolent and enduring world order.

As you’ve probably noticed, the heady optimism of the 1990s has given way to a growing sense of pessimism — even alarm — about the existing liberal order.

As you’ve probably noticed, the heady optimism of the 1990s has given way to a growing sense of pessimism — even alarm — about the existing liberal order.

The New York Times’s Roger Cohen, a thoughtful and committed liberal, believes that “the forces of disintegration are on the march” and “the foundations of the postwar world … are trembling.” An April white paper from the World Economic Forum cautions that the liberal world order “is being challenged by a variety of forces — by powerful authoritarian governments and anti‐liberal fundamentalist movements.” And in New York magazine, Andrew Sullivan warns that the United States itself may be imperiled because it has become “too democratic.”

Such fears are understandable. In Russia, China, India, Turkey, Egypt — and yes, even here in the United States — one sees either resurgent authoritarianism or a yearning for a “strong leader” whose bold actions will sweep away present discontents. According to democracy expert Larry Diamond, “between 2000 and 2015, democracy broke down in 27 countries,” while “many existing authoritarian regimes have become even less open, transparent, and responsive to their citizens.” Great Britain has now voted to leave the EU; Poland, Hungary, and Israel are heading in illiberal directions; and one of America’s two major political parties is about to nominate a presidential candidate who openly disdains the tolerance that is central to a liberal society, repeatedly expresses racist beliefs and baseless conspiracy theories, and has even questioned the idea of an independent judiciary. For those of us committed to core liberal ideals, these are not happy times.

For those of us committed to core liberal ideals, these are not happy times.

I may have a realist view of international politics and foreign policy, but I take no pleasure whatsoever from these developments. Like Robert Gilpin, “if pressed I would describe myself as a liberal in a realist 4

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world,” by which I mean that I appreciate the virtues of a liberal society, am grateful to live in one, and think the world would in fact be a better place if liberal institutions and values were more widely — even universally — embraced. (I’m deeply skeptical about our ability to accelerate that process, and especially with military force, but that’s another matter). So it would have been perfectly fine with me if the liberals’ earlier hopes had been realized. But they weren’t, and it’s important to consider why.

The first problem was that liberalism’s defenders oversold the product. We were told that if dictators kept falling and more states held free elections, defended free speech, implemented the rule of law, and adopted competitive markets, and joined the EU and/or NATO, then a vast “zone of peace” would be created, prosperity would spread, and any lingering political disagreements would be easily addressed within the framework of a liberal order.

When matters didn’t go quite so smoothly, and when some groups in these liberal societies were in fact harmed by these developments, a degree of backlash was inevitable. It didn’t help that elites in many liberal countries made some critical blunders, including the creation of the euro, the invasion of Iraq, the misguided attempt to nation‐build in Afghanistan, and the 2008 financial crisis. These and other mistakes helped undermine the legitimacy of the post‐Cold War order, open the door to illiberal forces, and left some segments of society vulnerable to nativist appeals.

Efforts to spread a liberal world order also faced predictable opposition from the leaders and groups who were directly threatened by our efforts. It was hardly surprising that Iran and Syria did what they could to thwart U.S. efforts in Iraq, for example, because the George W. Bush administration had made it clear these regimes were on its hit list, too. Similarly, is it that hard to fathom why Chinese and Russian leaders find Western efforts to spread “liberal” values threatening, or why they have taken various steps to forestall them?

Liberals also forgot that successful liberal societies require more than the formal institutions of democracy. They also depend on a broad and deep commitment to the underlying values of a liberal society, most notably tolerance. As events in Iraq, Afghanistan, and several other places demonstrate, however, writing a constitution, forming political parties, and holding “free and fair” elections won’t produce a genuinely liberal order unless individuals and groups in society also embrace the key liberal norms as well. This sort of cultural and normative commitment cannot be developed overnight or injected from outside, and certainly not with drones, special forces, and other instruments of violence.

It is also abundantly clear that post‐Cold War liberals underestimated the role of nationalism and other forms of local identity, including sectarianism, ethnicity, tribal bonds, and the like. They assumed that such atavistic attachments would gradually die out, be confined to apolitical, cultural expressions, or be adroitly balanced and managed within well‐designed democratic institutions.

But it turns out that many people in many places care more about national identities, historic enmities, territorial symbols, and traditional cultural values than they care about “freedom” as liberals define it. And if the Brexit vote tells us anything, it’s that some (mostly older) voters are more easily swayed by such appeals than by considerations of pure economic rationality (at least until they feel the AFGG 2018

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consequences). We may think our liberal values are universally valid, but sometimes other values will trump them (no pun intended).

We may think our liberal values are universally valid, but sometimes other values will trump them (no pun intended).

Such traditional sentiments will loom especially large when social change is rapid and unpredictable, and especially when once‐homogeneous societies are forced to incorporate and assimilate people whose backgrounds are different and have to do so within a short span of time. Liberals can talk all they want about the importance of tolerance and the virtues of multiculturalism (and I happen to agree with them), but the reality is that blending cultures within a single polity has never been smooth or simple. The resulting tensions provide ample grist for populist leaders who promise to defend “traditional” values (or “make the country great again”). Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, but it can still be a formidable political trope.

Most important of all, liberal societies are in trouble today because they are vulnerable to being hijacked by groups or individuals who take advantage of the very freedoms upon which liberal societies are based. As Donald Trump has been proving all year (and as Jean‐Marie Le Pen, Recep Erdogan, Geert Wilders, and other political entrepreneurs have shown in the past), leaders or movements whose commitment to liberal principles is at best skin‐deep can take advantage of the principles of open society and use it to rally a popular following. And there is nothing about a democratic order that ensures such efforts will invariably fail.

Deep down, I think this explains why so many people in the United States and in Europe are desperate to keep Uncle Sam fully engaged in Europe. It’s not so much the fear of a declining but assertive Russia; it’s their fear of Europe itself. Liberals want Europe to remain peaceful, tolerant, democratic and embedded within the EU framework, and they’d like to pull countries like Georgia or Ukraine more fully into Europe’s democratic circle eventually. But deep down, they just don’t trust the Europeans to manage this situation, and they fear it will all go south if the “American pacifier” is removed. For all of liberalism’s supposed virtues, at the end of the day its defenders cannot shake the suspicion that its European version is so delicate that it requires indefinite American support. Who knows? Maybe they’re right. But unless you think the United States has infinite resources and a limitless willingness to subsidize other wealthy states’ defenses, then the question is: what other global priorities are liberals prepared to sacrifice in order to preserve what’s left of the European order?

Source: Walt, S.M . (2017). The Collapse of the Liberal World Order. Available: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/26/the‐collapse‐of‐the‐liberal‐world‐order‐european‐union‐ brexit‐donald‐trump/. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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Currents of disruption: Not just a new world order, but a new world Samir Saran and Ashok Malik, 2017

It has become a cliché to contend that the first half of the 21st century is different from the second half of the 20th, or that the 20 years after the end of the Cold War are no guide to the two decades that lie ahead of us. While past experiences are somewhat comparable, distinctly different contexts diminish their utility as tools for navigation. As such, how does one respond to what is unfolding at the cusp of the 2020s and what exactly are the markers of change in the international system that should define responses, solutions and statecraft?

It is possible to see this change in narrow and symbolic terms, say by re‐configuration of the UN Security Council or by accepting the arrival of Asian candidates to the upper echelons of the Bretton Woods institutions. Other emblems of change would be the entry of India into an expanded Group of Seven as the eighth liberal democracy in that club of industrial economies, or new ocean politics resulting from the growing capacity of Chinese and to a lesser degree Indian naval power in an Indo‐ Pacific system hitherto underwritten by American maritime dominance.

Several such examples can be given and speculated upon. While some may well be realised and have a compounding impact on politics and society, these would still amount to narrow tactical shifts and to the reimagining of existing frameworks to incorporate rising powers. They would not, by themselves, be considered a clean‐sheet redesign of the global order or sufficiently grasp the currents of disruption that lie just below the surface.

The challenges are tectonic and technological. When and if they are spent, they will leave us with not merely a new world order but a new world, the order for which is beyond the realms of current‐day perception.

It would be safe to say that the next decade is likely to see the death of many institutions and arrangements that have hitherto been considered central to managing global affairs. At what stage will we begin to shape successor arrangements? And will these retain the agency of the state, or dissipate the powers of governance to big corporations, non‐monolithic cultures and an individual’s sense of moral conduct?

Sweeping change, induced mostly by technology, will not just pose questions for the institutional matrices of the early 21st century, but also test the relevance of the very hierarchies of international relations of the past half‐century. There is a fundamental mismatch between institutional arrangements currently in place to manage crises or 'keep the peace' and the disruptive tendencies that do not respect the state’s seal of sovereignty.

Four such disruptive developments are worth noting. The first and most salient concerns the very nature of power. The neat correlation of a big economy with big power that bears big responsibilities is under severe scrutiny. In the post‐war epoch and in the period after the Cold War, the world’s largest AFGG 2018

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economies were also its ultimate security guarantors. This was, for instance, the logic for creating the permanent membership of the Security Council in 1945. In turn, it was the big powers and, after 1990, the lone superpower that incubated the multilateral order and institutions that constituted the sinews of international cooperation, commerce and well‐being.

The un‐Enlightenment The roots of this sense of occidental responsibility go deeper than merely the twin world wars of the 20th century. They can be located in the Eurocentric construct that flowed out of the Enlightenment, an 18th century phenomenon that revolutionised Western civilisation but had mixed consequences for the rest of the planet. It promoted both worldwide commerce and colonialism, leaving its imprint on the hierarchy of 20th and early 21st century geopolitics.

The ensuing sense of obligation – almost a noblesse oblige on a global scale – led to great powers and large economies playing an interventionist role in distant societies and informing developmental assistance in the manner of an intercontinental social responsibility charter. They took on global developmental leadership and were the largest contributors to the international provision of public goods, thereby defining the ethic of great‐power behaviour.

The emerging powers of the early 21st century are different. For one, they have smaller capacities and political appetites. The economic and domestic political capital of a great power with a per capita income of US$40,000 is just not replicable by an emerging power with a per capita income of US$10,000. The latter faces enormous inequities and developmental gaps at home, and its generosity will perforce be constricted by domestic exigencies. Further, populist politics will make it harder for any power – old or emerging – to be an unremitting provider of global public goods.

Moreover, one of the new powers, China, is neither evangelical or expeditionary but transactional.

China does not have a political model and an ideological or civilisational template to export or scale up. China is also culturally comfortable with shades of grey; the Anglo‐Saxon quest for absolute, determinist clarity does not obsess Beijing.

China can live with long‐term disorder. It can sublimate the moral inconsistency of being authoritarian at home and liberal abroad; or protectionist at home but seeking an open global trading system.

Representing a society that is itself in transition, Beijing does not consider itself as default global peace‐keeper or net security provider in the manner in which the expression has so long been understood.

Thus, India’s role as the liberal democracy with the fastest‐rising contribution to global developmental assistance, as well as a net security provider in the coming decades, will be crucial. Along with Japan, it is the only exemplar of democratic and transparent traditions among the major powers of Asia. In years to come it is more likely to act in a manner that approximates the international obligations of actors such as the US. Yet it cannot do it alone, and its capacities are limited. The liberal world, including traditional powers that now increasingly looking inward, must guard against their efforts being crowded out by large, targeted and self‐serving assistance from non‐democratic political traditions to the north of India.

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Public goods, private provision The second development concerns the supply of public goods by large transnational corporations. This is not the first time the private sector has assisted in 'development', but the current scenario is unlike any other moment in history. As a result of both technology and the diminution of resources available to governments and public institutions, the early 21st century is seeing a creeping capture of the provision of public goods and services by business corporations and large transnational philanthropic entities.

The developing world’s public health agenda, for example, is being influenced by a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in some cases to a greater degree than by the World Health Organisation. The Trump Administration’s resolve to cut US funding for development programs that make allowance for abortion is being supplanted by large American charities and philanthropic institutions that see the right to choose as central to women’s health and empowerment. Such processes will curb the autonomy – and in some cases the excesses – of the state and of national governments seeking to achieve politically desirable goals.

The purpose here is not to make a value judgement; it is only to stress that the power landscape has become that much more diffused.

In the economic sphere too the concept of public goods and private provision – and of where the state, as the traditional provider of public goods, comes into this dynamic – has to be considered afresh. In most societies the internet and data services comprise a public utility being delivered by private corporations. Tesla and Uber (and Ola in India) are current and future providers of public transport networks without which cities will be unable to do business. But they are also networks over which the government – or even traditional political pressure groups such as trade unions – have only nominal control.

Even so, when there are interruptions to data services or public transport or changes to the nature of jobs and labour markets following disruptions by, for instance, app‐based intermediation, aggregation and similar technologies, the state will still remain answerable to its citizen.

Large industrial businesses and shared‐economy behemoths are conscious of their impact on both markets and communities. That is why suggestions of an income tax to be paid by robots have come from the founder of Microsoft, or why the chief executive of Tesla has urged governments to institute a universal basic income. The devolution of a 'public goods provider' role has in turn generated thinking on quasi‐government obligations among futuristic corporations.

In the next 20‐odd years, as creation of value and haemorrhaging of jobs carry on in parallel, as wealth generation and concerns over access to the essentials of life occur simultaneously, the 20th century thrust towards inequity mitigation will be subsumed by one centred on inequity management.

Conflicts of countries will take second place to conflicts of interests, both between and more so within societies and nation states. How will the international system address these conundrums?

Ghost in the machine AFGG 2018

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The third development is the uneasy but imminent transition in industrial production from human‐ intensive to machine‐driven ecosystems. The early 21st century is the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. For a world still coming to grips with the Third Industrial Revolution and the digital possibilities it continues to throw up, the dramatic change in the lifetime of a single human generation cannot even be fathomed.

In a sense we are all guessing, some intelligently and some wildly. This is the period that will see the maturing and possible commodification of a menu of new technologies – artificial intelligence and robotics, 3D manufacturing and custom‐made biological and pharmaceutical products, lethal autonomous weapons and driverless cars.

Take an example. The moral question of how a driverless car will decide between hitting a jaywalker and swerving and damaging the car has often been debated. The answer is both simple – save the human life – and complex: the modalities of saving that life will have social, economic and technological imperatives and implications. At which angle should the car swerve? Just enough to save the jaywalker or more than enough to save the jaywalker and maintain even more distance between car and human? That extra distance swerved will have costs. It could mean collision with an object such as an electric pole, a water hydrant, or a data distribution point. Who decides on what the driverless car must do and the angle at which it should swerve?

If the driverless car is in Dublin, is the decision taken by the Irish government, the car’s original code writers in California or a software programmer in Hyderabad to whom maintenance is outsourced?

Which jurisdiction's laws, regulations and normative principles will prevail? If different national jurisdictions have different regulations and fine print on something that should be so apparent – prioritising a human life – how will it affect insurance and investment decisions, including transnational ones, in relation to infrastructure that lies within damage‐causing distance of a driverless car while it is attempting to evade a jaywalker?

It is inevitable and entirely realistic that the sociology and economy of the machine will determine a specialised discipline in 21st century diplomacy and trade negotiations. Already the large cyber‐attack has displaced the nuclear‐tipped missile as the proximate threat. This is, however, only the beginning as the human‐machine equation is interrogated, and as predatory machines take jobs, rights and ultimately agency from humans.

It is also worth pondering whether automation will free up human resources for political violence.

Automation and the widespread use of machines, it is believed, will enhance productivity, but the linear assumption that human beings will use their free time for 'good' is historically inaccurate.

Industrial revolutions have brought with them great conflict. Just as technology will drive the creation of norms, it may also deepen old fault lines between states (and often within states, thought that is another debate).

Old Westphalia, new social contract Finally, the role of the state itself requires re‐examination. Technology is blurring national boundaries just at the time politics is defining them rigidly. Innovation and capital have impinged upon the domain 10

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of the state at a juncture when statism, nativism, identity and nationalism are in the midst of a comeback. They have emerged at their strongest after a quarter‐century of being pushed to the margins by globalisation and its attendant forces.

Of all the major international covenants and formational paradigms, the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) has proved the most resilient. At 270 years, it is much older than the UN or the Nuclear Non‐ Proliferation Treaty or the World Trade Organisation. Even so, it salience and the essential persuasiveness of its conflation of territoriality, ethnicity and religion continues to keep a significant proportion of global public opinion engaged.

Having said that, the early 21st century will entail an updating of the Westphalian charter and the state’s mandate. A new social contract between state and citizen is upon us; the old binary of left and right, of a socialist state and a liberal government, no longer holds. While democratic instincts have sharpened in the infancy of the 21st century, with technology, including social media, as a force multiplier, so have the average household’s economic and income anxieties. As such, while government is expected to intervene as a pillar of economic reassurance, there is a trenchant reaction to any state attempt to tailor cultural choices, undermine privacy or intrude into the home of the citizen.

This duality, where the government is acknowledged to have an economic role but where the state is expected to be almost libertarian when it comes to social freedoms (for natives and citizens at least), has no 20th century precedent. It calls on the state to be the guarantor of security and delivery, even if the state is not entirely responsible for delivery of public goods and services, and even if those public goods and services, not to speak of security threats to them, originate an ocean away, in the jurisdiction of an alien state.

The nation‐state will remain the fundamental unit of reckoning in the international system, but it will have to reckon, almost Brownian‐motion‐like, with other units and stakeholders in a fluid medium where disorder may have both permanence and legitimacy. It will also have to adapt to the truism that technology creates its own normative landscape and its own morality, and that this is the epoch of not just unprecedented production of technology but the almost monopolistic production of that technology by private and transnational corporations. Whether the state will be relegated to a secondary player on developmental concerns is an open question, but global governance institutions must be flexible enough to accommodate new and rising actors, state and non‐state.

In particular, these institutions must tackle the problem of technology‐driven determinism. Whether it is a Universal Basic Income or 'Robot Tax', social programs being promoted by the Silicon Valley's capitalist class script a new narrative of man, machine, and provision of pubic goods. These schemes are no longer beholden to the social contract between the state and citizen, and they provide no alternative to their unquestioned belief that technology will improve living standards across the board.

Global governance institutions, tempered by political realities as well as a rich history of successful and failed experiments at sustainable development, can intervene and lend new purpose to the provision of public goods by private actors.

Epilogue/Prologue AFGG 2018

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In March 2017, the finance ministers of the G20 countries met in Germany and were compelled to upgrade their 20th century hardware with a contemporary operating system. The G20, for the first time in the decade of the institution’s existence, acquiesced to the American call to drop promotion of free trade from its agenda. This was a marked shift for a collective with the explicit aim of rescuing and restating the imperatives of globalisation. Not for a long time, and not since the fall of the Soviet Union certainly, has the international system legitimised the divorce of domestic growth and prosperity from global commerce and economic integration.

In one telling moment, old and new notions of the Westphalian architecture, of the unwillingness of the West – the so‐called 'white world' – to continue to bear the burden of welfare of the global deprived, to free itself from colonial guilt that shaped the post‐war Western ethic and quest for universalisation of economic organising principles, developmental norms and humanitarian ideals, were all interrogated. In one telling moment, a Hobbesian existence was rationalised and there a shrugging off of the inevitability of a Lockean end state. In one telling moment, the future arrived to shake history by the scruff of its neck.

Source: Saran, S and Malik, A. (2017). Currents of disruption: Not just a new world order, but a new world. Available: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the‐interpreter/currents‐disruption‐not‐just‐new‐ world‐order‐new‐world. Last accessed 10th Dec 2017.

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The Future of Liberalism Making sense of 2016

Liberals lost most of the arguments this year. They should not feel defeated so much as invigorated FOR a certain kind of liberal, 2016 stands as a rebuke. If you believe, as The Economist does, in open economies and open societies, where the free exchange of goods, capital, people and ideas is encouraged and where universal freedoms are protected from state abuse by the rule of law, then this has been a year of setbacks. Not just over Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, but also the tragedy of Syria, abandoned to its suffering, and widespread support—in Hungary, Poland and beyond—for “illiberal democracy”. As globalisation has become a slur, nationalism, and even authoritarianism, have flourished. In Turkey relief at the failure of a coup was overtaken by savage (and popular) reprisals. In the Philippines voters chose a president who not only deployed death squads but bragged about pulling the trigger. All the while Russia, which hacked Western democracy, and China, which just last week set out to taunt America by seizing one of its maritime drones, insist liberalism is merely a cover for Western expansion.

Faced with this litany, many liberals (of the free‐market sort) have lost their nerve. Some have written epitaphs for the liberal order and issued warnings about the threat to democracy. Others argue that, with a timid tweak to immigration law or an extra tariff, life will simply return to normal. That is not good enough. The bitter harvest of 2016 has not suddenly destroyed liberalism’s claim to be the best way to confer dignity and bring about prosperity and equity. Rather than ducking the struggle of ideas, liberals should relish it.

Mill wheels In the past quarter‐century liberalism has had it too easy. Its dominance following Soviet communism’s collapse decayed into laziness and complacency. Amid growing inequality, society’s winners told themselves that they lived in a meritocracy—and that their success was therefore deserved. The experts recruited to help run large parts of the economy marvelled at their own brilliance. But ordinary people often saw wealth as a cover for privilege and expertise as disguised self‐interest.

After so long in charge, liberals, of all people, should have seen the backlash coming. As a set of beliefs that emerged at the start of the 19th century to oppose both the despotism of absolute monarchy and the terror of revolution, liberalism warns that uninterrupted power corrupts. Privilege becomes self‐perpetuating. Consensus stifles creativity and initiative. In an ever‐shifting world, dispute and argument are not just inevitable; they are welcome because they lead to renewal.

What is more, liberals have something to offer societies struggling with change. In the 19th century, as today, old ways were being upended by relentless technological, economic, social and political forces. People yearned for order. The illiberal solution was to install someone with sufficient power to dictate what was best—by slowing change if they were conservative, or smashing authority if they were revolutionary. You can hear echoes of that in calls to “take back control”, as well as in the mouths of autocrats who, summoning an angry nationalism, promise to hold back the cosmopolitan tide.

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Liberals came up with a different answer. Rather than being concentrated, power should be dispersed, using the rule of law, political parties and competitive markets. Rather than putting citizens at the service of a mighty, protecting state, liberalism sees individuals as uniquely able to choose what is best for themselves. Rather than running the world through warfare and strife, countries should embrace trade and treaties.

Such ideas have imprinted themselves on the West—and, despite Mr Trump’s flirtation with protectionism, they will probably endure. But only if liberalism can deal with its other problem: the loss of faith in progress. Liberals believe that change is welcome because, on the whole, it is for the better. Sure enough, they can point to how global poverty, life expectancy, opportunity and peace are all improving, even allowing for strife in the Middle East. Indeed, for most people on Earth there has never been a better time to be alive.

Large parts of the West, however, do not see it that way. For them, progress happens mainly to other people. Wealth does not spread itself, new technologies destroy jobs that never come back, an underclass is beyond help or redemption, and other cultures pose a threat—sometimes a violent one.

If it is to thrive, liberalism must have an answer for the pessimists, too. Yet, during those decades in power, liberals’ solutions have been underwhelming. In the 19th century liberal reformers met change with universal education, a vast programme of public works and the first employment rights. Later, citizens got the vote, health care and a safety net. After the Second World War, America built a global liberal order, using bodies such as the UN and the IMF to give form to its vision.

Nothing half so ambitious is coming from the West today. That must change. Liberals must explore the avenues that technology and social needs will open up. Power could be devolved from the state to cities, which act as laboratories for fresh policies. Politics might escape sterile partisanship using new forms of local democracy. The labyrinth of taxation and regulation could be rebuilt rationally.

Society could transform education and work so that “college” is something you return to over several careers in brand new industries. The possibilities are as yet unimagined, but a liberal system, in which individual creativity, preferences and enterprise have full expression, is more likely to seize them than any other.

The dream of reason After 2016, is that dream still possible? Some perspective is in order. This newspaper believes that Brexit and a Trump presidency are likely to prove costly and harmful. We are worried about today’s mix of nationalism, corporatism and popular discontent. However, 2016 also represented a demand for change. Never forget liberals’ capacity for reinvention. Do not underestimate the scope for people, including even a Trump administration and post‐Brexit Britain, to think and innovate their way out of trouble. The task is to harness that restless urge, while defending the tolerance and open‐mindedness that are the foundation stones of a decent, liberal world.

Source: The Economist. (2016). The future of liberalism How to make sense of 2016. Available: https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21712128‐liberals‐lost‐most‐arguments‐year‐they‐ should‐not‐feel‐defeated‐so‐much. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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The New World Order ‐ The Rise Of Post‐ Liberalism And What It Means For 2017 Aritha Wickramasinghe, 2017

On 8 November 2016, the world underwent a political shift of seismic proportions. Donald J Trump ‐ the abrasive, racist, divisive and misogynistic businessman without any political experience was elected through a flawed electoral process as the leader of the free world. Having received 3 million fewer votes than his main opponent Hillary Clinton and with mounting evidence of Russian cyber interference in his favour, Trump joins a growing list of political strongmen that are governing the world’s major powers and fracturing the established world order.

When British Prime Minister Theresa May, announced in her speech at the Conservative Party convention in October 2016 that, “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”, she was reaffirming the ideals of the emerging post‐liberal project ‐ dismantling the 1945 vision of a united, interdependent and peaceful world of global citizens. World War II saw some of the worst excesses of right wing divisive politics spill across the planet. Ultra nationalism, patriotism and fascism emerging from the world’s leading powers led to the deaths of over 80 million people (3 per cent of the world’s population at the time). By 1945, Japan was a scorched atomic wasteland and Europe was a barren graveyard with over 60 million refugees. It was the worst refugee crisis in human history and incomparable in magnitude to the 1 million Syrian refugees that triggered panic across Europe in 2015.

The horrors of World War II prompted the new political class and civil society emerging from its ashes to set about establishing a system that would prevent a war on the scale experienced happening again.

Creation of such an order required a thorough understanding of the structural deficiencies in the existing world order and immense foresight to create a new system that would prevent its repetition.

Prior to the beginning of World War II, the world had experienced a brief spluttering of liberal democracy and world peace through the League of Nations. Germany’s Weimer Republic, born out of the peace treaties of World War I, was one of the most liberal democracies on the planet but, it still failed to prevent the rise of Adolph Hitler as its Chancellor ‐ ultimately taking Europe and the world back to war.

History has shown us and is showing us again, that liberal democracy on its own is not a recipe for preventing mass human rights atrocities and global conflict. What is also required is a strong global framework of institutions that value and promote universal human rights, rule of law, liberal democracy, trade and political unions. For the last 70 years, the world has painstakingly built these institutions in the face of much resistance from warmongers, cartels and fascist demagogues wrapped under the banners of patriotism and nationalism. Through the establishment of the United Nations, World Trade Organisation, International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, European Union, ASEAN, MERCUSOR and even the highly dysfunctional SAARC, mankind has endured its most peaceful period in history and with that, the most rapid growth of wealth, knowledge and AFGG 2018

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technological advancement humanity has ever experienced. Today the average human being can expect to live 25 years longer than they would have in 1945, is 33 times wealthier and is almost twice as literate. Humanity has far better access to education, healthcare and information than ever before.

The exponential growth in technological advancement during the post‐war period has resulted in deep space exploration, 7.6 billion mobile phone connections and 40 per cent of the world being connected through the Internet. The world is without any doubt, far better than it has ever been.

Peace is inevitably a good thing. However, like all good things, too much of it can go unappreciated as it becomes abundant. In economics this is referred to as the law of “diminishing marginal utility”. If we see peace as the product, “utility” is the satisfaction or benefit derived by people enjoying it.

Marginal utility becomes the change (either an increase or decrease) in the levels of satisfaction by people enjoying peace. The laws of diminishing marginal utility means that, the initial period of peace yields far more satisfaction than the periods that follow it, with a continued reduction in satisfaction until you are left with a populace that is dissatisfied.

What the world witnessed in 2016 was probably the result of a rapidly diminished marginal utility of peace and what appears to be the birth of the post‐liberal order. Today, from Manila to Moscow and Cairo to Washington DC ‐ the strongman has risen back to power. The backlash against political unions through the Brexit vote; the rise of right wing, anti EU movements in Europe; the putsch against liberal ideology and its institutions through Trump’s election; and Putin’s increasingly expansionist and anti‐ Western rhetoric made 2016 look more like 1936 again. An increasingly dissatisfied and disaffected electorate is seeking apparent salvation through the new demagogues of the 21st Century. The question remains whether these new saviours can actually deliver on their promises of wiping out inequality and making their countries “great again”.

History has a knack for repeating itself and we have been here before. Whether the world can afford another repetition of the period between 1939‐1945 is probably an answer that none of us want to seek. But before we reach the twilight zone again, we must use every peaceful tool available to ensure that the world painstakingly built over the last seven decades is not dismantled by the egos at the helm in 2017. The post‐World War II institutions are not without their faults and failings. However, resolving their failures must not be through overthrowing them but by correcting and strengthening them. A truly peaceful world can never be achieved unless we create a planet where the rule of law rises above the strength of individual nations and the sovereignty of the people is above the egos of their leaders. That world is still within our grasps. But a blink too long and we may lose it forever.

Source: Wickramasinghe, A. (2017). The New World Order ‐ The Rise Of Post‐Liberalism And What It Means For 2017. Available: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aritha‐wickramasinghe/the‐new‐ world‐order‐the‐r_b_13956412.html. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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The Rise of Illiberal Democracy Fareed Zakaria, 1997 THE NEXT WAVE The American diplomat Richard Holbrooke pondered a problem on the eve of the September 1996 elections in Bosnia, which were meant to restore civic life to that ravaged country. "Suppose the election was declared free and fair," he said, and those elected are "racists, fascists, separatists, who are publicly opposed to [peace and reintegration]. That is the dilemma." Indeed it is, not just in the former Yugoslavia, but increasingly around the world. Democratically elected regimes, often ones that have been reelected or reaffirmed through referenda, are routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights and freedoms. From Peru to the Palestinian Authority, from Sierra Leone to Slovakia, from Pakistan to the Philippines, we see the rise of a disturbing phenomenon in international life ‐‐ illiberal democracy.

It has been difficult to recognize this problem because for almost a century in the West, democracy has meant liberal democracy ‐‐ a political system marked not only by free and fair elections, but also by the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property. In fact, this latter bundle of freedoms ‐‐ what might be termed constitutional liberalism ‐‐ is theoretically different and historically distinct from democracy. As the political scientist Philippe Schmitter has pointed out, "Liberalism, either as a conception of political liberty, or as a doctrine about economic policy, may have coincided with the rise of democracy. But it has never been immutably or unambiguously linked to its practice." Today the two strands of liberal democracy, interwoven in the Western political fabric, are coming apart in the rest of the world. Democracy is flourishing; constitutional liberalism is not.

Today, 118 of the world's 193 countries are democratic, encompassing a majority of its people (54.8 percent, to be exact), a vast increase from even a decade ago. In this season of victory, one might have expected Western statesmen and intellectuals to go one further than E. M. Forster and give a rousing three cheers for democracy. Instead there is a growing unease at the rapid spread of multiparty elections across south‐central Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, perhaps because of what happens after the elections. Popular leaders like Russia's Boris Yeltsin and Argentina's Carlos Menem bypass their parliaments and rule by presidential decree, eroding basic constitutional practices. The Iranian parliament ‐‐ elected more freely than most in the Middle East ‐‐ imposes harsh restrictions on speech, assembly, and even dress, diminishing that country's already meager supply of liberty.

Ethiopia's elected government turns its security forces on journalists and political opponents, doing permanent damage to human rights (as well as human beings).

Naturally there is a spectrum of illiberal democracy, ranging from modest offenders like Argentina to near‐tyrannies like Kazakstan and Belarus, with countries like Romania and Bangladesh in between.

Along much of the spectrum, elections are rarely as free and fair as in the West today, but they do reflect the reality of popular participation in politics and support for those elected. And the examples are not isolated or atypical. Freedom House's 1996‐97 survey, Freedom in the World, has separate rankings for political liberties and civil liberties, which correspond roughly with democracy and constitutional liberalism, respectively. Of the countries that lie between confirmed dictatorship and AFGG 2018

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consolidated democracy, 50 percent do better on political liberties than on civil ones. In other words, half of the "democratizing" countries in the world today are illiberal democracies.

Illiberal democracy is a growth industry. Seven years ago only 22 percent of democratizing countries could have been so categorized; five years ago that figure had risen to 35 percent. And to date few illiberal democracies have matured into liberal democracies; if anything, they are moving toward heightened illiberalism. Far from being a temporary or transitional stage, it appears that many countries are settling into a form of government that mixes a substantial degree of democracy with a substantial degree of illiberalism. Just as nations across the world have become comfortable with many variations of capitalism, they could well adopt and sustain varied forms of democracy. Western liberal democracy might prove to be not the final destination on the democratic road, but just one of many possible exits.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY From the time of Herodotus democracy has meant, first and foremost, the rule of the people. This view of democracy as a process of selecting governments, articulated by scholars ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Joseph Schumpeter to Robert Dahl, is now widely used by social scientists. In The Third Wave, Samuel P. Huntington explains why: Elections, open, free and fair, are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non.

Governments produced by elections may be inefficient, corrupt, shortsighted, irresponsible, dominated by special interests, and incapable of adopting policies demanded by the public good. These qualities make such governments undesirable but they do not make them undemocratic. Democracy is one public virtue, not the only one, and the relation of democracy to other public virtues and vices can only be understood if democracy is clearly distinguished from the other characteristics of political systems.

This definition also accords with the commonsense view of the term. If a country holds competitive, multiparty elections, we call it democratic. When public participation in politics is increased, for example through the enfranchisement of women, it is seen as more democratic. Of course elections must be open and fair, and this requires some protections for freedom of speech and assembly. But to go beyond this minimalist definition and label a country democratic only if it guarantees a comprehensive catalog of social, political, economic, and religious rights turns the word democracy into a badge of honor rather than a descriptive category. After all, Sweden has an economic system that many argue curtails individual property rights, France until recently had a state monopoly on television, and England has an established religion. But they are all clearly and identifiably democracies. To have democracy mean, subjectively, "a good government" renders it analytically useless.

Constitutional liberalism, on the other hand, is not about the procedures for selecting government, but rather government's goals. It refers to the tradition, deep in Western history, that seeks to protect an individual's autonomy and dignity against coercion, whatever the source ‐‐ state, church, or society.

The term marries two closely connected ideas. It is liberal because it draws on the philosophical strain, beginning with the Greeks, that emphasizes individual liberty.< It is constitutional because it rests on the tradition, beginning with the Romans, of the rule of law. Constitutional liberalism developed in Western Europe and the United States as a defense of the individual's right to life and property, and 18

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freedom of religion and speech. To secure these rights, it emphasized checks on the power of each branch of government, equality under the law, impartial courts and tribunals, and separation of church and state. Its canonical figures include the poet John Milton, the jurist William Blackstone, statesmen such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Baron de Montesquieu, John Stuart Mill, and Isaiah Berlin. In almost all of its variants, constitutional liberalism argues that human beings have certain natural (or "inalienable") rights and that governments must accept a basic law, limiting its own powers, that secures them. Thus in 1215 at Runnymede, England's barons forced the king to abide by the settled and customary law of the land. In the American colonies these laws were made explicit, and in 1638 the town of Hartford adopted the first written constitution in modern history. In the 1970s, Western nations codified standards of behavior for regimes across the globe. The Magna Carta, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the American Constitution, and the Helsinki Final Act are all expressions of constitutional liberalism.

THE ROAD TO LIBERAL DEMOCRACY Since 1945 Western governments have, for the most part, embodied both democracy and constitutional liberalism. Thus it is difficult to imagine the two apart, in the form of either illiberal democracy or liberal autocracy. In fact both have existed in the past and persist in the present. Until the twentieth century, most countries in Western Europe were liberal autocracies or, at best, semi‐ democracies. The franchise was tightly restricted, and elected legislatures had little power. In 1830 Great Britain, in some ways the most democratic European nation, allowed barely 2 percent of its population to vote for one house of Parliament; that figure rose to 7 percent after 1867 and reached around 40 percent in the 1880s. Only in the late 1940s did most Western countries become full‐ fledged democracies, with universal adult suffrage. But one hundred years earlier, by the late 1840s, most of them had adopted important aspects of constitutional liberalism ‐‐ the rule of law, private property rights, and increasingly, separated powers and free speech and assembly. For much of modern history, what characterized governments in Europe and North America, and differentiated them from those around the world, was not democracy but constitutional liberalism. The "Western model" is best symbolized not by the mass plebiscite but the impartial judge.

The recent history of East Asia follows the Western itinerary. After brief flirtations with democracy after World War II, most East Asian regimes turned authoritarian. Over time they moved from autocracy to liberalizing autocracy, and, in some cases, toward liberalizing semi‐democracy. Most of the regimes in East Asia remain only semi‐democratic, with patriarchs or one‐party systems that make their elections ratifications of power rather than genuine contests. But these regimes have accorded their citizens a widening sphere of economic, civil, religious, and limited political rights. As in the West, liberalization in East Asia has included economic liberalization, which is crucial in promoting both growth and liberal democracy. Historically, the factors most closely associated with full‐fledged liberal democracies are capitalism, a bourgeoisie, and a high per capita GNP. Today's East Asian governments are a mix of democracy, liberalism, capitalism, oligarchy, and corruption ‐‐ much like Western governments circa 1900.

Constitutional liberalism has led to democracy, but democracy does not seem to bring constitutional liberalism. In contrast to the Western and East Asian paths, during the last two decades in Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia, dictatorships with little background in constitutional liberalism have given way to democracy. The results are not encouraging. In the western hemisphere, with elections AFGG 2018

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having been held in every country except Cuba, a 1993 study by the scholar Larry Diamond determined that 10 of the 22 principal Latin American countries "have levels of human rights abuse that are incompatible with the consolidation of [liberal] democracy." In Africa, democratization has been extraordinarily rapid. Within six months in 1990 much of Francophone Africa lifted its ban on multiparty politics. Yet although elections have been held in most of the 45 sub‐Saharan states since 1991 (18 in 1996 alone), there have been setbacks for freedom in many countries. One of Africa's most careful observers, Michael Chege, surveyed the wave of democratization and drew the lesson that the continent had "overemphasized multiparty elections . . . and correspondingly neglected the basic tenets of liberal governance." In Central Asia, elections, even when reasonably free, as in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakstan, have resulted in strong executives, weak legislatures and judiciaries, and few civil and economic liberties. In the Islamic world, from the Palestinian Authority to Iran to Pakistan, democratization has led to an increasing role for theocratic politics, eroding long‐standing traditions of secularism and tolerance. In many parts of that world, such as Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and some of the Gulf States, were elections to be held tomorrow, the resulting regimes would almost certainly be more illiberal than the ones now in place.

Many of the countries of Central Europe, on the other hand, have moved successfully from communism to liberal democracy, having gone through the same phase of liberalization without democracy as other European countries did during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Austro‐ Hungarian empire, to which most belonged, was a classic liberal autocracy. Even outside Europe, the political scientist Myron Weiner detected a striking connection between a constitutional past and a liberal democratic present. He pointed out that, as of 1983, "every single country in the Third World that emerged from colonial rule since the Second World War with a population of at least one million (and almost all the smaller colonies as well) with a continuous democratic experience is a former British colony." British rule meant not democracy ‐‐ colonialism is by definition undemocratic ‐‐ but constitutional liberalism. Britain's legacy of law and administration has proved more beneficial than France's policy of enfranchising some of its colonial populations.

While liberal autocracies may have existed in the past, can one imagine them today? Until recently, a small but powerful example flourished off the Asian mainland ‐‐ Hong Kong. For 156 years, until July 1, 1997, Hong Kong was ruled by the British Crown through an appointed governor general. Until 1991 it had never held a meaningful election, but its government epitomized constitutional liberalism, protecting its citizens' basic rights and administering a fair court system and bureaucracy. A September 8, 1997, editorial on the island's future in The Washington Post was titled ominously, "Undoing Hong Kong's Democracy." Actually, Hong Kong has precious little democracy to undo; what it has is a framework of rights and laws. Small islands may not hold much practical significance in today's world, but they do help one weigh the relative value of democracy and constitutional liberalism. Consider, for example, the question of where you would rather live, Haiti, an illiberal democracy, or Antigua, a liberal semi‐democracy. Your choice would probably relate not to the weather, which is pleasant in both, but to the political climate, which is not.

ABSOLUTE SOVEREIGNTY John Stuart Mill opened his classic On Liberty by noting that as countries became democratic, people tended to believe that "too much importance had been attached to the limitation of power itself. That . . . was a response against rulers whose interests were opposed to those of the people." Once the people were themselves in charge, caution was unnecessary. "The nation did not need to be protected 20

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against its own will." As if confirming Mill's fears, consider the words of Alexandr Lukashenko after being elected president of Belarus with an overwhelming majority in a free election in 1994, when asked about limiting his powers: "There will be no dictatorship. I am of the people, and I am going to be for the people."

The tension between constitutional liberalism and democracy centers on the scope of governmental authority. Constitutional liberalism is about the limitation of power, democracy about its accumulation and use. For this reason, many eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century liberals saw in democracy a force that could undermine liberty. James Madison explained in The Federalist that "the danger of oppression" in a democracy came from "the majority of the community." Tocqueville warned of the "tyranny of the majority," writing, "The very essence of democratic government consists in the absolute sovereignty of the majority."

The tendency for a democratic government to believe it has absolute sovereignty (that is, power) can result in the centralization of authority, often by extraconstitutional means and with grim results. Over the last decade, elected governments claiming to represent the people have steadily encroached on the powers and rights of other elements in society, a usurpation that is both horizontal (from other branches of the national government) and vertical (from regional and local authorities as well as private businesses and other nongovernmental groups). Lukashenko and Peru's Alberto Fujimori are only the worst examples of this practice. (While Fujimori's actions ‐‐ disbanding the legislature and suspending the constitution, among others ‐‐ make it difficult to call his regime democratic, it is worth noting that he won two elections and was extremely popular until recently.) Even a bona fide reformer like Carlos Menem has passed close to 300 presidential decrees in his eight years in office, about three times as many as all previous Argentinean presidents put together, going back to 1853. Kyrgyzstan's Askar Akayev, elected with 60 percent of the vote, proposed enhancing his powers in a referendum that passed easily in 1996. His new powers include appointing all top officials except the prime minister, although he can dissolve parliament if it turns down three of his nominees for the latter post.

Horizontal usurpation, usually by presidents, is more obvious, but vertical usurpation is more common. Over the last three decades, the Indian government has routinely disbanded state legislatures on flimsy grounds, placing regions under New Delhi's direct rule. In a less dramatic but typical move, the elected government of the Central African Republic recently ended the long‐ standing independence of its university system, making it part of the central state apparatus.

