2018 International Studies by Cornell University Press

Persian Gulf Studies A CIRS/Cornell series

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Troubled Waters

Insecurity in the Persian Gulf

Mehran Kamrava

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kamrava, Mehran, 1964– author. Title: Troubled waters : insecurity in the Persian Gulf / Mehran Kamrava. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Series: Persian Gulf studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017038574 (print) | LCCN 2017041649 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501720376 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501720369 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501720352 | ISBN 9781501720352 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Security, International—Persian Gulf Region. | Human security—Persian Gulf Region. | Persian Gulf Region—Foreign relations. Classification: LCC JZ6009.P35 (ebook) | LCC JZ6009.P35 K36 2018 (print) | DDC 355/.0330536—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038574 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

1. The Trouble with the Persian Gulf

2. The Persian Gulf Security Architecture

3. The Belligerents

4. The Intractable Security Dilemma

111

5. Insecurity in the Persian Gulf

145

Notes

153

Bibliography

179

Index

191

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Introduction

Why is the Persian Gulf so chronically insecure? This is the central question guiding this book. Today, the Persian Gulf remains one of the most heavily militarized and insecure regions in the world. This book examines, individually and collectively, the causes and consequences of these dynamics, which have made this small waterway and its surrounding areas one of the most volatile and tension-filled regions in the world. This pervasive insecurity, the book argues, is largely a product of four interrelated developments, the examination of which forms the central basis around which the book’s arguments are organized. Briefly, the four developments are preoccupation with “conventional” security threats at the expense of pervasive, though largely intangible, nonconventional “critical security” issues; the flawed nature of the prevailing security architecture, which, ironically, perpetuates regional insecurity; the deliberate actions and policies of the regional and extraregional actors involved in the Persian Gulf; and the self-reinforcing nature of the region’s security dilemma.

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First, I argue here that security threats in the Persian Gulf emanate from two complementary sets of sources. One set may be broadly labeled as conventional security threats, arising out of actual physical and military challenges to states. Some of the primary ingredients of these sorts of threats involve armaments and weaponry, high politics, interstate tensions, international intrigue, proxy wars, and cross-border conflicts. Just as pervasive, though perhaps harder to grasp and to quantify, is another set of security threats, namely, those arising from the consequences of perceived threats to culture and identity. It is precisely these challenges to what are broadly defined as “human security” that in the post-2011 context have fanned the flames of sectarianism across the region. For the most part, discussions of human security, or what has also been more broadly called a critical security perspective, have largely been academic in nature. But in the post-2011 period, the Persian Gulf offers a paradigmatic example of the concrete consequences of perceived threats to human security. The nature of security threats, and perceptions of such threats, are fluid and tend to change over time. In the post-2011 Persian Gulf, I maintain, focusing on one category of threats and ignoring other threats, which may be out of sync with our conventional notions of security, only gives us an incomplete picture. The research for this book took me to several regional capitals, where I would typically meet with fellow academics and whoever in the various government ministries was willing to talk to me. In addition to learning that the waiting halls of foreign ministries must all have the same decorator, or at least have their furniture delivered from the same store, I was particularly struck by two exchanges I had with two of the region’s most prominent policymakers. In my interviews I always included the same question in my list of inquiries: “What is the biggest security threat your country faces today?” Most often, I would get the answer I expected. In Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, for example, the answer was always “Iran.” In Tehran, it was “The Gulf Cooperation Council and its American backers.” But on two occasions the responses surprised me, not so much for the answer itself but for the honesty and foresight of my respondents. In Muscat, asked to identify the biggest security threat to Oman, without even a pause Foreign Minister Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdullah shot back, “Unemployment.” When I asked the question again, thinking it might have been misunderstood, he repeated his answer.