Usurpation is particularly widespread in Latin America and the states of the former Soviet Union, perhaps because both regions mostly have presidencies. These systems tend to produce strong leaders who believe that they speak for the people ‐‐ even when they have been elected by no more than a plurality. (As Juan Linz points out, Salvador Allende was elected to the Chilean presidency in 1970 with only 36 percent of the vote. In similar circumstances, a prime minister would have had to share power in a coalition government.) Presidents appoint cabinets of cronies, rather than senior party figures, maintaining few internal checks on their power. And when their views conflict with those of the legislature, or even the courts, presidents tend to "go to the nation," bypassing the dreary tasks of bargaining and coalition‐building. While scholars debate the merits of presidential versus parliamentary forms of government, usurpation can occur under either, absent well‐developed alternate centers of power such as strong legislatures, courts, political parties, regional governments, and independent universities and media. Latin America actually combines presidential systems with AFGG 2018

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proportional representation, producing populist leaders and multiple parties ‐‐ an unstable combination.

Many Western governments and scholars have encouraged the creation of strong and centralized states in the Third World. Leaders in these countries have argued that they need the authority to break down feudalism, split entrenched coalitions, override vested interests, and bring order to chaotic societies. But this confuses the need for a legitimate government with that for a powerful one.

Governments that are seen as legitimate can usually maintain order and pursue tough policies, albeit slowly, by building coalitions. After all, few claim that governments in developing countries should not have adequate police powers; the trouble comes from all the other political, social, and economic powers that they accumulate. In crises like civil wars, constitutional governments might not be able to rule effectively, but the alternative ‐‐ states with vast security apparatuses that suspend constitutional rights ‐‐ has usually produced neither order nor good government. More often, such states have become predatory, maintaining some order but also arresting opponents, muzzling dissent, nationalizing industries, and confiscating property. While anarchy has its dangers, the greatest threats to human liberty and happiness in this century have been caused not by disorder but by brutally strong, centralized states, like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Maoist China. The Third World is littered with the bloody handiwork of strong states.

Historically, unchecked centralization has been the enemy of liberal democracy. As political participation increased in Europe over the nineteenth century, it was accommodated smoothly in countries such as England and Sweden, where medieval assemblies, local governments, and regional councils had remained strong. Countries like France and Prussia, on the other hand, where the monarchy had effectively centralized power (both horizontally and vertically), often ended up illiberal and undemocratic. It is not a coincidence that in twentieth‐century Spain, the beachhead of liberalism lay in Catalonia, for centuries a doggedly independent and autonomous region. In America, the presence of a rich variety of institutions ‐‐ state, local, and private ‐‐ made it much easier to accommodate the rapid and large extensions in suffrage that took place in the early nineteenth century. Arthur Schlesinger Sr. has documented how, during America's first 50 years, virtually every state, interest group and faction tried to weaken and even break up the federal government. More recently, India's semi‐liberal democracy has survived because of, not despite, its strong regions and varied languages, cultures, and even castes. The point is logical, even tautological: pluralism in the past helps ensure political pluralism in the present.

Fifty years ago, politicians in the developing world wanted extraordinary powers to implement then‐ fashionable economic doctrines, like nationalization of industries. Today their successors want similar powers to privatize those very industries. Menem's justification for his methods is that they are desperately needed to enact tough economic reforms. Similar arguments are made by Abdal Bucarem of Ecuador and by Fujimori. Lending institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have been sympathetic to these pleas, and the bond market has been positively exuberant. But except in emergencies like war, illiberal means are in the long run incompatible with liberal ends. Constitutional government is in fact the key to a successful economic reform policy. The experience of East Asia and Central Europe suggests that when regimes ‐‐ whether authoritarian, as in East Asia, or liberal democratic, as in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic ‐‐ protect individual rights, including those of property and contract, and create a framework of law and administration, capitalism and growth will follow. In a recent speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in 22

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Washington, explaining what it takes for capitalism to flourish, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan concluded that, "The guiding mechanism of a free market economy. . . is a bill of rights, enforced by an impartial judiciary" Finally, and perhaps more important, power accumulated to do good can be used subsequently to do ill. When Fujimori disbanded parliament, his approval ratings shot up to their highest ever. But recent opinion polls suggest that most of those who once approved of his actions now wish he were more constrained. In 1993 Boris Yeltsin famously (and literally) attacked the Russian parliament, prompted by parliament's own unconstitutional acts. He then suspended the constitutional court, dismantled the system of local governments, and fired several provincial governors. From the war in Chechnya to his economic programs, Yeltsin has displayed a routine lack of concern for constitutional procedures and limits. He may well be a liberal democrat at heart, but Yeltsin's actions have created a Russian super‐presidency. We can only hope his successor will not abuse it.

For centuries Western intellectuals have had a tendency to view constitutional liberalism as a quaint exercise in rule‐making, mere formalism that should take a back seat to battling larger evils in society.

The most eloquent counterpoint to this view remains an exchange in Robert Bolt's play A Man For All Seasons. The fiery young William Roper, who yearns to battle evil, is exasperated by Sir Thomas More's devotion to the law. More gently defends himself.

More: What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I'd cut every law in England to do that!

More: And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you ‐‐ where would you hide Roper, the laws all being flat?

ETHNIC CONFLICT AND WAR On December 8, 1996, Jack Lang made a dramatic dash to Belgrade. The French celebrity politician, formerly minister of culture, had been inspired by the student demonstrations involving tens of thousands against Slobodan Milosevic, a man Lang and many Western intellectuals held responsible for the war in the Balkans. Lang wanted to lend his moral support to the Yugoslav opposition. The leaders of the movement received him in their offices ‐‐ the philosophy department ‐‐ only to boot him out, declare him "an enemy of the Serbs," and order him to leave the country. It turned out that the students opposed Milosevic not for starting the war, but for failing to win it.

Lang's embarrassment highlights two common, and often mistaken, assumptions ‐‐ that the forces of democracy are the forces of ethnic harmony and of peace. Neither is necessarily true. Mature liberal democracies can usually accommodate ethnic divisions without violence or terror and live in peace with other liberal democracies. But without a background in constitutional liberalism, the introduction of democracy in divided societies has actually fomented nationalism, ethnic conflict, and even war.

The spate of elections held immediately after the collapse of communism were won in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia by nationalist separatists and resulted in the breakup of those countries. This was not in and of itself bad, since those countries had been bound together by force. But the rapid secessions, without guarantees, institutions, or political power for the many minorities living within the new countries, have caused spirals of rebellion, repression, and, in places like Bosnia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, war.

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Elections require that politicians compete for peoples' votes. In societies without strong traditions of multiethnic groups or assimilation, it is easiest to organize support along racial, ethnic, or religious lines. Once an ethnic group is in power, it tends to exclude other ethnic groups. Compromise seems impossible; one can bargain on material issues like housing, hospitals, and handouts, but how does one split the difference on a national religion? Political competition that is so divisive can rapidly degenerate into violence. Opposition movements, armed rebellions, and coups in Africa have often been directed against ethnically based regimes, many of which came to power through elections.

Surveying the breakdown of African and Asian democracies in the 1960s, two scholars concluded that democracy "is simply not viable in an environment of intense ethnic preferences." Recent studies, particularly of Africa and Central Asia, have confirmed this pessimism. A distinguished expert on ethnic conflict, Donald Horowitz, concluded, "In the face of this rather dismal account . . . of the concrete failures of democracy in divided societies . . . one is tempted to throw up one's hands. What is the point of holding elections if all they do in the end is to substitute a Bemba‐dominated regime for a Nyanja regime in Zambia, the two equally narrow, or a southern regime for a northern one in Benin, neither incorporating the other half of the state?"

Over the past decade, one of the most spirited debates among scholars of international relations concerns the "democratic peace" ‐‐ the assertion that no two modern democracies have gone to war with each other. The debate raises interesting substantive questions (does the American Civil War count? do nuclear weapons better explain the peace?) and even the statistical findings have raised interesting dissents. (As the scholar David Spiro points out, given the small number of both democracies and wars over the last two hundred years, sheer chance might explain the absence of war between democracies. No member of his family has ever won the lottery, yet few offer explanations for this impressive correlation.) But even if the statistics are correct, what explains them?

Kant, the original proponent of the democratic peace, contended that in democracies, those who pay for wars ‐‐ that is, the public ‐‐ make the decisions, so they are understandably cautious. But that claim suggests that democracies are more pacific than other states. Actually they are more warlike, going to war more often and with greater intensity than most states. It is only with other democracies that the peace holds.

When divining the cause behind this correlation, one thing becomes clear: the democratic peace is actually the liberal peace. Writing in the eighteenth century, Kant believed that democracies were tyrannical, and he specifically excluded them from his conception of "republican" governments, which lived in a zone of peace. Republicanism, for Kant, meant a separation of powers, checks and balances, the rule of law, protection of individual rights, and some level of representation in government (though nothing close to universal suffrage). Kant's other explanations for the "perpetual peace" between republics are all closely linked to their constitutional and liberal character: a mutual respect for the rights of each other's citizens, a system of checks and balances assuring that no single leader can drag his country into war, and classical liberal economic policies ‐‐ most importantly, free trade ‐‐ which create an interdependence that makes war costly and cooperation useful. Michael Doyle, the leading scholar on the subject, confirms in his 1997 book Ways of War and Peace that without constitutional liberalism, democracy itself has no peace‐inducing qualities: Kant distrusted unfettered, democratic majoritarianism, and his argument offers no support for a claim that all participatory polities ‐‐ democracies ‐‐ should be peaceful, either in general or between fellow democracies. Many participatory polities have been non‐liberal. For two thousand years before 24

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the modern age, popular rule was widely associated with aggressiveness (by Thucydides) or imperial success (by Machiavelli) . . . The decisive preference of [the] median voter might well include "ethnic cleansing" against other democratic polities.

The distinction between liberal and illiberal democracies sheds light on another striking statistical correlation. Political scientists Jack Snyder and Edward Mansfield contend, using an impressive data set, that over the last 200 years democratizing states went to war significantly more often than either stable autocracies or liberal democracies. In countries not grounded in constitutional liberalism, the rise of democracy often brings with it hyper‐nationalism and war‐mongering. When the political system is opened up, diverse groups with incompatible interests gain access to power and press their demands. Political and military leaders, who are often embattled remnants of the old authoritarian order, realize that to succeed that they must rally the masses behind a national cause. The result is invariably aggressive rhetoric and policies, which often drag countries into confrontation and war.

Noteworthy examples range from Napoleon III's France, Wilhelmine Germany, and Taisho Japan to those in today's newspapers, like Armenia and Azerbaijan and Milosevic's Serbia. The democratic peace, it turns out, has little to do with democracy.

THE AMERICAN PATH An American scholar recently traveled to Kazakstan on a U.S. government‐sponsored mission to help the new parliament draft its electoral laws. His counterpart, a senior member of the Kazak parliament, brushed aside the many options the American expert was outlining, saying emphatically, "We want our parliament to be just like your Congress." The American was horrified, recalling, "I tried to say something other than the three words that had immediately come screaming into my mind: 'No you don't!'" This view is not unusual. Americans in the democracy business tend to see their own system as an unwieldy contraption that no other country should put up with. In fact, the adoption of some aspects of the American constitutional framework could ameliorate many of the problems associated with illiberal democracy. The philosophy behind the U.S. Constitution, a fear of accumulated power, is as relevant today as it was in 1789. Kazakstan, as it happens, would be particularly well‐served by a strong parliament ‐‐ like the American Congress ‐‐ to check the insatiable appetite of its president.

It is odd that the United States is so often the advocate of elections and plebiscitary democracy abroad. What is distinctive about the American system is not how democratic it is but rather how undemocratic it is, placing as it does multiple constraints on electoral majorities. Of its three branches of government, one ‐‐ arguably paramount ‐‐ is headed by nine unelected men and women with life tenure. Its Senate is the most unrepresentative upper house in the world, with the lone exception of the House of Lords, which is powerless. (Every state sends two senators to Washington regardless of its population ‐‐ California's 30 million people have as many votes in the Senate as Arizona's 3.7 million ‐‐ which means that senators representing about 16 percent of the country can block any proposed law.) Similarly, in legislatures all over the United States, what is striking is not the power of majorities but that of minorities. To further check national power, state and local governments are strong and fiercely battle every federal intrusion onto their turf. Private businesses and other nongovernmental groups, what Tocqueville called intermediate associations, make up another stratum within society.

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based on the French Revolution. The French model places its faith in the goodness of human beings.

Once the people are the source of power, it should be unlimited so that they can create a just society.

(The French revolution, as Lord Acton observed, is not about the limitation of sovereign power but the abrogation of all intermediate powers that get in its way.) Most non‐Western countries have embraced the French model ‐‐ not least because political elites like the prospect of empowering the state, since that means empowering themselves ‐‐ and most have descended into bouts of chaos, tyranny, or both. This should have come as no surprise. After all, since its revolution France itself has run through two monarchies, two empires, one proto‐fascist dictatorship, and five republics.

Of course cultures vary, and different societies will require different frameworks of government. This is not a plea for the wholesale adoption of the American way but rather for a more variegated conception of liberal democracy, one that emphasizes both parts of that phrase. Before new policies can be adopted, there lies an intellectual task of recovering the constitutional liberal tradition, central to the Western experience and to the development of good government throughout the world.

Political progress in Western history has been the result of a growing recognition over the centuries that, as the Declaration of Independence puts it, human beings have "certain inalienable rights" and that "it is to secure these rights that governments are instituted." If a democracy does not preserve liberty and law, that it is a democracy is a small consolation.

LIBERALIZING FOREIGN POLICY A proper appreciation of constitutional liberalism has a variety of implications for American foreign policy. First, it suggests a certain humility. While it is easy to impose elections on a country, it is more difficult to push constitutional liberalism on a society. The process of genuine liberalization and democratization is gradual and long‐term, in which an election is only one step. Without appropriate preparation, it might even be a false step. Recognizing this, governments and nongovernmental organizations are increasingly promoting a wide array of measures designed to bolster constitutional liberalism in developing countries. The National Endowment for Democracy promotes free markets, independent labor movements, and political parties. The U.S. Agency for International Development funds independent judiciaries. In the end, however, elections trump everything. If a country holds elections, Washington and the world will tolerate a great deal from the resulting government, as they have with Yeltsin, Akayev, and Menem. In an age of images and symbols, elections are easy to capture on film. (How do you televise the rule of law?) But there is life after elections, especially for the people who live there.

Conversely, the absence of free and fair elections should be viewed as one flaw, not the definition of tyranny. Elections are an important virtue of governance, but they are not the only virtue.

Governments should be judged by yardsticks related to constitutional liberalism as well. Economic, civil, and religious liberties are at the core of human autonomy and dignity. If a government with limited democracy steadily expands these freedoms, it should not be branded a dictatorship. Despite the limited political choice they offer, countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand provide a better environment for the life, liberty, and happiness of their citizens than do either dictatorships like Iraq and Libya or illiberal democracies like Slovakia or Ghana. And the pressures of global capitalism can push the process of liberalization forward. Markets and morals can work together. Even China, which remains a deeply repressive regime, has given its citizens more autonomy and economic liberty than they have had in generations. Much more needs to change before China can even be called a liberalizing autocracy, but that should not mask the fact that much has changed.

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Finally, we need to revive constitutionalism. One effect of the overemphasis on pure democracy is that little effort is given to creating imaginative constitutions for transitional countries.

Constitutionalism, as it was understood by its greatest eighteenth century exponents, such as Montesquieu and Madison, is a complicated system of checks and balances designed to prevent the accumulation of power and the abuse of office. This is done not by simply writing up a list of rights but by constructing a system in which government will not violate those rights. Various groups must be included and empowered because, as Madison explained, "ambition must be made to counteract ambition." Constitutions were also meant to tame the passions of the public, creating not simply democratic but also deliberative government. Unfortunately, the rich variety of unelected bodies, indirect voting, federal arrangements, and checks and balances that characterized so many of the formal and informal constitutions of Europe are now regarded with suspicion. What could be called the Weimar syndrome ‐‐ named after interwar Germany's beautifully constructed constitution, which failed to avert fascism ‐‐ has made people regard constitutions as simply paperwork that cannot make much difference. (As if any political system in Germany would have easily weathered military defeat, social revolution, the Great Depression, and hyperinflation.) Procedures that inhibit direct democracy are seen as inauthentic, muzzling the voice of the people. Today around the world we see variations on the same majoritarian theme. But the trouble with these winner‐take‐all systems is that, in most democratizing countries, the winner really does take all.

DEMOCRACY'S DISCONTENTS We live in a democratic age. Through much of human history the danger to an individual's life, liberty and happiness came from the absolutism of monarchies, the dogma of churches, the terror of dictatorships, and the iron grip of totalitarianism. Dictators and a few straggling totalitarian regimes still persist, but increasingly they are anachronisms in a world of global markets, information, and media. There are no longer respectable alternatives to democracy; it is part of the fashionable attire of modernity. Thus the problems of governance in the 21st century will likely be problems within democracy. This makes them more difficult to handle, wrapped as they are in the mantle of legitimacy.

Illiberal democracies gain legitimacy, and thus strength, from the fact that they are reasonably democratic. Conversely, the greatest danger that illiberal democracy poses ‐‐ other than to its own people ‐‐ is that it will discredit liberal democracy itself, casting a shadow on democratic governance.

This would not be unprecedented. Every wave of democracy has been followed by setbacks in which the system was seen as inadequate and new alternatives were sought by ambitious leaders and restless masses. The last such period of disenchantment, in Europe during the interwar years, was seized upon by demagogues, many of whom were initially popular and even elected. Today, in the face of a spreading virus of illiberalism, the most useful role that the international community, and most importantly the United States, can play is ‐‐ instead of searching for new lands to democratize and new places to hold elections ‐‐ to consolidate democracy where it has taken root and to encourage the gradual development of constitutional liberalism across the globe. Democracy without constitutional liberalism is not simply inadequate, but dangerous, bringing with it the erosion of liberty, the abuse of power, ethnic divisions, and even war. Eighty years ago, Woodrow Wilson took America into the twentieth century with a challenge, to make the world safe for democracy. As we approach the next century, our task is to make democracy safe for the world.

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Source: Zakaria, F. (1997). The Rise of Illiberal Democracy. Available: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1997‐11‐01/rise‐illiberal‐democracy . Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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The End of the Global Liberal Order?

Mauro F. Guillen, 2017

The post‐World War II settlement was unique in its longevity and in the prosperity that it helped bring to many parts of the planet. It was strong enough to accommodate the process of decolonization and to avoid a frontal conflagration between the two superpowers, although it fueled numerous armed conflicts throughout Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia. Most importantly, in the post‐World War II era a number of institutions designed to promote a liberal global economic and geopolitical order were put in place, which have survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and the onset of large‐scale terrorism. These institutions are the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the World Bank in the economic sphere, and the United Nations (UN) in the geopolitical realm. In addition to these all or nearly all‐inclusive multilateral organizations, the international community has also inherited a mutated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which continues to play a pivotal role in security arrangements.

These organizations are far from perfect. Some of them have done mostly good, including the UN, the IMF and the WTO, while others, most notably the World Bank, have a far more mixed record in terms of accomplishments. For instance, the UN has made important contributions to advance the causes of poverty reduction, gender equality, and peace. The World Bank, by contrast, has been criticized for its emphasis on large infrastructure projects that do not necessarily address the needs of the poor (Stiglitz, 2002). Multilateral organizations were intended to bring geopolitical stability to the world, and to promote the orderly functioning of the global economy and exchange of goods and services between countries. They pursued a gradual agenda of liberalization of trade and investment in the world, providing a sense of direction and a recipe for sustainable economic development. These institutions also played a key, though sometimes controversial, role during times of crises. By and large, however, no major meltdown has occurred in the world since 1945, nothing comparable to a world war or a Great Depression (Guillén, 2016).

Globalization and Liberalism Under Siege At the present time, however, this liberal geopolitical and economic order is under attack. While some of its old antagonists, like Russia, continue to assail it while simultaneously benefiting from it, the staunchest opponents are now populist movements in Europe and the United States. Intriguingly, they originate in both the far left wing and far right wing. Both claim that globalization and the liberal economic order have unequally benefited society. On the far left, the villain is the financial sector for the most part, while on the far right the scapegoat is the immigrant. The Occupy Wall Street movement, for instance, became a strong critic of policies protecting the financial sector and of the bailouts of banks during the crisis. On the far right, xenophobic parties in France, Germany, Holland, Sweden, and the UK have gained in popular support. Recent election results in Europe and the United States demonstrate that these rather extreme positions are gaining in popular support (Janssen, 2016).

At recent gatherings of global economic leaders, China has emerged as the improbable defender of the liberal economic order. For instance, at the 2017 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Chinese President Xi Jinping was, in the absence of the U.S. President, the main defender of free trade AFGG 2018

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(Elliott and Wearden, 2017). Beijing has everything to gain from continued free trade and investment, and little to lose politically, unless it cannot deliver economic growth to its citizens. China, by itself, cannot hold the order together, especially because it is underrepresented at the IMF and the WTO in spite of its growing economic might. The United States and Europe must continue to be the main pillars of the global liberal order because they will continue to account for more than 50 percent of global trade and global investments (Guillén, 2016).

The main threat to the global liberal order derives from political upheaval in Europe and North America. The U.S. is now moving away from global engagement, as evident from the actions of the new administration, and the European Union is in a permanent state of crisis due to the influx of refugees and problems with the currency union. Moreover, the relationship across the Atlantic is under stress due to divergent trade and migration agendas and the Trump Administration’s insistence that European partners contribute more to the NATO budget. Russia’s divide‐and‐conquer approach to geopolitics and heavy handed diplomacy also threatens to further complicate the transatlantic partnership.

In Defense of Global Engagement The future may not be as bleak as it appears to be if the international community takes a series of steps in defense of global engagement. First and foremost, the U.S. needs to remain globally engaged by boosting multilateral institutions such as the UN, inviting emerging powers and new partners to the negotiating table on major global issues, and providing leadership to overcome pervasive conflicts, like those in Ukraine and Syria. This is a premise that cannot be abandoned. Without the U.S., there will be far more geopolitical chaos and far more protectionism in the world. The problem is that a large segment of the American electorate is asking for less international involvement and more protectionism. Opportunistic leaders are taking advantage of the situation to undermine the existing order without proposing a new one. Either the current political alignment in Washington renews its commitment to stability in the world or the balance of forces changes in the next two electoral cycles.

There is no third alternative, or it is simply unacceptable.

The second crucial step that needs to be taken in defense of the global liberal order involves a change in the direction of the European Union and the Euro Zone. Brexit is a European and global tectonic shift, and it should help the rest of Europe reflect on what went wrong. The consequences of the crisis in terms of slow growth and persistent unemployment must be addressed with far more resolution, not only by the European Central Bank but also by Europe’s most robust economies. For instance, Germany could utilize their financial surpluses to stimulate the EU economy through increased spending and investment. A declining and stagnant Europe is a bad omen for the world, and EU countries should collaborate more effectively to avoid a recession in the Euro Zone.

The third key step in defending the global liberal order is institutional renewal. The world has changed significantly since 1945. Despite changes in the last 70 years, the international community still relies on the same institutions and processes. They need to be reformed, giving more influence to emerging economies, such as China and India, and by assigning voting rights to them that are proportional to their new weight in the global economy. Institutions like the WTO, World Bank, and the UN also need to be recalibrated in terms of their mission and tool kits by addressing problems in a way that respects 30

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local variations and preferences without using a one‐size‐fits‐all approach (Guillén and Ontiveros, 2016).

Conclusion Change is pervasive in the world, and the only possible response to it is change itself. For that, global leaders will need to start talking and will need to start generating new ideas and solutions to vexing issues. The global liberal economic and geopolitical order has overwhelmingly served to improve the livelihood of people around the world. It still represents the best option for a peaceful and prosperous future, but it will need to be reformed or it will become moribund.

References Elliott, L., Wearden, G., 2017. Xi Jinping signals China will champion free trade if Trump builds barriers.

The Guardian. January 17, 2017.

Guillén, M., 2016. The Architecture of Collapse: The Global System in the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Guillén, M.F., Ontiveros, E., 2016. Global Turning Points. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, second edition.

Janssen, T., 2016. A Love‐Hate Relationship: Far‐Right Parties and the European Union. Brussels: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016.

Stiglitz, Joseph 2002. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 2002.

Source: Guillen, M F . (2017). The End of the Global Liberal Order?. Available: http://www.e‐ ir.info/2017/03/04/the‐end‐of‐the‐global‐liberal‐order/. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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How should universities confront a post‐ truth world?

Ole Petter Ottersen

In a world characterised by increasing turbulence and conflict, and of inequities and dissatisfaction, academic freedom has come under siege. In some parts of the world, academic freedom is under brutal attack. In other parts of the world, academic freedom is under mounting pressure. Even in the Nordic countries, many scholars report that their academic freedom is diminishing.

Academics and universities have to be aware of this sad state of affairs and help safeguard academic freedom, not only in their own countries, but worldwide.

Let us start with the most heinous examples. Last year I was present when Robert Quinn, founding executive director of the Scholars at Risk network, presented his report Free to Think. The report of the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project describes 333 attacks on higher education communities, arising from 247 verified incidents in 65 countries between January 2011 and May 2015.

A new edition of the report, published last month, analysed 158 such attacks in 35 countries in 16 months, from May 2015 to August 2016.

Higher education institutions are attacked and threatened even in countries that have a democratic system in place or are held to be on the path to democracy. The Free to Think report makes us aware of the enormous scale of this problem and calls for collective action.

Collective action

How should we safeguard academic freedom? In Norway, as in many other countries, academic freedom is protected by law and our government’s ethical guidelines state that scholars should publish their results and conclusions “even if they run against adopted policy”.

Embedded in this statement lies the understanding that society benefits from critique and that progress is driven by academics and universities that challenge dogmas and ideologies. The idea is that society is strengthened and stabilised through constructive criticism founded on academic freedom and free exchange of opinions.

Sadly, this understanding does not pervade the world at large. It is enough to look at developments in Turkey, which have taken a turn for the worse. Just last month Gulay Barbarosoglu, who was elected rector of Bogaziçi University with an overwhelming majority this summer, was not allowed to take office. The Turkish president decided that a former vice‐rector should be the principal instead.

A richness of perspectives and voices that speak truth to power are core elements of any recipe for social progress, but are not universally recognised as such. To return to the Free to Thinkreport’s recommendations on collective action, we need to embed the norm that higher education institutions should enjoy the same protection as hospitals in times of conflict and unrest.

After all, education is a large intergenerational project at the core of every civilisation and is there to 38

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ensure that our entire intellectual, scientific and cultural heritage is passed on from one generation to the next.

Attacking or suppressing academic freedom impacts societies and halts progress to an extent that cannot easily be fathomed. It is unfortunate that it is often seen as a privilege for the few. The fact is that academic freedom is a good for the many – that is, for society at large.

Countering the post‐truth society

For society to reap the full benefit of academic freedom, scientific evidence must be duly respected and acted upon by politicians and policy‐makers. In this regard it is rather ominous that the Oxford Dictionaries recently selected ‘post‐truth’ as the international word of the year.

The Washington Post wrote on 16 November that Oxford Dictionaries made their choice "after the contentious Brexit referendum and an equally divisive US presidential election caused usage of the adjective to skyrocket".

The dictionary defines post‐truth as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief". As an example the dictionary uses the following sentence: "In this era of post‐truth politics, it is easy to cherry‐pick data and come to whatever conclusion you desire.”

In the background we hear British politician Michael Gove’s statement that: "The people of Britain have had enough of experts." The lack of confidence in academia is a great challenge. For, what role can a truth‐seeking university play in an era characterised as "post‐truth”?

I was reminded by a colleague recently of what the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote in 1998: "The non‐suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots...

"One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion... All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet."

This was written 18 years ago. An accurate prophecy indeed.

Faced with the prospect of a post‐factual society, universities have to re‐establish a respect for objective truth and powerful arguments – through our educational programmes and through our public outreach.

We have to create many more arenas for debate – arenas that are open and inclusive so as to give a voice to those who feel left behind too. Universities should be trust‐building as well as truth‐seeking.

In our age of turbulence these two words – trust and truth – are inextricably intertwined.

Ole Petter Ottersen is rector of the University of Oslo, Norway Source: Ottersen, O P . (2016). How should universities confront a post‐truth world?. Available: http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2016120519520037. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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Yes, the Truth Still Matters David Shribman, 2017

Pittsburgh — Of all the questions that the ascendancy of Donald Trump has raised — on the value of political experience in governing, on the fitness of business executives as government executives or the profile of the Republicans as defenders of the rich and the Democrats as the sentinels of the poor — none is as perplexing as perhaps the central question of the age: Does the truth still matter?

It emerged again recently when reports surfaced that the president, who had previously acknowledged his presence on the “Access Hollywood” videotape, has suggested that he did not make the comments on the tape. He also resumed questioning whether Barack Obama was born in the United States — despite having said he accepted it as true last year. In a speech, Mr. Trump, contradicting almost every analysis of the tax bill, said the measure would hurt wealthy people, including himself.

For nearly a half‐century in journalism, from hometown cub reporter to national political correspondent to metro daily executive editor, I’ve navigated with the aid of a newspaperman’s North Star: the conviction that there is such a thing as objective truth that can be discovered and delivered through dispassionate hard work and passionate good faith, and that the product of that effort, if thoroughly documented, would be accepted as the truth.

Mr. Trump has turned that accepted truth on its head, sowing doubts about the veracity of news reporting by promoting the notion that the mainstream media spews “fake news.” Employing an evocative, sinister phrase dating to the French Revolution and embraced by Lenin and his Soviet successors, he has declared that great portions of the press are the “enemy of the people.”

Much of the Trump rhetoric on the press, to be sure, is less statecraft than stagecraft, designed to dismiss negative stories — as if the media had been never critical of past presidents instead of the equal‐opportunity pugilists who bedeviled Bill Clinton (in the Monica Lewinsky episode) and George W. Bush (in the aftermath of the Iraq war).

Even so, Mr. Trump can be credited with prompting, however inadvertently, the most profound period of press self‐assessment in decades — and it comes at a period of unusual financial peril for the mainstream media. All around are sad affirmations of the diminishing credibility of the press, disheartening reminders that at least a third of the country, and perhaps more, regards our work as meaningless, biased or untruthful. In newsrooms, as at newsstands across the country, difficult but vital questions about the methods and motives of the press are being raised, forcing newsmongers and consumers of news to question long‐held assumptions.

Earlier this year, Representative Tim Murphy, a Republican whose district includes the southern suburbs of Pittsburgh, told a closed‐door fund‐raiser in the tony Duquesne Club that our newspaper, the Post‐Gazette, specialized in “fake news.” One of my sources called me while the session was underway, and when it ended, I telephoned the astonished Mr. Murphy and demanded an apology, which he granted only reluctantly. Eight months later our paper reported that the congressman, 40

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ardently anti‐abortion, had sought to persuade his mistress to undergo the procedure. He later resigned under pressure.

This has become routine. The most prominent public‐relations officer in Pittsburgh told us that a perfectly benign, and completely accurate, report on his institution’s activities was another example of fake news. Our police reporter repeatedly gets emails accusing her of producing fake news. Readers have called our high‐tech writer charging she had produced fake news. I speak in the community all the time, and in the past year the question of whether The Post‐Gazette is a purveyor of fake news never fails to come up. It’s almost always the first question.

My answer: In the 15 years I have been executive editor, we have not knowingly published one story, or one paragraph, or one sentence, or one syllable that was not true.

It’s not that these questions never emerged before. It was possible to assemble established facts to argue, for example, that the 906 bills passed by Congress from 1947 to 1949 — including the Taft‐ Hartley Act and the major reorganization of the armed services and the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency — meant that Congress was productive in that period. But it also was possible to arrange the same facts, or to pick some facts and to omit others, to argue quite the opposite, as Harry Truman did in the 1948 presidential election when, in politically potent rhetoric, he spoke of the “do‐ nothing 80th Congress.”

During Watergate, Vice President Spiro Agnew spoke of “nattering nabobs of negativism” to attack the press that bit by bit was uncovering the truth of President Richard Nixon’s lies. This year we had Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, introducing the notion of “alternative facts.”

Her phrase became an instant flash point, for almost no one seriously believed that provable facts had contradictory alternatives. There is no alternative to the fact that the sun is 93 million miles from the earth, nor to the fact that the earth’s atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen, nor even to the fact that Mr. Trump’s Inauguration Day crowd was smaller than Mr. Obama’s.

Though political figures often tell whoppers, it is incontrovertible that there is such a thing as the truth.

The larger question remains: Do people still care?

They should, and need to. The human story is replete with examples of moments when the truth was traduced or when the truth was obscured: the disputed reports about how the battleship Maine was sunk in 1898; the trumped‐up conspiracy surrounding the 1933 burning of the Reichstag that led to a brutal suspension of civil liberties shortly after the Nazis took power in Germany; the false contention that the U‐2 reconnaissance plane flown by Francis Gary Powers in 1960 wasn’t engaged in espionage over the Soviet Union; the misleading claims about the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin episode that drew the United States deeper into Vietnam; the repeated obfuscations of the 1970s Watergate scandal; Bill Clinton’s 1998 denials of a relationship with Monica Lewinsky; and the false belief that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction in 2003.

The president’s taunts have prompted long‐overdue if uncomfortable and unwelcome reflection in our newsroom and others. But it has also prompted all of us to be more humble, more careful and more dedicated than ever to the basic elements of our craft: to marshal facts, produce stories and pay little mind to criticism, whether from left or right.

To show, by our work, that the truth still matters.

(Source: Shribman, D. (2017). Yes, the Truth Still Matters. Available: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/opinion/truth‐matters‐trump‐fake‐ news.html?mtrref=undefined&assetType=opinion. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.)

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Dear Liberals: Being Critical of Islam Is Not Racism Shawn Moksvold

At the G20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, President Obama responded to the latest terrorist attacks in Paris and made a slightly surprising allusion.

In a response to a question about the relationship between Islam and terrorism, he said “... I also think the Muslim community has to think about how we make sure that children are not being infected with this twisted notion that somehow they can kill innocent people and that that is justified by religion.

To some degree, that is something that has to come from within the Muslim community itself, and I think there have been times where there has not been enough pushback against extremism.”

The President, who almost put forth a motion for reform in Islam, couldn’t help but later sanitize an otherwise promising declaration, padding his statements with obfuscation and taking great pains to disqualify a connection between the teachings of a religion and the actions of terrorists.

I understand his unwillingness to be inflammatory, and I get that there are reasons he tries to remove terrorist ideology from the Everyman. And I understand his reluctance to offend millions of Muslims.

But this effort to avoid causing offense seems to be obscuring an otherwise useful conversation about the relationship between religion and extremism. The President’s doublespeak is symptomatic of an unsettling problem.

Legitimate criticism of Islamists has been acute but sparse, and the pushback against debate has come in many flavors — almost all widely missing the point. In Europe and the United States, the left are a great deal of the problem. One of the characteristics of the liberal left is a political preoccupation with defending those who are disenfranchised; those that are viewed as victims. Often, I count myself as one of these liberals.

In the last 50 years, the liberal left has accomplished much by flouting a negligent Establishment, strengthening civil liberties that would have otherwise been lost in stagnant conservatism. But any chronic preoccupation eventually leads to myopia, and in the case of Islamism, the left seems to have lost its way. Perhaps this is a result of some deep‐seated fear of offending, but I submit that dishonesty is at the heart.

This conflict between pragmatism and the liberal tradition is typified in Sam Harris and the reaction he has received from the left. Among other things, he is a rare counter‐voice to simple liberal Islam apologists, bringing to light the connection between Islamic doctrine and violent behavior.

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Harris’ analysis has been met with knee‐jerk cries of racism, bigotry and the weak label “Islamophobia.” I hold the left mostly responsible for the term Islamophobia, which cleverly equates racism and xenophobia with criticism of the ideas of a specific religion — an unfair lumping together.

It is a favorite tool used to silence those who link a religious ideology with negative concepts. When an interpretation of any religious teaching equates to blatant human rights abuses or harm to society, it is simply irresponsible to let it slide. Many liberals on the left seem to confuse criticism of other cultures (religion, in this case) with an endorsement of racism.

Nick Cohen makes the important clarification that “a trap springs when you fail to realize that tolerating is not the same as respecting or endorsing. A tolerant society does not abandon the freedom to argue.” Tolerating the ideas of Sam Harris does not somehow mean that one is a xenophobe. Far from it. Cohen distinguishes two groups of liberals: one group decries human rights abuses that result from religion in any culture (objectification of women, criminalizing gays, punishment for diverse beliefs...etc.), while the other is selective in its human rights pet projects. This latter group of liberals is a serious problem.

In the moral response to theocracies like Saudi Arabia, the hypocrisy seems to be laid bare, as that loathsome regime has institutionalized religion, using the same scripture and philosophy as terrorist groups like ISIS, the Taliban and Al‐Shabaab to justify appalling atrocities. Sam Harris criticizes Islam’s bad ideas by way of example and thought experiment and analogy, trying to debate, and instead of being judged by his analysis, he is labeled with lazy terms like “dangerous” and “bigot” by leftist apologists who work very hard to find racism and bigotry where none exists.

Comedian Dean Obeidallah and commentator Glen Greenwald are shining examples of the limitations of the liberal tradition, both resorting to easy personal attacks on Harris, ignoring any link between doctrine and violence (Greenwald just being more verbose and dishonest about it). Reza Aslan also attempts to cast Harris as dangerous and unqualified to criticize religion because he thinks Harris isn’t an expert on religion. He dresses his affectations in the standard obfuscations of an academic, the kind of thing the left eats up. Yet his gab is nothing more than a convoluted blanket apology for religions veiled in more sloppy ad hominem attacks of character on Sam Harris and those who think like him (Aslan calls these people his disciples).

These dodges and excuses are becoming numerous, but they generally take form in at least one of the following standard talking points of the left, talking points that usually place blame on ourselves: vague notions of inequality, imperialism, the CIA, American foreign policy, poverty, the Iraq War, failure of integration into European society...etc. These are all real issues that deserve attention, but in the case against radicalization and Islamism, they seem to be camouflage on the elephant in the room.

Unfortunately, many of the voices that are approaching any venture into the moral landscape of this problem are the loudest voices of demagoguery in the West — those on the far right (one of several key notions that Greenwald has trouble grasping). It is unfortunate and frightening because these are the people that have at best a tenuous grasp on the issue at hand, and they are often the most religious themselves, as well as uninformed, genuinely racist, bigoted, xenophobic or overtly nationalist.

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In France, Marine Le Pen has been at her most puffed‐up lately, riding a wave of fashionable blanket fear of immigrants, of bearded men in skull caps and of any French citizen who disagrees with the limited National Front party platform. The drivel from Republican politicians in the U.S. has been spectacular these days: rejecting desperate Syrian refugees, imagined no‐go zones in Paris and London where the police are afraid to enter for fear of Sharia, screening immigrants for acceptable religious affiliations, Ben Carson’s half‐witted “monitoring” of every single visitor that travels to the United States. But however easy it is to dispense with the appalling ideas of the right, it is all the more disconcerting that they are the ones even approaching a real debate. The left’s problem is a bit more complex.

In a free society, often uncomfortable things must be said to opposing parties to effectively work out complex issues. But when someone attempts to criticize the beliefs of a religion (mostly Islam), the left will invariably attach that criticism to racism. But racism cannot also be used for those who question the ideas of a religion, or their dogmas, or attempt to demonstrate the relationship of religious ideas to terrorism. This only cuts off the kind of debate that has usually taken place in the conversations of the liberal left.

There will always be people who agree or disagree with whether or not a particular interpretation of a text (holy or otherwise) is correct. And that is the point. The goal of an enlightened people is to be able to discuss those interpretations for the benefit of society, to discuss what is harmful and what is not. There are many people in the United States, for example, who fervently believe that all the animal life we see today once packed into a wooden boat to escape a global flood from an angry God. We have come to the conclusion that no one should be prevented from believing this, but those believers must live with their ideas being scrutinized (and for the most part, they do), and more importantly, they must accept that these ideas will not be institutionalized. It would not be helpful for the left to denounce the criticism of literal readings of the Bible as racist or contriving a term like Christophobic.

So, what is there to do?

Firstly: have ideas, discuss, criticize. I reserve the right to criticize any belief system that seems to me to violate rational thought, human rights or free speech. Much less, I expect my criticisms not to be criminalized. I may be wrong, I may be partly right, but I expect to be able to discuss without fear of reprisal, either from the left or from Islamic religious fundamentalists.

In the Information Age, it has become easier than ever to witness the behavior of far‐off cultures first hand, testing the limits of cultural relativism. The debate on what is moral (and what is not) cannot be cut off for whatever reason, the least of all because of selective liberal political correctness.

Secondly, Muslims must be allowed to have ideas, discuss and criticize their own belief systems without fear. Yes, this is easy for me to say, a non‐Muslim living in Western Europe. But anyone can recognize the courage of people like Maajid Nawaz, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Malala Yousafzai and Saudi blogger Raif Badawi (amongst many others) who have dealt with the consequences of questioning their Muslim religious establishments, to the detriment of their own safety, well‐being and worse.

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But this is exactly the ambiguous middle ground that is required for debate and change. Muslim theocrats do not like this middle ground. In Iran, the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei says it best: “The present US officials are against the principles of Islam and unlike their statements they are after fomenting differences among Muslims and its example is creating terrorist groups like Daesh....” It seems to me that these differences between Muslims is what is needed, not through incitement or force with ulterior motives, but as natural processes; differences created by free conversation, what Maajid Nawaz calls the “grey zone,” a healthy disruption of fundamentalism. He stresses that by forcing everyone to pick sides, what ISIS clearly wants, non‐Muslims and Muslims will only drift to opposite poles. What about all the Muslims in the middle who question some parts of their religion but not all? So that they are not judged by the actions of extremists, should they not also be allowed to question and speak freely and think critically without fear of those in their own community? In that grey zone I would place the ability to accept (and provide) criticism without calls of blasphemy or racism (again, from fundamentalists or liberals).

It is not necessary to be an expert on the complexities of Muslim movements to notice that Muslim tolerance of believers in other strains of Islam is by moderate estimates low, and tolerance of non‐ believers even lower. And it should not be unacceptably offensive to Muslim apologists like Dean Obeidallah and Reza Aslan to mention that this intolerance is noticeable, nor should it be unacceptable to suggest that the teachings of religious ideas have much to do with the actions of the some Muslims, to whatever extent they are a minority, who are activists and jihadists. As Nawaz stresses, Islam doesn’t have everything to do with their actions, but it has something to do with it.

It is time that the left remember its principles, and stop castrating debate and free discourse. Perhaps it needs to look to real liberals in Muslim societies abroad, like Malala Yousafzai and the countless others who speak out against their theocracies, fearing for their lives daily. It is time for the left to put as much intellectual muscle into criticizing harmful religious ideas as it does into protecting the sensibilities of the everyday Muslim living in London.

Source: Moksvold, S. (2017). Dear Liberals: Being Critical of Islam Is Not Racism. Available: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/shawn‐moksvold/the‐lefts‐problem‐with‐fr_b_8930598.html. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017

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Does ISIS really have nothing to do with Islam? Islamic apologetics carry serious risks.

Shadi Hamid, 2015

Every time the Islamic State commits yet another attack or atrocity, Muslims, particularly Western Muslims, shudder. Attacks like the ones in Paris mean another round of demands that Muslims condemn the acts, as if we should presume guilt, or perhaps some indirect taint.

The impulse to separate Islam from the sins and crimes of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is understandable, and it often includes statements such as ISIS has “nothing to do with Islam” or that ISIS is merely “using Islam” as a pretext. The sentiment is usually well‐intentioned. We live in an age of growing anti‐Muslim bigotry, where mainstream politicians now feel license to say things that might have once been unimaginable.

To protect Islam – and, by extension, Muslims – from any association with extremists and extremism is a worthy cause.

But saying something for the right reasons doesn’t necessarily make it right. An overwhelming majority of Muslims oppose ISIS and its ideology. But that’s not quite the same as saying that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, when it very clearly has something to do with it.

If you actually look at ISIS’s approach to governance, it would be difficult – impossible, really – to conclude that it is just making things up as it goes along and then giving it an Islamic luster only after the fact.

[Why the question of Christian vs. Muslim refugees has become so incredibly divisive] It is tempting, for example, to look at the role of former Saddam‐era Baathist party officers in the organization’s senior ranks and leap to the conclusion that religion can’t matter all that much. Yet many younger Baathists came up through Saddam Hussein’s late‐period Islamization initiative, and, in any case, just because someone starts as a Baathist – or any other kind of secular nationalist – doesn’t mean they can’t, at some later point, “get” religion.

There is a role for Islamic apologetics – if defending Islam rather than analyzing it is your objective. I am a Muslim myself, and it’s impossible for me to believe that a just God could ever sanction the behavior of groups like ISIS. 46

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But if the goal is to understand ISIS, then I, and other analysts who happen to be Muslim, would be better served by cordoning off our personal assumptions and preferences. What Islam should be and what Islam is actually understood to be by Muslims (including extremist Muslims) are very different things.

For scholars of Islamist movements and Islam’s role in politics, Muslim and non‐Muslim alike, there should be one overarching objective: to understand and to explain, rather than to make judgments about which interpretations of Islam are correct, or who is or isn’t a “true” Muslim.

[Analysis: After the Paris attacks, here’s how to think about the relationship between ISIS and Islam] In addition to being a Muslim, I am an American, as well as a small‐l liberal. I have written about how, even if we personally believe liberalism is the best available ideological framework for ordering society, that should not be allowed to distort our understanding of mainstream Islamist movements such as, say, the Muslim Brotherhood and its analogues across the region.

It makes little sense to compare Islamists to some liberal ideal, when they are a product of very different contexts than our own.

The “is ISIS Islamic?” debate can seem circular and exhausting. But it’s an important one nonetheless. Islamic apologetics lead us down a path of diminishing the role of religion in politics. If the past few years of Middle Eastern turmoil have made anything clear, it’s that, for Islamists of various stripes – mainstream or extremist – religion matters.

Often, religion matters a great deal. It inspires supporters to action; it affects the willingness to die (and, in the case of ISIS, the willingness to kill); it influences strategic calculations and even battlefield decisions. Insisting otherwise isn’t even effective at countering Islamophobia, since, to the unpersuaded, claims that Islam and ISIS are unrelated sound entirely divorced from reality.

[In light of the Paris attacks, is it time to eradicate religion?]

Instead, we can and should have a debate – hopefully a nuanced, informed one – about how religious motivations and political context (such as civil wars or governance deficits) interact in the case of ISIS and other religiously influenced movements. It is tough to have that discussion when the starting premise is to disregard the importance of religion as an explanatory factor.

The analytical approach I’m proposing comes with its own risks. Underscoring the power of religion in general, and Islam in particular, may provide fodder for bigots who might latch on to our statements and misuse them for their own ends.

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In the end, though, it’s not my job to make Islam look good, or to argue that Islam “is a religion of peace,” when the reality is more complicated. We have to be faithful to our findings and conclusions, even if – or perhaps particularly when – they make us most uncomfortable.

Source: Hamid, S. (2015). Does ISIS really have nothing to do with Islam? Islamic apologetics carry serious risks. Available: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts‐of‐faith/wp/2015/11/18/does‐ isis‐really‐have‐nothing‐to‐do‐with‐islam‐islamic‐apologetics‐carry‐serious‐ risks/?utm_term=.e75cebf6ece6. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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The Inner Workings of the Apologist Mindset Ali A. Rizvi, 2014

“People don’t derive their values from their religion — they bring their values to their religion. Which is why religions like Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, [and] Islam, are experienced in such profound, wide diversity. Two individuals can look at the exact same text and come away with radically different interpretations. Those interpretations have nothing to do with the text, which is, after all, just words on a page, and everything to do with the cultural, nationalistic, ethnic, political prejudices and preconceived notions that the individual brings to the text.”

What Aslan is saying here is pretty extraordinary. He is asserting that sizeable percentages of Muslims around the world — many of whom have said in multiple polls that they support killing apostates and stoning adulterers to death — don’t get these views from their religion, but their attitudes are somehow inherent in them as people.

Think about that for a second. Aslan isn’t being equivocal here — he is using absolute terms. He’s saying interpretations of the Quran have “nothing” — nothing — “to do with the text,” and “everything” — everything — to do with people’s “prejudices and preconceived notions.” In his New York Times op‐ed, he wrote, “If you are a violent misogynist, you will find plenty in your scriptures to justify your beliefs.” The fault, according to Aslan, lies with people, not the scriptures.

As my friend Christopher Massie points out: “The conclusion that disproportionate numbers of intrinsically violent and misogynistic people reside in a certain region of the world could not be more bigoted or racist.”

Recall also when Ben Affleck referred to criticism of Islam as “racist.” By saying that, he implied that Islam or its adherents are all of a particular race. This, of course, is a remarkably racist assertion in itself.

Here’s the thing: there is good reason to believe that neither Aslan nor Affleck is racist or bigoted.

Why, then, would they make such bigoted statements demonizing large groups of people?

This is the consequence of conflating criticism of ideas with bigotry against a people.

Aslan says that these “prejudices and preconceived notions” can be “cultural, nationalistic, ethnic, political” — but never religious. Really? So every time a jihadist yells “Allahu Akbar” and severs the head of a non‐Muslim from his body with a knife, citing verses like 47:4 and 8:12‐13 from the Quran, you can blame every possible factor for his actions except the one source that literally contains the words, “Smite the disbelievers upon their necks”? And these words have nothing to do with an action that is completely consistent with them?

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The apologist’s inevitable response will be that these words are being read too “literally.” And there’s a good reason that reading holy books “literally” — or exactly the way they’re written — terrifies religious apologists. I’m with them on this. It terrifies me too. It is for this reason that Aslan insists that approaching these holy books the way most people approach most books — by reading the words on their pages precisely as they are written and assuming that the author actually meant what he wanted to say — is somehow “unsophisticated.”

He is partially right about one thing: thankfully, the vast majority of Muslims don’t derive all of their morality from the Quran. But he is wrong to completely dismiss those who do — those who don’t just dismiss scriptural passages as “words on a page,” but take them seriously.

Words have power. Aslan acknowledges this when it comes to the role of politics, culture, and nationalism in shaping people’s “prejudices” and “preconceived notions.” But he doesn’t acknowledge this when it comes to religion. This doesn’t make any rational sense, considering the incredible influence these holy books have held over billions of people for millennia, despite a plethora of scientific discoveries and advancements that have successfully countered virtually all of their claims.

Apologists like Aslan will often go to unreasonable lengths to protect inhuman ideas at the expense of real‐life human beings. They will also label criticisms of ideas, books, and beliefs “bigotry” or “racism” in the absence of any substantive counter‐argument.

As a brown‐skinned man with a Muslim name and family who grew up in Muslim‐majority countries well into my twenties, I think it is an injustice and an insult to genuine victims of anti‐Muslim bigotry to exploit their pain and struggle by using it to stifle any legitimate criticism of Islam. This is precisely what umbrella terms like “Islamophobia” do.

Since the Maher/Harris/Affleck dust‐up, this conversation has finally broken into the liberal mainstream in a big way. Moderate Muslims of the “this has nothing to do with religion” variety like Aslan are finally being called out and held accountable for their claims by their fellow liberals. Many of them are now re‐evaluating their own views.

Despite the initial reflexive backlash, this is a welcome development in the long run. It is a valuable opportunity for atheists of influence to engage with a fast‐growing community of reformers and secularists from the Muslim world. Sam Harris is co‐writing a book with Muslim reformist and ex‐ jihadist Maajid Nawaz, and engaging with Irshad Manji. Brave new voices emerging from within countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are demonstrating value for honesty and introspection despite great risk to their lives. Ex‐Muslims and atheists from Muslim backgrounds are coming out and organizing at unprecedented rates. These are the voices we need in our discourse, not those of disingenuous apologists like Aslan.

Source: Rizvi, A. (2014). The Inner Workings of the Apologist Mindset. Available: https://www.richarddawkins.net/2014/10/the‐inner‐workings‐of‐the‐apologist‐mindset/.

Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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An atheist Muslim on what the left and right get wrong about Islam Sean Illing, 2017

“The left is wrong on Islam. The right is wrong on Muslims.”

These words were tweeted by Ali Rizvi, author of the new book The Atheist Muslim. Rizvi was born in Pakistan in 1975 into what he calls a “moderate to liberal Muslim family.” He was raised in Libya and later moved to Saudi Arabia, where he lived for more than a decade. He’s now a writer and physician based in Canada.

Rizvi’s book is partly a plea for secularism and partly a defense of Islam as a culture. It’s also an internal challenge to Islam as a body of doctrines. Rizvi speaks directly to agnostics, atheists, and humanists living in the Muslim world, enjoining them to embrace secular culture without abandoning their Muslim identity.

This is a difficult line to walk, and Rizvi does an admirable job of it.

I talked to him by phone about his book, what he hopes to accomplish, and what he meant when he wrote that the left is wrong about Islam and the right is wrong about Muslims. We also discussed what an “honest conversation” about Islam looks like and why the current political climate makes that conversation all the more difficult.

Our lightly edited conversation follows.

Criticizing Islam without demonizing Muslims Sean Illing This is not an easy book to write. You’re exposing yourself to a lot of criticism on all sides. So why write it?

Ali Rizvi I grew up in a moderate to liberal Muslim family in three Muslim‐majority countries that were culturally very different. I developed certain perspectives about the religion and the Muslim experience that most others didn’t have. I’m not just talking about Islam itself, but also the Muslim experience, which is more personal and more to do with identity rather than ideology or belief.

Like most issues, in the United States especially, the conversation around this issue — about Islam, Muslims, and terrorism — eventually diverged into the left and the right. You had the liberals with their view, and the conservatives with their view, and I felt both of them were really missing the mark.

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of beliefs, a bunch of ideas in a book. It's not human. Muslims are real, living, breathing people, and to me, there's a big difference between criticizing ideas and demonizing human beings.

Sean Illing And your sense was that both the left and the right were failing to capture this distinction?

Ali Rizvi Neither side was making that distinction. On the left, people were saying that if you have any criticism against Islam, then you were a bigot against all Muslims. On the right, it was like, there are a lot of problematic things in Islamic scripture, so everyone who is Muslim must be banned, or profiled, or demonized. Both sides weren't making that distinction between challenging ideas, which has historically moved societies forward, and demonizing human beings, which only rips societies apart.

Sean Illing How does your book split this difference?

Ali Rizvi I think all of us have the right to believe what we want, and we must respect that right, but that doesn't necessarily mean we have to respect the beliefs themselves. That's what this book is about. It’s about making that distinction between Islamic ideology and Muslim identity, and explores how we can have an honest conversation about ideas and beliefs without descending into bigotry against those who might challenge or hold them.

Sean Illing I think a lot of what you’re saying leads back to a fundamental question about whether Islam (or really any religion) is essentially a culture — or where the line between the two is drawn.

Ali Rizvi There’s definitely some interplay between the two. But culture is always evolving. If you look at secular societies like the United States, the way it was in the 1950s is very different from the way it is now.

It's moved a lot, culturally. But religion freezes culture in time. Religion dogmatizes culture and arrests its evolution.

Sean Illing You might also say that religion helps to create and reinforce culture, but I take your point.

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Ali Rizvi Sure, and there are aspects of this that can be positive. There are many of us who are atheists but retain some cultural elements of the religion. For example, I still enjoy the Eid holiday and the fast‐ breaking iftar feasts of Ramadan with my family. I have pleasant childhood associations and memories with these things.

This is true for other religions too. Richard Dawkins himself, who is a ... well, you don't get more atheist than Richard Dawkins. Yet he has also described himself as a cultural Christian. He even says he prefers singing the religious Christmas carols like “Silent Night” to the others, like “Jingle Bells” and “Rudolph the Red‐Nosed Reindeer.” I think we should be able to enjoy some of these rituals without the burden of belief.

What the left and right get wrong about Islam Sean Illing There’s a lot more to be said about this, but I want to refocus us on the political questions. I’ll be honest: I came to this conversation with some trepidation. I’m of the left, but I do believe there is an element of the left that struggles to talk honestly about the problems in the Muslim world, in part because so many feel obliged (rightly, I think) to beat back the bigotry on the right and also because religion is rarely the only variable driving behavior.

But when I saw your tweet the other day claiming that the left was wrong about Islam and the right was wrong about Muslims, that felt like a good way into this difficult debate. Can you tell me what you meant by that?

Ali Rizvi I think the left has a blind spot when it comes to Islam and the right has a blind spot when it comes to Muslims. When Christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson say something that's homophobic or misogynistic, people on the left descend on them like a ton of bricks. They’re very comfortable with criticizing and satirizing fundamentalist Christianity. But when it comes to Islam, which has many of the same homophobic and misogynistic teachings, they throw their hands up, back off, and say, whoa, hold on, we must respect their religion and culture.

Sean Illing You seem to applaud the intent here but still think it’s ultimately counterproductive.

Ali Rizvi I get that it comes from a good place. I’m a liberal myself, and I vote liberal. It’s part of our liberal conscience to protect the rights of minorities, as they should be protected. But that doesn’t mean we must protect and defend all of their beliefs as well, many of which are just as illiberal as the beliefs of Christian fundamentalists.

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This is very frustrating to our liberal counterparts in Muslim‐majority countries, who are fighting fundamentalist Islam the same way that liberals here fight fundamentalist Christianity, and they’re even risking their lives for it. Many have died for it. Yet they hear their liberal counterparts in the West calling their ideas “Islamophobic.” This is a devastating double standard for them.

Sean Illing And what of the right?

Ali Rizvi Those on the right paint all Muslims with the same brush. The title of my book speaks to millions of people in the Muslim world who are atheist or agnostic but must publicly identify as Muslim or they’d be disowned, ostracized, or even killed by their families and governments. They’re atheist in thought but Muslim by presentation. They’re living a contradictory existence. Hence the title of the book.

They retain the Muslim label because the governments and Islamist groups in their countries won’t let them shake it off. Well, now, with Trump’s Muslim ban, especially the first one he proposed as a candidate in 2015, Trump won’t let them shake it off either. Blanket bans like that include many people like me, because we have Muslim names and come from Muslim‐majority countries.

Islam isn’t a religion of war or peace Sean Illing I don’t believe Islam is inherently or necessarily violent, and I think a broad view of history justifies that claim. But there is, at this moment, an inordinate amount of chaos springing out of the Muslim world. Much of that is due to political and economic and social and historical factors, and I’m sure some of it has to do with specific religious doctrines. I don’t feel equipped to assign weights to these causes, and I’m about as far from an authority on Islam as one can get, so I struggle to say anything definitive or useful about these problems.

Ali Rizvi I'm going to paraphrase my friend Maajid Nawaz on this. He says Islam is neither a religion of war nor a religion of peace. It's just a religion, like any other religion. Sure, the scriptures of these religions have inspired a lot of people to do good things, but they have also inspired a lot of people to do bad things as well.

Look at it this way. Do you know Jewish people who eat bacon? Almost all of my Jewish friends eat bacon. Now, does that mean that Judaism is suddenly okay with bacon?

This is the difference between religion and people. You can’t say, hey, I have a lot of Jewish friends who eat bacon, so Judaism must be okay with pork. It doesn't make sense. So when I say that most Muslims I know are very peaceful and law‐abiding, that they wouldn't dream of violence, that doesn't erase all of the violence and the calls for martyrdom and jihad and holy war against disbelievers in 54

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Islamic scripture. Most of my Muslim friends, both in Pakistan and here, had premarital sex and drank alcohol too. That doesn’t mean Islam allows either of those things.

The hard truth is there is a lot of violence endorsed in the Quran, and there are other terrible things, as there are in the Old Testament. But there are more people in the world — even if it’s a minority of Muslims — who take their scripture seriously. It’s dishonest to say that violent Muslim groups like ISIS are being un‐Islamic.

Sean Illing And how do you account for all the other external factors that conspired to create the conditions of unrest in these countries?

Ali Rizvi Foreign policy is a factor. It wasn’t long ago that the United States was hailing the Afghan mujahedeen as heroes for fighting against the Soviets. The word “mujahedeen” literally means people who wage jihad. That was a good thing for America in the 1980s. Bin Laden was among these fighters, and himself was a recipient of US funding and training. We’ve seen how that turned out.

But there’s also this — if you're a young Iraqi man and your family was bombed by the US, your reaction may be that you may become anti‐American. You might say, okay, I'm going to fight these guys. But would your reaction to US foreign policy be to start enslaving and raping 9‐year‐old Yazidi girls? Or forcing local non‐Muslim minorities to pay a tax or convert to Islam, or be crucified publicly, as commanded in the Quranic verses 9:29‐30 and 5:33? Or beheading Shias or apostates who have left Islam? Or throwing gays off rooftops?

That isn’t just the reaction of someone simply to US foreign policy. These are things they're doing to their own people. Killing apostates and taking sex slaves. So the question about weighting and how much it matters, it's a good question. But these people tell us why they do what they do. There are terrorists who after a terrorist attack will say, “This is our revenge for what you're doing to our lands and our people.” And then there are other times that they’ll put out statements saying, “This is what the Quran says.” ISIS often puts out very accurate statements quoting the Quran that completely fit their actions.

Sean Illing Right, but again, it becomes awfully tempting to analyze this disorder in a vacuum. When states fail and societies collapse, you often see tribal and ethnic and religious violence depending on how the fault lines are drawn, and so it’s never as easy as isolating a text or some doctrines as the chief cause.

Ali Rizvi Fair enough. The thing is, we have had a lot of discussion about the US foreign policy and how that has caused problems in the Muslim world, but we somehow shy away from talking about the equally important religious, doctrinal basis for these terrorist acts. We shouldn’t deny either. I’m convinced AFGG 2018

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that one of the main reasons we haven’t resolved this problem is that we are afraid to make the complete diagnosis.

The appeal of fundamentalism Sean Illing I wonder if a complete diagnosis is even possible. Step back and take a broader historical view. The contents of these texts haven’t changed — it’s the political and social and economic conditions that have changed. So the question then becomes what is it about these conditions that produces certain interpretations or leads to certain doctrines becoming more manifest?

Ali Rizvi A lot of this has to do with the lure of belonging to a group and the search for an identity. In my book, I discuss the ideas of Erik Erikson, who coined the term “identity crisis,” and James Marcia, who wrote at length about how young people go about resolving it in terms of exploration and commitment to a set of values.

Identity achievement is characterized by high exploration and high commitment, meaning you expose yourself to a variety of options and then commit to a set of values that represents you best. Identity foreclosure is low exploration, high commitment. These are people who commit to a set of values without much exploration — such as those from strict religious upbringings who adopt their parents’ teachings without much questioning. Identity moratorium is high exploration, low commitment, marked by indecisiveness. And identity diffusion is low exploration, low commitment. These are your wandering souls.

If you look at how we as human beings resolve our identity crises as adolescents and young adults, you see that some of these processes, such as identity foreclosure in this case, lend themselves better to explaining what might cause a young person to join, or resist, violent ideologies like jihadism. I think it’s a much better model to both understand it and counter it. It also acknowledges the role of the ideology and doctrine itself, rather than deflecting from it.

Sean Illing I agree that in many cases we’re talking about existentially adrift people, people pining for something grand or noble or meaningful in their lives. And in a lot of ways, ISIS or Islamic extremism is the biggest game in town on that front. These movements or groups offer a singularly purposeful struggle, and it’s hard to overstate the appeal of that.

Ali Rizvi Yeah. I think that's actually very legitimate. A lot of these people are just wandering souls. They're just trying to find a place for themselves. But the more interesting question for me is why is Islam, why is this particular religion, so appealing to them? Why do people prone to violence find Islam so appealing for their purpose?

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The way we think about this is strange. We try really, really hard to dance around it. When someone tells us they did something for political reasons, we accept it easily. “Sure, they did it for politics."

When someone says, "I did this for money," we believe them. Even when people say, "I played Doom, the video game, and I listened to Marilyn Manson," we take it at face value and have all these cultural conversations about the role of video games and music in violence.

But when people say, “I'm doing this in the name of Allah,” and quote verse 8:12, which says, “Strike the disbelievers upon the neck and strike from them every finger tip," and we see them doing exactly what those words say, we look at that and go, "No, no, it's got to be politics. It’s got to be for money.

Let's see what video games they were playing."

That's the only thing I have a problem with. I acknowledge the other causes. I have explored them in my book. Yes, there are political grievances, and there are foreign policy grievances. We never deny those. So why do we deny that religion itself, the scripture itself, can drive these atrocities?

Sean Illing Those are fair points. I’ve often found myself struggling to argue that people can be confused about what’s actually motivating them, or at least blind to the root causes. But this is a difficult case to make in this context. In any case, we obviously need a nuanced conversation, and it’s just not happening.

Take someone like Sam Harris, who I think makes a decent point when he talks about the link between ideas and actions. Harris often understates the extent to which religious ideas can be props or justifications for behaviors that are motivated by nonreligious grievances. On the other hand, though, there are a lot of people who just deny such a connection altogether, which is absurd. Again, what’s interesting to me is what makes specific ideas attractive at specific periods of history? We have to isolate those conditions and causes.

Ali Rizvi I think it's more complicated than that. Think of the [National Rifle Association] slogan, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” The typical liberal response to that, and rightly so, is no, don’t downplay the deadliness of guns. You can’t take them out of the equation. Even if they’re just a tool or prop, they’re central to it.

Now replace “guns” in that statement with “religion” or “beliefs.” Religion is a much worse prop in this case, because it’s got ideological roots. There are words in the scripture that command, verbatim, exactly the kinds of violent acts we see Islamic militant groups do. They’re not quoting Islamic Studies professors at Al‐Azhar University. They’re quoting the Quran and Hadith.

And yes, in some cases Islam is used by nonreligious people for other motives. A good example of this is when the Pakistani government banned YouTube in the country after a film mocking Islam and Muhammad went viral. This helped the government because it deprived political dissenters of a huge platform. Now, if they’d said, “We’re banning YouTube because we want to quash political dissent,” the entire country would’ve risen up against them. But when they said they wanted to do it to stop AFGG 2018

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blasphemy against our beloved prophet, the masses supported them. So they used religious reasons for nonreligious purposes.

But this still doesn’t take away from the point. It still stands that religion — and I say religion in general this time because while Islam is especially dangerous today, the other Abrahamic religions have served the same purpose when they were — lends itself extremely well to the goals and whims of authoritarians, tyrants, and the violent everywhere, whether it’s being used as a prop or driving them by belief.

The Trump factor Sean Illing Trump and Trumpism adds a whole other layer of urgency to this conversation. I think we have to find a way to talk about these problems in honest and productive ways, and that is all the more difficult against the backdrop of an explicitly anti‐Muslim administration.

Ali Rizvi That's what the book is about. The book is my answer to that question. How do we have an honest conversation about this without descending into bigotry, and how do we do it in a morally responsible way? I won't completely blame liberals for the rise of Trump — I think the far right owns a lot of that.

But liberals aren’t blame‐free. They left a vacuum.

The failure of liberals to address Islamism from an honest and moral position left a void that allowed the Trumpian right to opportunistically address it from a position of xenophobia and bigotry.

Harris warned of this — the hijacking of the conversation by irrational actors on the far right — over 10 years ago. And disagree with him as much as you want, but he has always been mindful of that distinction between criticizing Islam and demonizing Muslims. His book with Maajid, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, is evidence of that. This is a point that we just need to drive home and keep repeating. Unless we do that, we can't have a responsible conversation about it.

Sean Illing Agreed. But that’s why someone like Harris, who I do think is occasionally unfairly criticized, makes a more productive conversation less likely. This came up recently in his podcast with Fareed Zakaria. If we say that a religion is reducible to the concretized doctrines in its holy text, then we don’t leave much room for evolution or reformation. As you said, a religion at any moment is essentially what its believers decide it is. The Bible is riddled with terrible Bronze Age dogmas, but most Christians don’t take those parts seriously any longer. The same can be true for any religion.

Ali Rizvi Now we're getting into the idea of reform, and this is what Maajid Nawaz talks about, who actually helped change Sam's view on this as well.

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I don’t think anyone’s saying that a religion is reducible to the concretized doctrines in its holy text. I know Sam doesn’t think that either. But we are saying that those texts are a huge, huge part of the religion. In Islam, the divinity and infallibility of the Quran is the only thing that every sect and denomination agrees on. And again, no matter how many Jews start eating pork, the religion of Judaism will never be okay with swine flesh.

One thing Christians and Jews don’t always understand, because it’s hard to relate to, is that most Muslims do revere their holy text very differently from them. It’s not just divinely inspired or written by men of God. It is written by God himself, every letter, every punctuation mark. It’s literal, and it’s infallible. You can’t even touch the book unless you’ve performed an ablution ritual. It’s very serious.

What a reformation looks like Sean Illing Your book is partly a call for reformation. Given what you just said, what is it that you think should be done?

Ali Rizvi I say that the first step to reform in Islam is rejection of infallibility. This seems outrageous to some.

They say it’ll never happen. But it has happened in the past. Reform Jews today make up a majority of American Jews. None of them believe the Torah is the literal word of God anymore. But for a long time, that was the deal — the Torah was revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai and the Tabernacle like the Quran was to Muhammad starting in the Cave of Hira at Mecca. It was error‐free. Suggesting otherwise was blasphemy — and look up Leviticus 24:16 to learn the consequences of that.

Amazingly, in the last 10 or 15 years, I've started seeing younger Muslims start to doubt the absolute infallibility of the Quran. They say, you know, it was compiled so long after the prophet’s death by his companions, pieced together from their collective memories, something could’ve been left out or added in, and you can only say it’s divinely inspired, not purely divine. Now, that seems like a small demotion — but it's actually huge.

This is why I say I believe in Muslim reform, not Islamic reform. I don’t think using mental gymnastics to reinterpret scripture is convincing. You can’t keep saying “kill” actually means “love,” or “beat your wife” is misinterpreted and actually means “kiss your wife,” and stay credible. In the internet age, everything is exposed. It's online, you can look it up in a dozen languages, multiple translations, the context and syntax and etymology of every word — any 12‐year‐old can dig that up today.

But when you look at the entire book as a whole and you say, "Well, is this divine or is this just divinely inspired? What is the likelihood that God really said this? If God created binary pulsars and time dilation and tectonic plate shifts, all these amazing things, why would he care if I eat pork or who I have sex with?” That you can work with. Don’t change the way Islam reads, but try and change the way young Muslims think, how they approach and process information. Skepticism, empirical analysis, critical thinking.

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Sean Illing I think your perspective here is desperately needed, though I have no idea how likely it is to resonate.

But I remain convinced that telling Muslims their religion is bullshit and built on false claims won’t make the world any better. Your book does a wonderful job of showing how religions are about a lot more than ideas. Any time you’re talking about religion, you’re also talking about identity and culture and ritual and community, and any approach that condemns Islam as such will no doubt alienate the vast majority of Muslims.

Ali Rizvi Well, my book is pretty hard on the religion too, but it’s not about telling people their religion is bullshit — it’s about how you tell them that. I say in the book that setting the stage for the conversation is often more important than the conversation itself. I’ve had this conversation with my Muslim friends and family for a very long time, and I’ve often had to find creative ways to have it in countries where saying it like it is can have horrible consequences. I’ve always wanted to figure out the best way to have it, a way that is both honest and constructive.

The thing is, most Muslims don’t really know too much about Islam. They were born into Muslim families, so being Muslim is a lot like a birth identity for them. And when you criticize Islam or a problematic verse in the Quran, or joke about Muhammad, they take it personally as an attack on them, on their identity.

In my book, I deliberately tried to first establish a connection based on shared identity, and then move to the ideas. I talked about how I was raised, all the rituals my family and I participated in, all the little things that happen when you grow up Muslim — with the message that I’ve been where you’ve been.

I was raised the same way. I respect how important this identity feels and how real this experience is.

We come from the same place.

And once that’s locked down, I’ve noticed, in nearly every case, that people are much more receptive to criticism of their beliefs. It’s really amazing. It’s because now they know you’re talking about ideas and beliefs, and you’re not attacking them as people. And when that happens, I notice that many more people have doubts about their beliefs than you’d think.

Sean Illing Are there times when being honest might be counterproductive, and if so, how do we balance that tension?

Ali Rizvi There's an argument about what's productive versus what is honest, and how do we balance that — how do we be constructive while also being honest. When you talk very seriously about something like, you know, a man living inside a fish, there's no way to really talk about that without sounding like you're mocking something. That's just one example. I’m just saying how difficult it can sometimes be to have honest conversations about beliefs.

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But I would urge liberals to have this conversation openly, honestly, and responsibly. It’s already happening within the Muslim world. Several white Western liberals have confided to me that they agree with what I say, but won’t say it themselves because they’re afraid they’ll be labeled bigots or Islamophobes. I call that “Islamophobo‐phobia,” the fear of being called Islamophobic. It’s a great way to shut down the conversation and silence people with colonial or white guilt.

I get that. That’s why the Muslim Brotherhood loves the term so much. It conflates legitimate criticism of Islam with anti‐Muslim bigotry. And it exploits victims of anti‐Muslim bigotry by using their experiences for the political purpose of censoring criticism of Islam. When you fall for that, when you hold back from standing up for your liberal values, you’re not helping to curb terrorism. You’re already a victim of it.

Liberals today enjoy the benefits of the Enlightenment, which their predecessors brought about through great acts of blasphemy and rebellion, often at deadly cost to their lives and livelihoods.

Today, this conversation and this movement is happening within the Muslim world. It doesn’t just include the hijab‐wearing women and bearded men you see on your TV. It includes the beer‐drinking Muslim colleague you work with; it includes the Muslim girl at college who had doubts about her religion’s views on women; it includes agnostics, atheists, and free thinkers like me who want the freedom to change our minds without literally having to lose our heads. There are many voices in this conversation, and you don’t have to choose. Just let it happen.

Be an ally, not a savior.

Source: Illing, S. (2017). An atheist Muslim on what the left and right get wrong about Islam. Available: https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/7/7/15886862/islam‐trump‐isis‐terrorism‐ali‐rizvi‐ religion‐sam‐harris. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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The Silent Rise of the Female Driven Economy Danielle Kayembe, 2017

Women represent the largest disruptive force in business — and the business world is unprepared.

Currently women are the largest unserved market in business as a result of coded patriarchy — the assumption of male as default and exclusion of female perspectives in nearly every domain. Put very simply, most of the structures, design, technology and products we interact with are designed with male as the default.

This has led to an echo chamber in the business environment that has created the largest unaddressed market in business. This market has been largely ignored for decades by the mostly male‐led companies and investment teams who function as gatekeepers to capital, and are unable to see opportunities outside of their lived experiences.

With the success of companies like The Honest Company and Thinx, we’re seeing the rise of women‐ centered innovation: products and services designed for women by women, based on the pain points women experience in daily life. The existing ecosystem of companies and funds is unprepared to understand this massive opportunity, much less identify, invest in and nurture this next generation of companies. What implications will this disruptive force have for technology, business and future investment trends?

Understanding Our World Few people know that the wheel track — the distance between the center of the wheels across the width of a vehicle — is a standardized measurement that has not changed since it was designed in 300 BC.

This one, simple, design element has stayed largely constant from the width of the Roman gladiator’s chariot, to the width of horse‐drawn carriages in Victorian England, train tracks in the 1800’s, to today’s automobiles. The wheel track even determined the size of the spaceships we launched into outer space because the ships’ components had to be transported via trains, with standardized wheel tracks, to the launch pads. We don’t think about it, yet human history has been shaped around this one design element for centuries.

The wheel track still affects us every day — it determines the size of our roads, the plans of our cities, the paths we walk on our way home. It impacts what time we wake up to go to work in the morning (determined by how many cars can fit on the roads) and how big our neighborhood park is.

The wheel track is an invisible, implicit and unstated force that few have ever thought about.

It’s an invisible organizing principle that quietly orders your life.

Patriarchy is very much the same: It delineates our choices, 62

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It narrows our definitions, It defines what is taboo, It defines what is acceptable, It defines what is valued and why, It defines what is “default” and what is “other”, It defines what is rewarded.

Coded Patriarchy We rarely stop to think about the ways that patriarchy shapes our daily lives as an invisible organizing principle. We’re largely unaware of the way the female perspective is quietly omitted in design, business, technology, clothing and even our cities. A few examples: Cities: ∙ The average women struggles to open doors when going in and out of buildings — because most doors are designed for the tensile strength of an average man[i][ii] ∙ Long lines for women’s restrooms reflect poor design; women do up to 5 things in a restroom, and men do one: “many public restrooms continue to be facilities that are equal in physical space, while favoring men’s bodies, experiences, and needs“[iii] ∙ According to many building codes, pregnant women are categorized as “disabled” because their needs are (necessarily) different from those of the average man.

Automobiles: ∙ When airbags were first released, hundreds of women and children were injured or killed when the bags deployed. The reason? The group of male engineers who designed them were all over 250 lbs and didn’t think to test for women[iv] ∙ While every car has a cup‐holder, there is no place for a woman to place her purse or her shoes (yes, shoes).

Technology: ∙ Of the top health trackers (Apple, Fitbit, Nike)[v] — not one had a period tracker at release, even though half of the target customer base tracks periods as part of their normal health routine, and health trackers are primarily used by women ∙ Naming a flagship product “iPad” when half of your consumers are women who associate that with hygiene ∙ Designing “personal assistant” AI with a female interface, i.e. — Alexa, Siri, Amy.

We Live in a Silent Female‐Driven Economy Women are the single largest productive economic force, and drive almost every economic indicator — but you would be forgiven for not knowing this fact.

Women control 85% of consumer spending globally.[vi][vii] Why? Because your average woman makes purchases for herself, her husband or partner, her children and also her elderly parents. Women make 70% of major financial decisions for themselves and their families, everything from auto, insurance, home and investment. In the US alone, women control $14 trillion assets or roughly 60% of personal wealth and 51% of stock, which is expected to climb to $22 trillion in 2020. Globally, women control $36 trillion in total wealth.[viii]

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Based on statistics released in 2015[ix], women collectively represent the second largest economy in the world based on earned income vs GDP. Remember that these number don’t account for the fact that women are paid 25–40% less than men globally,[x][xi] and that your average women does an estimated 4.5 hours of unpaid work daily (22.5 hours per week).[xii] In developing countries, women are doing as much as 10x work as men. Adjusted for these factors, women would likely be the largest collective economic power on the planet — let that sink in. A conservative back of the envelope calculation accounting for these factors, results in an estimated ~$19T in true productivity.

Graph: Country GDP vs Global Female Earned Income Yet in most countries, we have poor data as to women’s true productivity because women’s work often isn’t properly tracked or captured by economic indicators. Only a fraction of the total productive work women do globally is reflected in traditional economic indicators. GDP or “gross domestic product” is the economic indicator for measuring the strength of a country’s economy. Designed by men and defined as “the total value of everything produced by all the people and companies in the country,” GDP calculations have literally no way of accounting for women’s uncompensated labor — an area of productivity that is foundational to the function of every economy in the world. Current staggering estimates are that women globally produce a minimum $10 trillion in uncompensated labor. [xiii][xiv]

The Irrationality of Markets With all of this data, you’d expect companies and businesses to invest heavily in balanced or female‐ heavy teams to better understand and engage with their core customers.

However, when we look at business, we see the opposite. Women are largely excluded from senior management positions across every industry from business, advertising agencies, media, health and even technology. Technology companies employ approximately 20% women, but they’re mostly shut out of coding, innovation and design divisions. Out of 1,500 S&P CEOs, there are fewer female CEO’s than there are CEOs named John.[xv] Despite the increased scrutiny when it comes to funding and entrepreneurship, women’s access to capital is decreasing: in 2015 women were receiving 15% of total VC funding, and those numbers have declined to 2% in 2017.[xvi]

Funds, markets, and investment have continued to flow in ways that run contrary to the logic of objective data on the immense opportunity presented by the economic force of women.

The Coming Wave of Disruption The new generation of women is increasingly stepping into entrepreneurship and innovation. Yet as they do so, we are seeing a wave of businesses with women centered innovation at the core — meaning, products and services that are designed to reflect women’s pain points and direct needs. This may seem like a minor point — but keep in mind that this simple assertion disrupts thousands of years of social conditioning to “code” for the masculine.

Almost all of the products and services women purchase are created, designed, built and sold to women by men. This means that most products women use are uncomfortable or ill‐suited to their needs.

In business, investors often chase emerging markets — invest early and wait years for the investments to yield above market returns. We saw this with markets like India, China and, most recently Africa.

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Yet, I would argue that women are the single largest opportunity in the market today — overlooked, underfunded. There are few markets left in today’s world with no competition — yet this is exactly the state of affairs when it comes to women. While there are 23 billion pairs of shoes sold globally in 2015,[xvii] it’s estimated that men own an average of 12 pairs of shoes while women own an average of 27 pairs of shoes.[xviii] Women spend an estimated four and a half times more on clothes and shoes than men[xix] — however, there are almost no shoes designed by women with women in mind. And the same is true across almost every category that women consume with very few exceptions.

The result is that any new product will be the first and likely market leader. However, unlike your standard emerging market, you don’t have to wait years for the market to mature. Women are already a fully matured market in terms of size and economic spending. There’s almost no gap or lag time. In addition, due to the lack of access to capital, women don’t have the luxury of building wildly unprofitable businesses for 5–7 years[xx]. As a result women are more likely to build revenue‐positive businesses.

The result is that women’s companies can grow at an incredibly fast pace. Thinx reached tens of millions in revenue in 2 years. Honest Company was valued at $1 billion in under 5 years.[xxi]

The Impact As women begin to innovate products based on their own pain points, what will result is a fundamental shift in consumer buying, belief, and behavior patterns based on the following:

Preference for female‐designed products in all areas Greater scrutiny and dissatisfaction of products and services that aren’t. Similar to consumer awareness of “organic” and “sustainable” — when they are on the shelf next to other products it increases scrutiny on, and dissatisfaction with, the products that don’t meet these new criteria. Seeing “cage‐free” and “free range” mark on your eggs makes you look suspiciously at brands with unlabeled cartons.

Expectation of female‐focused messaging and branding Female audiences will be less willing to engage with branding and messaging that is not authentically crafted with female‐driven insights. “Pink‐washing” will not be enough to sway consumers. Existing companies and brands that haven’t invested in promoting feminism, inclusion within their teams and upper management will lose the battle to new companies that have built their companies from the ground up with these principles baked into their DNA. Brands that win will have to employ the Unilever approach — doubling down on brands like Dove, which actively engage with women, and drastically shifting the messaging and channels used to reach the target audience.[xxii]

Purpose and Planet: Women are systemic thinkers and consumers Beyond addressing women’s direct needs, many WCI‐designed products and brands have sustainability or social impact at the core of their product. For example, Honest Company is focused on organic, non‐ toxic products for baby and home. Thinx reduces the environmental impact of disposable hygiene products. Watermelon WTR supports organic farmers while addressing the inherent waste in our food system — up to 50% of edible produce is disposed of for cosmetic reasons.[xxiii][xxiv] Purpose is a key driver of millennial women’s purchasing behaviors, and drives this dominant new consumer base to AFGG 2018

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choose one product over another. Further, trends suggest that millennial women will consume differently, buying fewer disposable products.

Quick Waves of Adoption Because so few products and services reflect women’s needs, women have learned not to trust advertising. Recent research shows that 99% of millennials are not influenced by advertising. Instead, women have formed ancillary networks through which they seek and share referrals to understand the efficacy and fit of a product for themselves before buying.

This accounts for the very different behaviors of men and women online. Women join more networks, share and refer content 62% more often than men; using social networking to make connections and form communities, while men prefer content oriented sites that can increase their status.[xxv]The implications of this are profound for new product adoption rates because women operate as organic evangelists. As women find new products that they like the word will spread quickly, translating into faster uptake and adoption by other women.

Multiplier Effect As pointed out earlier, women dominate consumer spending because they buy for so many other people within their immediate circles. Yet think of the multiplier effect across close circles — women engage in an average of 68% of gift‐buying activities and for a greater number of recipients compared to men: birthdays, bar + bat mitzvahs, wedding + baby showers, graduations, weddings, holidays. Men primarily report simply purchasing a gift for their wives.[xxvi][xxvii] These are all touchpoints where women are passing along their product and service preference to their wider circles of influence. This is further supported by a recent Nielsen study which shows that multicultural millennials drive 47% of total US GDP and have a “profound influence on their peers, as well as both older and younger generations.”[xxviii]

These factors will create a fundamental upheaval for brands and a shift in buying patterns that will be generational and more disruptive than expected.

Buying Patterns Consumers, especially millennials are increasingly careful about their purchases. What we’ve seen in terms of the impact on buying patterns for heritage brands like Campbell’s and Kraft is that once these buying patterns shift away, they don’t shift back. Boston Consulting Group estimates that large companies have lost $18 billion in sales to small companies in the 5‐year period ending in 2014; the largest 25 companies lost a combined 5% share in the food and beverage industry alone.[xxix][xxx]

Asleep at the Wheel The current business, technology and investment establishment is asleep at the wheel. After decades of an “I’ll ask my wife” or “just make it pink and charge more” mentality when it comes to women’s products, along with decades of resistance to calls for diversification — which would have resulted in less hostile environments for female employees — existing institutions don’t have the internal resources and knowledge necessary to adapt. After fostering and rewarding cultures where the most capable women are talked over, poorly paid, rarely promoted and shut out of innovation, these firms 66

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will continue to lose their best female talent. Further, these companies and funds don’t have the internal culture or external network to identify, invest in and nurture this next generation of companies.