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Something similar happened in another regional capital, where in a confidential interview with the minister of defense I asked for reasons behind the recent introduction of compulsory military service in the country. The response: “to prevent boredom.” “Our young are easily bored,” the defense minister explained, “and they can fall prey to Daesh and its propaganda. Our goal is to keep them busy, give them discipline, and to instill in them a sense of hope in the future.” The minister went on to confirm what those of us who live in the region feel viscerally, that there is a palpable sense of unease among many strata of society arising from perceived threats to cultural authenticity and to identity. If left unaddressed, such feelings have the potential of growing into serious threats to the state. That these worries were being expressed by no less than a defense minister, rather than by a sociologist or a social worker, was all the more interesting. In the chapters to come, I place the importance of pervasive military threats in the Persian Gulf within the context of a broader array of security challenges that also include elements of human security. The prevailing security architecture of the Persian Gulf, I argue, has neglected some of the more pervasive security threats the region faces while exaggerating others for seemingly political and ideological reasons. Neglect of human security concerns, in particular, has given rise to issues of identity politics and sectarianism, which have in turn been manipulated by states for instrumentalist purposes. A second, central argument of the book points to the role of agency in general, and individual policymaking and initiatives in particular, as one of the primary causes of the Persian Gulf’s pervasive insecurity. Studying security in the Gulf reminds us of that simple truism in political science, that agency matters. Institutions may limit the range of choices available to policymakers, but not during critical junctures, as in the Arab Spring, or when leaders retain their supremacy over institutions, as is often the case in the Middle East.1 Much of the pervasive insecurity in the Persian Gulf, I argue, is not only the product of larger structural dynamics built into the region’s security architecture. It is also a result of deliberate policies followed by regional actors, in collusion with their foreign backers, meant deliberately to identify and to undermine opponents. Many regional actors, I maintain, are willful belligerents. Agency and structure complement each other and compete for importance depending on prevailing circumstances and conditions, with agency

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being particularly consequential in moments of change and transition. The time frame this books covers, the period after the 2011 Arab uprisings, happens to be one of the most fluid and unpredictable in the history of the Persian Gulf. Not only did many Middle Eastern countries witness regime change; within the Persian Gulf itself a number of regional policymakers left office and were replaced by new ones. Qatar’s reigning emir retired and was succeeded by his son in June 2013. Iran elected a new president the following August. A new king assumed power in Saudi Arabia in January 2015. Further, in the United States, Donald Trump pulled off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton in the country’s 2016 presidential elections. Trump’s presidential victory has been especially consequential for security dynamics in the Persian Gulf. Within a few months, the ripple effect of Trump’s election sent tidal waves of change to the prevailing diplomatic and security arrangements of the Persian Gulf. Within days of the U.S. president’s visit to Riyadh in May 2017 to meet with a group of Arab and Muslim leaders, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched a massive and sudden campaign to isolate Qatar and to induce a “change in behavior” among its leaders. With Bahrain and Egypt as part of their alliance, the Saudi-Emirati campaign threatened to cause irreparable fractures in the very structure of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Within days of spearheading the economic boycott and blockade of Qatar, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman changed the line of succession within the kingdom’s royal family. He removed his nephew Mohammed bin Nayef from the position of heir apparent and instead promoted his son, the ambitious Mohammed bin Salman, to the position. Even in places where the top leadership did not necessarily change, as in Bahrain and especially in the UAE, new actors rose to influence, while others were eclipsed. In the UAE, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed is generally seen as the country’s ruler. In all these instances, new policies were put in place, the cumulative effects of which have further heightened regional tensions and insecurity across the Persian Gulf. A third cause of regional insecurity lies in the very nature of the regional security architecture. This security architecture has two basic features: it relies on the objectives and components of U.S. power, and it is premised