Long Term Implications: Rise of the Female Driven Economy When a population controls 85% of consumer spending yet only receives 2% of venture funding, there is a fundamental disconnect at the leadership level in the business and investment community. Women simply represent the largest arbitrage opportunity in the market today.

Rise of Female Investment Ecosystem As the waves of female‐founded companies reach liquidity events through IPOs or acquisition, a new ecosystem will form. We’ll see a new wave of women founders and employees becoming serial entrepreneurs (like Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk), and launching their own VC and PE funds to reinvest in other female‐founded companies in the WCI space.

Rise of Female Investor Class Currently women control $14 trillion in assets — approximately 60% of personal wealth and 51% of stock in the US (for comparison, US pension funds control roughly $19 trillion in retirement and pension assets as of FYE 2016)[xxxi]. Yet most banks, investment and pension funds continue to focus their marketing on men. As female‐founded companies go mainstream, this silent female majority of investors will increasingly shift from being passive to active investors. They will seek to invest in companies selling products they are using/familiar with, and will increasingly be sought out by female founders when they are fundraising. They will bypass the existing venture capital ecosystem and form their own. This wave of female‐controlled capital coming off the sidelines will be a gamechanger and will redefine how we quantify economic value.

Mass Gutting of C‐suites and Boards Across Corporate America and Investment Funds The mass firings at Uber after the resignation of its CEO is the canary in the coalmine. Their executive suite was swiftly gutted, senior management and board members let go. Tone‐deaf executives that are more Travis than Trudeau will not last. The environment will only grow less tolerant as the discussion around “women in business” begins to shift from harassment to bottom lines. As companies and boards see the profits that result from taking women seriously as customers, founders and innovators, we’ll see a wave of changes in executive leadership. The darlings of the business world shifted from middle‐ aged men in Brooks Brothers suits, to college drop‐outs in hoodies — it’s about to shift again.

Heritage Brands Will Continue to Lose Women and Millennial Customers Value of existing brands will decrease and those gains will not return. Heritage brands may hold on to older buyers but will struggle to remake their brands in ways that are authentic to women and millennial buyers. Millennials are loyal to values — not brands.

Implications for Women, Innovation and Leadership The implications for women are profound, from a career, innovation and business leadership perspective.

First, every woman, by virtue of her lived experience, is now a walking hub of multi‐million dollar business ideas. Any pain point experienced is a signal for innovation in a wide‐open market.

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Second, for the last 50 years that women have been integrated into the work force, they have traditionally been encouraged to reject or mask their femininity. However, leadership and innovation for women in the new era will mean bringing to work and leading with all of the things women have historically been told to leave at the boardroom door. Insights about our daily, lived experiences as women — from menstruation to motherhood — are all lucrative and growing spheres of business.

Finally, as a woman, every pain point you’ve experienced walking through daily life is an empire‐ building business idea that has never occurred to a single one of the Fortune 500 CEO’s named John, Mark or James.

[i] K.H. Eberhard Kroemer, “Designing for Muscular Strength of Various Populations”. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a011537.pdf. December 1974 [ii] Bill Dowell for Herman Miller, “The Evolution of Anthropometrics and User Control”. https://www.hermanmiller.com/research/categories/white‐papers/the‐evolution‐of‐ anthropometrics‐and‐user‐control/ [iii] Soraya Chemaly, “The Everyday Sexism of Women Waiting in Public Toilet Lines”. http://time.com/3653871/womens‐bathroom‐lines‐sexist‐potty‐parity/. January 5, 2015 [iv] Colin Katagiri, “Debugging the Gender Gap: Documentary Film Screening & Panel — A Reflection”. http://foundry10.org/subject‐areas/code‐debugging‐gender‐gap/. January 6, 2017 [v] Arielle Duhaime‐Ross, “Apple Promised an Expansive Health App, So Why Can’t I Track Menstruation?”. https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/25/6844021/apple‐promised‐an‐expansive‐ health‐app‐so‐why‐cant‐i‐track. September 25, 2014 [vi] Ekaterina Walter, “The Top 30 Statistics You Need to Know When Marketing to Women”. https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/01/24/the‐top‐30‐stats‐you‐need‐to‐know‐ when‐marketing‐to‐women/#.tnw_wUzMxTvr. January 24, 2012 [vii] Jill Krasny, “Women Control The Money In America”. http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic‐women‐control‐the‐money‐in‐america‐2012‐ 2. February 17, 2012 [viii] Bank of Montreal Wealth Institute, “Financial Concerns of Women”. https://www.bmo.com/privatebank/pdf/Q1‐2015‐Wealth‐Institute‐Report‐Financial‐ Concerns‐of‐Women.pdf. March 2015 [ix] Elena Holodny, “Women Are the Next China”. http://www.businessinsider.com/women‐could‐be‐ the‐next‐global‐growth‐engine‐2015‐10 October 6, 2015 [x] Sonam Sheth and Skye Gould, “5 Charts Show How Much More Men Make Than Women”. http://www.businessinsider.com/gender‐wage‐pay‐gap‐charts‐2017‐3/#the‐gender‐wage‐ gap‐varies‐widely‐depending‐on‐the‐state‐1 March 8, 2017 [xi] Larry Elliott, “UN Launches Initiative for Women’s Economic Empowerment at Davos”. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/21/un‐global‐womens‐economic‐ empowerment‐initiative‐davos January 21, 2016 [xii] Annalisa Merelli, “There’s a Mind‐Boggling Amount of Work Women Do That We Can’t Quantify”. https://qz.com/686075/we‐still‐have‐literally‐no‐way‐to‐quantify‐exactly‐how‐much‐work‐ women‐do/ May 18, 2016 [xiii] McKinsey Global Institute, “How Advancing Women’s Equality Can Add $12 Trillion to Global Wealth”. https://www.mckinsey.com/global‐themes/employment‐and‐growth/how‐advancing‐ womens‐equality‐can‐add‐12‐trillion‐to‐global‐growth September 2015 68

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[xiv] Annalisa Merelli, “There’s a Mind‐Boggling Amount of Work Women Do That We Can’t Quantify”. https://qz.com/686075/we‐still‐have‐literally‐no‐way‐to‐quantify‐exactly‐how‐much‐work‐ women‐do/ May 18, 2016 [xv] Justin Wolfers, “Fewer Women Run Big Companies Than Men Named John”. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/upshot/fewer‐women‐run‐big‐companies‐than‐men‐ named‐john.html?mcubz=0 March 2, 2015 [xvi] Dana Kanze, Laura Huang, “Male and Female Entrepreneurs Get Asked Different Questions by VCs — And it Affects How Much Funding They Get”. https://hbr.org/2017/06/male‐and‐female‐ entrepreneurs‐get‐asked‐different‐questions‐by‐vcs‐and‐it‐affects‐how‐much‐funding‐they‐get June 27, 2017 [xvii] World Footwear, “Worldwide Footwear Production Reached 23 Billion pairs in 2015”. https://www.worldfootwear.com/news.asp?id=1817&Worldwide_footwear_production_reac hed_230_billion_pairs_in_2015 August 2, 2016 [xviii] Time Magazine, “Time Style and Design Poll”. http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1169863,00.html March 5, 2006 [xix] James Salmon, “Women Spend 7 Billion a Year on Clothes and Shoes”. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article‐3753812/Women‐spend‐7billion‐year‐clothes‐ shoes.html August 22, 2016 [xx] Matt Egan, “16 Firms Worth Billions Despite Losing Money”. http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/23/investing/shazam‐tech‐startups‐lose‐money/index.html January 23, 2015 [xxi] Sara Ashley O’Brien and Cristina Alesci, “Unilever Looks to Buy Jessica Alba’s Honest Company”. http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/16/technology/unilever‐honest‐ company/index.html September 16, 2016 [xxii] Dominique Mosbergen, “Since Lingerie Brand Aerie Ditched Photoshopped Ads, Sales Have Surged”. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/aerie‐photoshop‐sales‐growth‐ 2016_us_573d35d6e4b0646cbeec260c May 19, 2016 [xxiii] Suzanne Goldenberg, “Half of All US Food Produce is Thrown Away, New Research Suggests”. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/13/us‐food‐waste‐ugly‐fruit‐ vegetables‐perfect July 13, 2016 [xxiv] Modern Farmer, “How WTRMLN WTR (With Help from Beyoncé) Turns Food Waste Into Health Fuel”. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/modern‐farmer/how‐wtrmln‐wtr‐with‐help‐ _b_11201078.html July 28, 2016 [xxv] Jenna Goudreau, “What Men and Women are Doing on Facebook”. https://www.forbes.com/2010/04/26/popular‐social‐networking‐sites‐forbes‐woman‐ time‐facebook‐twitter.html April 26, 2010 [xxvi] Chris Keane, “Men Think They Do All The Holiday Shopping, But Women Beg to Differ”. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/men‐think‐they‐do‐all‐holiday‐shopping‐ women‐beg‐differ‐n694026 November 25, 2011 [xxvii] Monique M.H. Pollmann and Ilja van Beest. “ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3873259/ December 26, 2013 [xxviii] Nielsen, “Multicultural Millennials: The Multiplier Effect”, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2017/multicultural‐millennials‐‐the‐ multiplier‐effect.html. January 18, 2017 AFGG 2018

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[xxix] The Robin Report, “Kraft, Campbell Soup, Nestle …and More” http://therobinreport.com/kraft‐ campbell‐soup‐nestleand‐ more/?utm_source=The+Robin+Report&utm_campaign=50c9172c86‐ August 19, 2015 [xxx] E.J. Schultz, “Big Food’s Big Problem: Consumers Don’t Trust Brands”. http://adage.com/article/cmo‐strategy/big‐food‐falters‐marketers‐responding/298747/ May 25, 2015 [xxxi] Wikipedia, “Pension Funds; United States” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_fund#United_States

Source: Kayembe, D. (2017). The Silent Rise of the Female Driven Economy.Available: https://blog.usejournal.com/the‐silent‐rise‐of‐the‐female‐drive‐economy‐cdc0bc0f2b5.

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Women entrepreneurs: The changemakers of a better world Hannah Koh, 2017 Helping women start their own businesses is one way to scale up the impact they can have on sustainable development, but they still face a series of challenges such as a lack of access to capital and meaningful mentoring.

When Indonesian business woman Shinta Widjaja Kamdani began learning the ropes of the family business from her father, she struggled to make her father understand that she could be “as good as any man holding the role”.

Today, as the chief executive officer of Sintesa Group—one of Indonesia’s largest conglomerates with businesses in the consumer products, real estate, industrial and energy sectors—Kamdani has not only proven her business chops, but also helps other women to go into business, both as corporate workers and entrepreneurs.

This is why she has collaborated with other business leaders in setting up the Indonesia Business Coalition for Women Empowerment, focused on gender equality in the workplace, and in 2011 cofounded the Angel Investment Network Indonesia to fund startups.

Speaking at a panel discussion at the Asian Women in Leadership Summit 2017 in Singapore last month, Kamdani commented that entrepreneurship is a key driver of the Indonesian economy. According to the Indonesian Central Bureau of Statistics, the fourth most populous country in the world had a 5.5 per cent unemployment rate in 2016, translating into 7 million people looking for work.

Not only can entrepreneurship drive economic growth and development in Indonesia, but research has shown that when women become entrepreneurs, returns can be even greater. For instance, when a woman is empowered and successful, she will spend 90 per cent of each dollar that she earns on educaton and healthcare for her family, compared to 30 to 40 per cent for men.

Kamdani is also proving to be a key advocate of sustainability, as the vice chairwoman of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KADIN), which was instrumental in the now‐defunct Indonesian Palm Oil Pledge, and is founder and president of the Indonesia Business Council for Sustainable Development. She is also the vice chair of WWF Indonesia. As the chief of Sintesa she has committed to boosting the company’s renewable energy generation capacity to 1,000 megawatts by 2020.

Vinika Rao, executive director ‐ Emerging Markets Institute at graduate business school INSEAD, who had moderated the panel discussion Kamdani spoke on, told Eco‐Business later: “The importance of women entrepreneurship for development is undeniable.”

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“When they’re successful, women become true changemakers. For every dollar they make in income, almost 90 per cent goes back into the family, into education, into healthcare for the children,” she said, pointing to the scale of impact that would be possible by encouraging more women to become entrepreneurs.

Rao added: “I’m not saying it’s not true of men, but clearly it holds true for more women than men.”

Women have also been found to be more responsible investors, with a 2015 study by the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing reporting that women are more likely to take the sustainability of potential investments into account than men.

When they’re successful, women become true changemakers. For every dollar they make in income, almost 90 per cent goes back into the family, into education, into healthcare for the children.

Vinika Rao, executive director ‐ Emerging Markets Institute, INSEAD Barriers to entry But women entrepreneurs still face more obstacles to business than their male counterparts, according to a recently released study by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP).

The report, Fostering women’s entrepreneurship in ASEAN: Transforming prospects, transforming societies, found that gender inequality creates an average income loss for developing countries. The figure ranges from 7 per cent in Cambodia to 29 per cent in Brunei.

Unequal access to resources, cultural and social norms, poor internet connectivity, the lack of education, and limited access to finance are some of the challenges that the report identifies as stacked against the female would‐be entrepreneur.

Advertisement This is even more so for women living in rural areas who both work outside the home and take care of the household, said Kamdani, who noted that starting a new business in major cities was easier.

Drawing similar conclusions to the report, the Indonesian businesswoman told her mostly female audience at the one‐day summit that there were four specific challenges for women in rural areas who want to start their own businesses: acceptance from the family, a lack of education and skills, the lack of capital, and having recourse to expertise and help.

Woman‐to‐woman mentoring is one way to solve some of these issues and can be just as critical as offering funding as an angel investor, said Kamdani. “The power of mentoring is unimaginable, and it’s not just about business. A lot of it is speaking woman to woman, even about something basic like ‘How can I talk to my husband about wanting to start a business’?”

She said even as the Angel Investment Network Indonesia invests in women’s businesses, it also builds a network of mentors to connect women who need help to successful women.

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Sitting at the table Speakers at the event also urged women to speak up and sit at the table in corporate settings in order to make more headway in staking leadership roles.

The case for having more gender diversity in top management roles has been proven in research.

Having women in leadership roles can promote resilience and help societies and families bounce back from stress and shock, research has found. The World Economic Forum has also reported that companies that have women leaders tend to perform better than companies without, whether it comes to financial performance or corporate sustainability.

Beth Boswell, head of communications, Asia & Russia for Alcon, recommended practical measures for women to be seen and heard in the workplace, saying: “It drives me crazy that women sit on the outside and don’t take a seat at the table.”

She advised that women come with opinions on the issues discussed. “Make sure you have a point of view and make sure it’s heard. Who do you need to know two years from now? Network,” Boswell urged, saying women who want to advance have to be seen as “smart and contributing”.

Yuko Nakahira, managing director of 3M Singapore, added that while a company’s leadership team is responsible for gender diversity, women need to own their own development. “When I mentor women I tell them: ‘Show your fighting spirit, then people around you can help.’”

But INSEAD’s Rao pointed out that mentoring alone is not a solution. INSEAD research has shown that men who have been mentored for two years tend to be promoted two years later, but the same does not seem to happen for women, in what has been called overmentoring and undersponsoring.

Women need “more than just mentorship”, she stressed. “It has to be an active sponsorship, an active sharing of contacts, opening of doors, and understanding that what defines leadership qualities has to be more inclusive.”

Because women leaders tend be more collaborative than male leaders, this is often misinterpreted as them having less vision, Rao added. Men in senior roles can therefore be crucial “gatekeepers” for women and actively facilitate new connections and take on sponsorship roles.

However John Buckley, chief risk officer of JP Morgan in Asia Pacific, said there is strength in expressing their true personalities. “The mistake people make is that they aren’t their authentic selves,” he said.

“You are 10 times more powerful and influential by being yourself and expressing it that way.”

Source: Koh, H. (2017). Women entrepreneurs: The changemakers of a better world. Available: http://www.eco‐business.com/news/women‐entrepreneurs‐the‐changemakers‐of‐a‐better‐world/.

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Women and the Vision Thing Herminia Ibarra and Otilia Obodaru, 2017 Many believe that bias against women lingers in the business world, particularly when it comes to evaluating their leadership ability. Recently, we had a chance to see whether that assumption was true. In a study of thousands of 360‐degree assessments collected by Insead’s executive education program over the past five years, we looked at whether women actually received lower ratings than men. To our surprise, we found the opposite: As a group, women outshone men in most of the leadership dimensions measured. There was one exception, however, and it was a big one: Women scored lower on “envisioning”—the ability to recognize new opportunities and trends in the environment and develop a new strategic direction for an enterprise.

But was this weakness a perception or a reality? How much did it matter to women’s ability to lead?

And how could someone not perceived as visionary acquire the right capabilities? As we explored these issues with successful female executives, we arrived at another question: Was a reputation for vision even something many of them wanted to achieve?

A Brilliant Career A leading services company CEO we’ll call Anne Dumas typified in many ways the women we spoke with. The pillar of her leadership style was a principle taught to her 20 years ago by her first boss: Always stay close to the details. As she explained it: “I think strategy comes naturally from knowing your business and the forces that influence your market, clients, and suppliers—not at a high level but at a detailed level. Intermediaries kill your insight. You obviously can’t monitor everything, but nothing should keep you from knowing in detail the processes on which your company runs—not supervising everything but understanding at a detailed level what is going on. Otherwise, you are hostage to people who will play politics. At best you don’t have full information; at worst you’re vulnerable to hidden agendas. My job is to go to the relevant detail level.”

In her four years as CEO, Dumas had achieved some impressive results. She had doubled revenues and operating margins, given the company a new strategic direction, and undertaken a fundamental reorganization of the company’s core processes and structures. More recently, she had turned her attention to developing her leadership team.

Yet Dumas knew she should somehow improve her communication effectiveness, particularly in her role as an executive member of her parent company’s board. One challenge was her stylistic mismatch with her chairman, a broad‐brush, big‐picture thinker who often balked at what he perceived as excessive attention to detail. She found herself reluctant to favor “form over substance.” She told us, “I always wonder what people mean when they say, ‘He’s not much of a manager but is a good leader.’

Leader of what? You have to do things to be a leader.” She went on to imply that so‐called visionary behaviors might even be harmful. “We are in danger today of being mesmerized by people who play with our reptilian brain. For me, it is manipulation. I can do the storytelling too, but I refuse to play on people’s emotions. If the string pulling is too obvious, I can’t make myself do it.”

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Dumas’s reluctance is not unusual. One of the biggest developmental hurdles that aspiring leaders, male and female alike, must clear is learning to sell their ideas—their vision of the future—to numerous stakeholders. Presenting an inspiring story about the future is very different from generating a brilliant strategic analysis or crafting a logical implementation plan, competencies on which managers like Dumas have built their careers.

Indeed, a whole generation of women now entering the C‐suite owe their success to a strong command of the technical elements of their jobs and a nose‐to‐the‐grindstone focus on accomplishing quantifiable objectives. But as they step into bigger leadership roles—or are assessed on their potential to do so—the rules of the game change, and a different set of skills comes to the fore.

Vision Impaired Our research drew on 360‐degree evaluations of 2,816 executives from 149 countries enrolled in executive education courses at Insead. As with most 360‐degree exercises, these managers filled out self‐assessments and invited subordinates, peers, supervisors, and other people they dealt with in a professional context, such as suppliers and customers, to evaluate them on a set of leadership dimensions. In total 22,244 observers participated. (See the sidebar “Critical Components of Leadership” for a description of the Global Executive Leadership Inventory, or GELI.) As we looked for patterns within this data set, we focused on differences between the male and female leaders, both in terms of how they saw themselves and in terms of how the observers evaluated them. Certainly, there were plenty of data to work with, since 20% of the executives assessed and 27% of the evaluating observers were women. When analyzing the data, we controlled for the effects of the executives’ age and level.

The first surprise for us, given prior published research, was that we found no evidence of a female “modesty effect.” Quite the opposite: Women rated themselves significantly higher than men rated themselves on four of the 10 GELI dimensions we analyzed. And on the remaining dimensions, the women and men gave themselves ratings that were about the same.

Our analyses of how leaders were rated by their male and female associates—bosses, peers, and subordinates—also challenged the common wisdom. Again based on prior research, we’d expected gender stereotypes to lower the ratings of female leaders, particularly those given by men. That was not the case. If there was a gender bias, it favored female leaders: Male observers scored female leaders significantly higher than they scored male leaders on seven dimensions, and female observers scored them significantly higher on eight. (See the exhibit “Comparing the Ratings of Male and Female Leaders.”)

Ratings on one dimension, however, defied this pattern. Female leaders were rated lower by their male observers (but not by women) on their capabilities in “envisioning.” That deficit casts a large shadow over what would otherwise be an extremely favorable picture of female executives. The GELI instrument does not claim that the different dimensions of leadership are equal in importance, and as other research has shown, some do matter more than others to people’s idea of what makes a leader.

In particular, the envisioning dimension is, for most observers, a must‐have capability.

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Intrigued by this one apparent weakness, we looked more closely at the observers’ ratings. Was a particular group responsible for bringing the envisioning scores down? Indeed one was. As shown in the exhibit “Who Says Women Aren’t Visionary?” the male peers (who represented the majority of peers in our sample) rated women lower on envisioning. Interestingly, female peers did not downgrade women, contrary to the frequently heard claim that women compete rather than cooperate with one another. Our data suggest it’s the men who might feel most competitive toward their female peers. Male superiors and subordinates rated male and female leaders about the same.

What It Means to Be Visionary George H.W. Bush famously responded to the suggestion that he look up from the short‐term goals of his campaign and start focusing on the longer term by saying, “Oh—the vision thing.” His answer underlines vision’s ambiguity. Just what do we mean when we say a person is visionary?

The distinction between management and leadership has long been recognized. Most agree that managing for continuous improvement to the status quo is different from being a force for change that compels a group to innovate and depart from routine. And if leadership is essentially about realizing change, then crafting and articulating a vision of a better future is a leadership prerequisite.

No vision, no leadership.

But just as leadership is a question of what one does rather than what one is, so too is vision. It encompasses the abilities to frame the current practices as inadequate, to generate ideas for new strategies, and to communicate possibilities in inspiring ways to others. Being visionary, therefore, is not the same as being charismatic. It entails “naming” broad‐stroke patterns and setting strategy based on those patterns. (See the sidebar “What Does It Mean to Have Vision?”)

Visionary leaders don’t answer the question “Where are we going?” simply for themselves; they make sure that those around them understand the direction as well. As they search for new paths, they conduct a vigorous exchange with an array of people inside and outside their organizations, knowing that great visions rarely emerge from solitary analysis. As “practical futurists,” leaders also test new ideas pragmatically against current resources (money, people, organizational capabilities) and work with others to figure out how to realize the desired future. True strategists offer much more than the generic vision statements that companies hang on their walls; they articulate a clear point of view about what will transpire and position their organizations to respond to it. All of this adds up to a tall order for anyone in a leadership role. It’s not obvious, however, why it should be a particular challenge for women.

Perception or Reality?

As we sought to understand why women fail to impress with their vision, research findings from prior studies were not much help. To begin with, most attempts to compare men’s and women’s styles have focused on how leaders are rated by subordinates. Yet, as we all know, leaders play a key role in managing stakeholders above, across, and outside their units. Moreover, the vast majority of studies ask participants either to rate hypothetical male and female leaders or to evaluate “the majority” of male or female leaders they know, rather than the actual, specific leaders they know well. Empirical 76

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studies of gender differences in leadership styles have often used populations of students, members of diverse associations, and nonmanagers, rather than the midlevel to senior business managers we are actually trying to understand.

We turned therefore to the experts who were living this reality every day: the women participating in our executive education programs. When we asked how they would interpret our data, we heard three explanations. First, several women noted that they tended to set strategy via processes that differed from those used by their male counterparts. This suggests that what may in fact be visionary leadership is not perceived that way because it takes a different path. Second, we heard that women often find it risky to stray away from concrete facts, analyses, and details. And third, many women betrayed negative attitudes toward visionary leadership. Because they thought of themselves as grounded, concrete, and no‐nonsense, and had seen many so‐called visionary ideas founder in execution, they tended to eye envisioning behaviors with some suspicion. Each of these interpretations invited serious consideration.

Theory 1: Women are equally visionary but in a different way.

Several of the women who had taken the GELI survey argued that it is not that women lack vision but that they come to their visions in a less directive way than men do. One executive put it like this: “Many women tend to be quite collaborative in forming their vision. They take into account the input of many and then describe the result as the group’s vision rather than their own.” Another said, “I don’t see myself as particularly visionary in the creative sense. I see myself as pulling and putting together abstract pieces of information or observations that lead to possible strategies and future opportunities.”

Vivienne Cox, CEO of BP Alternative Energy, is known for having an “organic” leadership style. She led a team that crafted a strategy for moving BP into alternative energy in a more unified and substantial way, by combining a set of peripheral businesses such as solar, wind, and hydrogen‐fired power plants into one new low‐carbon‐powered unit that BP would invest billions in. Ask those involved how the new strategy came about, and the answer always involves multiple players working collaboratively.

One of her key lieutenants described Cox’s approach like this: “She thinks about how to create incentives or objectives so that the organization will naturally find its own solutions and structures. It encourages people to be thoughtful, innovative, and self‐regulating.” Cox herself claims that her role is to be a “catalyst.” She consistently articulates a management philosophy in which the leader does not drive change but, rather, allows potential to emerge.

Interestingly, the processes these women describe do not hinge just on a collaborative style. They also rely on diverse and external inputs and alliances. At BP Alternative Energy, Cox spent much of her time talking to key people outside her business group and the company in order to develop a strategic perspective on opportunities and sell the idea of low‐carbon power to her CEO and peers. Her ideas were informed by a wide network that included thought leaders in a range of sectors. She brought in outsiders who could transcend a parochial view to fill key roles and invited potential adversaries into the process early on to make sure her team was also informed by those who had a different view of the world. Our results hint at an interesting hypothesis: By involving their male peers in the process of creating a vision, female leaders may get less credit for the result.

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Theory 2: Women hesitate to go out on a limb.

Some women responded to our findings by noting that they need to base their marching orders on concrete facts and irrefutable analysis, not unprovable assertions about how the future will take shape. Here, two Democratic candidates for the 2008 U.S. presidential race offer an interesting parallel. Barack Obama was viewed as a visionary, a charismatic communicator offering a more hopeful if undetailed future. Hillary Clinton was viewed as a competent executor with an impressive if uninspiring grasp of policy detail. According to a recent New Yorkerarticle by George Packer, Clinton as much as admitted that she does not inspire through rhetoric and emotion. She said: “A President, no matter how rhetorically inspiring, still has to show strength and effectiveness in the day‐to‐day handling of the job, because people are counting on that. So, yes, words are critically important, but they’re not enough. You have to act. In my own experience, sometimes it’s putting one foot in front of the other day after day.”

Might women feel they have to choose between being seen as competent and in control or being visionary? Recall Anne Dumas, our services executive, and her pride in having a vast, detailed knowledge of what is happening in her firm. Often, she told us, she’d called on that reservoir of data to defend her position against challenges. The same attitude comes through in the observation of a management consultant who told us, “Men speak more confidently and boldly on an issue, with very little data to back it up. Women want to have a lot of data and feel confident that they can back up what they are saying.”

A common obstacle for female leaders is that they often lack the presumption of competence accorded to their male peers. As a result, women are less likely to go out on a limb, extrapolating from facts and figures to interpretations that are more easily challenged. When a situation is rife with threat—when people, male or female, expect that they are “guilty until proven innocent”—they adopt a defensive, often rigid, posture, relying less on their imagination and creativity and sticking to safe choices.

The presumption‐of‐competence effect is compounded by gender stereotypes that lead us to expect emotional, collaborative women and rational, directive men. When men communicate from the heart or manage participatively, it’s taken as evidence of range, an added plus. Women’s emotional communication or inclusive process, by contrast, is implicitly viewed as proof of an incapacity or unwillingness to do otherwise, even if the situation calls for it.

Theory 3: Women don’t put much stock in vision.

Do men and women really have different leadership styles? Certainly a lot of ink has been spilled on the question, but the answer provided by hundreds of studies, subjected to meta‐analysis, is no. When other factors (such as title, role, and salary) are held constant, similarities in style vastly outweigh the differences. The occasional finding that women are slightly more people oriented and participative tends not to hold up in settings where there are few women—that is, in line positions and upper management. But put aside the science and ask individuals for their opinion on whether men and women have different leadership styles, and most women (and men) answer yes.

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This can only complicate the solution to the vision deficit. It’s one thing for a woman who suspects she is wrongly perceived to resolve to change certain behaviors in order to convey the competence and substance she has to offer. It’s quite another thing when her own self‐conception has become colored by the same biases.

Our interviews with female executives highlighted one potential difference in attitude between the genders that could explain women’s lower ratings on envisioning. We suspect women may not value envisioning as a critical leadership competency to the same extent that men do or may have a more skeptical view of envisioning’s part in achieving results. Over and over again in our discussions with women, we heard them take pride in their concrete, no‐nonsense attitude and practical orientation toward everyday work problems. We were reminded of a comment made by Margaret Thatcher: “If you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman.” Many of the women we interviewed similarly expressed the opinion that women were more thorough, had a better command of detail, and were less prone to self‐promotion than men. Like Anne Dumas, they valued substance over form as a means of gaining credibility with key stakeholders. A pharmaceutical executive elaborated further: “I see women as more practical. Although the women in my organization are very strategic, they are also often the ones who ground the organization in what is possible, what can or cannot be done from the human dimension.”

Making the Leadership Transition Women may dismiss the importance of vision—and they may be reassured by the many claims made over the years about their superior emotional intelligence—but the fact remains that women are a minority in the top ranks of business organizations. Our findings suggest to us that the shortfall is in no small part due to women’s perceived lack of vision.

The findings of a 2008 study by Catalyst researchers Jeanine Prime and Nancy Carter and IMD professors Karsten Jonsen and Martha Maznevski concur. In it, more than 1,000 executives from nine countries (all alumni of executive education programs) were asked for their impressions of men and women in general as leaders. Both men and women tended to believe that the two genders have distinct leadership strengths, with women outscoring men on some behaviors, and men outscoring women on others. But here’s the catch: When people were asked to rate the behaviors’ relative importance to overall leadership effectiveness, the “male” behaviors had the edge. Across countries, “inspiring others”—a component of our envisioning dimension—landed at the top of the rankings as most important to overall leadership effectiveness. And what of the areas of leadership where men agreed that women were stronger? Let’s take women’s standout advantage: their much greater skill at “supporting others.” That one ranked at the bottom of the list. As a component of overall leadership effectiveness, it was clearly not critical but merely nice to have.

We’ve seen how these priorities play out at close hand, in the personal stories of women we study.

Particularly at midcareer, when senior management sizes up the leadership potential of competent managers, they take their toll. A manager we’ll call Susan offers a cautionary tale. A strong performer, Susan rose through the functional ranks in logistics and distribution, thanks to her superior technical and people skills and belief in running a tight ship. As a manager she prided herself on her efficient planning and organizing and her success in building a loyal, high‐performing team. But her boss saw AFGG 2018

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her capabilities differently. By this point in her career, he expected her to sense emerging trends or unexploited opportunities in the business environment, to craft strategy based on a view of the business as opposed to a view of her function, and to actively work to identify and bring on board stakeholders. Eventually a proposal came from outside her division calling for a radical reorganization of it. Still focused on making continuous improvement to the existing operation, Susan lacked the networks that would have helped her spot shifting priorities in the wider market and was blindsided by the idea.

It’s often observed that the very talents that bring managers success in midlevel roles can be obstacles to their taking on bigger leadership roles. That was Susan’s situation, and it’s possible that it is a common trap for women. Having had the message drummed into their heads that they must be rational, nonemotional, and hyperefficient, they might actually place a higher value than men on knowing the details cold and getting the job done. That, in turn, makes their leadership transition more difficult, because they stick with what they know longer. Another woman we interviewed, this one an investment banker, captured the scale of the challenge. “It’s like my whole basis for existence is taken away from me,” she told us, “if I can’t rely on the facts.” Her words reminded us that an executive’s accustomed approach and style define who she is as a leader. To walk away from them is to be left without a clear sense of identity.

The challenge facing women, then, is to stop dismissing the vision thing and make vision one of the things they are known for. In a senior leadership role, it’s the best use of their time and attention. It’s a set of competencies that can be developed. And of all the leadership dimensions we measured, it’s the only thing holding women back.

Source: Ibarra, H and Obodaru, O. (2009). Women and the Vision Thing.Available: https://hbr.org/2009/01/women‐and‐the‐vision‐thing. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017

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EJISDC (2015) 70, 9, 1-2

1 Book Review

Women and ICT in Africa and the Middle East: Changing Selves, Changing Societies

Edited by: Ineke Buskens & Anne Webb Zed Books, London 2014: ISBN: 978-1-98360-042-7; £ 21.99; 326pp Reviewed by: Atta Addo London School of Economics & Political Science a.a.addo@lse.ac.uk Will it be possible to turn ICT into a force for the good for the developing world [...] and how might ICT [...] be influenced and formed by notions of social justice and sustainability? (p.2).

These are the questions explored in this edited volume: a collection of reports on twenty-one research projects undertaken in fourteen African and Middle Eastern countries by the Gender Research in Africa and the Middle East into ICTs for Empowerment (GRACE) network.

Although the research reported in this volume was undertaken between 2008 and 2012, GRACE has been in the field since 2004 and previously published African Women and ICTs: Investigating Technology, Gender and Empowerment (2009). The GRACE network conducts research “for the purpose of social transformation” (p.3), specifically, how ICTs might enable desirable interventions in gender relations and the “socioeconomic-political-religious structures that support them” (p.4) based on an assumption that “ICTs can benefit women greatly and contribute to women’s empowerment and gender-equality endeavours” (p.7).

Excluding a methodology section at the end, the book’s twenty-one essays are divided into three parts that are meant to reflect the “processes of personal and social change that (need to) take place when women in the South set out to explicitly empower themselves in and through the use of ICT” (p.7). These “stages” or “clustered experiences” women encounter on their journey of empowerment “with ICT, through ICT and in ICT” involve agentic use of ICT (as opposed to unintentional use), “participation in ICT space” their “ICTenhance being, doing, relating and becoming” (p.8). Hence, part 1 (chapters 1-7), ‘Agentic ICT use: the aspiration for emancipation versus the power of gender traditions’, discusses the use of ICTs in women’s personal and professional lives against the backdrop of structural inequalities and systemic biases that have deep socioeconomic, religious and cultural roots.

The cases implicate ICTs in issues like high maternal mortality and gender-based violence (Yemen), equal access at tertiary level (Sudan), gender policy in tertiary science and technology education (Zimbabwe), work environment for women (Kenya) political participation (Senegal), and women’s legal rights (Tunisia). This mosaic of cases are unified by the core section narrative of agentic use as well as a subtext of changes in the digital divide, made possible by widespread new technologies like mobile phones.

Part 2 (chapters 8-14), ‘Developing critical voice in and through safe ICT-created space’ is about the role of ICTs in raising gender awareness and thereby creating a safe space for women’s participation and self-expression. The gripping and insightful set of cases are woven around themes of women’s critical voice in patriarchal and sexist social contexts and explore ICT use in relation to issues like resilience during sectarian clashes (Nigeria), body image and self-esteem issues (Egypt), teenage girls’ ‘sexting’ (South Africa), gender awareness (Yemen), gender empowerment (Jordan), and expression (Palestine). Part 3 (chapters 15-21), ‘ICT-enhanced relating and becoming: personal and social transformation’ explores the potential for ICTs to enable personal and social transformations through relational ties, community and local participation. The cases are drawn from Zambia, Sudan, Egypt, Uganda, and Cameroon and address the implication of ICTs for such diverse issues as AFGG 2018

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female sexual expression (Zambia), Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) (Sudan), democratic participation (Cameroon), land tenure (Egypt) among others.

Methodologically, the general approach taken in the case research is referred to by the editor as “normative action research” which is “purpose-aligned” and “future oriented” and produces knowledge that would be ‘able to do things’, ‘to make things happen’ and “change people’s behavior and environments” (p.7, p.293). As such, the main research questions are not hypothesis driven or hermeneutic-interpretive, but rather, ‘how to’ questions (p.297). This approach is rooted in pragmatic action research (Coenen, 1987) as well as normative action research (Baburogul and Ravn, 1992), emancipatory action research (Buskens and Earl, 2008) and planning monitoring and evaluation method of ‘outcome mapping’ (Earl et al.

2001) (p.294).

Overall, the empirical account is fascinating and the aims of the research project worthwhile. Furthermore, aside development practitioners who will find the volume illuminating, the action research method will be eye opening for ICT4D scholars who are not used to this approach but may be keen to explore it in their own work. Despite these strengths, the book has drawbacks, chief among these being the brevity of the articles.

Cramming 21 research articles into a 326-page book did not allow for sufficient treatment of the subject matter or related analytical and methodological issues in each of the articles.

Given this limitation, it is hard to assess the rigor of the studies, even according to the volumes own criteria outlined in the methodology section, as there is not much exposition and analysis.

A substantive critique relates to the general assumption upon which the project is built, namely, that “ICTs can benefit women greatly and contribute to women’s empowerment and gender-equality endeavours” (p.7). This claim is reminiscent of what Orlikowski and Iacono (2001, p. 123) term the “tool view of technology”. They note that this view “represents the common, received wisdom about what technology is and means [...] the engineered artifact, expected to do what its designers intend it to do. As such, what the technology is and how it works are seen to be largely technical matters (separate, definable, unchanging, and over which humans have control).” Despite the currency of such ‘tool view’ among practitioners, the field of Information Systems has over the last few decades problematized it by insisting that technology is not independent of the social and organizational arrangements within which it is developed and used. As such, even in action research, rather than taking for granted the potential of ICTs for social and organizational change, some degree of skepticism might be in order.

Reference Orlikowski, W.J. and Iacono, S.C. (2001) Research Commentary: Desperately Seeking the “IT” in IT Research- A Call to Theorizing the IT Artifact. Information Systems Research, 12, 2, 121-134.

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World Review of Business Research Vol. 6. No. 1. March 2016 Issue. Pp. 161 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 178

The Role of Women Entrepreneurs in Establishing Sustainable Development in Developing Nations Kalpana R. Ambepitiya* The woman plays a significant role in the economic development of any country. This is a considerable factor with great emphasis on any developing scenario. Women contribute and support the economy extensively in different ways by being employed in many different sectors. Many successful businesses are run by women some of whom are very skilled in entrepreneurial activities. Some of these women are well educated and are aware of correct application of theory in business. It is a known fact that many of the most successful and worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest enterprises are owned and run by women today. In developing countries, some women are running small enterprises many of which have proven to be successful.

Women entrepreneurs in both developed and developing countries are socially powerful in terms of education and making a positive impact on the society. It is important to study how women in business and their skills can be utilized to achieve a sustainable economy in a developing nation.

Objectives of this study cover an extensive range from the study of the development of women entrepreneurs to a sustainable economy, social system, and ecology. A descriptive research methodology has been used for this study and administered to a selected sample from a specific population that include women in businesses and executives who represent both private and public sectors of selected developing countries. The Study has been carried out over a period of six months and has used a questionnaire as the survey instrument. The survey has indicated how women entrepreneurs can be positioned to play an important role in promoting sustainable practices in the economy, the social system and the ecology. The researcher concludes the study by observing that given the positive effect made by women on the economy and development, women entrepreneurship is key to the developing world in promoting sustainable practices in business socially, economically and ecologically.

Field of Research: Entrepreneurship and Economics

1. Introduction Western society in the early nineteen century, dictated that the most suitable place for the woman is her home. People believed that women can best serve the society by offering their energy to the creation of healthful and nurturing households. However in the 1970s, women left home and entered the workforce in droves. Women today are once more leaving the workforce in droves in favour of being at home. Yet, unlike generations of women before them, these women are opting to work from home not as homemakers, but as job-making entrepreneurs. Many women are starting businesses that align with their personal values and ________________________________ *Kalpana R. Ambepitiya, Department of Management and Finance, General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University, Kandawala Estate, Rathmalana, Sri Lanka. Kalpana.ambepitiya@gmail.com AFGG 2018

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Ambepitiya offer freedom and flexibility when it comes to things like scheduling. “The glass ceiling that once limited a woman‟s career path has paved a new road towards business ownership, where women can utilize their sharp business acumen while building strong family ties (Forbs 2012). The development of women is an integrated and unified concept, stretching across economic, social and cultural fields (Mehta and Sethi 1997). Women‟s participation is now considered a significant factor in economic and social development. However, they are reasonably unexploited as a source of entrepreneurship in both developing and developed countries. This is a reality principally in areas of new business creation (Brush 1994).

In the last few decades, the attitudes of people have changed and women entrepreneurs are considered significant in economic development and wealth creation. Women entrepreneurs also recognized as social icons to motivate women in developing countries. The significant number of woman headed businesses and their productive activities, particularly in the industry sector make them a force to be reckoned with and empower them in the overall economic development of their nations. Whether they are involved in small or medium scale production activities, or in the informal sectors, women's entrepreneurial activities are not only a means for economic survival, but they also have positive social repercussions for the women themselves and their social environment (UNIDO 2001).

In the last couple of decades, there has been a change in attitude and entrepreneurs are considered to be important in relation to both wealth creation and economic regeneration.

Indeed, the role and importance of female entrepreneurship and new business creation to both developed and developing economies have received increased attention from academics and policy makers in recent years. This growth in interest in the economic contribution of entrepreneurship has been reflected in an increased level and variety of public and private sector policy initiatives at local, regional and national levels to stimulate and support the development of the sector (Henry et al. 2003). Today, many opportunities to start new businesses and international support is available to women entrepreneurs. Female-run enterprises are steadily growing all over the world, contributing to household income and growth of national economies. However, women face time, human, physical, and social constraints that limit their ability to grow their businesses. Women‟s development is directly related to the nation‟s development. Therefore, sustainable development of women‟s resources, their abilities, interests, skills and other potentialities are of paramount importance in this sector. Women entrepreneurship responds to increasing demands for best practices and tools to integrate gender in private sector development.

In view of the growing importance of entrepreneurship oriented development supported to find the fact that about 40% of enterprises in developing countries are owned and run by women (Zororo 2011). Observation and empirical evidence point to and reveal that the relationship between women entrepreneurship and the sustainable development is positive. An entrepreneur offers some new value(s) to the society, sometimes in the form of innovative or novel things through the creation of a firm. Women entrepreneurship is a potential means of empowering people, developing rural women and solving other social problems. Women entrepreneurs can be positioned to play an important role in promoting sustainable practices in economics, social system and ecology, to reach sustainable development. This research aims to study the role of women entrepreneurs in sustainable development by taking into consideration the adaptations of social, economical and environmental practices in business operations. Following are the sub objectives: 1. To examine the impact of the activities of women entrepreneurs on the economy of developing countries.

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Ambepitiya 2. To determine the effect(s) of activities of women entrepreneurs on the culture and the social development of their own.

3. To ascertain the impact of womenâ&#x20AC;&#x;s entrepreneurial activities to protect the eco-system of developing countries.

This paper has been organized to discuss the sustainable role played by women entrepreneurs in developing countries. Therefore, literature in the fields of social, economical and environmental aspects of different developing backgrounds has been reviewed. Variables have been identified through the literature survey and a hypothesis has been developed. The methodology, as an important aspect in this study, was developed to capture the views of four different countries, i.e., Sri Lanka, India, Maldives and Nigeria. The findings have been organized to reflect the role of women entrepreneurs in developing countries towards sustainable development in social, economical and environmental aspects. This paper contends that women entrepreneurship development must focus on producing new breeds of entrepreneurs with visions for sustainable development for the well being of the society.

2. Literature Review Entrepreneurship is considered the processes of emergency, behaviour and performance of entrepreneur (Ogundele 2004). An Entrepreneur can be developed through formal education, entrepreneurial training and development. Entrepreneurship requires an application of energy and passion towards the creation and implementation of new ideas and creative solutions. The essential ingredients include willingness to take calculated risks in terms of time, equity, or career; ability to formulate an effective venture team; creative skill to marshal needed resources; fundamental skill of building a solid business plan; and, finally, vision to recognize opportunity where others see chaos, contradiction, and confusion. Many business entrepreneurs around the world have exploited the environment with impunity, without any thought of sustainability. Entrepreneurs seek growth and profit within the business world. They are constant innovators and always are trying to capture larger market shares in the competitive marketplace. They are pioneering individualists who create one venture after another and one innovation after another (Frederick and Kuratko 2010). There are three broad categories of such skills which comprise oftwenty eight elements. The first is management development perspective skill. There are thirteen elements in this category, i.e., time management, entrepreneurial self development, managing change for competitive success, decision-making, human resources environment of business, helping people to learn, team building, project management, re-engineering or business process redesign, total quality management, organizational development, corporate excellence and people skills(Ogundele 2005).

The factors which influence the initial entrepreneurial decision are used to develop a theory for female entrepreneurs. The model describes three broad groups: (a.) "Antecedent Influences" include those aspects of the entrepreneursâ&#x20AC;&#x; background which affect her motivation, perceptions, and skills and knowledge. These include genetic factors, family influence, education, and previous career experience.(b.) The "Incubator Organization" describes the nature of the organization for which the entrepreneur worked immediately prior to the start-up.

Relevant factors include the specific geographic location, the type of the skills and knowledge acquired, the degree of contact with possible fellow founders, and the extent to which the entrepreneur gained experience of a small business setting. Beyond these, there are particular motivations and triggers to stay with or to leave an organization - the push versus pull factors.(c.) "Environmental Factors" external to the individual and to her incubator organizations provide an important setting within which the individual entrepreneur is able to 163

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Ambepitiya flourish. Important factors here include the prevailing general economic conditions, but more specifically the accessibility and availability of venture capital, role models of successful entrepreneurs, and the availability of supporting services (Birley& Harris 1988).

According to the classical definition given by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987, development is sustainable if it “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” It is usually understood that this “intergenerational” equity would be impossible to achieve in the absence of present-day social equity, if the economic activities of some groups of people continue to jeopardize the well-being of people belonging to other groups or living in other parts of the world.

As shown in Figure 01, sustainability development aims to make an influential effort on Ecology, Sociology and Economy. Ecological focus includes genetic diversity, resilience, and ecological productivity which endeavour to stabilize environment. Sociological focus includes cultural diversity, cultural sustainability, social justice and participation. Building a fair and free society is the base of this. Reducing poverty, quality enhancing and production of useful goods and services are the objectives of a sustainable economy.

Figure 1: Objectives of sustainable development

ECOLOGY 1. Genetic diversity 2. Resilience 3. Ecological productivity

ECONOMY 1. Reducing poverty

SOCIAL SYSTEM 1. Cultural diversity

2. Equity enhancing

2. sustainability

3. Inceasing useful good and services

4. Participation

3. Social justice

Source: Beyond Economic Growth: An Introduction to Sustainable Development

Whilst many of the early contributions to defining sustainable development came from the disciplines related to economics and ecology, it is the third sphere that has accommodated much recent work. Starkey and Walford (2001) stated that for example, sustainable development is a moral concept that seeks to define a „fair and just‟ development. They suggest that since the environment is the basis of all economic activity and of life itself, „it is surely only right that the quality and integrity of the environment be maintained for future generations‟. Notions of „environmental justice‟ are now a prominent part of the contemporary discussions on the meaning and practice of sustainable development and take the moral concerns further: in addition to environmental protection, the concern is for how environmental hazards (such as pollution) and goods (such as access to green space) are distributed across society. Environmental justice also encompasses a concern for equity of environmental management interventions and the nature of public involvement in decision-making.

Understanding the political nature of sustainable development in practice; how the solutions 164 86

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Ambepitiya proposed and the choices and trade-offs made can carry different costs for different groups of people is of importance. The benefits of ethical practices on business enterprise development include among others; good business image, loyal customers and more importantly the guarantee of sustainable enterprise activities. Ethical business practices give businesses the assurance of dealing with happier and confident stakeholders. There is also the assurance of profits over a long period of time due to business focus on quality needs of consumers (Adewole 2015).

Women own nearly 8 million businesses in the United States accounting for $ 1.2 trillion of the GDP. Compared to men, women tend to spend more of their earned income on the health and education of their families. In the United States, women went from holding 37% of all jobs to nearly 48% over the past forty years. Some statistics show that the reductions in barriers to female labour force participation would increase the GDP of USA by 9%, the GDP of Europe by 13% and the GDP of Japan by 16%. The reduction in barriers to women‟s equal access to productive resources could raise total agricultural output in developing countries from 2.5% to 4%. It will also result in reducing the number of hungry people in the world by up to 150 million people (The World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report and the Food of United Nations 2014).

Conceptual Framework Figure 2: Conceptual framework Women Entrepreneurs

  

     

Hardworking Information Seeking Creative and innovative  Risk taking Seeking opportunity and initiative Demand of efficiency and quality Persistence Goal setting Networking Independence and self confidence

Sustainability Development Ecology: Environment-friendly activities, Philanthropy, Green production, Green education Social System: Culture, tradition, wellbeing of the society, Taking part of social activities, leadership, Fair trade practices Economics: Elimination of poverty, creating employment,, environment challenges, Financial independence

Source: Developed by the researcher

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Ambepitiya Hypothesis H0: Driving women entrepreneurs towards a collection of social, ecological and economical business practices does not support sustainable development in developing nations.

H1: Driving women entrepreneurs towards a collection of social, ecological and economical business practices supports sustainable development in developing nations.

3. Methodology and the Model This study aims to examine the role of women entrepreneurs in establishing sustainable development in developing nations. Therefore, sixty (60) women entrepreneurs representing four developing countries and forty (40) executives representing private and public sector companies were selected to conduct this study.

Sample proportion Table 1: Sample Proportion Name of the sample Women entrepreneurs

Executives

Proportion Sri Lanka - 30 India - 15 Maldives - 10 Nigeria – 05 Private sector – 25 Sri Lanka – 15 India – 05 Maldives – 10

No. of participants 60

40

Public sector – 15

Sri Lanka – 10 Maldives - 05 Source: Developed by the researcher

An empirical survey was designed with two sets in order to study the views and experiences of women entrepreneurs through Facebook, email and google+ sites using the „snowball sampling‟ method. Questionnaires were distributed among the above social media network communities and friends living in the selected countries. Secondly, informal interviews were conducted with some women entrepreneurs in order to study challenges, opportunities and practical applicability of women entrepreneurship. A total of 60women entrepreneurs and 40 executives participated in this study. Convenience sampling method was used in the second set to obtain more scientific result that could be used to represent the entire population.

Therefore the sample was selected from the sampling frame which was provided by selecting public and private sector organizations in the form of a list of their employees. Executives were selected from India, Sri Lanka and Maldives. Women entrepreneurship is influenced by controllable variables such as philanthropist sentiments and environmental friendliness, the intention to eliminate poverty and support employment, the intention to be financially independent, inborn talents and abilities and non controllable variables such as culture, tradition, economic growth and country‟s SME policy. Aiming to eliminate poverty and support 166 88

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Ambepitiya employment development, becoming a philanthropist by practicing green activities in business operations are some of the abovementioned variables which were evaluated later in this study in order to measure the correlation between each variable. Research data analysis was conducted using univariate analysis such as frequency tables, diagrams, correlation and measures of dispersion.

4. The Findings Data for the Study was obtained from 100 participants using a questionnaire based survey.

Out of those, 20 participants were subjected to interviews designed to collect unstructured facts.

4.1 Women Entrepreneurs in Ecological Development Figure 3 demonstrates the engagement of women entrepreneurs in environment-friendly activities in their business operations. More than 50% of the women entrepreneurs agreed that they run their businesses in ways that minimize negative effects on the environment. Many of them stated that garbage disposal and waste management are the key areas that they focus on. They agreed that an extra income can be generated by practicing waste management and proper waste disposal. The sample of executives indicated that more than 50% of them agree that women entrepreneurs engage in environment-friendly business activities. According to them, womenâ&#x20AC;&#x; inborn ability of neatness and carefulness are significant reasons for this occurrence.

Figure 3: Environment-friendly activities in business operations

Environment-friendly activities in business operations 30 25

Response

20 15 10 5 0

Totally Agree

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

Totally Diagree

Women Entrepreneurs

27

17

10

6

0

Executives

17

7

7

7

2

Source: Survey data

Women entrepreneurs promote green practices and applications in productions and services.

It is clearly evident through Figure 4 in which more than 50% of women entrepreneurs have admitted that they have adopted green applications in production and services. They promote green practices in marketing, advertising, staffing etc. Access to information has made it 167

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Ambepitiya possible for them to understand how important these things are in a business. Activities of Non-governmental organizations appear to be prominent in creating awareness of green practices among emerging businesses. The executives also agree to the statement proving that women entrepreneurs are green promoters in production and services. According the executives, this is a unique area that women in business can develop and use to compete in the market place.

Figure 4: Application of green practices in production and services

Women Entrepreneurs are Green promoters in productions and services 100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0%

Totally Agree

Agree

Neutral Women Entrepreneurs

Disagree

Totally Diagree

Executives

Source: Survey data

Figure 5 represents the correlation between environment-friendly practices in business activities and promoting green activities in production and service delivery. There is a positive, strong partial correlation between these two variables. Therefore, women entrepreneurs who apply environment-friendly activities in business practices can be considered green promoters.

Figure 5: Correlation between promoting green activities in production and service delivery and employing environment-friendly practices in business activities

Women Entrepreneurs become philantropists

Correlation between promoting green activities in production & service delivery and taking environmental-friendly practices in business activities 20 y = 0.7564x + 2.9231 R² = 0.8264

15

Women Entrepreneurs

10 5 0

Linear (Women Entrepreneurs ) 0

5

10

15

20

Promote Environment-friendly business activities

Source: Survey data

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Ambepitiya Figure 6: Most women entrepreneurs become philanthropists

Most Women Entrepreneurs become Philanthropists

Response

40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Totally Agree

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

Totally Diagree

Executives

15

3

5

2

15

Women Entrepreneurs

19

12

13

11

5

Source: Survey data

It is evident that most women entrepreneurs become philanthropists later to serve the society well according to the responses of executives. This is difficult to apply in developing countries.

Some women continue their businesses while paying more attention to ecological and charitable activities. Some minor scenarios were found where women completely left or sold out their businesses to become philanthropists. However, women entrepreneurs in this sample still believe that they may become philanthropists later as seen from the results shown in Figure 6.However, becoming a philanthropist is not an easy a task in a developing country.

Figure 7: Best icons to promote Green education

Women Entrepreneurs are Best Icons to Promote green Education to Younger Generation 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Totally Agree

Agree

Neutral Women Entrepreneurs

Disagree

Totally Diagree

Executives

Source: Survey data

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Ambepitiya It is necessary for the young generation of a country to be aware of and educated on best and suitable business practices. Women entrepreneurs who have been adopting green activities into business practices and testing them on production and services also can be a part of this.

As seen from Figure 7, more than 60% of the women entrepreneurs and more than 50% of the executives agree that women entrepreneurs are suitable icons to educate the younger generation about good business practices.

Figure 8: The correlation between becoming a philanthropist and being a social icon to educate the younger generation

Best icons to educat the young generation

Correlation between becoming a philanthropists and being icons to educate the young generarion 30 y = 2.0513x - 12.615 R² = 0.8592

25 20

Women Entrepreneurs

15 10

Linear (Women Entrepreneurs )

5 0

-5 0

5 10 15 20 Women entrepreneurs become philantropists

Source: Survey data

Figure 8depictsthe relationship between becoming a philanthropist and being an icon to educate the younger generation of a country. There is a strong positive partial relationship between these two. Therefore, women entrepreneurs who become icons to educate the young are likely to become philanthropists in the future.

4.2 Women entrepreneurs in Economic Development Figure 9: Support of the women entrepreneurs to eliminate poverty

Support of the women entrepreneurs to elimiinate poverty 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Women Entrepreneurs

20 12 Totally Agree

Agree

Executives 8 Neutral

0 Disagree

0 Totally Diagree

Source: Survey data

The majority of women entrepreneurs in the sample agreed that they contribute to eliminate poverty. They earn for themselves and the family, therefore the family is able to fulfil their 170 92

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Ambepitiya needs. In such families, the burden of earning is not the 100% responsibility of men. On the other hand, entrepreneurship helps women to use their abilities and skills in a maximum capacity, while giving them self satisfaction. As seen in Figure 9, more that 50% of the executives also agreed that women run businesses do contribute to eliminate poverty of a country.

Figure 10: Women entrepreneurs provide employment opportunities

Women entrepreneurs Provide employment opportunities Response

60 40 20 0

Totally Agree

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

Totally Diagree

Executives

17

18

4

1

0

Women Entrepreneurs

24

30

3

2

1

Source: Survey data

As depicted by Figure 10, providing employment opportunities is one important factor why developing nations require more women entrepreneurs. However, women entrepreneurs in the sample and the executives stated that the majority of women support the society and the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x;s economy by offering goods and services and by offering employment opportunities.

Providing employment opportunity is helpful in eliminating poverty.

Figure 11: Correlation between eliminating poverty and providing employment opportunities

providing employment oportunities

Correlation between eliminating poverty and providing employment opportunities 35 y = 0.9396x + 0.7253 R² = 0.8346

30 25 20

Women Entrepreneurs

15 Linear (Women Entrepreneurs )

10 5 0

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

Support to eleminate poverty Source: Survey data

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Ambepitiya As seen in Figure 11, there is a positive partial, but strong relationship between women's entrepreneurial activities to eliminate poverty and the employment opportunities created by the actions of women entrepreneurs. This is significant, especially for a sustainability driven economy.

Women in businesses worldwide have created independent women. It is very common in developing countries. In Africa, women run businesses mainly support them to feed their families. Social issues such as domestic violence and prostitution also can be eradicated if women can become financially independent. Figure 12 indicates that the majority of women entrepreneurs and executive in the two samples agreed that the women entrepreneurs do become financially independent.

Figure 12: Women entrepreneurs are financially independent

Women Entrepreneurs are financially independent Totally Diagree Disagree Neutral Agree Totally Agree 0

5

10

15

Executives

20

25

30

35

Women Entrepreneurs

Source: Survey data

Figure 13: Women entrepreneurs provide useful goods and services to the society

Women Entrepreneurs find usefull business opportunities which minimise cost and increase effectiveness Response

60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Totally Agree

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

Totally Diagree

Executives

17

18

4

1

0

Women Entrepreneurs

24

30

3

2

1

Source: Survey data

Women entrepreneurs find useful business opportunities through which they can make more profit in the production of goods and services. Goods and services required for day to day needs of the people are the goods and services produced most by women entrepreneurs.

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Ambepitiya Figure 13 shows that more than 50% of the women entrepreneurs agree that they find business opportunities related to necessary goods and services in their respective countries.

Agriculture, clothing, beauty culture, food, etc. are few of the main industries in which women entrepreneurs run business operations. The executives also agree that women entrepreneurs engage in the production of useful goods and services. According to them, it is necessary to have businesses which provide useful goods and services when the country is in the process of establishing sustainable development.

4.3 Women Entrepreneurs in Social Development Figure 14: Women entrepreneurs are social examples of overcoming challenges

Women Entrepreneurs are social examples of overcoming challenges 40 30 20 10 0

Totally Agree

Agree

Neutral Women Entrepreneurs

Disagree

Totally Diagree

Executives

Source: Survey data

Women and employment is a factor that requires special consideration in any developing country. Women are the main characters in the family who manage the wellbeing of the family.

Men earn and women mange it in order to fulfil the requirements of the family. Women in a developing country face many challenges. It is not an easy task to manage the affairs of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x;s family. Managing a business while paying the attention to the development of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x;s family is a great challenge. Yet, women entrepreneurs have successfully overcome this challenge. As depicted in Figure 14, the majority of women entrepreneurs and executives who participated in this survey have agreed that women entrepreneurs are adapt at facing challenges posed by the external environment.

According to Figure 15, it is clear that most women entrepreneurs and executives agree that women entrepreneurs promote culture and traditional aspects through their business operations. Women always try to align their activities with cultural and traditional values.

Women play a key role in practicing cultural aspects and promoting tradition, especially in developing nations. Women entrepreneurs who participated in this study mentioned that they apply and use traditional methods of production, for example, indigenous agricultural methods in order to protect nutrition and freshness of vegetables.

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Ambepitiya Figure 15: Women entrepreneurs promote culture and traditions through business operations

Women Entrepreneurs promote culture and traditions through business operations Totally Diagree Disagree Neutral Agree Totally Agree 0

5 Totally Agree 17

Executives Women Entrepreneurs

24

10

15

20

25

30

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

18

4

1

Totally Diagree 0

30

3

2

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35

Source: Survey data

Figure 16: Women entrepreneurs, equally contribute to the wellbeing of the society

Women Entrepreneurs equally contribute to the wellbeing of the society

Totally Diagree Disagree Neutral Agree Totally Agree 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

Response Source: Survey data

Women contribute to the society by playing different roles like the roles of the housewife, mother, daughter and the good citizen. The roles performed and the responsibilities fulfilled by women entrepreneurs for the wellbeing of society are considerably high as indicated in Figure 16. Women entrepreneurs and executives both have agreed that contribution of women entrepreneurs to the wellbeing of society is equal to that of men.

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Ambepitiya Figure 17: Frequent participation in social activities and taking leadership Frequent participation in social activities and taking leadership 35 30 Response

25 20 15 10 5 0

Totally Agree

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

Totally Diagree

Women Entrepreneurs

30

24

3

2

1

Executives

16

18

5

1

0

Source: Survey data

According to Figure 17, more than 50% of both sample groups have agreed to the statement that women entrepreneurs frequently participate in social activities and take leadership. Social gatherings, charity events, professional development occasions, unions, political party campaigns and events, etc. are the social and political activities in which women participate and take leadership roles.

Figure 18: Women entrepreneurs practice and admire fair trade and fair business operations

Women Entrepreneurs practice and admire fair trade and fair business operations Response

30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Totally Agree

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

Totally Diagree

Women Entrepreneurs

27

25

5

2

1

Executives

15

20

4

1

0

Source: Survey data

According to the women entrepreneurs who participated in the interview, they engage in fair trade and fair business activities. Figure 18 shows that it is recognized by majority of the executives and the women entrepreneurs who participated in this survey. Practices which were specifically mentioned by them include creating opportunities for poor producers, fair trading practices; receipts and payments, ensuring no discrimination and maintaining safe working conditions.

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Ambepitiya Hypothesis Testing t-Test: Two-Sample Assuming Unequal Variances Support Mean

Not support 33.5

16.5

4.5

4.5

Observations

2

2

Hypothesized Mean Difference

0

Df

2

Variance

t Stat

8.013876853

P(T<=t) one-tail

0.007608221

t Critical one-tail

2.91998558

P(T<=t) two-tail

0.015216441

t Critical two-tail

4.30265273

Source: Survey data

The T test is larger in absolute value than in critical value. This emphasizes the fact that majority of the sample agreed on the fact that women entrepreneurs who are engaged in social, ecological and economical business practices support sustainable development in developing nations. Therefore, the null hypothesis is rejected.

5. Conclusion In recent decades, there is an increasing interest in women entrepreneurship development.

Governments, policy makers and academics have paid special attention towards developing this area, particularly in developing countries. This interest has encouraged countries to establish and support women entrepreneurship, especially in rural areas. This resulted in linking local capabilities with the rural economic growth and taking them into the selfemployment sphere. Most importantly, this concept has helped governments to eliminate poverty and create employment opportunities. Women as entrepreneurs are now playing a far greater role than they did at the introductory stages. They are more educated and better aware of information. Now they are faced with another challenge to drive the economy towards sustainable development. Socially responsible, economically concerned and environment friendly activities in these enterprises carried out by women reach their own business goals while supporting to reach national goals. These businesses focus on trading with the poor, helping the community to develop skills and abilities, paying fair prices and receiving fair payments, encouraging fair treatment of all staff and encouraging environment-friendly conditions in business operations. These are activities which are significant in sustainable development of a country. Developing nations must focus further attention towards women entrepreneurs. They need to further consider avenues to build capacity of women in relation to business development, including their capability to become productive and innovative entrepreneurs while accepting their contribution to the national economy.

From an academic perspective, this supports the Triple-Bottom-Line concept introduced by Elkington in 1994 based on the context of sustainable values in business practices of entrepreneurs. As the analysis suggests, this concept is a promising approach for women entrepreneurs aiming at contributing to sustainability development.Elkington in 2004 concludes that there are three main value creating aspects in sustainable conduct, namely: (a) economic prosperity; (b) environmental quality and; (c) social justice. This concept has been further 176 98

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Ambepitiya developed by him into “3P formulation” which consists of “people, planet and profit”. Through the Study, the same concept was discussed in relation to women in entrepreneurship since this has a significant value in theory.The relationship between women entrepreneurs and sustainability is affirmed by this study and therefore, it would be instrumental in developing a new model on sustainable values in businesseswhich should be addressed more comprehensively in future empirical research. Lastly, the analysis has highlighted several similar academic debates which exist in the realm of Sociology, Ecology and Economy in business practices. The role of women entrepreneurs in sustainable development in the developing context can be directly linked to and illustrated by the concept of Triple-BottomLine and 3P formulation. To fully use the potential of existing theoretical and empirical knowledge for sustainable women entrepreneurs, it is of greatest importance to build links between different theoretical and academic debates based on insights from various backgrounds.

In addition to the insights and implications that this study offers, some important limitations too have been captured. Firstly, while women entrepreneurs do create positive impacts on the country and aim at increasing market efforts making a significant contribution to sustainable development in developing nations, it is not easy for women to realize potential opportunities which support sustainable development. Secondly, the financial support is less in these countries due to economic barriers in those contexts. Furthermore, attention of policy makers, governments, academics and professionals will be essential in order to develop women entrepreneurship as mentioned above. Lastly, the proposed concept of the role of women entrepreneurs in establishing sustainable development in developing nations builds a strong platform to engage in more empirical investigations.

References Adewole, A 2015, „Sustainable Entrepreneurial Development and the Problems of Business Ethical Practices in Nigeria‟, International Journal of Business and Social Sciences, vol.

6, no.1, pp. 187-191. viewed 01 February 2016, http://ijbssnet.com/journals/Vol_6_No_1_Januaryr_2015/20.pdf.

Birley, S, Harris, P & Harris, P 1988. „Female Entrepreneurs – are they really any different?’, Journal of Small Business Management, 5, p.87. viewed 15 October 2014, https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/bitstream/1826/439/2/SWP0587.pdf.

Brush, CG 1992, Research on Women Business Owners: Past Trends: A New Perspective & Future Direction. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice.vol 16, 5-30.

Elliot, JA 2006, An Introduction to Sustainable Development, 3rd end, Routledge Perspective on Development Series, Abingdon, Oxon.

Elkington, J 2004, „Enter the triple bottom line‟, in Henriques, A & Richardson,J (ed.), The triple bottom line, does it all add up? Assessing the sustainability of business and CSR London, Earthscan Publications Ltd, London, pp. 1-16.

Frederick, HH & Kuratko, HF 2010, Entrepreneurship, theory, process and practice, Sengage Australia (Pvt) Limited, Australia.

Forbes 2012. Entrepreneurship Is The New Women's Movement, 08 June, viewed 10 October 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2012/06/08/entrepreneurship-is-thenew-womens-movement.

Henry, C, Hill, F & Leitch, C 2003. Entrepreneurship education and training, Ashagate publishing Ltd, Aldershot.

Mehta, S & Sethi, N 1997, Targeting women for Development, Social Welfare journal, vol.34, no.10.

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Ambepitiya Ogundele OJK 2004, „Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurship in Business Organizations‟, in Ogundele, OJK (ed.), Introduction to Business Organisation; A Book for Readings, Molofin Nominees, Lagos, pp. 348- 365.

Ogundele, OJK 2005, „Entrepreneurship development for a Great and Dynamic Economy in Nigeria‟, Paper presented to the 2nd Annual Conference of National Association for Encouraging Quality Education, Ekpoma, 09 –13 November.

Ongach RN & Bwisa, HM 2013, „Factors Influencing Growth of Women owned Micro and Small Enterprises A Survey of Kitale Municipality’, International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 10. viewed 01 February 2015, http://hrmars.com/hrmars_papers/Factors_Influencing_Growth_of_Women_owned_Micro _and_Small_Enterprises.pdf.

Starkey, R and Walford, R. 2001, The earthscan reader in business and sustainable development, Earthscan Publications Ltd, London.

UNIDO, 2001, Women entrepreneurship development in selected African countries, Working Paper no.0 7, United Nations Industrial Development Organization, viewed 08 February 2016, http://www.unido.org/fileadmin/user_media/Publications/Pub_free/Women_entre preneurship_development_in_selected_African_countries.pdf .

United Nations Foundation, 2014, Resolutions: Female Entrepreneurs Are Key to Sustainable Global Development, United Nations Foundation, viewed 10 February 2016, http://www.unfoundation.org/blog/female-entrepreneurs.html.

United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development,1987, Our Common Future, Chapter 2: Towards Sustainable Development , United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, viewed 20 December 2015, http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-02.htm.

World Economic Forum, 2014, The Global Gender Gap Report, World Economic Forum, viewed 14 October 2015, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GGGR14/GGGR_CompleteReport_2014.pdf.

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Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Is a Black Box Ian Bremmer, 2016

Donald Trump’s foreign policy? Still up in the air at this point. With Hillary Clinton, we would have known exactly what we were getting. That was her biggest selling point—and a big part of the problem. But Trump is the ultimate black box. Much of this was by design—making America great again was always about America itself, allies and enemies be damned. That makes for an effective political pitch, but it’s a wholly unrealistic governing philosophy for a person whose main responsibility is to navigate the country through choppy geopolitical waters.

And these days, the waters are heaving. The foreign policy challenges Trump will face on Jan. 20 are much more complex than those that Obama inherited from George W. Bush. Technological change, particularly in communications and in the workplace, creates risks and problems that are entirely new. Russia is looking to undermine U.S. power and influence whenever and wherever possible, and a Trump presidency could well embolden Vladimir Putin. Trump becomes the face of Western capitalism at a moment China is offering the world an alternative economic model. For fans of globalization as it has progressed for the past few decades, that’s cause for concern.

Let the questions begin. How best to respond to Russian aggression in cyberspace while minimizing the risk of a dangerous escalation? How best to balance all‐important relations with China? How long before North Korea demands an urgent and forceful U.S. response? How best to repair damaged relations with Britain, European allies, Japan, Israel, and Saudi Arabia after a period of tension in which each of them has hedged bets on American staying power? There are no easy answers. There weren’t going to be any for a former secretary of state, and there certainly won’t be any for Donald Trump.

We do know that the “pivot” to Asia is dead, as is the Trans‐Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal that went along with it. Asian allies had signed on to TPP to balance against China’s growing geostrategic weight. Overnight, China now looks much more stable and sane to its Asian neighbors than the U.S. does. America’s special relationship with Europe was already under strain; there’s no reason to think that will change with President Trump sitting in the Oval Office.

Fires in the Middle East will continue to rage like they always have, and while American forays in the region have yielded few tangible results over the last decade‐plus, they at least added some semblance of predictability to the proceedings. No longer.

But let’s be clear: “America First” is not an isolationist policy but a unilateral one. It does not have America retreat from the world, but impose its will firmly upon it. Trump views foreign policy as a businessman would—as purely transactional. That makes it incredibly difficult for the U.S. to continue in its capacity as the policeman of global security, the architect of global trade AFGG 2018

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Donald Trump has helped to reveal just how many Americans care more about nation‐building at home than in far‐flung battle zones. It’s clear that millions of Americans want a more robust economic recovery, a surge in job creation, investment in infrastructure and a budget surplus— quite a combination. Americans are divided on how to improve healthcare, immigration and tax policies, and those divisions are reflected in a polarized Congress. But they’re not nearly so divided on the need to invest in the future of America’s economy rather than Iraq’s or Syria’s.

They aren’t nearly as interested in U.S. foreign policy. That’s good news for Trump, who will have to figure it out as he goes along. That’s bad news for the rest of the world.

Source: Bremmer, I. (2016). Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Is a Black Box.Available: http://time.com/4564673/president‐donald‐trump‐foreign‐policy/. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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Donald Trump Might Set a Record—for the Biggest Decline of American Power in History

Tom Engelhardt, 2017

When the Trump years come to an end, will the United States be a pariah nation?

In its own inside out, upside‐down way, it’s almost wondrous to behold. As befits our president’s wildest dreams, it may even prove to be a record for the ages, one for the history books. He was, after all, the candidate who sensed it first. When those he was running against, like the rest of Washington’s politicians, were still insisting that the United States remained at the top of its game, not an— but the—“indispensable nation,” the only truly “exceptional” one on the face of the earth, he said nothing of the sort. He campaigned on America’s decline, on this country’s increasing lack of exceptionality, its potential dispensability. He ran on the single word “again”—as in “make America great again”—because (the implication was) it just isn’t anymore. And he swore that he and he alone was the best shot Americans, or at least non‐immigrant white Americans, had at ever seeing the best of days again.

In that sense, he was our first declinist candidate for president, and if that didn’t tell you something during the election season, it should have. No question about it, he hit a chord, rang a bell, because out in the heartland it was possible to sense a deepening reality that wasn’t evident in Washington.

The wealthiest country on the planet, the most militarily powerful in the history of… well, anybody, anywhere, anytime (or so we were repeatedly told)… couldn’t win a war, not even with the investment of trillions of taxpayer dollars, couldn’t do anything but spread chaos by force of arms.

Meanwhile, at home, despite all that wealth, despite billionaires galore, including the one running for president, despite the transnational corporate heaven inhabited by Google and Facebook and Apple and the rest of the crew, parts of this country and its infrastructure were starting to feel distinctly (to use a word from another universe) Third Worldish. He sensed that, too. He regularly said things like this: “We spent six trillion dollars in the Middle East, we got nothing.… And we have an obsolete plane system. We have obsolete airports. We have obsolete trains. We have bad roads. Airports.” And this: “Our airports are like from a third‐world country.” And on the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, he couldn’t have been more on the mark.

In parts of the United States, white working‐class and middle‐class Americans could sense that the future was no longer theirs, that their children would not have a shot at what they had had, that they themselves increasingly didn’t have a shot at what they had had. The American Dream seemed to be gaining an almost nightmarish sheen, given that the real value of the average wage of a worker hadn’t increased since the 1970s; that the cost of a college education had gone through the roof and the educational‐debt burden for children with dreams of getting ahead was now staggering; that unions were cratering; that income inequality was at a historic high; and… well, you know the story, really you do. In essence, for them the famed American Dream seemed ever more like someone else’s trademarked property.

Indispensable? Exceptional? This country? Not anymore. Not as they were experiencing it.

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And because of that, Donald Trump won the lottery. He answered the $64,000 question. (If you’re not of a certain age, Google it, but believe me, it’s a reference in our president’s memory book.) He entered the Oval Office with almost 50 percent of the vote and a fervent base of support for his promised program of doing it all over again, 1950s‐style. It had been one hell of a pitch from the businessman billionaire. He had promised a future of stratospheric terrificness, of greatness on an historic scale. He promised to keep the evil ones—the rapists, job thieves, and terrorists—away, to wall them out or toss them out or ban them from ever traveling here. He also promised to set incredible records, as only a mega‐businessman like him could conceivably do, the sort of all‐American records this country hadn’t seen in a long, long time. And early as it is in the Trump era, it seems as if, on one score at least, he could deliver something for the record books going back to the times when those recording the acts of rulers were still scratching them out in clay or wax. At this point, there’s at least a chance that Donald Trump might preside over the most precipitous decline of a truly dominant power in history, one only recently considered at the height of its glory. It could prove to be a fall for the ages. Admittedly, that other superpower of the Cold War era, the Soviet Union, imploded in 1991, which was about the fastest way imaginable to leave the global stage. Still, despite the “evil empire” talk of that era, the USSR was always the secondary, the weaker of the two superpowers. It was never Rome, or Spain, or Great Britain.

When it comes to the United States, we’re talking about a country that not so long ago saw itself as the only great power left on planet Earth, “the lone superpower.” It was the one still standing, triumphant, at the end of a history of great power rivalry that went back to a time when the wooden warships of various European states first broke out into a larger world and began to conquer it. It stood by itself at, as its proponents liked to claim at the time, the end of history.

APPLYING HARD POWER TO A FAILING WORLD As we watch, it seems almost possible to see President Trump, in real time, tweet by tweet, speech by speech, sword dance by sword dance, intervention by intervention, act by act, in the process of dismantling the system of global power—of “soft power,” in particular, and of alliances of every sort— by which the United States made its will felt, made itself a truly global hegemon. Whether his “America first” policies are aimed at creating a future order of autocrats, or petro‐states, or are nothing more than the expression of his libidinous urges and secret hatreds, he may already be succeeding in taking down that world order in record fashion.

Despite the mainstream pieties of the moment about the nature of the system Donald Trump appears to be dismantling in Europe and elsewhere, it was anything but either terribly “liberal” or particularly peaceable. Wars, invasions, occupations, the undermining or overthrow of governments, brutal acts and conflicts of every sort succeeded one another in the years of American glory. Past administrations in Washington had a notorious weakness for autocrats, just as Donald Trump does today. They regularly had less than no respect for democracy if, from Iran to Guatemala to Chile, the will of the people seemed to stand in Washington’s way. (It is, as Vladimir Putin has been only too happy to point out of late, an irony of our moment that the country that has undermined or overthrown or meddled in more electoral systems than any other is in a total snit over the possibility that one of its own elections was meddled with.) To enforce their global system, Americans never shied away from torture, black sites, death squads, assassinations, and other grim practices. In those years, the US planted its military on close to 1,000 overseas military bases, garrisoning the planet as no other country ever had.

Nonetheless, the canceling of the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, threats against NAFTA, the undermining of NATO, the promise of protective tariffs on foreign goods (and the possible trade wars that might go with them) could go a long way toward dismantling the American global system of soft power and economic dominance as it has existed in 104

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these last decades. If such acts and others like them prove effective in the months and years to come, they will leave only one kind of power in the American global quiver: hard military power, and its handmaiden, the kind of covert power Washington, through the CIA in particular, has long specialized in. If America’s alliances crack open and its soft power becomes too angry or edgy to pass for dominant power anymore, its massive machinery of destruction will still be left, including its vast nuclear arsenal. While, in the Trump era, a drive to cut domestic spending of every sort is evident, more money is still slated to go to the military, already funded at levels not reached by combinations of other major powers.

Given the last 15 years of history, it’s not hard to imagine what’s likely to result from the further elevation of military power: disaster. This is especially true because Donald Trump has appointed to key positions in his administration a crew of generals who spent the last decade and a half fighting America’s catastrophic wars across the Greater Middle East. They are not only notoriously incapable of thinking outside the box about the application of military power, but faced with the crisis of failed wars and failing states, of spreading terror movements and a growing refugee crisis across that crucial region, they can evidently only imagine one solution to just about any problem: more of the same.

More troops, more mini‐surges, more military trainers and advisers, more air strikes, more drone strikes… more.

After a decade and a half of such thinking we already know perfectly well where this ends—in further failure, more chaos and suffering, but above all in an inability of the United States to effectively apply its hard power anywhere in any way that doesn’t make matters worse. Since, in addition, the Trump administration is filled with Iranophobes, including a president who has only recently fused himself to the Saudi royal family in an attempt to further isolate and undermine Iran, the possibility that a military‐first version of American foreign policy will spread further is only growing.

Such “more” thinking is typical as well of much of the rest of the cast of characters now in key positions in the Trump administration. Take the CIA, for instance. Under its new director, Mike Pompeo (distinctly a “more” kind of guy and an Iranophobe of the first order), two key positions have reportedly been filled: a new chief of counterterrorism and a new head of Iran operations (recently identified as Michael D’Andrea, an Agency hardliner with the nickname “the Dark Prince”). Here’s how Matthew Rosenberg and Adam Goldman of the New York Times recently describedtheir similar approaches to their jobs (my emphasis added):

Mr. D’Andrea’s new role is one of a number of moves inside the spy agency that signal a more muscular approach to covert operations under the leadership of Mike Pompeo, the conservative Republican and former congressman, the officials said. The agency also recently named a new chief of counterterrorism, who has begun pushing for greater latitude to strike militants.

In other words, more!

Rest assured of one thing, whatever Donald Trump accomplishes in the way of dismantling America’s version of soft power, “his” generals and intelligence operatives will handle the hard‐power part of the equation just as “ably.”

THE FIRST AMERICAN LASTER? If a Trump presidency achieves a record for the ages when it comes to the precipitous decline of the American global system, little as The Donald ever cares to share credit for anything, he will undoubtedly have to share it for such an achievement. It’s true that kings, emperors, and autocrats, the top dogs of any moment, prefer to take all the credit for the “records” set in their time. When we look back, however, it’s likely that President Trump will be seen as having given a tottering system AFGG 2018

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that necessary push. It will undoubtedly be clear enough by then that the US, seemingly at the height of any power’s power in 1991 when the Soviet Union disappeared, began heading for the exits soon thereafter, still enwreathed in self‐congratulation and triumphalism.

Had this not been so, Donald Trump would never have won the 2016 election. It wasn’t he, after all, who gave the US heartland an increasingly Third World feel. It wasn’t he who spent those trillions of dollars so disastrously on invasions and occupations, dead‐end wars, drone strikes and special ops raids, reconstruction and deconstruction in a never‐ending war on terror that today looks more like a war for the spread of terror. It wasn’t he who created the growing inequality gap in this country or produced all those billionaires amid a population that increasingly felt left in the lurch. It wasn’t he who hiked college tuitions or increased the debt levels of the young or set roads and bridges to crumbling and created the conditions for Third World‐style airports.

If both the American global and domestic systems hadn’t been rotting out before Donald Trump arrived on the scene, that “again” of his wouldn’t have worked. Thought of another way, when the US was truly at the height of its economic clout and power, American leaders felt no need to speak incessantly of how “indispensable” or “exceptional” the country was. It seemed too self‐evident to mention. Someday, some historian may use those very words in the mouths of American presidents and other politicians (and their claims, for instance, that the US military was “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known”) as a set of increasingly defensive markers for measuring the decline of American power.

So here’s the question: When the Trump years (months?) come to an end, will the US be not the planet’s most exceptional land, but a pariah nation? Will that “again” still be the story of the year, the decade, the century? Will the last American Firster turn out to have been the first American Laster?

Will it truly be one for the record books?

Source: Engelhardt, T. (2017). Donald Trump Might Set a Record—for the Biggest Decline of American Power in History. Available: https://www.thenation.com/article/donald‐trump‐might‐set‐a‐record‐ for‐the‐biggest‐decline‐of‐american‐power‐in‐history/. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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The New Geopolitics Bruce Jones, 2017

America’s politics are mired in dysfunction and division. Much of the focus is on economic questions, and much of the heat is generated by the culture wars; but real wars—and America’s role in them— are part of the debate too.

While this debate preoccupies America, the world is changing, and rapidly. We have entered a new phase in international affairs, leaving behind us the brief moment characterized by untrammeled American dominance. Many of the changes underway are beyond America’s control. However, some dynamics could still be shaped by concerted and disciplined American policy—and might. Whether we are capable of that in the current moment remains to be seen, as does the price Americans are willing to pay to do so. To paraphrase Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, America is entitled to decide what role we want to play in the world, but we are not entitled to pretend the world is not changing around us.

We have entered a new phase in international affairs, leaving behind us the brief moment characterized by untrammeled American dominance.

The idioms of “international order,” “American leadership,” and “America First” dominate—but often obfuscate—the debate. More charged labels such as “nationalist” and “globalist,” often just as devoid of precision, are the accompanying epithets. Peel these away, and the new geopolitics has a number of distinctive features, some illuminated by history, some potentially unique to our moment of political and technological flux.

This new phase has been variously described as a new Cold War between two major powers, or a “G‐ Zero,” i.e. a world of every country for themselves. By my reckoning, it is neither, though it has elements of both. In the realm of economic affairs, we are in something that resembles multi‐polarity, although some of the major economic actors (like Japan) don’t really act as poles of the economic order, as that term is conventionally used. Seen through the lens of the weaponization of cyber and artificial intelligence, we’re approaching a new Cold War between Russia and the West. Both of these features are part of a wider emergence of a new geopolitics, a new “great game” of competition between major powers that is rife with risk of confrontation and deadly miscalculation, but also hardly free of opportunity for countries and private actors nimble enough to adapt.

The dynamics of economic multi‐polarity obscure the central reality of what I think is best described as asymmetric bipolarity: the fact that the United States and China are the central factor in every other actor’s calculation, albeit unevenly. There’s still a huge disparity between those two actors of course, but China profits from “the shadow of the future” and from America’s present dysfunction and decisions, and is thus more equal in states’ long‐term calculations.

RELATED CONTENT We are operating in a changing system that has an asymmetric bipolarity at its core, and a fluid, economic multipolarity orbiting around it. It has the following additional features.

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First, we are in an undeclared arms race between the United States and China. The primary venue of that arms race is naval power: our effort to maintain naval primacy in Asia, China’s race to upend us using both conventional and asymmetric weaponry. The application of cyber and artificial intelligence tools to the relationship complicates matters; we’re applying 19th century statecraft in a world of 21st century weapons. This arms race is still of a modest scale by Cold War standards and is kept in check by comity between the top leaders, economic ties, and cooperation on global issues. But it is still an arms race. And it is triggering a core debate in the United States as to whether to unilaterally disarm in the regional military struggle, in order to avoid a risk of conflict with China; or whether to push back harder on China’s militarization, in order to prevent what otherwise seems likely, namely a conflict between the major Asian powers.

That debate hinges a second feature of the new geopolitical competition, namely an active re‐ evaluation by the world’s major economies of their security relationships with the United States.

Several major countries are debating whether they can rely on the United States to maintain inter‐ state security in their region (to balance China’s rise in Asia; to contain Iran in the Middle East; to curtail Russian aggression in Europe), at which point those powers seek continued or deeper alignment with Washington. This could prove ephemeral. But if they decide that the United States is not reliable, those powers will seek self‐help (read: nuclear weapons) or warmer ties to Beijing. Russia looms larger in this picture than the notion of bipolarity suggests, because of the scale of its weapons sales; but Moscow operates as assertively as it does only in so far as it can sustain diplomatic cover from China. Tom Wright’s recent account of competition entailing “all measures short of war” captures the tensions and risks that accompany this re‐assessment.

This is in turn occasioning or amplifying a struggle over political and economic alignment in countries as disparate as Germany and Saudi Arabia. Because of the scale of global economic growth over the past three decades, there are now simply a lot more countries whose internal direction and external relations impact key regional and global dynamics. Germany’s evolving posture in Europe is part of the story, as is Britain’s attempt to rebalance national control and regional integration. Saudi Arabia’s attempt to shake up the regional balance of power is also part of the picture, as is Iran’s and Turkey’s evolving search for partners and patrons. In Asia, enduring distrust between Japan and the Republic of Korea shape and constrain their responses to China’s growing assertiveness and influence—to say nothing of the prospects for a military confrontation between the United States and North Korea.

Brazil’s extended turmoil and Argentina’s emergent but fragile stability seem more remote from great power muscle movements, but will fundamentally shape the prospects for peace and economic development in the Western hemisphere. The European project’s struggle with far‐right populism, Poland’s retreat from liberalism, Israel’s courtship of Russia—all of this also forms part of the field of play.

This is accompanied by rapidly evolving patterns of economic interaction: whether in the Canada‐EU trade agreement, Japan’s new willingness to exert regional leadership on free trade in Asia, or the expansion of Sino‐German economic ties; this too is part of the reality. It is too simplistic to argue that deepening economic integration renders this competition benign. Economic integration raises the domestic stakes in great power relations, sometimes in stabilizing ways, but also sometimes in distorting ones, particularly with the ascendance of economic nationalism. Modern history offers a cautionary tale: After the wars of the late 1800s, the economically integrated countries of Germany 108

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and the United Kingdom moved deliberately to shift away from integration to re‐nationalization of production, with momentous consequence.

The tools of renewed geopolitical competition differ depending on the type of state in play. Advanced economies are playing an insidious game of “confront and conceal,” with cyber intrusions, discreet or disguised financial influence, and disinformation to influence or disrupt an opponent’s internal politics. In less advanced economies, large‐scale infrastructure spending combined with political pressure and corruption has emerged as the technique of choice by the great powers, while counter‐ corruption campaigns are the vehicle for domestic purges. In politically unstable environments such as Syria and Yemen, we’ve witnessed the re‐emergence of old‐fashioned proxy warfare—that is, the flow of money, weapons, intelligence, and political support to national or sub‐national or even trans‐ national military units fighting for control of politics or territory in an active conflict, with potentially devastating human cost.

As every major country (and for that matter, every major global financial and energy firm) feels its way through the shifting contours of the core—U.S.‐China relations—the new geopolitical competition plays out most acutely around three essential questions: How hard will China push in Asia, and how hard will America push back? How much instability will Russia seek to spread in Europe, or in conflict spots in other regions, and will the United States work with Europe to contain its efforts (or can Europe do so alone)? And how much instability or presumptive stability will the United States inject into an already turbulent Middle East, and what other powers will profit from the re‐alignment of inter‐state relations there?

In this fluid environment, analysis of the new geopolitics—and America’s role in it—must address four sets of questions.

1. What are the attitudes, aptitudes, and capabilities of the other players in this evolving game—i.e. we need greater specificity about the contours and direction of both regional and global competition and cooperation, economic and strategic. What, exactly, are we up against? And where are the opportunities, and the greatest risks? For the past several years, Brookings scholars have been undertaking this study, and now major accounts of the dynamics of some of the key players are shedding light on their evolving strategies. Must‐reads in this include Fiona Hill and Cliff Gaddy’s magisterial account of Vladimir Putin; Cheng Li’s account of the new politics of Xi Jinping’s China; Bruce Riedel’s narrative about the relationship between kings and presidents that has shaped the U.S.‐Saudi relationship since the 1940s and shapes it still; Kemal Kirişci’s lament for Turkey’s drift from the West as part of a long‐troubled alliance; the account by Harold Trinkunas and David Mares of Brazil’s search for a global role; and Shivshanker Menon’s insider account of the choices India confronts in managing its own rise in a contested region. Major studies soon to be released on Iran, Germany, Israel, and India‐China relations will add to our understanding of landscape of changing geopolitical ties.

2. How do we talk about America’s role in this shifting game? The terms and terminology of engagement are muddled—we need a new vocabulary that illuminates rather than one that obfuscates.

Constructing new, more precise, and more persuasive terms is very much a work in progress. I believe we would profit from less time spent debating “order” and more time talking about the central AFGG 2018

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objectives we’re trying to achieve: avoiding a major power war in Asia; protecting European security and democracy from Russia; maintaining an open economic system. (It eludes me what American policymakers think they are trying to achieve in the Middle East.) Against the backdrop of those specific objectives, we can debate how much of the burden the United States should carry, and what can be shared. Ted Piccone’s account of the liberal and anti‐liberal debates among five rising democratic (or semi‐democratic) powers illuminates what’s at stake if we enter a phase of geopolitics that rewards closed over open systems.

3. What role does the United States intend to play in shaping globalization from here on out, and what role does China intend to play? And what is the nature of that economy? In our political debate, we use the term “free trade” as if we still operated in a 1970s economy where goods produced in one country are traded to another; the reality is global supply and value chains that repeatedly crisscross national borders. Will we try, like King Canute, to hold back the tides of global economic production, or will we learn to swim in newly contested waters? Mireya Solís’ account of Japan’s dilemmas as a trading nation confronting the new realities of globalization sheds light not only on this central ally’s response to the new geopolitics, but some of the dilemmas the United States also faces as a country now far more deeply integrated in global supply chain economics.

4. And what is the future of the international security architecture, through which most strategies and most operations are at least partially implemented—and which needs to be recast for contemporary threats and contemporary geopolitics? President Trump is not wrong to critique the existing system for burden‐sharing, though he has yet to provide a compelling alternative vision. How and with whom we work on international security is a more open question than current debates about NATO or our role in the Middle East and Asia acknowledge. Michael O’Hanlon’s challenge to rethink NATO’s role in Eastern Europe has provoked much debate within the halls of Brookings; and while I don’t agree precisely with his prescription, I share his concern that NATO and our overall security architecture is out of alignment both with the changing balance of power and with the new threats we must confront.

A new Brookings project on burden‐sharing past, present, and future will add to this debate.

These questions about the new geopolitics must inform a new debate about America’s role—and interests—in a much more competitive world. What choices we as a nation now make will reverberate through this new geopolitical landscape, leading us either to a situation of tense stability or to a more dramatic, and probably violent, re‐ordering of international relations.

Source: Jones, B. (2017). The new geopolitics . Available: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order‐ from‐chaos/2017/11/28/the‐new‐geopolitics/ . Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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Do social media threaten democracy?

The Economist, 2017

Facebook, Google and Twitter were supposed to save politics as good information drove out prejudice and falsehood. Something has gone very wrong IN 1962 a British political scientist, Bernard Crick, published “In Defence of Politics”. He argued that the art of political horse‐trading, far from being shabby, lets people of different beliefs live together in a peaceful, thriving society. In a liberal democracy, nobody gets exactly what he wants, but everyone broadly has the freedom to lead the life he chooses. However, without decent information, civility and conciliation, societies resolve their differences by resorting to coercion.

How Crick would have been dismayed by the falsehood and partisanship on display in this week’s Senate committee hearings in Washington. Not long ago social media held out the promise of a more enlightened politics, as accurate information and effortless communication helped good people drive out corruption, bigotry and lies. Yet Facebook acknowledged that before and after last year’s American election, between January 2015 and August this year, 146m users may have seen Russian misinformation on its platform. Google’s YouTube admitted to 1,108 Russian‐linked videos and Twitter to 36,746 accounts. Far from bringing enlightenment, social media have been spreading poison.

Russia’s trouble‐making is only the start. From South Africa to Spain, politics is getting uglier. Part of the reason is that, by spreading untruth and outrage, corroding voters’ judgment and aggravating partisanship, social media erode the conditions for the horse‐trading that Crick thought fosters liberty.

A shorter attention spa...oh, look at that!

The use of social media does not cause division so much as amplify it. The financial crisis of 2007‐08 stoked popular anger at a wealthy elite that had left everyone else behind. The culture wars have split voters by identity rather than class. Nor are social media alone in their power to polarise—just look at cable TV and talk radio. But, whereas Fox News is familiar, social‐media platforms are new and still poorly understood. And, because of how they work, they wield extraordinary influence.

They make their money by putting photos, personal posts, news stories and ads in front of you.

Because they can measure how you react, they know just how to get under your skin (see article).

They collect data about you in order to have algorithms to determine what will catch your eye, in an “attention economy” that keeps users scrolling, clicking and sharing—again and again and again.

Anyone setting out to shape opinion can produce dozens of ads, analyse them and see which is hardest to resist. The result is compelling: one study found that users in rich countries touch their phones 2,600 times a day.

It would be wonderful if such a system helped wisdom and truth rise to the surface. But, whatever Keats said, truth is not beauty so much as it is hard work—especially when you disagree with it.

Everyone who has scrolled through Facebook knows how, instead of imparting wisdom, the system dishes out compulsive stuff that tends to reinforce people’s biases.

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This aggravates the politics of contempt that took hold, in the United States at least, in the 1990s.

Because different sides see different facts, they share no empirical basis for reaching a compromise.

Because each side hears time and again that the other lot are good for nothing but lying, bad faith and slander, the system has even less room for empathy. Because people are sucked into a maelstrom of pettiness, scandal and outrage, they lose sight of what matters for the society they share.

This tends to discredit the compromises and subtleties of liberal democracy, and to boost the politicians who feed off conspiracy and nativism. Consider the probes into Russia’s election hack by Congress and the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, who has just issued his first indictments. After Russia attacked America, Americans ended up attacking each other. Because the framers of the constitution wanted to hold back tyrants and mobs, social media aggravate Washington gridlock. In Hungary and Poland, without such constraints, they help sustain an illiberal, winner‐takes‐all style of democracy. In Myanmar, where Facebook is the main source of news for many, it has deepened the hatred of the Rohingya, victims of ethnic cleansing.

Social media, social responsibility What is to be done? People will adapt, as they always do. A survey this week found that only 37% of Americans trust what they get from social media, half the share that trust printed newspapers and magazines. Yet in the time it takes to adapt, bad governments with bad politics could do a lot of harm.

Society has created devices, such as libel, and ownership laws, to rein in old media. Some are calling for social‐media companies, like publishers, to be similarly accountable for what appears on their platforms; to be more transparent; and to be treated as monopolies that need breaking up. All these ideas have merit, but they come with trade‐offs. When Facebook farms out items to independent outfits for fact‐checking, the evidence that it moderates behaviour is mixed. Moreover, politics is not like other kinds of speech; it is dangerous to ask a handful of big firms to deem what is healthy for society. Congress wants transparency about who pays for political ads, but a lot of malign influence comes through people carelessly sharing barely credible news posts. Breaking up social‐media giants might make sense in antitrust terms, but it would not help with political speech—indeed, by multiplying the number of platforms, it could make the industry harder to manage.

There are other remedies. The social‐media companies should adjust their sites to make clearer if a post comes from a friend or a trusted source. They could accompany the sharing of posts with reminders of the harm from misinformation. Bots are often used to amplify political messages. Twitter could disallow the worst—or mark them as such. Most powerfully, they could adapt their algorithms to put clickbait lower down the feed. Because these changes cut against a business‐model designed to monopolise attention, they may well have to be imposed by law or by a regulator.

Social media are being abused. But, with a will, society can harness them and revive that early dream of enlightenment. The stakes for liberal democracy could hardly be higher.

Source: The Economist. (2017). Do social media threaten democracy?.Available: https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21730871‐facebook‐google‐and‐twitter‐were‐supposed‐ save‐politics‐good‐information‐drove‐out. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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When is it Ethical to Publish Stolen Data?

Helen Lewis, 2015

From the Pentagon Papers to Hollywood e‐mails, reporters and editors face complex decisions when it comes to reporting on information from hackers and leakers When Germanwings Flight 9525 crashed in the French Alps on March 24, the deaths of the 150 people on board were initially assumed to be a tragic accident. But within 48 hours, a transcript of the plane’s voice recorder was leaked to the media. It revealed that co‐pilot Andreas Lubitz had set the aircraft on a collision course. Just before the plane crashed the pilot, who was locked out of the cockpit, could be heard screaming, “Open the damn door!”

The recording was evidence that the crash was not an accident, but a deliberate act of mass murder.

It duly led news bulletins around the world. But should the media have published the transcripts, particularly when the investigation was still in progress? The International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations condemned the leak, calling it a “breach of trust” with investigators and victims’ families that harmed flight safety by stoking “uninformed” speculation.

The media were unmoved. There was no navel‐gazing about the ethics of publishing the transcript, and no groundswell of public opinion against it. That makes it relatively unusual among cases involving leaked, stolen, or hacked information, which often provoke controversy. Such sources are familiar ways to obtain stories—consider the impact of the Pentagon Papers being leaked in 1971—but the emergence of WikiLeaks in 2006 made it clear they will become ever more important in the digital era.

Since then, there have been questions over the publication of Sony executives’ corporate e‐mails in late 2014, the publication of leaked celebrity nude photos last August, and Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about the extent of U.S. intelligence operations.

Journalists have been accused of invading privacy, threatening national security, and breaching copyright by publishing such stories, and their sources might lose their jobs, their freedom, or even their lives. So how should reporters and editors decide whether to publish and how much to redact?

And what technical know‐how do they need to protect whistleblowers?

The Sony hack provided something of a test case, as did the iCloud leak, which included naked photographs of actresses including Jennifer Lawrence. The New York Times was reluctant to report on the huge dump of e‐mails and other confidential material taken from Sony’s servers, with executive editor Dean Baquet asserting that the paper would only cover newsworthy information surfaced by other outlets, and would not dig through the files itself. The Times gave op‐ed space to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin to call publishing the leaked information “morally treasonous and spectacularly dishonorable,” although its public editor Margaret Sullivan later defended reporting on the e‐mails when the contents were newsworthy. “No, this isn’t a Snowden Redux, but when top Hollywood figures make racially tinged jokes about the president, that’s legitimate news,” she wrote in a blog post on December 12, 2014.

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Other sites had already made the same decision. Gawker dived into the Sony data with something approaching glee, creating a microsite to host the revelations. Notable headlines included “The Natalie Portman‐Ryan Seacrest Gaza Strip Reply‐All Chain from Hell,” “Hollywood Executives Think Jaden and Willow Smith Are Crazy, Too,” and “Sony’s Embarrassing Powerpoints Are Even Worse Than Their Shitty Movies.” Sam Biddle, who led Gawker’s reporting, defends its coverage by arguing that the hack was the biggest technology story of the year. “It exposed the way an enormous, publicly traded multinational company functions and revealed a lot about the people making decisions at an institution of huge cultural power,” he says. “If that’s not newsworthy, I don’t know what is.”

Biddle is also keen to stress that there were plenty of juicy nuggets of information Gawker did not publicize, even though they were already public because the data was dumped online. “I think that’s something that hasn’t been said enough,” he points out. “We would have never published something like Social Security numbers or addresses or credit card information, things that were all there.” (That said, in April, Gawker’s sister site Jezebel did publish part of a Sony executive’s Amazon order history, which included pubic hair dye.)

What not to publish is a key concern for anyone dealing with leaked or stolen data. In July 2010, WikiLeaks was criticized by the Pentagon for its handling of the U.S. embassy cables, as details of informers, activists, and opposition politicians in autocratic regimes were not redacted before the documents were made available on file sharing sites. The Guardian and The New York Times had largely removed such sensitive information before publication.

Reporters working with sensitive information should take particular care with files stored as PDFs. In 2005, a blogger discovered that the Pentagon had inadequately redacted PDFs of an official U.S. military inquiry into the accidental killing of an Italian agent in Baghdad. The “redaction” consisted only of highlighting the text in black shading, and so copying and pasting it into another document restored its readability.

The same simple mistake was made by The New York Times in January 2014 when it published a PDF from documents handed over by Edward Snowden. Pasting the text into a new document revealed the name of a National Security Agency agent as well as the target of an operation in Mosul, Iraq.

When asked about this mistake by John Oliver, host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” in an April episode, Snowden replied, “It is a f**kup and these things do happen in reporting. In journalism we have to accept that some mistakes will be made. This is a fundamental concept of liberty.”

In order to reduce the chances of such a mistake happening, reporters working with sensitive information should ask themselves first if any redactions are needed; if they are, they must be carried out by someone with the relevant expertise. It is also best practice to open sensitive documents only on a computer that is “air gapped”—not connected to the Internet—in case viruses or malware have been hidden within the files, which could alert their owners. While working on the Snowden leaks, The Guardian went further and established a secure room, into which reporters were not allowed to bring phones or other electronic equipment in case they were bugged.

Shielding a source’s identity can be tricky when documents or photos have metadata Understanding the content of leaked documents as fully as possible also makes it easier to protect sources. In 1983, Peter Preston, who edited The Guardian from 1975 to 1995, published a story based 114

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on a leaked document containing plans for cruise missile deployment in Britain. The government forced the newspaper to turn over the documents, and some seemingly unintelligible squiggles in the top corner allowed it to be traced to a Foreign & Commonwealth Office photocopying machine and, ultimately, to the source, Sarah Tisdall, who was jailed for six months for violating the Official Secrets Act. “I feel that, once The Guardian used the document in that story, we owed its provider protection,” Preston says now. “But providing it sight unseen—and looking in the wrong direction anyway—was a nightmare.”

Because digital documents often carry all kinds of metadata hidden underneath their visible contents, making originals available should be handled with care. This applies to pictures as well as text. The hiding place of fugitive tech entrepreneur John McAfee, who was named as a “person of interest” in a death in Belize, was unwittingly revealed by Vice in 2012 when the magazine posted a photo of editor in chief Rocco Castoro posing with him. The picture, part of a post entitled “We Are with John McAfee Right Now, Suckers,” still contained its Exif data, revealing not only that it was captured on an iPhone 4S, but the exact location in Guatemala where it was taken. (McAfee, who is still wanted for questioning, fled the country and now lives in Tennessee.)

It is possible to strip metadata from photos, something Vice belatedly did in the McAfee case. And according to Guardian tech reporter Alex Hern, the saga carries two basic lessons for journalists working with digital information: Know your tools, and think twice before publishing original documents exactly as you received them. “The former is harder, but the latter obviously goes against what you want to do as a journalist,” he says. “If you create a new image/document, and paste in what you want to share, it’s a fairly safe way to ensure that the metadata isn’t carried over.” There is a tradeoff, however: “You also ensure that independent researchers can no longer verify that your document is genuine.”

Quinn Norton, a tech reporter who has written for Wired, also tells a story about a source losing access to information because of metadata. She had set up a relationship with an anonymous contact who had access to mail servers at four Syrian embassies. She worked with ProPublica, following security protocols—for example, only opening the encrypted documents on a computer that was air‐gapped.

Unfortunately, Norton says, ProPublica may not have scrubbed the documents clean of all the metadata before sending them to the Syrians for comment. Within two hours, Norton’s source lost access but was not identified.

Although metadata is unlikely to endanger journalists’ lives, it might affect their livelihood. Norton argues that the law has not yet caught up with the realities of handling digital information. For example, she says, possessing child pornography is a strict liability offense in some jurisdictions. It does not matter if you have not looked at the material; you only have to be in possession of it to be committing a crime. So any journalist opening up a parcel of encrypted data runs the risk that hackers have embedded something nasty in there for which he or she is now legally responsible.

If that sounds far‐fetched, consider that, according to Norton, hackers insertedencrypted links to child porn websites into the blockchain, or shared database, used to trade the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, intending to make it so everyone who owns Bitcoins would be committing a criminal offense. It was their idea of a prank. Similarly, she warns that being part of a large media organization does not AFGG 2018

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necessarily provide protection against prosecutions for computer fraud or misuse. Wronged companies or the Department of Justice can choose to target individuals rather than institutions.

When dealing with documents obtained under murky circumstances, news organizations should follow standard procedure and question the motives of their sources. Jane E. Kirtley, the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota, recalls a 1982 story in which a Republican campaigner named Dan Cohen approached two major papers in Minnesota with information on the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, who had been charged with a shoplifting offense in 1970. (The conviction was later vacated.) Both papers’ reporters agreed to Cohen’s terms: They would publish the story without naming him as their source. But, independently, both sets of editors overruled them. “Their editors overrode their promises on the ground that the real story was not the minor shoplifting charge, but the fact that a political operative was trying to smear an opposing candidate shortly before the election,” says Kirtley. For her, the case illustrates the fact that “this was a situation where the reporters should have questioned the source’s motives before agreeing to his terms.” Cohen later sued both papers. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the First Amendment did not protect the newspapers from being sued for breach of contract.

After the Sony hack, Andrew Wallenstein, co‐editor of Variety, went public with his doubts over whether to publish information that might have been obtained by foreign spies. Writing on the Variety site last December, he asked: “What if suspected hacker North Korea bombed Culver City [site of Sony Pictures headquarters]? Can I sift through the rubble for Sony executives’ hard drives? … Outlandish as that sounds, it’s also strange that because the nature of the Sony attack was virtual instead of physical, it’s fair game to scavenge for data.” Despite his ambivalence, he concluded that there was sufficient public interest in reporting on a major company. Besides, he added, “journalism is, in some sense, permissible thievery.”

This is a characterization Kirtley disputes. “Under U.S. law, a critical factor is whether the news organization itself broke the law to get the documents,” she says. “Simply being the recipient, especially if the documents come from an unknown source through a brown paper envelope or digital dropbox, is not considered ‘theft,’ even if the source broke the law in obtaining or passing on the documents.” This is the key issue in the “Lux Leaks” case, where French TV journalist Edouard Perrin was charged on April 23 as an accomplice to theft, alongside two employees of accountancy firm PwC, for his part in publishing details of corporate tax avoidance in Luxembourg. The authorities there allege that Perrin did not simply receive leaked documents, but directed his source to look out for particular files, thus playing a “more active role in the committing of these offenses.”

Kirtley adds that there is an ethical distinction, as well as a legal one: “For me, it always comes down to a balance between the value of the information to the public interest as compared to the harm that would be caused to the individual by publication.” Gawker’s Biddle believes the idea of harm to individuals can be overstated, not least by those whose embarrassing secrets are revealed by stolen or leaked documents. “I think the ‘Well, the Pentagon Papers, sure, but Sony…’ argument is silly,” he says. “Leaked data doesn’t have to be world historical to be worthwhile. How high we want to apply the public interest test is probably more a matter of squeamishness.”

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For reporters dealing with the Sony hack, the leak gave an insight into how those controlling a multibillion‐dollar business that shapes our cultural landscape functioned behind closed doors.

WikiLeaks, which produced a searchable index of the Sony files in April, argued on its website that “behind the scenes this is an influential corporation, with ties to the White House (there are almost 100 U.S. government e‐mail addresses in the archive), with an ability to impact laws and policies, and with connections to the U.S. military‐industrial complex.” Sony disagrees. “The cyber attack on Sony Pictures was a malicious criminal act, and we strongly condemn the indexing of stolen employee and other private and privileged information on WikiLeaks,” the company said in a statement.

The involvement of WikiLeaks points to another consideration news organizations must bear in mind: If they don’t publish, someone else will. In the case of the Sony hack, Wallenstein at Variety argues, “Our very real qualms about motive were superseded not just by the contents of the leak but by the incontrovertible fact that [they] were thrust into the public domain by the hackers and other media.

Tiptoeing around the elephant in the room seemed pointless.”

For journalists in the digital marketplace, how to treat stolen data that is available elsewhere is an increasingly pressing question. The commercial pressure is always to follow up a story that other outlets have run, particularly when it involves gossip about Angelina Jolie and what powerful people say when they think no one can overhear them. It is more important than ever to have “red lines”— clear guidance on what an organization will and will not publish under any circumstances—and an internal procedure for applying a public interest test to the gray areas. “Ultimately, what news organizations offer is credibility,” says Kirtley. “By this I mean not only accuracy—because I do think there is a clear responsibility to authenticate anything we publish—but also the practice of vetting information and doing one’s best to put it in the proper context.”

The iCloud leak provides an instructive example of where media organizations voluntarily impose limits on material that would interest the public but which is not in the public interest. News organizations across the world happily wrote stories about starlets’ intimate photographs being dumped on file‐sharing sites—and reaped the traffic benefits from search engine optimization that reeled in anyone Googling “naked celebrity pictures.” However, no major news outlets published the pictures themselves. Biddle’s explanation for this is simple: “The iCloud hack itself was deeply interesting, which is why we covered it. But the pictures themselves? Not at all. We’re a lurid tabloid site, but not a pornography site.”

A pressing question for journalists is how to treat stolen data that other media outlets are covering Many agree that individuals have a greater right to privacy than corporations and that revealing financial details or personal opinions is less invasive than revealing naked photographs. But not everyone. Brad Pitt compared the Sony leak to the News of the World’s phone‐hacking, when reporters illegally accessed the voicemails of celebrities, politicians, and athletes as well as families of dead U.K. soldiers and a 13‐year‐old murder victim over several years in the early 2000s, and declared: “I don’t see any difference in [News of the World parent company] News Corp hacking phone calls and people hacking e‐mails.” Preston echoes this: “Nothing much in the Sony celeb package even came near a public interest reason for publishing. Yet lofty Brits and lofty Americans just scooped it all up— AFGG 2018

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something as illegal, as stolen, as anything on the [News Corp chairman Rupert] Murdoch charge sheet.”

It is also worth noting that news organizations may not have hacked the Sony e‐mails, but someone did—and that person has committed an offense for which the penalties are severe. Aaron Swartz, who downloaded more than four million paywalled academic articles with the intention of making them freely available online, was facing 35 years in prison when he killed himself in January 2013. Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, who exposed a flaw in AT&T’s security and passed the information to Gawker, was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison. He served just over a year before his conviction was vacated. Chelsea, formerly Bradley, Manning was sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment for passing classified U.S. government data to WikiLeaks.

While the idea of “public interest” is important in the newsroom, it provides little protection in the U.S. for sources who have broken the law to acquire newsworthy information. In the U.K., the situation is fractionally better. The Data Protection Act recognizes a public interest defense. For this reason, Norton says it is vital for journalists to do what they can to protect sources. She uses Tor and Tails, free tools that make her Web usage almost impossible to track. “But what I need is for my source to use Tor and Tails,” she says. “When I write the piece, my name is going to be attached to that. I’m not going to be anonymous.” Just interacting with her publicly could put a source in danger, she adds: “I’m a high‐value target. I don’t know why law enforcement wouldn’t hang around and watch who I talked to.”

Richard Sambrook, director of the Centre for Journalism at Cardiff University and a former head of news at the BBC, says it’s also important to prepare a source psychologically for the effects of publication. He worked at the BBC during one of its biggest controversies, when reporter Andrew Gilligan claimed that the Tony Blair government had “sexed up” a report on Iraqi weapons capabilities to provide a better pretext for invading the country in 2003. Gilligan relied on an unnamed source.

The Ministry of Defence investigation into the leak focused on UN weapons inspector David Kelly.

Kelly, who told his bosses that he had talked to Gilligan, was distraught at his identity becoming public knowledge, and he was found dead a week later. “The BBC went to some lengths to protect his identity, even allowing misunderstandings about the source’s role to perpetuate, for which it was strongly criticized by the Hutton Inquiry [into the leak],” Sambrook says. “However, to have corrected misunderstandings would have risked identifying him … Kelly understood he was talking to journalists about matters he shouldn’t, but I do not believe he recognized the scale of risk or what would happen to him once he came forward.”

Handling stolen documents is a fraught and fractious business, one where the ethical and legal boundaries are ill defined. It is therefore vital that news organizations develop robust procedures to protect their sources and their staff and to give their readers the information they need to make sense of the world. As Preston notes, “It’s the job of editors to publish, not to keep secrets.”

Source: Lewis, H. (2015). When Is it Ethical to Publish Stolen Data?. Available: http://niemanreports.org/articles/when‐is‐it‐ethical‐to‐publish‐stolen‐data/. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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Hacking India's Elections Vinayak Dalmia, 2017

New technology creates opportunities for democracy — and also threats.

Politics in 2017 is a far cry from 1951‐52, when India faced her first full election. The internet and other technologies create wonderful opportunities for democracy, but they also create grave threats.

President Barack Obama’s election in 2008 in the United States was historic on many fronts. Among other things, he was the first internet politician and his 2008 campaign ushered in a new era of modern, tech‐savvy elections. From posting campaign videos on YouTube that were watched for over 14.5 millions hours, to sending promotional SMSs and emails to supporters, the Obama campaign not only made its poll promises and ideas freely accessible to internet and phone users all across the globe, it also turned its supporters into active and motivated campaigners who were forwarding these messages and video links to their friends and family. It is noteworthy that many of these new age “campaigners” would not have been able to contribute in a traditional door‐to‐door canvassing scenario — the use of internet and social media made it easier for them to support their favorite candidate’s campaign.

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The tools of campaign managers have only become more sophisticated in the eight‐plus years since Obama’s first election. With over 86 percent of adult Americans using the internet, of whom 79 percent use Facebook, social media emerged as a powerful game‐changing platform in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. In the Indian context too, the general elections held in 2014 saw a tectonic shift in campaign strategy, with an increasing reliance on social media and smart phone applications to connect with the youth and organize them as a campaign base. The 2014 polls were eventually dubbed as “India’s first social media election.”

However, new technology goes beyond connecting with the electorate. The thriving new field of Big Data helps campaign managers gather information about each and every individual voter — their likes, their interests, and their political opinions — by combing through users’ Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media and internet activity. The U.K. firm Cambridge Analytica, which was in charge of Trump’s campaign, collected over 4,000 data points for every adult American citizen based on their their internet usage. This data was used to create a psychometric profile for each individual voter assign them into different segments. Personalized voting pitches were designed for these segments and delivered to voters’ social media accounts using targeted postings and advertisements.

With such micro‐targeting, political candidates no longer need to pay attention to public discourse.

Instead their energies are focused on winning every voter by making promises specific people would like to hear. Experts predict that with rapid advancements in technology, it will be possible in the future for virtual avatars of politicians to come on door‐to‐door campaigns and interact with individual voters, about whom these avatars would have full background information thanks to Big Data. On the AFGG 2018

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metro, on your way to work, imagine yourself shaking hands with a life‐size avatar of a future prime minister who is concerned about your problems and promises to resolve them.

Thus campaigning would be reduced to saying as little as possible in the public sphere to allow the candidates full leeway to say what they want privately. And, as most of private sphere would be segmented based on highly accurate data about each and every voter, eventually the political speech around us would be filtered more and more so that we hear only what we would like to hear and nothing else.

Hacking Elections: A New Battlefield While the ethics of using these advanced tools in elections are themselves questionable, there is a much greater cause of concern — the hacking of elections. The alleged Russian interference in the U.S. presidential elections, including allegations of hacking the Democratic National Committee, has brought these issues to the forefront. Another example is Andrés Sepúlveda, who is currently serving a 10‐year prison sentence in Colombo under the charge of espionage and election hacking. In a 2016 Bloomberg story, he came out with detailed accounts of how he had rigged Latin American elections, using cyber attacks, for over a decade.

We live in the world of WikiLeaks and Twitter farms, and throughout the democratic world authorities are waking up to the fact that political establishments have become vulnerable to attacks by hackers.

In May 2015, German intelligence discovered a breach of 14 servers in the Bundestag (lower house of the German parliament) network, which was later linked to an attack by hackers in Russia.

Election hackers operate by breaking into opposing party’s emails, confidential files, or social media accounts. They then publicly release embarrassing information about political opponents in the media and on the internet. In addition to that they also flood the internet and social media with fake news in order to polarize and sway voters and troll opposing party candidates through multiple accounts on social media channels.

Unfortunately, the modern election is fraught with vulnerabilities from enemies within and outside and we have only just seen the tip of the iceberg.

The India Story As the number of internet users across world is climbing up, these strategies will become more effective in both predicting and influencing election results. If we take a look at the Indian context, the number of internet users in 2019 is projected to be over 520 million, over 50 percent of whom will be on Facebook. The penetration of smartphones is also projected to increase to 48 percent by 2019. As more Indians embrace social media platforms, it will be easier for campaign managers to customize and disseminate their messages to a well‐segmented audience. As voters would be getting information not just from a party’s official accounts but also from enthusiastic supporters and volunteers, it would be difficult for them to verify the authenticity of claims. Short of arranging a coup or physically hacking the end result, the Big Data methods of social media manipulation and engineering in adverse hands could come very close to dictating the outcome of the next general elections. This should be a true nightmare for any election commissioner.

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India is a young experiment in democracy. For many first time voters and other social groups the internet and smartphones may very well be the primary funnel through which they find their voice, vote, and ideology. Attempts have always been made by foreign and domestic enemies to destabilize nations and hijack elections; trying to manipulate internal political outcomes is not new.

But with technology, it is becoming easier and cheaper to do so. The enemy could be anywhere.

Conclusion The Election Commission (EC) is India’s pride. It has done a remarkable job in conducting elections on a scale unlike anywhere else on the planet. It is now time for it to brace for this new challenge. There is a fine balance between encouraging free speech and regulating spread of misinformation. A digital code of conduct and rules and regulations must be drafted. At the same time, the EC has to prepare to better secure politicians and political parties’ vital information. A cyber cell should be established to monitor the campaign activities of different parties, keep an eye on fake news trending, and defend against other attacks.

India and the EC can also pay attention to the precautionary steps now being taken by global tech giants and governments. The Indian political scene has only had a taste of both the power and threats of technology. As the country starts playing with these new toys, it is equally important to pay heed to the statutory warnings that always come with new things.

Source: Dalmia, V. (2017). Hacking India's Elections. The Diplomat. Available: https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/hacking‐indias‐elections/. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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The Chinese World Order Andrew J. Nathan, 2017

Ten years ago the journalist James Mann published a book called The China Fantasy, in which he criticized American policymakers for using something he called “the Soothing Scenario” to justify the policy of diplomatic and economic engagement with China. According to this view, China’s exposure to the benefits of globalization would lead the country to embrace democratic institutions and support the American‐led world order. Instead, Mann predicted, China would remain an authoritarian country, and its success would encourage other authoritarian regimes to resist pressures to change.1 Mann’s prediction turned out to be true. China took advantage of the growing potential of unrestricted global commerce to emerge as the number one trading nation and the second‐largest economy in the world. It is the top trading partner of every other country in Asia, not least because of its crucial position assembling parts that have been produced elsewhere in the region. Sixty‐four countries have joined China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) infrastructure initiative, which was announced in 2013 and consists of ports, railways, roads, and airfields linking China to Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe—a “New Silk Road” that, if it succeeds, will greatly expand China’s economic and diplomatic influence. Twenty‐nine heads of state attended Beijing’s OBOR conference in mid‐May. Meanwhile, China has remained an authoritarian, one‐party state that is backed by an increasingly powerful military. China’s military budget has risen at the same rate as its GDP for the past quarter‐ century, from $17 billion in 1990 to $152 billion in 2017—a 900 percent increase. This has allowed China to acquire aircraft carriers, sophisticated missiles, advanced submarines, and cyberwar capabilities that challenge American military dominance in Asia. It has vastly expanded its naval presence in what it calls the “near seas” around its coast, and even into the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

China has attained this new position of power while mostly complying with the rules of the World Trade Organization, which it joined in 2001. Still, in 2016 Western governments found it necessary to renege on a commitment they made when China joined to give it full “market economy status” after fifteen years of membership. This status would have made it harder for other WTO members to sue China for “dumping”—selling products at less than market‐price production cost to drive out competitors—but the promise to accord that status had been based on the expectation that China would turn into a Western‐style market economy.

That has not happened. Instead, the state has continued to control the Chinese economy in its effort to expand the market share of Chinese enterprises both in China and abroad. Beijing has carried out industrial espionage to acquire advanced Western technology, forced the transfer of technology from Western to Chinese enterprises through joint ventures and merger agreements, and, for a time (although not now), suppressed the exchange value of its currency in order to stimulate exports. Since 2006, Beijing has used various forms of regulation that are not banned by the WTO to make it difficult for foreign businesses to enter and compete in its domestic market, and to give an advantage to Chinese enterprises—especially in cutting‐edge fields like semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and information and communications technology.

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China’s increasingly pervasive economic influence has contributed to the populist and antiglobalization movements that are now taking hold in many countries in the West, including in the US with Donald Trump. In a striking reversal, it was Chinese President Xi Jinping rather than a European or American leader who delivered a strong defense of globalization at the January 2017 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

President Barack Obama sought to strengthen US alliances in Asia in the hope of keeping China’s rise in check. By contrast, President Trump has questioned the value of alliances with Japan and South Korea, withdrawn from the Trans‐Pacific Partnership, and for a time put a hold on American Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) in the South China Sea. At the Mar‐a‐Lago summit in April, Trump embarrassingly acted like Xi Jinping’s pupil on the question of North Korea’s growing nuclear menace, stating, “After listening [to Xi] for ten minutes, I realized it’s not so easy.” He then cast aside his campaign commitments to raise tariffs on China and challenge China on currency manipulation in what turned out to be the vain hope that China would solve the North Korea problem for him. To the contrary, the threat has only grown, with Pyongyang’s successful July 4 test of a long‐range missile that may be capable of reaching Alaska.

To make matters worse, the Trump family have placed themselves conspicuously on China’s payroll, accepting future profits in the form of trademarks for both the Trump and Ivanka brands, and seeking Chinese investment in Kushner real estate projects. When China Labor Watch, a New York–based labor rights organization, published information on poor conditions in a factory where Ivanka’s brand‐name shoes had recently been produced, China detained the group’s three field investigators, the only time CLW’s investigators have been detained for exposing the abuse of Chinese workers.2 These signs of confusion in American policy have accelerated the growth of China’s economic and political influence. In Asia, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte softened the previous Filipino administration’s position on its South China Sea territorial dispute with China and accepted a large Chinese trade and investment package; Malaysian leader Najib Razak agreed to the first purchase of Chinese vessels for his navy; Korean voters selected a new president, Moon Jae‐in, who has promised closer relations with Beijing; and Vietnam has stepped up diplomatic and military relations with China.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has stuck to the American alliance, but if US policy continues to show weakness, Japan will ultimately face a choice either of compromising with China’s territorial claims in the East China Sea or of rearming itself more heavily, perhaps even with nuclear weapons.

According to Graham Allison, director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, in his new book Destined for War, “As far ahead as the eye can see, the defining question about global order is whether China and the US can escape Thucydides’s Trap,” which he defines as a likely war between a dominant power and a rising power.

Two other recent books, however, while approaching the subject in very different ways, suggest that China is not as threatening as many commentators would have us believe. Michael Auslin, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute, declares the end of the Asian Century before it has much begun, because leading Asian countries, including China, have not adopted the business‐friendly economic practices, pro‐democracy political reforms, and cooperative regional institutions that would enable them effectively to rival the West. Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian academic more on the left, AFGG 2018

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argues instead that the emergence of China and other Asian powers is an accomplished fact that cannot be reversed, but that the power shift does not present a serious threat to Western interests.

Although both books discuss all of Asia, China is central to their arguments.

Auslin’s analysis is grounded in the contested set of ideas that used to be called the Washington Consensus—the belief that free markets, free trade, and political democracy are necessary for economies to grow and political systems to be stable. Since the Chinese approach disregards this theory, Auslin thinks the country will stumble before it seriously challenges American preeminence.

He sees many problems in the Chinese economy, including the excessive number and size of state‐ owned enterprises, opaque corporate governance, huge government debt (200 percent of GDPby some estimates), a property bubble, and overdependence on exports. But this adds up simply to a description of how the economy is run, not to an argument that this way of running it will not work.

In fact, the Chinese economy is not as vulnerable as Auslin thinks. First, because the Chinese currency, the yuan, is not freely convertible, it is difficult for yuan holders to invest on a large scale anywhere but China without government permission. To be sure, there is a dribble of capital abroad sufficient to allow the purchase of high‐end real estate in Vancouver, Los Angeles, and New York, but this is hardly enough to starve investment in China or subject the yuan to currency speculation. Second, just as the US dollar enjoys the “exorbitant privilege” of being accepted everywhere as a bearer of value even though it is not backed by any tangible asset, so too the Chinese yuan is accepted by participants in the Chinese economy and even to a limited extent overseas as a bearer of value, which gives the government the ability to print money at will in order to stimulate economic growth, with limited risk of inflation.

Third, both the debtors and the creditors in the Chinese economy are mostly government entities, so the government can adjust their debt relationships without causing a financial crisis. Beijing worked its way out of previous debt overhangs by creating “asset management companies” (or “bad banks”) to take bad loans off the books of state banks, and it worked. Such tactics can be used again if necessary.

Auslin is more persuasive in suggesting the extent to which high‐level corruption has damaged the legitimacy of China’s one‐party rule, and how ineffective the regime’s heavy‐handed propaganda is in its aim of reinforcing that legitimacy. Even so, surveys show that the Chinese public gives the regime credit for sustained economic growth and for carrying out a serious battle against corruption. Auslin agrees with an unnamed China specialist—apparently the well‐respected George Washington University scholar David Shambaugh—that the Chinese regime has entered its “endgame.”3 This may be true, but the same prediction has been made so often for decades that it is hard to be convinced by it now. By seeing the Chinese regime and other Asian political systems like Thailand, Myanmar, and Malaysia that haven’t developed Western‐style governments as examples of “unfinished revolutions,” Auslin commits the fallacy of conflating political stability with democratization.

Unlike Auslin, Stuenkel does not believe that Chinese power will fade, but he sees China’s ambitions as more economic than military. It is true that China has built and fortified sand islands in the South China Sea, increased its allocation of troops to UN peacekeeping operations in Africa, established a 124

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small naval base in Djibouti, used Chinese naval forces to evacuate some 36,000 Chinese workers from Libya, and dispatched ships to participate in the multilateral anti‐piracy patrol in the Gulf of Aden.

But in Stuenkel’s view, these efforts are not likely to lead to the creation of a US‐style global military empire. It would be difficult for China to defend its far‐flung, fragile network of economic interests by chiefly military power. China’s enormous investments in resources and infrastructure abroad can pay off only if peace is maintained across these turbulent regions by political means, including respect for international law. According to Stuenkel, China wants nothing more than to preserve the main elements of the world trading order from which it has benefited so much, while gaining greater influence in the institutions that enforce and develop this order.

Because the US Congress refused until recently to authorize increased voting rights for China in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—and, one might add, because China accumulated a huge stock of foreign exchange that it needed to invest—Beijing set out to create what Stuenkel calls a “parallel order” of international economic institutions. He identifies twenty‐two newly created multilateral institutions, ranging from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific, in which China is a participant and usually the leading member.

Stuenkel argues these are “parallel” rather than “alternative” institutions: they provide infrastructure investment, regulate trade, facilitate international payments, and carry out security and diplomatic dialogues in much the same way as similar Western‐dominated institutions that they parallel. They operate according to rules that are consistent with existing institutions in the same fields, and their participants continue simultaneously as members of the older institutions. In Stuenkel’s view, their creation is a good thing: [They] will provide additional platforms for cooperation (among both non‐Western and between non‐ Western and Western powers), and spread the burden of contributing global public goods [such as UN peacekeeping operations, anti‐piracy patrols, and the control of climate change] more evenly….

All these institutions will deepen China’s integration into the global economy, possibly reducing the risk of conflict, and lifting all boats.

Auslin and Stuenkel both present, to use James Mann’s phrase, “soothing scenarios”: either China’s rise will stall before it poses a serious threat to American interests, or it will bring new vitality to the existing international order. But both are too optimistic. Although China’s rate of growth has slowed from double digits to an official annual rate (which some economists think is exaggerated) of 6.7 percent in 2016, and will slow further as the economy matures, few believe it will fall below 3 percent in the foreseeable future.

As Stuenkel points out, at that rate it will inevitably overtake the US economy, even if the US were to accelerate its own rate of growth, simply because China’s population is four times as big as America’s.

In a few more decades, China’s economy will be twice as big as that of the US. An economic or political crisis, if it occurs, can slow China’s rise, but China is not going back to the poverty of the pre‐reform era.

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Stuenkel is persuasive in arguing that Beijing cares chiefly about political stability at home and economic access abroad, and not about promoting its authoritarian political model to the rest of the world. Nor do China’s leaders seek, as some have suggested, to expel the United States from Asia, or to “rule the world.” They are, however, pursuing two goals that clash fundamentally with important American interests (leaving aside China’s abuse of the US–China economic relationship, which is a problem that can be gradually resolved through negotiations).

The first is its effort to alter the military balance in Asia. Along its long, exposed coastline, China is confronted with a string of American allies and partners: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam. There are some 60,000 American troops deployed in the area, and American bases in Guam and Pearl Harbor command the Pacific. Just beyond the line twelve nautical miles from the Chinese coast that defines its sovereign “territorial waters,” the US Seventh Fleet conducts regular intelligence‐gathering and surveillance operations. Along its land borders China likewise confronts American deployments, alliances, and military cooperation arrangements—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, Mongolia, and India.

With China’s power rising, its rulers no longer accept being so tightly hemmed in. They are now in a position to press South Korea to reverse the deployment of an American Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system; to move Chinese military ships and submarines through strategic straits between the Japanese islands; to challenge the Japanese claim to the Senkakus, the disputed islands in the East China Sea; to pressure Taiwan to accept unification with China; and to harass US ships and planes in the South China Sea. These moves challenge the established American position in Asia.

The second serious clash of interests has to do with the freedoms of thought and speech. The regime is hypersensitive about its image because of its shallow legitimacy at home. This has led it not only to engage in standard public relations and media work around the world, but also to use diplomatic pressure, visa denials, financial influence, surveillance, and threats to try to control what journalists, scholars, and Chinese students and scholars abroad say about China. The effort to silence critics extends to human rights institutions like the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, where China works to assure that it and other authoritarian regimes are not criticized; it even reaches Hollywood, where studios eager to gain access to the Chinese market increasingly avoid unfavorable portrayals of China. This offensive poses a special challenge to the West, one in which the usual cliché about balancing values and interests in foreign policy does not apply. As China extends its efforts at thought control beyond its own borders, our values are our interests.

Some have suggested that the US scale back its position in Asia to accommodate China’s desire for greater military influence in its own region. In his 2011 book On China, Henry Kissinger proposed that the two sides agree on a “Pacific Community”—“a region to which the United States, China, and other states all belong and in whose peaceful development all participate.” Graham Allison’s ideas for how to avoid war are equally anodyne: “Understand what China is trying to do,” “Do strategy,” and “Make domestic challenges central.”

Other strategists have been more specific, proposing that the US and China establish a mutually acceptable security balance by making concessions to each other over Taiwan, the Senkakus, military 126

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deployments, and offensive and defensive missile systems. Through such an approach, Washington and Beijing could demonstrate that each does not seek to threaten the other’s core security interests.4 The difficulty with such proposals is that Beijing is likely to interpret them as asking it to accept an intrusive American presence just when the shifting power balance should allow that situation to be corrected. And on the US side, yielding preemptively to Chinese ambitions would destroy its credibility with all of its allies, not only in Asia but elsewhere as well. The resulting destabilization would not serve American or Chinese interests.

Auslin’s recommendations for managing the rise of China are for the US to strengthen its military presence in the region; build additional links—such as with India and Indonesia—on top of its existing alliance system; and intensify American pressures for democratic transformation. It should stick to these policies, he says, until “China’s leaders…come to appreciate the benefits of constructive engagement.” This is a grand vision that faces three obstacles—the lack of consistency across administrations in Washington needed to implement such a strategy; the unwillingness of countries like India, Indonesia, and even our formal allies South Korea and Japan to tilt so conspicuously against the largest and still‐growing regional power; and the unlikelihood that China would come to accept this American posture as beneficial.

For his part, Stuenkel recommends that the United States enlarge the participation of the rising powers in existing institutions so they have a fair share of influence, encourage China and other rising powers to contribute even more to global public goods such as UN peacekeeping operations, anti‐ piracy patrols, and the control of climate change, and “fully embrace, rather than criticize or try to isolate” the new parallel economic institutions that China is creating. These are constructive ideas, but they do not address the core problems of regional security and human rights.

The US should cooperate with China in those areas where common interests exist, such as nonproliferation and climate change (the position of the Trump administration notwithstanding). And the US must push steadily to open the Chinese economy on a reciprocal basis—an effort that would have been greatly aided by staying in the TPP. But in order to respond successfully to China’s growing military power, the US must hold the line firmly where strategic interests clash, such as over Taiwan and the US naval presence in the South China Sea. Above all, the US must defend international standards of human rights and freedoms more strongly than it has in recent years; it makes no sense to defer to the loudly voiced sensitivities of the Chinese regime even as China interferes more and more often in our freedoms. Competition, friction, and testing between the United States and China are unavoidable, probably for decades. To navigate this process, the US needs an accurate assessment of China’s interests, but even more of its own.    

James Mann, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (Viking, 2007).

John Ruwitch, “Activist Probing Factories Making Ivanka Trump Shoes in China Arrested: Group,” Reuters, May 31, 2017.

David Shambaugh, China’s Future (Polity, 2016).

For example, James Steinberg and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Strategic Reassurance and Resolve: US–China Relations in the Twenty‐First Century (Princeton University Press, 2014), and Lyle AFGG 2018

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J. Goldstein, Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US–China Rivalry (Georgetown University Press, 2015).

Source: Nathan, A J. (2017). The Chinese World Order. Available: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/12/chinese‐world‐order/. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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How China Sees World Order Richard Fontaine and Mira Rapp‐Hooper, 2016

CHINA’S RAPID ascent to great‐power status has, more than any other international development, raised concerns about the future of the liberal international order. Forged in the ashes of the Second World War, that order has enabled a seven‐decade period of great‐power peace, the expansion of democratic rule and a massive increase in global prosperity. Now, it seems, world order is under threat—not least from China’s rising power. While Beijing has thus far avoided active military aggression and refrained from exclusionary economic arrangements, American policymakers worry quite openly about China’s challenge to the underlying rules of the road. They hope that Beijing will embrace the existing pillars of global order and even work to support them; they fear that China will prove revisionist, seeking to undermine the rules‐based order and fashion an illiberal alternative that excludes the United States.

This combination of hopes and fears has driven America’s China policy across multiple administrations.

From Bush administration–era exhortations that Beijing act as a “responsible stakeholder” to Obama administration hopes that China would become a “partner in underwriting the international order,” American leaders have consistently called on China to join the prevailing global system. The question underlying the U.S. approach has not been whether the premise is correct, but rather which combination of carrots, sticks and engagement is likeliest to ensure that Beijing firmly embraces global rules and institutions. But at a moment when China is transgressing some of those rules and establishing alternative institutions, it is worth looking closely at the assumptions that have undergirded U.S. policy.

Three propositions support America’s approach. The first is that there exists one more‐or‐less‐unified liberal international order, and that this order is both based on rules and open to any nation that seeks to join it. The second is that if China is brought into this liberal order, the underlying rules and institutions will shape Beijing more than they will be shaped by it. The third is that it is the task of the United States and its partners is to bring China into the existing order, and that if the attempt proves unsuccessful, the seventy‐year‐old, rules‐based global order is headed for the dustbin of history.

The three propositions suggest a sophisticated U.S. approach to the world’s second most powerful country—one that sails between the Scylla of containment and the Charybdis of unconditional engagement. They promise an American policy based on enlightened self‐interest and positive‐sum outcomes in which, as Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter recently said, “everyone rises and everybody wins.” And it extends a hand to Beijing: come on in, China, and you’ll see that the rules‐ based water is fine.

The trouble is that each of these propositions is woefully incomplete. They simplify both the nature of world order and China’s role in it. And so long as they serve as the basis for American policy, Washington’s approach will lack the nuance and understanding required both to prod China toward greater global integration and to bring partners on board the effort.

CONSIDER FIRST the liberal international order from which China has benefitted and to which it should contribute. The term “international order” is shorthand and can invite confusion. There is not one order but many different components and layers of order. These include global institutions, such as AFGG 2018

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the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, as well as regional institutions, such as the Asia Development Bank. They also include a dense network of treaties and regimes, ranging from the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The United States itself cannot be considered a “responsible stakeholder” in every one of them. Together with various rules and norms, ranging from those governing state sovereignty to those that relate to human rights, these institutions and regimes are interconnected but have distinct aims. They vary widely in their reach and purpose.

China has long been party to institutions and regimes, and its decision to support the prevailing system is not a binary one: Beijing rejects some rules, accepts others and seeks to rewrite others still. As a result, there is no single answer to the question of whether China intends to embrace the rules‐based international order, nor is there a monolithic way to characterize the type of great power that China aspires to be.

In many global institutions, Beijing has proven a willing partner, and it has sought a leadership role in crafting new international regimes. In economic affairs, China seeks greater representation in and revisions to global institutions, just as it creates new economic institutions and regimes at the regional level. When it comes to security issues close to its borders, China is especially likely to reject prevailing regimes and rules.

Because there is no single international order, and because Chinese participation is diverse and complex, U.S. leaders cannot simply absorb China into a preexisting structure. If American policymakers hope to increase China’s participation in the web of institutions, regimes, rules and norms that together constitute world order, they must craft an engagement strategy that is as nimble as Beijing’s international participation itself.

WHEN POLICYMAKERS invoke the “liberal, rules‐based international order,” they engage, consciously or not, in a fair bit of euphemism. The phrase refers to the prevailing constellation of institutions, regimes, rules and norms that seek to govern international behavior, many of which have been put in place under U.S. leadership since 1945. It is a rules‐based order because it elevates standards above a might‐makes‐right doctrine, though there remain broad domains—such as cyberspace—in which few rules exist. It is open, because any nation‐state that wishes to follow those standards can join its ranks; there are no exclusionary regional or ideological blocs. And it is liberal, because it is weighted toward protection of free‐market capitalism and liberal political values. This order did not materialize as an undifferentiated structure; rather, it was built on many different levels, for many different purposes, over a period of many years. Some of the rules underpinning the maritime order, for instance, date back centuries, while standards expressed in key human‐rights conventions are relatively new.

China was a founding member of several of the global institutions at the center of this order, including the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Other institutions took shape without Chinese participation. China joined the World Trade Organization only in 2001, for example, after a lengthy negotiation process and a period of observer status, and is a member of the G‐20, but not the G‐7. In addition, China participates in many regional organizations, including the Asian Development Bank, which it joined twenty years after its inception, and the East Asia Summit, of which it was a founding member and the key initial organizer.

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Multilateral treaties and regimes represent another layer of international order, and China has a complex history of participation in them. The 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty enshrined China as one of five nuclear states, but China did not ratify the treaty until 1992. It now participates to some degree in all the multilateral regimes governing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. China played an active role in UNCLOS negotiations, but did not ratify the treaty until 1996, and since then has repeatedly contravened the accord’s provisions.

Prevailing norms may not be codified in formal documents or contain clear enforcement mechanisms.

Rather, they become part of the global order as significant numbers of states support and uphold them. These include state sovereignty norms as well as others governing human rights, some of which are expressed in nonbinding agreements like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It comes as no surprise that China’s support of specific norms has both varied over time and changed as its definition of national interest has evolved.

Since 1945, active American leadership has been critical to the design, expansion and enforcement of international institutions, regimes and norms—across time, geography and issue area. But China has also helped to construct some of these rules, and the degree to which China played a role in fashioning global standards varies widely. China does not lie entirely outside this system, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi went so far as to declare in September 2015 that China is a “staunch supporter of the current international order.”

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This characterization is clearly a shorthand of its own, and not fully accurate. As it has continued to amass a larger share of global power, China has taken exception to key international rules, established new institutions and regimes, and simply ignored other elements of global order that Chinese leaders believe inappropriately constrain their foreign policy. American policymakers and lawmakers therefore need a fuller view of Beijing’s variegated international approach if they hope to shape future Chinese attitudes and determine which Chinese actions to support or oppose.

IN RECENT years, China has begun to take active steps toward bolstering some existing global institutions and has become involved in the drafting of new global rules. For decades China was a fairly indifferent member of the UN Security Council, often abstaining from votes or taking a stand only when another member (typically Russia) was also willing to adopt the same position. This passive stance is changing: China has tripled its contributions to the UN budget (and now gives as much as Britain and France), deployed thousands of troops on UN peacekeeping missions and edged toward a more assertive position in the Security Council.

Despite the fact that it remained outside the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty for over two decades, China has recently played a more active role in halting the spread of nuclear weapons. This was most notable in its support for the P5+1 negotiations with Iran and compliance with the global sanctions regime, which resulted in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action under UN auspices. China has also signed on to several rounds of Security Council sanctions against North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, although its support for these has been hard‐won due to its long‐standing relationship with Pyongyang. Nonetheless, as China has risen, it has clearly calculated that the spread of nuclear weapons, on balance, works against its interests. Despite the export of sensitive technologies by some Chinese firms, Beijing has generally acted through global institutions and regimes to constrain the spread of nuclear weapons.

China has demonstrated leadership on international efforts to combat climate change as well, both through the UN and outside of it. A 2014 U.S.‐Chinese climate‐change agreement led to the December 2015 Paris accord, in which 195 countries agreed to curb emissions. Beijing’s role is particularly noteworthy given that China helped to scuttle the passage of a binding treaty at Copenhagen just five years before.

Together, these examples suggest that an increasingly powerful China will not simply reject a monolithic international order but actively reinforce and shape elements of it where doing so advances Chinese interests.

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CHINA STRADDLES the international economic order, having prospered under its rules while seeking to shift it away from U.S. dominance and toward a more China‐centric model. Beijing is a prominent member of the World Trade Organization, but its globally competitive state‐owned enterprises and their push for indigenous innovation have revealed gaps in the WTO’s regulatory structure, which divides trade into actions taken by governments and actions taken by private companies. Chinese efforts to use these enterprises to win market share have prompted nations that are unable to employ multilateral mechanisms in their defense to respond with ad hoc protectionist measures. And despite the fact that it has backed away from difficult market reforms, China has accelerated its push for Market Economy Status within the WTO. If China is granted such status, it will become more difficult for other countries to bring antidumping cases against Chinese companies, which may in turn flood European and U.S. markets with Chinese goods.

At the same time, China has pursued its own regional trade architecture, advancing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) as an alternative to the Trans‐Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. RCEP would link the ten Association of Southeast Asian Nation members with six countries enjoying free‐trade agreements with ASEAN, including China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. But it includes lower standards on food, safety, labor and currency issues, does not place restrictions on China’s state‐owned enterprises and does not include the United States.

RCEP and TPP need not necessarily stand as strict alternatives, and Beijing was invited to join TPP, which presently includes a dozen regional economies responsible for roughly 40 percent of global GDP. China seems unlikely to meet TPP’s high standards, however, and so the two trade deals may persist as competitors in practice.

In finance, China has bypassed the World Bank by lending bilaterally to developing countries, often without regard for good governance or transparency in the target states. It founded the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to support regional infrastructure projects and the New Development Bank (formerly the BRICS Bank) to finance development in emerging economies. Both new banks serve as alternatives to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

Beijing has also begun to transform the renminbi into a global currency, and was granted Special Drawing Rights status by the IMF in late 2015. This places the renminbi in an international reserve‐ currency basket alongside the U.S. dollar, the euro, the British pound and the Japanese yen, and may eventually move the international monetary system away from the dollar. In short, China has signed on to many of the prominent institutions that make up the global economic order, but sought to shift their rules from within and advance alternative arrangements from without.

BEIJING HAS generally sought to limit outside influence near its borders and to advance its own interests, sometimes at the expense of existing rules and regimes. In this, China is not so different from other rising powers, and Chinese officials in their private moments have been known to refer to the South China Sea, for instance, as their country’s Caribbean. Beijing has also led some limited security institution building. In 2001, China founded the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which originally served as a confidence‐building organization with the goal of demilitarizing borders in Central Asia. The SCO’s stated security goal is to combat the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism and extremism, although it appears aimed also at limiting U.S. influence in Central Asia and beyond.

Even Iran is on the brink of membership.

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China has also sought to elevate the status of the Conference on Interactions and Confidence‐Building Measures in Asia (CICA), a regional security mechanism. At a 2014 meeting of CICA, Xi Jinping denounced U.S. alliances and called for security in Asia to be “maintained by Asians themselves,” urging the members to build a new regional security framework. The so‐called New Security Concept that resulted was widely understood to have been a critique of existing U.S. regional‐security institutions, and a gesture at how they might be replaced. (The concept has gained little traction so far.)

Nowhere has China more clearly repudiated a prevailing aspect of the international order than with its rejection of the Law of the Sea regime. China is a signatory to UNCLOS and helped to craft some of its most important features. It now holds a widely rejected interpretation of key provisions, despite the fact that Beijing did not raise these issues before acceding to the treaty.

China has more obviously flouted UNCLOS as its power has grown. In the early‐to‐mid 2000s, Beijing began interfering with U.S. military vessels and aircraft exercising their rights under the convention near Chinese shores. It later became more assertive about its own claims to distant islands, most notably ejecting the Philippines from Scarborough Shoal in 2012. It has formally submitted its dubious “Nine‐Dash Line” maritime boundary to the United Nations in an attempt to legitimize this far‐flung claim, but it refused to take part in an international court case brought by the Philippines under UNCLOS. Beijing insists that the court has no jurisdiction, despite widespread consensus to the contrary.

In addition, China has employed coercion in ways that violate its 2002 Declaration on Conduct with ASEAN. Following its rapid‐fire construction of artificial landmasses in the Spratly Islands, for example, Beijing has attempted to impose so‐called “military alert zones” in the seas and skies of the South China Sea, contravening international law. As it has taken these steps, Beijing has preferred to keep its long‐term intentions ambiguous. It has eroded existing maritime regimes and rules without either leaving UNCLOS or offering replacements.

CHINA FIRMLY rejects most aspects of the international human‐rights order, one that is rooted in respect for fundamental liberties and the democratic process. It is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, for example, but clearly transgresses that document’s commitments to freedom of thought and religion, freedom of expression and right to peaceful assembly. Indeed, China’s own constitution enshrines freedoms of press, religion, speech and association, but Beijing routinely flouts these in its treatment of its own citizens. Whether at home or in its support for autocracies such as North Korea, Beijing tends to elevate the norm of sovereignty over those human‐ rights principles to which it has formally assented.

While its transgressions against prevailing human‐rights norms were for decades largely a domestic affair, China’s increasing global weight means that it is now an issue in international fora. Beijing has taken a strong stance against the emerging “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, which elevates the protection of individuals against atrocities above the traditional sovereign norm against outside interference. Notably, China has joined Russia in vetoing four Security Council resolutions that provided for international intervention in the devastating Syrian civil war.

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institutions and governments, toward a state‐centric “Internet sovereignty” approach that would give governments a freer hand to restrict the flow of online communications. Xi Jinping has stated that “freedom and order are both necessary in cyberspace,” and Beijing has used major international Internet‐governance summits to enlist other autocracies (such as Russia and Iran) in its efforts, putting it in direct competition with the United States and leading democracies.

THE BUILDING blocks of the current international system have served the United States and other nations extraordinarily well, and they are worth preserving, defending and extending. But there is no single international order to be saved, and should American policymakers wish to enlist China as a responsible stakeholder in its multitudinous components they must develop not one approach but many. Developing a granular appreciation for Beijing’s evolving disposition and building strategies informed by it are urgent tasks for the U.S. government. In the meantime, some policy prescriptions flow naturally from a broader understanding of world order and a closer analysis of Chinese behavior.

First, China often adopts a different set of approaches to institutions and rules that apply in Asia than it does on broader global issues. Closer to home, Beijing is more likely to oppose existing rules, as in the maritime and human‐rights spheres. It is also more likely to advance alternative institutions inside of Asia than further afield, as with the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Beijing’s One Belt, One Road initiative. At the same time, China demonstrates support and even a degree of leadership on several broader international issues.

Chinese activism on these issues does not amount to altruism, and Beijing has abiding national interests in supporting these regimes. As a result, U.S. policymakers should not convince themselves that they need to “buy” Chinese participation at the UN or on climate change by making compromises elsewhere in the bilateral relationship. It seems quite unlikely that Washington will be able to locate a particular set of concessions on regional issues that will guarantee Beijing’s support for a U.S.‐ Chinese “grand bargain.” Instead, a well‐calibrated U.S. engagement strategy must acknowledge that China can contest regional rules while buttressing global ones, and will do so as its interests dictate.

Second, there is a difference between Chinese attempts to erode existing international rules (and America’s dominant role in setting them) and a move toward wholesale replacement. Even in the maritime order, which represents perhaps Beijing’s most visible transgressions, China often opts for ambiguity in its strategy, rather than attempting to advance new rules of its own. Beijing insists that Chinese behavior is consistent with the Law of the Sea, not that the law should be scrapped or modified. Similarly, China’s manifest violations of existing human‐rights conventions, and its support for authoritarianism in general, in no way translate into a new Chinese‐backed human‐rights regime.

Where China is not advancing replacement regimes, U.S. leaders should adopt strategies that unambiguously reaffirm and reinforce existing rules with the help of allies and partners. They must highlight Beijing’s rejectionist positions as anomalous and endeavor to limit their influence.

Third, as China and others offer concepts for alternative institutions, the United States should not adopt knee‐jerk rejectionism itself. Here the Obama administration’s opposition to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is a case study in what not to do. The AIIB may have its flaws, but opposing the very existence of a source of capital for countries that need it is a fool’s errand. Instead, the United States should focus its efforts on encouraging transparency in the bank’s governance and raising its lending standards.

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New regimes and organizations do not automatically lead to the erosion of the prevailing order; the specific rules in question and the organization’s intent make all the difference. American support or opposition should be calibrated accordingly. In some cases, as with the AIIB, a China leading a new and rules‐bound multilateral organization is precisely what the United States should want to see, if the governance and standards are right. Similarly, it remains to be seen how China will try to implement its One Belt, One Road initiative, but the project may develop infrastructure in Central Asia in ways that actually complement U.S. interests.

Fourth, U.S. policymakers should recognize that given the significant challenges in pushing back against China when it thwarts existing rules and shaping its efforts to build new institutions, U.S.‐ Chinese relations are bound to be especially competitive in those domains where rules remain unwritten. In areas such as cybersecurity and outer space, Washington should be particularly vigorous in crafting new governance structures and employing a diplomatic effort to win support for them. It should invite China’s support and voice in making the rules but enlist others in pushing back against any attempts by Beijing to use its voice to undermine the principles that should animate them. To that end, the difference between rule breaking and compliance in these new areas should be as clear as possible, as soon as possible.

Finally, while China’s leaders appear to be engaged in a complex international‐engagement strategy, it is possible that they themselves do not know what that approach will look like in the future. Beijing may ultimately choose to sign on to emerging Internet‐governance rules, or abandon some of its regional economic initiatives if its economic turbulence continues. In light of this uncertainty, an appropriately nimble U.S. policy must incorporate the reality that China’s engagement strategy in different domains may change as future events dictate.

IN A recent interview, President Obama summed up the fundamental thesis underlying China policy under successive administrations. “If we get [the relationship] right and China continues on a peaceful rise,” he said, “we have a partner that is growing in capability and sharing with us the burdens and responsibilities of maintaining an international order.” The converse, however, is deeply unattractive.

If China fails, or “if it feels so overwhelmed that it never takes on the responsibilities of a country its size in maintaining the international order,” the chances of dealing with global challenges will decline and the possibility of conflict rise.

In this last year of Obama’s second term, the 2016 U.S. presidential election is taking place amid broad questions of China’s future—not only what kind of power it seeks to be but also the degree to which Beijing, facing sliding economic growth and rising defense investments, can make good on its aspirations.

The presidential candidates also face questions of international order that are more fundamental than any since the end of the Cold War. Long gone are concerns about an American hyperpower writing the world’s rules and ignoring them wherever it wishes. Instead, the fraying order has moved into the front of foreign‐policy minds, as has America’s limited power to shape and enforce its terms. The candidates and their advisors will need to offer strategies to bolster world order, to reshape it where necessary and to ensure that it has a fighting chance of living on for at least another seven decades.

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administration will need to simultaneously work with China on climate change, shape Beijing’s emerging economic institutions, and stand tough on cyber security and the South China Sea. It will also need to work closely with its pantheon of allies and partners, many of whom not only have a stake in the endurance of international order but also have for years been its pillars.

This attempt, and the imperative of working with traditional friends to shape Beijing’s choices, starts with an appreciation for the realities of global order today, and of China’s multifaceted approach to it. With extension of that order the chief aim of American grand strategy, getting China right—or at least as right as possible—is critical to the effort.

Richard Fontaine is the president of the Center for a New American Security. Mira Rapp‐Hooper is a senior fellow in Asia‐Pacific Security at the Center for a New American Security.

Source: Fontaine, R and Rapp‐Hooper, M. (2016). How China Sees World Order. Available: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/how‐china‐sees‐world‐order‐15846?page=show. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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China Sees Opening Left by Trump in Europe, and Quietly Steps In Steven Erlanger, 2017

LONDON — Much of the world’s attention at the Group of 20 economic summit on Friday and Saturday will be on President Trump’s first meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, with strenuous efforts to decipher the nature of the long‐distance bromance between them.

But the leader of the world’s other superpower, Xi Jinping of China, will also be in Hamburg, Germany, ready to slip quietly into the widening gap between Mr. Trump and longtime European allies and to position Beijing as the globe’s newest, biggest defender of a multilateral, rules‐based system.

Mr. Xi will have just concluded a state visit with Germany, including bilateral meetings and a small dinner Tuesday night in Berlin with the summit host, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has made no secret of her differences with Mr. Trump.

Having helped Ms. Merkel open the Berlin Zoo’s new $10 million panda garden (complete with two new Chinese pandas), and watched a German‐Chinese youth soccer match, Mr. Xi will have already made a mark.

He has cemented his closeness to Germany and Ms. Merkel, the woman many consider not just the most important leader in Europe, but also the reluctant, de facto leader of the West.

“The election of Trump has facilitated China’s aims in Europe,” said Angela Stanzel, an Asia scholar at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.

“Trump facilitates China’s narrative of being the new defender of multilateralism and especially global free trade, and China sees Germany as defending that, too, as a kind of sidekick,” she added. “And it fits into the Chinese idea of creating an alternative leadership to the United States.”

Even before this week, Mr. Xi has tried to take advantage of Mr. Trump’s nationalist and protectionist policies and open disdain for multilateral institutions, using a much‐publicized speech in Davos, Switzerland, in January to proclaim himself a champion of global trade, much as the United States used to do.

Export‐dependent Germany shares China’s view, with Mrs. Merkel defending everything from trade deals to the United Nations and the Paris climate accord, from which Mr. Trump has withdrawn.

And China recognizes how important Germany has become in influencing European Union policies toward China, including trade and human rights, especially after Britain’s vote to quit the bloc.

Speaking to Mr. Xi in Berlin on Wednesday, Mrs. Merkel said tellingly: “I am delighted to be able to welcome you in a period of unrest in the world, where China and Germany can make an effort to soothe this unrest a bit and to make a somewhat quieter world out of it.” The two countries have “a comprehensive strategic partnership,” she said.

Mr. Xi’s state visit follows another high‐level trip to Germany, at the end of May, by the Chinese prime minister, Li Keqiang.

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His visit also comes just after Mrs. Merkel, who is up for re‐election in September, said that Mr. Trump’s America was no longer a reliably close ally and that Europe must “really take our fate into our own hands.”

In a measure of Mr. Trump’s increasing unpopularity in Germany, her party’s election material now refers to the United States as a “most important partner outside Europe” rather than, as four years ago, its “most important friend.”

There are tensions, of course, between China and Germany, and China and Europe, too, but largely over trade and access to markets.

In the last year especially, Ms. Stanzel said, German officials and the German public have become “more critical of Chinese economic patterns and investments in Germany, especially in key technologies and industries where Germany is known to have a global edge.”

Mrs. Merkel was particularly upset last year, German officials have said, when China bought the cutting‐edge German robotics firm so important to manufacturing, Kuka Robotics. The Germans see China moving from demanding technical know‐how from European investors to wanting to own the technology outright.

But these problems pale next to Mr. Xi’s fraught relations with Mr. Trump, whose public estimates of their relationship swing wildly.

The latest North Korean missile test is another strain, given Mr. Trump’s public desire that China and Mr. Xi restrain Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions through stepped‐up economic sanctions.

Only last week, Mr. Trump angered China by approving a $1.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, sanctioning a Chinese bank for evading sanctions on North Korea, warning that America would act to restrict Chinese steel imports and sending an American warship off the coast of contested islands in the South China Sea that Beijing claims.

For all those reasons, suggested Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a research group based in London, Mr. Xi is likely to keep a low profile in Hamburg.

“While China would like to gradually ramp up the idea of its global leadership, it would be better in Hamburg to keep the attention on Trump and Putin and the aftermath of Brexit,” he said.

“The timing for Xi is not good,” Mr. Niblett said. “He will feel the risk that Trump may use foreign policy as a more fruitful appeal to his base. China‐bashing, though it has some risks, is a pretty safe bet for rallying forces in the U.S.” The world has shifted since Mr. Xi’s Davos speech, he said. “Xi would prefer nice clear water between a munificent China and an America focused on itself,” he said. “But there’s a lot of trouble out there, and China is getting wrapped up in Trump’s drama, while China likes minimal drama.”

Despite new worries in Europe about China becoming more of a competitor than a partner, Mr. Xi sees another advantage, and a challenge, in keeping the European Union sweet.

China favors regional hegemonies rather than American hyperpower and sees a world of regions, where China, Russia and Europe dominate their respective areas, Mr. Niblett said.

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While trying to be dominant in East Asia, China has no interest in ruffling Russia’s feathers, especially with Mr. Putin in an election year and Russia as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

So China will take a more watchful role in Hamburg, eager to get along with everyone, but especially the Europeans.

The Chinese see the European Union as “an essential partner for the kind of multilateral, globalized world China wants to see, where each region looks after itself and comes together flexibly to meet global challenges, like climate,” Mr. Niblett said.

“The last thing China wants,” he added, “is to get on worse with the E.U. now that the U.S. relationship is so fickle.”

Source: Erlanger, S. (2016 ). China Sees Opening Left by Trump in Europe, and Quietly Steps In. Available: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/world/europe/xi‐merkel‐trump‐china‐ germany.html. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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An Era of Authoritarian Influence?

How Democracies Should Respond

Thorsten Benner, 2017

THORSTEN BENNER is Director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. Follow him on Twitter @thorstenbenner [1]. Research for this article was funded by Stiftung Mercator.

For two decades after the end of the Cold War, the direction of international influence was clear: it radiated from liberal democracies [2] outward, as the West sought to spread its model of governance around the world. With the help of Western‐led democracy promotion, the thinking went, authoritarian states [3] would be relegated to the dustbin of history.

That has changed. In recent years, authoritarian states have boldly sought to influence Western democracies. They have done so to strengthen their own regimes, to weaken Western states’ ability to challenge authoritarianism, and to push the world toward illiberalism [4].

Russia’s brazen attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election thus fits a broader pattern, even though much of the analysis [5] of that operation has presented it as an anomaly. Authoritarian influencing, as it might be called, involves actions not just by Russia but also by China and other states Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. It has affected many Western democracies. And it involves not just political meddling and propaganda programs but lower‐profile work through political parties, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses.

Some of these tactics—such as the release of kompromat, or compromising material meant to undermine political targets—recall those used during the Cold War [6]. Yet today’s authoritarian states have more tools than their predecessors, because contemporary elites and institutions are deeply enmeshed in Western economies and can use digital channels to spread ideas and meddle in their politics. Democracies’ openness to foreign money and ideas, the eagerness of their professional classes to profit from illiberal clients, and their political weaknesses have made authoritarians’ jobs easier.

States have always sought to influence one another, and democracies have been no exception: some may find it fair that they are now getting a taste of their own medicine. Still, advocates of open societies have reason to worry. Authoritarian influence can weaken liberal states, entrench authoritarian rule in illiberal ones, and undermine democratizing societies—as in the Balkans [7], where Russia has sought to destabilize Montenegro [8] and other countries.

Democracies should try to end the enabling roles of their professionals by introducing new transparency requirements. They should more tightly regulate key sectors—from high technology to party finance—to protect them from outside influence. And activist groups should campaign against firms that provide services to autocrats. The goal should be to close off some of the channels of authoritarian influence while preserving democracies’ commitments to openness.

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CAN’T BUY ‘EM LOVE? What unites all authoritarian efforts at influence abroad is their perception that the fate of their regimes depends in part on how democratic states approach them. Authoritarian states feel vulnerable to Western hostility and seek influence in liberal democracies in part to stave off the West’s attempts to delegitimize them and to safeguard their survival. To that end, they strive to hinder plans for democracy promotion, support for dissidents, sanctions, and regime change. Authoritarian countries from small to large seek to build a protective shield by gaining influence in the West. The great powers among them (China and Russia [9]) also seek to prevent Western incursions into what they consider their spheres of interest.

A second motivation is authoritarian regimes’ desire to enhance their domestic positions. The goal is to turn Western societies into safe havens for official interests, drawing on networks in business and politics for support. That is especially the case for states whose elites rely on illicit rents from natural resources, as in Angola’s case, since they depend on Western capitals to enjoy their spoils.

Authoritarians pay bankers and accountants to launder their money and court politicians who are willing to defend them. They hire Western public relations firms to polish their reputations [10], Western lawyers to file libel suits [11] against their critics, and Western real estate companies to transform ill‐gotten wealth into legal assets [12]. When their fortunes sour, foreign property, bank accounts, and passports ease their flight abroad. As the political scientists Alexander Cooley [13] and John Heathershaw have argued [14], Central Asia’s autocrats see such services as a major source of strength: they help shore up their legitimacy abroad and protect their rule at home. (An investigation by a group of American and European media outlets recently revealed that Azerbaijani elites [15] spent some $2.9 billion to fund personal payments, launder money, and buy luxury goods in Europe between 2012 and 2014.)

Finally, some authoritarian states seek influence to tilt the global order in an illiberal direction. Their targets include the domestic institutions of Western states and international organizations such as the UN, EU, and NATO. Russia, for instance, seeks to fracture Western societies and governments and undermine public faith in liberal democracy by discrediting democratic institutions and officials. Its ultimate goal is to make Western governments either too weak to project power against it or ideologically opposed to doing so. Many of these efforts are pragmatic rather than ideological: to preserve Russia’s power in eastern and central Europe, for instance, the Kremlin believes it must cripple the European Union. But at least some in Moscow see aggressive illiberalism[16] as a way to defend civilization against cultural decadence.

As for China, it has cracked down [17] on Western ideas at home and aggressively spreads authoritarian norms in international institutions—for example, by seeking to use bodies such as the International Telecommunication Union to give cover to its crackdown on Internet freedoms.

Similarly, China has confronted [18] Western academic publishers, such as Cambridge University Press, with aggressive censorship [19] demands. Yet so far, China has shown much less interest in sowing instability abroad. Beijing seeks to promote a positive image of China and its one‐party dictatorship to Western publics. Unlike Russia, China has economic interests that demand a stable, if pliant, European Union.

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THINKFLUENCERS Authoritarian influence plays out in three main areas. The first is public opinion and the institutions that support it: the media, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and universities.

A few authoritarian governments have bought Western media outlets, as Angolan interests have in Portugal. More frequently, however, states establish their own Western‐language outlets to disseminate their worldviews, as Russia has with RT and China has with CCTV in the United States.

Such outlets cover the news, but they also disseminate lies and distortions [20] about the political enemies of authoritarians, which are often spread further on social media. Such influence seeking can also take more respectable forms: consider the partnership between private Australian and state‐run Chinese outlets completed during Chinese propaganda chief Liu Qibao’s visit to Sydney in 2016, through which leading Australian newspapers published a supplement prepared by the Communist Party's English‐language China Daily. Such measures serve Chinese President Xi Jinping’s call [21] to increase China’s “international discourse power [22]” through “flagship external propaganda media.”

China has made major donations [23] to think tanks in Brussels, and in 2014, wealthy businesspeople connected to the Communist Party gave [24] $2.2 million to help found a think tank [25] in Sydney, the Australia‐China Relations Institute. Kremlin‐linked players have sponsored [26] Paris‐based organizations, such as the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation; in 2016, they helped set up [27] a major new think tank in Berlin called the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute. [28] The Gulf states have paid [29] millions of dollars to think tanks in Washington. Gifts to universities provide a deeper veneer of respectability. The most notorious case was that of the Muammar al‐Qaddafi regime’s donations [30] to the London School of Economics nearly a decade ago, but gifts from state or state‐affiliated groups from China, Qatar, Russia, and Saudi Arabia are commonplace, thanks in part to many universities’ difficulty in securing public funding. Although in some contexts such donations produce explicit lobbying in favor of authoritarian interests, more often the result is the dulling of criticism.

The second area in which authoritarian states seek influence is in political parties. At the most basic level, some authoritarian states directly fund friendly organizations and politicians. Russia has cultivated [31] close ties with right‐wing groups in Europe—groups it did not create but seeks to exploit. It has provided [32] financial support to far‐right parties such as France’s National Front[33] and Hungary’s Jobbik, has thrown its political support behind [34]the far‐right Alternative for Germany, and has signed cooperation deals with Austria’s Freedom Party [35] and Italy's Northern League [36]. China, for its part, does not limit itself to groups with which it shares ideological positions.

It seeks influence among mainstream parties so that they pursue policies more favorable to its interests. This year, for example, a major controversy erupted in Australia [37] over Australian Chinese businessmen connected to the Communist Party having channeled millions of dollars in donations to the country’s major political parties. And as the China analyst Christopher Johnson told the [38]Financial Times [38], New Zealand’s recent investigation into a Chinese‐born member of Parliament who trained at a top academy for Chinese military intelligence officers has turned the spotlight on Beijing’s efforts to “cultivat[e] people at [the] grassroots political levels of Western democracies and [help] them to reach positions of influence.” Some French observers, meanwhile, have claimed [39] that former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement received AFGG 2018

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illicit support from Libya [40] and Qatar during his 2007 campaign. (A probe into those allegations is ongoing.)

The cultivation of alliances with Western politicians can secure preferential treatment, even when direct support is not involved. More than any other form of authoritarian influence, such interventions depend on Western officials’ own interest in pursuing them. In Italy, for example, Russia has courted [41] figures from across the party spectrum who seek closer ties [42] between Rome and Moscow. That appears to have helped ensure that Italy has acted as a chief critic [43] of the EU’s sanctions against Russia.

The third arena in which authoritarian states seek influence is business. Governments invest in major sectors not just to make profits but also to gain leverage over host countries.

China’s investments [44] in Greece’s infrastructure offer one example. In recent years, Beijing has given the austerity‐squeezed country a financial lifeline, investing heavily in the port of Piraeus, Greece’s biggest, as part of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure project. Those investments have provided China new access to top Greek decision‐makers—and, by extension, a way to influence EU foreign policy as Greek officials take the interests of their country’s key investor into account. Angola’s acquisition of controlling stakes in Portuguese banks [45] during the financial crisis, which gave the country privileged access to top Portuguese politicians, is another case.

Resource‐rich states trust oil and mining companies [46] to lobby Western authorities on their behalf.

And even when direct ownership is not involved, a company’s or sector’s reliance on authoritarian‐ backed clients can shape national policies. Russia’s construction [47] of two nuclear reactors in Hungary, for example, has helped Russian President Vladimir Putin find a friendly ear in a country where most people have long been skeptical of Russia.

But perhaps the greatest consequence of the enmeshment of authoritarian interests in Western economies is the capture of the Western professionals [48] who depend on their patronage. Service providers in banking, accounting, the law [49], and public relations [50] are eager to meet authoritarian demand. This is a new normal [51]—not only in London, where the trend has been particularly well documented [52], but in every Western capital, including Washington, where lobbyists such as Paul Manafort and the Podesta Group [53] have worked on behalf [54] of former Ukrainian President and Russia ally Viktor Yanukovych. Such professionals protect the interests of regimes and their elites and grant them access and respectability. Thus wealthy Russians have used London firms as back offices, turning the city into an educational hub for their children and a laundry for their money. Many of the links uncovered so far between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign similarly revolve around the economic interests of Putin’s kleptocracy [55].

Western professionals treat authoritarians as clients like any other. These relationships depend less on ideological affinities than on a banal alignment of interests: one that guarantees business for professionals and access and services for their clients.

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Authoritarians’ most effective channels of influence are not the flashy interventions that have recently held the Western media’s attention. They are instead the stocks of power they have built up through political and economic investments. A good example was provided by the EU’s failure to agree on a joint statement criticizing China’s role in the standoff in the South China Sea last year. Hungary and Greece, in which China has invested heavily, dissented [56] from a strongly worded draft put forward by other EU states. Similarly, this June, Greece blocked an EU statement condemning China’s human rights record. As China increases its investments abroad, these trends will deepen.

Stocks of influence can also contribute to authoritarian regimes’ prestige. Russia and China have benefited in this way, as has Qatar, which has secured some influence [57] over French Middle East policy [58], a favorable regime for foreign direct investment, a measure of influence in the banlieues, and several high‐status acquisitions, such as the football club Paris Saint‐Germain.

As for turning Western societies in a more illiberal direction, foreign influence tends to deepen domestic trends that are already eroding trust in liberal democracy. When Western elites appear to be up for sale (as in the case of former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who was nominated to head the board [59] of the Russian state‐controlled oil company Rosneft), it feeds the perception that democratic leaders are no more virtuous than the elites of kleptocracies. Active measures, such as the Russian operation around the U.S. election, can worsen political polarization, even if they do not create it, and propaganda from outlets such as RT feeds audiences that already distrust mainstream news sources. In those efforts, authoritarian states often seek to exploit ethnic minorities. Moscow rallied Russian speakers in Germany around the story [60] of a Russian German girl who falsely claimed to have been raped by migrants, for example, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to mobilize parts of Europe’s Turkish‐speaking communities against their governments and in support of his authoritarian consolidation of power.

All of this is cause for concern. At the same time, it is important to recognize that many attempts at influence do not bear fruit—often thanks to political backlash. Qatar’s closeness to Sarkozy and the special treatment it garnered led to an outburst of hostile investigative journalism, turning Qatar into a bête noire among the French public. Angola’s blunt exercise of power in crisis‐ridden Portugal produced an unprecedented surge of judicial activism in the years after 2012, which exposed Angolan oligarchs’ money laundering and some Portuguese elites’ complicity in it. Despite Moscow’s efforts to invest in ties with German businesses and policymakers, Berlin decided to support sanctions on Russia over its annexation of Crimea and its war in eastern Ukraine.

Similarly, Russia’s actions during the 2016 U.S. election had a number of unintended side effects. At first, those effects were good for Russia, since Trump’s choices—such as his unwillingness to point a finger at Moscow—drove a wedge between the White House and the U.S. intelligence services. But that benefit has since been outweighed by the anti‐Russian backlash on the part of the Democratic Party, large parts of the U.S. political establishment, and American lawmakers, who have imposed new sanctions on Russia. And although Trump’s equivocation about the U.S. commitment to NATO is welcome in Moscow, it has not been matched by a U.S.‐Russian deal acknowledging Russia’s sphere of influence in Europe.

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Deterring China, Russia, and others from trying to influence liberal democracies won’t work. Threats of massive retaliation are an unrealistic and inappropriate response to the many influencing efforts that are technically legal, since they can lead to counterproductive escalations. Officials should reserve promises of punishment for the most egregious breaches, such as attempts to tamper with the electoral process by hacking voting machines.

Democracies should tackle the mechanisms of authoritarian influence head‐on. As they do so, liberal states need to make sure they do not turn themselves into closed societies for fear of foreign influence. (Hungary [61] and Israel [62] have recently made this mistake, passing laws that target foreign‐funded nongovernmental organizations, many of which are critical of the authorities.) Even introducing a form of reciprocity—under which Western states would allow Chinese media, say, to operate only in the West if Beijing did the same for Western journalists in China—would be misguided, especially when it concerns questions of liberal countries’ values. It would put open societies on the same footing as authoritarian states without seriously changing their calculus: if pushed, most illiberal governments would choose the more restrictive path and drag democratic governments down with them.

The right way to handle the problem is through transparency requirements, regulations, and campaigns to build public awareness, all of which make use of one of democracies’ key advantages: critical public debate. When the mechanisms and effects of authoritarian influencing are exposed, it politicizes the issue, stripping authoritarian governments of the free pass they too often enjoy.

The United States and EU governments should require firms and consultants competing for government contracts to disclose their previous business relationships, including with clients from authoritarian states, and they should force lobbyists to make similar disclosures. Nonprofits, sports clubs, faith groups, universities, and political parties should likewise be required to come clean about funding they receive and the conditions attached to it.

At the same time, activist groups must aggressively seek to raise public awareness of the problem, making use of the data governments should force firms to disclose about their relationships with authoritarian clients or donors. And government agencies should take into account the degree to which candidates for public tenders may have been compromised by work for authoritarians. All of this would increase the costs for enablers in the West by exposing them to the court of public opinion.

As shown by the case [63] of the British public relations firm Bell Pottinger—which recently went bankrupt after it was revealed to have run a racially charged campaign in South Africa—companies’ bottom lines are vulnerable when they receive such hearings. Finally, because transparency measures and public campaigns can’t uncover everything, journalists and academics should work together to do so, as Cooley and Heathershaw have suggested?

Public awareness is not a panacea, but it can help make societies more resilient. Consider the recent experiences of France [64] and Germany [65], where this year political and intelligence officials sought to acclimate the public to the possibility that outsiders would seek to meddle in their elections.

France was prepared [66] for the outbreak of the so‐called #MacronLeaks, which occurred just before the first round of France’s presidential elections in April and were meant to undermine Emmanuel Macron’s candidacy. The German public is unlikely to be caught off‐guard if there are similar attempts 146

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to exploit hacked data [67] from politicians ahead of this month’s election. It also helps when officials swiftly debunk lies spread on social media and when news outlets carefully assess the veracity of leaked documents, which can be tampered with or forged.

Officials should introduce regulations that eliminate vulnerabilities and cut off channels of influence.

First, they should shore up the critical infrastructure of their democracies: their political parties, legislatures, and ministries. Democracies should institute rules that mandate a high level of cybersecurity measures across such institutions to better protect them from hacks. Right now, the safeguards fall far short. And although Western states should not apply a blanket stigma to foreign‐ funded nongovernmental organizations, they should not hesitate to close down institutions that act badly (for example, by harassing the critics of their allies, as some organizations in Austria and Germany have done on Erdogan’s behalf).

Democracies should prohibit their political parties from receiving foreign funding. And while open societies should welcome foreign investments, their governments must also bar the foreign takeover of companies in crucial sectors, such as high technology [68], public infrastructure, and the media.

That would safeguard their intellectual property, strip foreign governments of the political leverage associated with owning big utilities, and protect the independence of news outlets. That the EU is moving toward a tougher screening process [69] for foreign investment is a good start.

More broadly, liberal states need to stop the infiltration of dirty authoritarian money and the complicity of Western professionals in laundering it. That means ending hidden ownership and other vehicles [70] authoritarians use to shield their assets in the West and pursuing the kind of judicial activism that is uncovering the trail of Angolan money in Portugal. Democracies’ provision of a safe haven for money and assets stolen from the populations of authoritarian states is morally indefensible.

Twenty years ago, the German British sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf argued [71] that "a century of authoritarianism is by no means the most unlikely prospect for the twenty‐first century." Preventing that outcome from materializing is the central task of open societies today. Internal illiberal challenges pose the greatest threat—but they must not be fortified from without. The first order of business must be to disrupt the all‐too‐smooth links between authoritarian states and their enablers among Western elites and to regulate the one‐sided openness that allows authoritarians to influence liberal democracies. Only if this first line of defense holds will open societies be in a position to stand up for their values, curtail the international influence of authoritarians, and hinder their ability to oppress and rob their citizens.

Links [1] https://twitter.com/thorstenbenner [2] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2012-01-01/strange-triumph-liberal-democracy [3] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2007-07-01/return-authoritarian-great-powers [4] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1997-11-01/rise-illiberal-democracy [5] http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/us-historiker-timothy-snyder-russland-hat-einen-cyberkrieggewonnen/19988150.html [6] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/france/2016-12-16/europe-russias-digital-cross-hairs [7] http://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300219135/rival-power [8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/11/serbia-deports-russians-suspected-of-plottingAFGG 2018

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montenegro-coup [9] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2015-12-14/how-china-sees-russia [10] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/sep/05/reputation-laundering-is-lucrative-business-forlondon-pr-firms [11] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/7301403/How-libel-tourism-became-an-embarrassment-to-Britainsreputation.html [12] https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/shell-company-towers-of-secrecy-real-estate [13] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/alexander-cooley [14] https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Without-Borders-Power-Central/dp/0300208448 [15] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/04/uk-at-centre-of-secret-3bn-azerbaijani-moneylaundering-and-lobbying-scheme [16] https://imrussia.org/en/analysis/world/2500-putinism-and-the-european-far-right [17] https://www.ft.com/content/8a7552d8-1f68-11e7-a454-ab04428977f9 [18] https://www.ft.com/content/7c5e665c-8724-11e7-8bb1-5ba57d47eff7 [19] http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1062304.shtml [20] http://www.li.com/activities/publications/winning-the-information-war [21] http://www.smh.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/chinas-propaganda-arms-push-soft-power-inaustralian-media-deals-20160531-gp7yz6.html [22] https://www.merics.org/en/merics-analysis/china-monitor/merics-china-monitor-no-34/ [23] http://www.politico.eu/article/china-think-tank-exits-brussels-lobbying-madariaga/ [24] https://theconversation.com/the-australia-china-relations-institute-doesnt-belong-at-uts-78743 [25] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/foreign-affairs/bob-carrs-think-tank-operating-as-achina-propaganda-arm/news-story/a6ed1b9355937b7cfa86301f58cd13f6 [26] http://www.slate.fr/story/97835/IDC-russie-france-poutine [27] http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/putin-vertrauter-jakunin-gruendet-politik-institut-in-berlin14308332.html [28] https://doc-research.org/en/ [29] https://www.vox.com/2016/3/21/11275354/saudi-arabia-gulf-washington [30] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/nov/30/gaddafi-donation-lse-bribes-inquiry [31] http://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summary/fellow_travellers_russia_anti_westernism_and_europes_politi cal_parties_7213 [32] https://www.routledge.com/Russia-and-the-Western-Far-Right-TangoNoir/Shekhovtsov/p/book/9781138658646 [33] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/interviews/2016-10-17/france-s-next-revolution [34] https://www.ft.com/content/d78bd9b8-f833-11e6-9516-2d969e0d3b65 [35] https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-signs-cooperation-agreement-with-anti-immigrant-party-in-austria1482170810 [36] https://www.ft.com/content/0d33d22c-0280-11e7-ace0-1ce02ef0def9 [37] http://www.theage.com.au/interactive/2017/chinas-operation-australia/hard-power.html [38] https://www.ft.com/content/64991ca6-9796-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b [39] http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2013/04/2013419184913544818.html [40] http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2016/11/03/enquete-sur-le-financement-libyen-de-la-campagneles-soupcons-qui-pesent-sur-les-reseaux-sarkozy_5024799_3224.html [41] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/vladimir-putin-russia-trip-rome-italy [42] http://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_a_marriage_of_convenience_the_future_of_italyrussia_relation s [43] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/world/europe/russia-courts-italy-in-usabsence.html?mcubz=0&amp;_r=0 [44] https://asia.nikkei.com/magazine/20170316/Politics-Economy/China-s-Greek-investment-is-makingwaves-in-the-Aegean [45] http://www.politico.eu/article/cash-rich-angola-comes-to-cash-strapped-portugal-colony-oil-santosluanda-lisbon/ [46] https://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-giants-lobby-against-bill-to-toughen-russia-sanctions-1499114749 [47] https://www.ft.com/content/0478d38a-028a-11e7-ace0-1ce02ef0def9 [48] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/londons-laundry-business.html?mcubz=0 148

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[49] https://qz.com/1037549/how-the-family-of-vladimir-putins-us-sanctioned-ally-uses-british-companiesto-burnish-its-reputation/ [50] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gkkzd/pr-firms-in-the-uk-are-spinning-stories-for-foreign-dictators734 [51] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/transnational-corruption-andthe-globalized-individual/18E7DAF986E65BF94BE2621163AEE891 [52] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/opinion/london-rolls-out-the-blood-red-carpet-for-kleptocrats.html [53] http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/09/politics/podesta-manafort-lobbying/index.html [54] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-05-22/paul-manafort-s-lucrative-ukraine-years-arecentral-to-the-russia-probe [55] https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirtymoney-international-crime-syndicate [56] http://www.reuters.com/article/southchinasea-ruling-eu-idUSL8N1A130Y [57] https://www.amazon.fr/Une-France-sous-influence-terrain/dp/221367826X [58] http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/politique/la-france-sous-influence-etrangere_1878925.html [59] http://www.politico.eu/article/opinion-schroders-russian-sell-out/ [60] https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21690050-adolescents-fib-blows-up-international-incidentgirl-not-abducted [61] http://www.politico.eu/article/hungary-approves-anti-foreign-ngo-law/ [62] http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.795094 [63] http://www.bbc.com/news/business-41245719 [64] http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/08/french-intelligence-agency-braces-for-russian-bots-to-back-le-pen/ [65] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-election-russia-idUSKBN19P1FK [66] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/world/europe/hackers-came-but-the-french-wereprepared.html?mcubz=0 [67] http://www.zeit.de/digital/2017-05/cyberattack-bundestag-angela-merkel-fancy-bear-hacker-russia [68] https://www.merics.org/en/media-contact/press-releases/industriestaaten-bekommen-konkurrenz-ausfernost/ [69] https://www.ft.com/content/04fa752c-7dda-11e7-ab01-a13271d1ee9c [70] https://www.hudson.org/research/12928-the-kleptocracy-curse-rethinking-containment [71] http://www.zeit.de/1997/47/thema.txt.19971114.xml/komplettansicht

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Can China Supplant the U.S. in Europe?

Phillip Le Corre, 2017 Climate is the topic of the day, and it looks like the EU and China will indeed cooperate on the 2015 Paris Agreement now that Donald Trump has officially decided to pull out. A joint statement will be released, pledging to fully support the implementation of the Accord, which is good news. My own impression is that China will not go much beyond that as it copes with slowing economic growth and needs to manage a difficult transition into a service‐oriented economy. While China has become more norms‐conscious lately, and is always consistent with what it negotiates, it does not like international regulators overseeing its own commitments as shown by its resistance to the South China Sea ruling by an International Arbitration Court last year.

Like Zha Daojiong, I also do not believe Europe will turn to China as a “replacement” to the United States, nor do I think that Sino‐European relations will outshine Sino‐American relations.

Granted, China’s presence in the EU has been rising steadily over the past decade, both in terms of FDI, people‐to‐people exchanges, and soft power. The change is massive, when one looks at the 77 percent increase in Chinese FDI into the EU (UK included) in 2016 compared to 2015, the number of Chinese students, or the stronger presence of Chinese media and arts everywhere in Europe. The Belt and Road narrative has helped, obviously, in Europe as well as in other continents, especially as the “connectivity” concept (much liked by China and Brussels) has not led to a link between the B&R and the European investment strategy. The fascination with the United States remains intact in Chinese policy circles as well as in the general public. Every week, Chinese delegations come to Washington and New York to engage with American government or business circles. As a single country, the U.S. remains the prime recipient of Chinese FDI. The number of Chinese students there is close to 300,000 (twice as many as in the EU). And for all the grand talks of “strategic dialogues” between the EU and China, the real strategic relationship—a competitive one, as explained by Graham Allison—is the U.S.‐ China relationship. It is hard to imagine Europeans advocating a Sino‐European partnership that would take the lead in creating a new world order without the U.S. I also agree with Zha that the trans‐ Atlantic alliance is cultural.

Europe’s main economy, Germany, will be tied to NATO and to the trans‐Atlantic alliance for a very long time. Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing a major election in September, and security matters have become paramount. The U.K. is busy with an even more uncertain general election, and a hapless Brexit negotiation in the next two years. France, with its energetic, newly‐elected president, Emmanuel Macron, is keen to have a bigger impact on the world stage and is treading cautiously.

China, for its part, does not like uncertainty and is only mildly reassured that the EU is sticking together and—above all—that the Eurozone is not about to collapse.

Source: Corre, P L. (2017). Can China Supplant the U.S. in Europe?. Available: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/can‐china‐supplant‐the‐u‐s‐in‐europe/. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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Redefining Europe, and Europeans Carl Bilt, 2017

For Europe to find its place in a rapidly changing world, its citizens will have to look beyond the nation‐ state as their sole source of personal identity. There are few “first nations” left in the world today – and that is a welcome development.

LEIPZIG – Traveling through Germany in the run‐up to its federal election on September 24, one cannot help but be struck by the lingering signs of profound trauma from the 2015 refugee crisis.

Suddenly and virtually without warning, nearly a million desperate people – mostly Syrians fleeing the carnage in their homeland – flocked to Germany. And while Germany may be Europe’s most bureaucratically well‐managed country, even it was overwhelmed.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s response to the crisis two years ago was to throw out the rulebook and open her country’s borders. She famously told the German people, “Wir schaffen das” (We can do it).

But German public opinion today suggests that the country has become warier of such bold gestures.

Yes, Germany did it, because there was no alternative; and many Germans are proud of their country for rising to the occasion. But most hope that such a crisis never happens again.

Although many Germans have come to terms with what happened two years ago, a small minority still feels betrayed. They have responded with anger and xenophobic nationalism, and these sentiments will undoubtedly be reflected in how they vote.

But Germany’s trauma from the refugee crisis should be put in perspective. Far more refugees have sought and found protection in countries such as Lebanon and Turkey than in Germany. In relative terms, Germany would have had to take in 20 million refugees to match Lebanon in 2015. In Turkey, Istanbul alone is now hosting more refugees than all of Germany.

Of course, Germany is not the only European country that remains unsettled from the refugee crisis.

In my own country, Sweden, a political party that wants to shut us off from the rest of the world will most likely make strong gains in next year’s general election. And in many Central European countries that only recently regained their sense of sovereignty, refugees are widely viewed as posing a threat to national identity.

One way or another, these issues will dominate European politics in the years ahead. Europe is slowly trying to build up resilience to the kind of trauma it experienced in 2015. It is a continent that once exported war and turmoil, but that now wants to protect itself from its neighbors’ problems.

One of the lessons from 2015 is that the European Union will need to develop a far stronger common foreign and security policy. The EU must replace lofty rhetoric with concrete action, while also accepting its regional and global responsibilities. Barbed wire fencing between Hungary and Serbia AFGG 2018

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will not shield Europe from the effects of war in Ukraine, putsches and terrorism in Anatolia, or violent conflagrations in the Levant and Mesopotamia. And it will not help Europe manage the dramatic shift now underway in Africa, which will be home to 40% of the world’s working‐age population in a few decades.

Another lesson from 2015 is that European countries must learn to redefine their national identities.

The United States, Australia, and Canada have all been built on immigration, and most of us are the progeny of people from somewhere else. Indeed, there is not much left of the “first nations” in these countries. It is now entirely possible for there to be more people of Swedish descent in Chicago than in Stockholm.

To be sure, Europe is different from its Western counterparts. Its tribes have been fighting one another for millennia. And for the past two centuries, Europeans have been building ever‐stronger nation‐ states and national identities on the basis of long, complicated historical experiences.

The EU itself was of course built by nation‐states. But their citizens wanted to overcome their long legacy of tribalism and war. Judged by that objective, the EU’s first half‐century has been a tremendous success. And yet the strains are there for anyone to see. Whether justified or not, when people perceive a threat to their national identity, their tribal instincts kick in. And for a truly frightened few, Brussels and Mecca have both come to be seen as mortal threats.

For Europe to find its place in a rapidly changing world, its citizens will have to learn to tap multiple identities. One can be a proud Swede and a proud European at the same time; one can also be both German and Turkish, and derive strength from that duality. It is not disloyal to see oneself as a citizen of the world. On the contrary, it is honorable.

Such a shift in attitudes would make for a very different Europe. We would have finally moved on from ancient tribal conflicts and fears, and embraced a networked, digital future. Merkel, who will likely be elected to another four‐year term as chancellor on September 24, told Germans that they “can do it.”

But whether Germany and the rest of Europe will do it remains to be seen. We have our work cut out for us.

Source: Bildt, C. (2017). Redefining Europe, and Europeans. Available: https://www.project‐ syndicate.org/commentary/european‐nation‐states‐identity‐crisis‐by‐carl‐bildt‐2017‐09.

Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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Engaging with the Indian Ocean Garima Mohan, 2017

The Indian Ocean, despite its geographical distance, has significant economic and strategic importance for Germany and Europe. A majority of European sea trade transits through the Ocean, along with half of Germany’s sea‐borne supply and two‐thirds of all containers carrying German exports. The Indian Ocean is also Germany’s primary gateway to the Asia‐Pacific markets, which receive the second largest share of German exports after Europe, constituting 18.5 percent of all exports. In addition to being a conduit for trade, the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) is a driver of growth itself, which has recalibrated the region’s economic importance for Germany and Europe. With their high growth rates, emerging markets in South Asia and East Africa are important investment destinations. Increasing regional integration, demand for maritime technologies and infrastructure, emerging ‘Blue Economy’, and untapped mineral and energy reserves in the Ocean offer several economic opportunities.

Related to its economic importance, maritime security in the Indian Ocean is of vital interest to Germany as well. As an exporting nation, it is highly dependent on unimpeded maritime trade routes in the Indian Ocean. In addition, the Indian Ocean contains strategic chokepoints including the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca through which 34 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum are transported per day towards Europe and Asia – constituting 61 percent of the global maritime oil trade. Germany’s dependence on these trade and energy sea‐lines of communication (SLOCs) makes securing them necessary.

However, both economic opportunities in the region and the security of sea‐lanes will be impacted significantly by changing dynamics in the Indian Ocean – particularly the increasing geopolitical and geo‐economic competition. This study analyzes the most important developments in the IOR focusing on the changing security dynamics, economic shifts, and emerging multilateral arrangements. It investigates the opportunities and challenges these create for Germany and Europe, and outlines what German engagement in the Indian Ocean could look like.

Source: Mohan, G. (2017). Engaging with the Indian Ocean. Available: http://www.gppi.net/publications/rising‐powers/article/engaging‐with‐the‐indian‐ocean/. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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The great liberal fallacy Samir Saran and Jaibal Naduvath , 2017

Liberal fundamentalism is now at war with unbridled street anger, whose revisionist purpose and impatience have exhibited a dangerous capacity to self‐destruct.

PROLOGUE: In April of 2016, UC Berkeley cancelled Milo Yiannopoulos’ planned speech in response to campus protests. For an institution that prides itself on its long and stellar liberal legacy — the centerpiece of which is the freedom to hold and express a view, irrespective of its political persuasion — the Rubicon was silently crossed.

The appeal of liberalism lies in its capacity to accommodate difference, to resist the instinctive urge to reduce the ‘other’ to fit the prisms of the ‘self’, and to recognise their independent and distinct agency. This lends it the unique capacity to account for the ambivalent nature of truth, to recognise and accept the many greys of reality and allow for the creation of assimilative and syncretic spaces.

Liberal, pluralist approaches have formed the basis for modern societies, where diverse opinions, preferences and choices make up a grand social and political canvas.

Ideologies, however, possess a fundamental contradiction: they are seldom ever practised as idealised. Participation in the liberal public sphere was compromised by the inability to widen access and agency beyond a select few with economic means and social ‘status’. The poor, racial and ethnic minorities and even women remained excluded from its ambit.

Key conversations that organised politics, economics and social norms thus largely remained an elite discussion, which despite their apparent differences, shared common class interests and presumptions around morality. This convergence of interests shaped the public discourse.

It trickled down to the society through one‐way, mass‐oriented technologies of print and broadcast media, owned and controlled by this class, informed by their thinking and influenced by their sensibilities. The discourse thus remained incestuous and public consensus often imaginary and contrived.

The inherent flaw in this model was its contrariness to the liberal dictum. It left out large swathes of people who were constrained by the economics of access and politics of acceptance. The liberal public sphere has thus always remained contested and illiberal in its practice.

The domination of a Western cultural‐technological narrative, mostly at the cost of indigenous ethos in non‐Western settings, meant that it soon became an ideal that was either imposed upon or embraced by societies with sometimes‐different social evolutions. This then became 154

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another reason of discord in many localities, where existing socio‐economic exclusions were reinforced through elite discourse. The marginalised were now also voiceless.

Then came the Internet and social media, which dramatically altered the social canvas. It mainstreamed the marginal.

The ever‐reducing cost of the internet sees more users getting online each day, increasing the reach of the medium and the consequent amplification of multiple messages. The ease and simplicity of engagement afforded by social media’s two‐way communication architecture has proven the most disruptive.

Breaking from the past, where power simply came to be concentrated with a new elite, and subjugating those not fortunate enough to be a part of it, the new order has dispersed discursive power.

Without the shackles of previous structures, the internet has allowed large sections of society, hitherto outside the public sphere, to organise themselves, script their own narratives and shape their own democracy. The significant lowering of the barriers of entry, allowed, for the first time, meaningful mass participation in public discourse. Attempts to control and regulate access have had limited impact at best, as the medium forever brings forth new methods to circumvent control, and new pathways to agitate, constantly altering ways to propagate and receive ideas.

While the dominant and the marginal have constantly renegotiated their power equations throughout history, what distinguishes the new dynamic is its participative nature. It has levelled class differences. That too at an unprecedented pace. Breaking from the past, where power simply came to be concentrated with a new elite, and subjugating those not fortunate enough to be a part of it, the new order has dispersed discursive power.

The newcomers with digital ‘megaphones’ are not bound by old class structures. Instead, deeply aggrieved by their long exclusion, they have set about recasting the public sphere by challenging class presumptions and breaching the boundaries that define it. For their anger is deeper, their hate more potent, and their victimhood more tragic.

Their revenge and redemption lies in dismantling old structures and antiquated arenas that set the rules of social behaviour and public debate. They have successfully challenged, and in several cases, even usurped established political systems, catapulting into power the marginal, whose project now is to legitimise their world‐view and consolidate their new‐found power and authority. They sought to recast institutions of state and society in the mould of their truths and beliefs. In many instances, these truths and beliefs were defined not by substantive new ethics but being in contest with the normative.

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The new wave was responsible for several populist mass movements in the last decade. The Tunisian Revolution, Arab Spring or the 2011 pro‐democracy protests in China constitute resistance at the bleeding edge of this change. On the other hand, the coming to power of populist governments on a fierce anti‐establishment plank in the US, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere through a process of democratic transition constitutes resistance at the soft edge. Nevertheless, at their core, they share similar objectives and use similar approaches, which combine aggressive street dissent and internet activism. Arising from their disillusionment, the objective of the new stakeholders has mostly gravitated to dismantle what existed while seldom possessing a meaningful alternate blueprint.

The newcomers with digital ‘megaphones’ are not bound by old class structures. Instead, deeply aggrieved by their long exclusion, they have set about recasting the public sphereby challenging class presumptions and breaching the boundaries that define it.

In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker says that binary logic helps one to quickly choose: between fight or flight, between one moral position and another. This lends it a near hypnotic capacity in public discourses where attention spans are notoriously short and competitive appeal relies more on rhetoric than meaning. Diminished in influence and capacity to influence political change, the old elite’s response has situated itself in exploiting this pernicious blindside of mass psyche.

They have sought to oversimplify the discourse by obfuscating inherent subtleties and ambiguities that inform reality, reducing the conversation to binary labels built around reciprocal determination: ‘fake news’; our liberalism versus their illiberalism; our accommodativeness versus their intolerance, our goodness versus their evil. This simplistic binary logic is easier to perpetuate as it does not ensnare the ‘plebs’ in complex subtleties.

Their project relies on reducing newcomers through selective representations made up of half‐truths, lumpenising, and denial of agency, in a colonial intellectualism redux. In the manifest, their new narrative is built upon the twin pillars of condescension and fear.

They seek to entangle the newcomers in discussions alien to them, using a mix of provocation and patronage. Their anxiety and uncertain response in new settings is used to contrast this seemingly inferior agency with superior experiences of the ‘self’. The ‘different’ approach of the ‘other’ then becomes the rationale of the politics of disdain, of their boorishness, and lesser agency.

This is captured by the new energy infused into and fear perpetuated through the ‘fake news’ narrative. Framed as a novelty, the liberal elites accuse the newcomers of resorting to it, thereby diminishing the quality of debate and political response. This approach is reductive as it dismisses the real and perceived grievances attached to these narratives. Belittling them as ‘fake’ provides the perfect alibi to ignore accumulated hurt and anger.

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And then the hypocrisy. Is ‘fake news’ new? Can we discount its historical role in political and public discourse, and its use by elites who hitherto dominated the public sphere, in furthering their interests and sustaining class dominance? From that standpoint, it at best constitutes a borrowed institutional practice by the new stakeholders.

William Hazlitt once said: ‘Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.’ In resorting to labels and framing their discourse through a narrow binary logic, in resorting to the politics of fear and denial of the other’s ‘otherness’, the old elite reveal their Janus face. In seeking to create a counter narrative which is morally absolutist, where the only just choice on offer is theirs, they have become the same as the abhorred other of their imagination — fundamentalist, polarising and dangerous, and every bit as regressive and illiberal.

This clash between the old and the new is for the crown jewels of acquisition, ownership and retention of public influence and space. The ethic at the core of this struggle is power.

Liberal fundamentalism is now at war with unbridled street anger, whose revisionist purpose and impatience have exhibited a dangerous capacity to self‐destruct.

Away from this contest for the zeitpolitik, then, participants in the new public sphere, old and new alike, need to arrive at an entente cordiale built upon the vast grounds they share. The only fair redemption is in moving away from binaries, to adopting a syncretic approach that is above the politics of difference; in charting new pathways that are inclusive and representative of mainstream and marginal interests. Such space exists, but between arrogance of the ‘self’ and anger for the ‘other’.

EPILOGUE: In August of 2016, armed French policemen walked up to a woman at a beach in Nice. The woman, in a burkini, was made to remove some of her clothes and ticketed for failing to upkeep ‘secularism and good morals’.

Source: Saran, S and Naduvath, J. (2017). The great liberal fallacy .Available: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/essay/the‐great‐liberal‐fallacy. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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Globalism, radicalism, populism on Raisina Hill Samir Saran, 2017

The keynote speeches by three world leaders at the Raisina Dialogue stood out for their pronouncements on globalisation.

In many ways, the Raisina Dialogue hosted by Observer Research Foundation and the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, set the tone for the year's momentous developments in geopolitics. 2017 is yet to complete fifty days, but the events of the last few weeks will have a lasting impact on our times. The Raisina Dialogue, in particular, highlighted the clash between liberal "internationalism" and the radical movements that threaten to upend it.

Keynote speeches by three leaders at Raisina stood out for their pronouncements on globalisation. The first, by India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, sounded a note of caution about the "gains of globalisation" being at risk. "Economic gains are no longer easy to come by," said PM Modi, who went on to cite the "barriers to effective multilateralism." The Prime Minister's message was direct and simple: that globalisation needs new inheritors who can help promote the projects, regimes and norms of the 20 th century. This responsibility would invariably fall on the shoulders of a class of nations that we have come to know as "emerging powers."

"Globalisation needs new inheritors who can help promote the projects, regimes and norms of the 20 th century." — Narendra Modi A second perspective on globalisation came from former Canadian PM Stephen Harper, who highlighted the role that religion plays in these turbulent times. Mr. Harper noted the role that Pope John Paul II, a Pole, played in providing "anti‐communists in Poland effective leadership outside the country" in their struggle against the Soviet Union. PM Harper was hinting at the capacity of a religious leader whose tacit support of the Western ethos ensured resistance to entrenched nation‐states. In this respect, religion returned to world politics (to destroy the Soviet Empire) in the eighties, long before the rise of the Islamic State. Can tendencies driven by religious sentiment today — whether through the rise of terrorist groups like ISIS, or through the counter‐movements against migration in Europe — defeat the globalisation project driven by states?

Can tendencies driven by religious sentiment today defeat the globalisation project driven by states?

And finally, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson offered yet another take on globalisation, in balancing his full‐throated defence of Brexit with his call for greater economic cooperation with Britain. The "selective" or "a la carte" globalisation that Secretary Johnson pushed for at the Raisina Dialogue reflects the desire of many Western states to preserve its economic benefits while assuaging "nativist" tendencies at home.

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What do these three speeches at the recently concluded global conclave tell us about the world today? For one, they concede that globalisation of a certain kind has run its course. This was a globalisation spurred by Western leadership in the 20 th century, promoting ideas and institutions to salvage economies that had been devastated after two great wars. The urgency and desire to create those linkages no longer exist in the trans‐Atlantic universe, so this period is witnessing selective de‐globalisation.

Second, the leaders' speeches acknowledge that globalisation is a victim of its own success.

In true Hegelian fashion, the "idea" has been destroyed by its "actualisation." Globalised economies today promote the free and rapid flow of information, bringing communities, societies and peoples together. These connected networks are by no means homogenous.

They are miscellaneous groupings that often have little in common, by way of political heritage or intellectual traditions. As a result, they begin to sense their respective differences quickly and conspicuously. To be sure, the world was just as polarised or opinionated before the Information Age. But digital spaces have made distances shorter, and differences sharper.

Digital spaces have made distances shorter, and differences sharper.

Third, their utterances indicated globalisation is in need of new torchbearers, who may not be able to project strength or underwrite stability in the same vein as the United States or Europe, but will preserve its normative roots regionally. These torchbearers will emerge from Asia, Africa and Latin America: they may not be connected by a lingua franca but their political systems will share a common commitment to free expression and trade. Their rise will be neither smooth nor inevitable. If disruptors today find the cost to destabilise the global system rather low, its custodians realise it is expensive to fix the mess they leave behind.

Prime Minister Modi astutely observed at the RaisinaDialogue that the dust has not yet settled on what has replaced the Cold War. Russian Parliamentarian Vyacheslav Nikonov, one of the speakers at the Dialogue, went one step further: "We may not be the number one military in the world," he said, "but we [Russia] are not No. 2 either." With the traditional leadership of Western powers giving way to the rise of regional powers, it is anyone’s guess if they will emerge as preservers or destroyers.

Above all, the speeches by Mr. Modi, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Harper at the Dialogue reflect their desire to couch globalisation in normative terms. The Washington Consensus was not solely about free markets, but also untrammelled expression and political dissent. The room for promoting such norms, for all the reasons mentioned above, is considerably limited today.

The rise of China presents perhaps the biggest challenge to an ideas‐based global order.

Beijing has pursued with transactional vigour and single‐minded ambition the setting up of regional financial architecture to bankroll its infrastructure projects. These initiatives place little regard for notions held sacred in the international order.

At the Dialogue, PM Modi highlighted the importance of these norms for the continued execution of the globalisation project. "Only by respecting the sovereignty of countries involved, can regional connectivity corridors fulfil their promise and avoid differences and discord," said PM Modi.

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It should be clear then that there is only one legitimate inheritor to the global liberal order of any consequence: India. New Delhi alone can pursue the expansion of regional and global economic linkages while staying true to the ideals that drive them. The Raisina Dialogue itself was an example of how a global platform can be forged in India, bringing together contradicting opinions and voices from across the world. As the steward of the process, the Prime Minister cited the Rig Veda, inviting "noble thoughts [...] from all directions." The future of the globalisation project is intimately tied to India’s modernisation and rise. There is no growth without ideas, and conversely, no innovation without prosperity. India is the world’s best shot and perhaps the last shot at achieving both in these turbulent times.

Source: Saran, S. (2017). Globalism, radicalism, populism on Raisina Hill.Available: http://www.orfonline.org/expert‐speaks/globalism‐radicalism‐populism‐raisina‐hill/. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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Brexit, Trump, and Five (Wrong) Lessons About ‘The Populist Challenge’ Prof. Cas Mudde, 2017

If populism wasn’t already the political buzzword of the 21st‐century before the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom (UK) and the rise of Trump in the United States (U.S.), it surely is now. Media stories about populism have been proliferating at an exponential rate, as have populism “experts”. Everything is populism and everyone is a populism expert.

But while populism is an important concept to understand contemporary politics in many democracies around the world, it tells only part of the story. This is because populism is a so‐called “thin” ideology, which is almost always combined with one or more other ideologies when political actors are successful. Moreover, the success of populist actors, like all political actors, is dependent upon the cultural and political system they operate in (and rarely have helped shape before they became successful).

I’ll illustrate both points on the basis of two of the most striking political developments in western democracies of this year, the Brexit vote and the rise of Trump, which have become the prime examples of successful populism in much recent reporting.

(1) Brexit and Trump are at least as much about nativism as about populism There is no doubt that populism ‐ a thin‐centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté general (general will) of the people ‐ has played an important role in the success of both Brexit and Trump. Both campaigns attack(ed) “the corrupt elite” for stifling “the people” and betraying the “general will” (or “silent majority”) ‐ although Trump himself is more elitist than populist. But that is only part of the story.

At the core of the Brexit campaign was nationalism, i.e. the idea that the British people should be sovereign in their own country. Nationalism was what combined all forces within the Leave camp, from establishment Tories to anti‐establishment Kippers (members of the United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP). On top of that, xenophobia towards both East Europeans and non‐ Europeans (mostly Muslims) was instrumental in pushing the Leave camp to a majority. In other words, nativism ‐ i.e. xenophobic nationalism ‐ was at least as important as populism.

This is even more the case for Trump, who emerged victorious in the primaries within a deep field of populists. Particularly at his early rallies audiences would be near‐comatose as Trump would rattle off his own achievements (e.g. selling condos to the Chinese), get only slightly excited when he would attack the political establishment (“the Washington elite”), but get really rowdy when he would go after the Mexicans and the Muslims. And although nativism is certainly not limited to Trump within AFGG 2018

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the Republican Party, it has been the core of his campaign from the beginning ‐ in fact, even before that, as he entered the national political debate as the most ferocious voice of Birtherism.

(2) Brexit support was only partly populist radical right While Brexit (and Trump) was not just about populism, but a specific form a right‐wingpopulism (which I call the populist radical right), it was also a highly complex phenomenon, which has some similarities, but also important differences, with populist radical right parties in Europe. Crucially, the UK referendum followed a majoritarian logic, in which voters only had two options: Leave and Remain.

This limited choice brought together broad alliances of people who were pro‐ and anti‐EU membership. For example, the Leave camp included civic nationalists, open to multiculturalism but hostile to limited sovereignty, nativists, against both immigrants and the EU, and neoliberals, who believe the EU stifles the free market with its bureaucracy and social legislation ‐ as well as a smaller group of radical left voters, who fundamentally oppose the EU as a neoliberal project.

(3) Trump voters versus Trump supporters The electorate that will vote for Trump on November 8 is not the same as the one that has voted for him in the primaries. It will not only be much bigger, but it will also be much more diverse.

The real Trump electorate, i.e. the people who truly support Trump ‐ not just over Hillary Clinton but over anyone, including other Republicans ‐ lays somewhere in between the Trump electorate in the Republican primaries and his electorate in the presidential election ‐ though much closer to the former than the latter.

Only a small and selective portion of Republicans vote in the primaries, irrespective of the candidates.

But in the presidential elections, many people will vote for Trump out of party loyalty or out of disdain for Hillary Clinton (or because of both). They would prefer to vote for a non‐radical right Republican candidate, such as John Kasich or Marco Rubio, but they don’t have that choice. Voters in Europe do, because they can vote for a conservative or a neoliberal party without “wasting” their vote ‐ as most countries use some form of proportional representation that also gives parliamentary representation to smaller parties.

The exception is the two‐round presidential election that countries like Austria (next month) and France (next year) use. Here the first round works a bit similar to the primary process in the US, i.e. selecting the most popular left and right candidate for the run‐off. Hence, the primaries electorate of Trump is more similar to the first‐round electorates of Norbert Hofer and Marine Le Pen, while his presidential electorate is more similar to the second‐round electorates of Hofer and, though to a lesser extent, Le Pen. The latter combine the core populist radical right support ‐ i.e. which populist radical right parties would attract in elections with a proportional system ‐ with a more diverse electorate that simply votes against the other candidate.

(4) Brexit and Trump are about the mainstreaming of populist radical right politics (or the radicalization of mainstream politics).

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Rather than seeing the Brexit and Trump votes as indicators of the support of the populist radical right, they should be viewed as indicators of the increasing mainstreaming of populist radical right politics and politicians. For at least two decades populist radical right politics have been almost exclusive to populist radical right parties ‐ while mainstream parties did at times adopt some of the rhetoric, they rarely fundamentally changed their ideologies or policies. Populist radical right parties and politicians were mostly shunned or accepted under specific circumstances ‐ for example, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) could only enter the government without its (then) leader, Jörg Haider. Although this is still somewhat the case in the Brexit and Trump examples ‐ for example, some Conservatives within the Leave campaign kept UKIP leader Nigel Farage at a distance, while many within the GOP establishment do not openly support Trump (but will vote for him) ‐ the merger between mainstream and radical right is intensifying.

This merger of mainstream right and populist radical right is almost complete in some East Central European countries, like Hungary and Poland, where formerly conservative politicians now openly voice populist radical right ideas while remaining comfortably within their mainstream right political groups within the European Union. But it is also affecting several established right‐wing parties and politicians in Western Europe, as can be seen in the recent statements by former French president, and 2017 presidential hopeful, Nicolas Sarkozy as well as by various leaders of the Christian Social Union (CSU) in Germany and the Conservative Party in the UK. (5) The real lesson is to look beyond populism and the usual suspects In short, both populism and the usual populist suspect show only part of the current illiberal challenge to liberal democracy. There is a reason that radical right populists are much more successful than left‐ wing populists and that reason is nativism! Consequently, (radical right) populist actors will not disappear once the economic crisis is finally over, or even when the recent economic inequality has been undone ‐ as several new populist experts are claiming.

At least as important, populist radical right politics is no longer tied only to the usual suspects, i.e. traditional populist radical right parties. Whether Sarkozy or Le Pen wins the 2016 presidential elections is at this point almost irrelevant. The almost certain implosion of UKIP will at best soften the increasingly authoritiarian, nativist, and populist policies of the Tory government. And the predicted defeat of Trump will not mean the end of Trumpism within the GOP. That is the real challenge of liberal democrats going forward, i.e. the radicalization of the mainstream right. And as long as we equate populist radical right politics with (only) populist radical right parties, liberal democrats will fail to meet this challenge!

Source: Mudde, C. (2017). Brexit, Trump, and Five (Wrong) Lessons About ‘The Populist Challenge’. Available: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/cas‐mudde/brexit‐trump‐and‐five‐ wro_b_12801832.html. Last accessed 15th Dec 2017.

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For further information, please contact: SONALI MITTRA

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+91 99100 28657 vijatkumar@orfonline.org ARKA BISWAS

+91 97111 89226 arkabiswas@orfonline.org ARUN MEHRA

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