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on excluding, containing, and marginalizing two of the region’s largest and most important states, Iran and Iraq. However, in spite of extensive military commitment, coupled with crippling sanctions imposed on Iran because of its nuclear program, efforts at establishing an American-led security architecture in the Persian Gulf have failed to make the region more secure. Moreover, the resulting security architecture is inherently unstable, relying on actors who often do not share common objectives or even always see eye to eye. A fourth cause of insecurity in the Persian Gulf results from the pervasiveness of the “security dilemma” among virtually all actors involved in the region. A security dilemma is a vicious cycle in which securityproducing efforts by one state result in a sense of insecurity among another state, which then embarks on its own security-producing measures, in turn prompting the first actor to take additional steps to enhance its security. While by no means unique to the Persian Gulf, a number of factors have coalesced to make the region’s security dilemma increasingly intractable in recent years. These factors include the growing sectarianization of foreign and security policy pursuits by countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, especially since 2011; the ever-expansive military cooperation between the United States and the Arab states of the region; and the spread of proxy wars in weak and fragile states such as Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. My goal here is neither to offer a historical chronology nor to set forth a general theory of the international relations of the Persian Gulf. Instead, I will bring together the different components that explain the puzzle of Persian Gulf insecurity. There are four pieces to the puzzle, each explored in greater detail in chapter 1. The chapter has two primary objectives. First, it presents a broad outline of some of the most salient historical, political, and military factors that have shaped the international relations of the Persian Gulf. Second, the chapter problematizes the notion of security, arguing that the concept ought to be broadened to include a wider category of threats and challenges that go beyond merely military and physical dimensions. This sets the stage for chapter 2, which examines the Persian Gulf’s prevailing security architecture. More specifically, the chapter traces the historic evolution of the architecture, and then analyzes the ways in which the very arrangements meant to make the region secure are largely

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responsible for its insecurity. The chapter points to the dominant role of the United States in fostering and maintaining the architecture; its reliance on regional allies; and its exclusion, initially of both Iran and Iraq and now largely of only Iran, as the primary causes for the flaws in which it inheres. Structures such as security architectures are not immutable. They are only as robust as the actions and commitments of the actors that are influenced by them in one form or another. Chapter 3 looks at the cast of characters—more specifically the state actors—whose foreign and security policies have so greatly contributed, both intentionally and unintentionally, to the perpetual insecurity of the Persian Gulf. These actors include the United States, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as a collective security or political and economic organization, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Iran. The deepening security dilemma of the region and the resulting pervasive insecurity, the chapter contends, are as much the result of deliberate policies pursued by each of these actors as they are an outcome of structural dynamics inherent in the region’s security architecture. Chapter 4 turns the book’s attention to the Persian Gulf’s security dilemma. Since the 2011 Arab uprisings, the strategic landscape of the Middle East in general, and the Persian Gulf in particular, has witnessed unprecedented levels of securitization.2 This pervasive securitization has only deepened the region’s security dilemma and the resulting insecurity of many regional and extraregional actors. In my efforts to better understand regional threat perceptions, I interviewed many technical experts and other key policy figures in foreign ministries in Abu Dhabi, Doha, Riyadh, Muscat, and Tehran. Without fail, everyone I interviewed expressed apprehension and fear about the intentions of neighboring states, regardless of whether or not they were a part of the GCC. Mistrust and skepticism about the intentions of others deepens the region’s security dilemma, only aggravating the pervasiveness of the Persian Gulf’s insecurity. The book’s final chapter brings together the main arguments of the previous chapters. It ends with an examination of possible win-win scenarios that are likely to reduce tensions and security threats in the Persian Gulf. There has been no shortage of such scenarios offered over the years, meant to reduce tensions in the region. But these are, unfortunately, only

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possible scenarios, the plausibility of which policymakers and politicians are seldom willing to entertain. At least for the foreseeable future, the realities of the Persian Gulf are likely to keep it insecure. The book offers several key takeaways. One has to do with the very nature of the security threats as perceived inside the region. Perceived threats and anxieties in the Persian Gulf are not just regional and international; they are also domestic, rooted in patterns of economic development and processes of social change. A broadened conception of security needs to take into account feelings of social and economic unease produced by demographic imbalances and the dizzying pace of socioeconomic transition. In many ways, this broadening of notions of security can no longer be avoided in the post-2011 era, when Persian Gulf states have securitized the individual and collective identities of their citizens. Long resonant but largely dormant in their societies, it was the Persian Gulf states themselves that awakened sectarian impulses in their populations in order to instrumentally frame an us-versus-them narrative. Even when the flames of sectarianism no longer needed fanning by the state and had assumed dynamics of their own, policymakers and other key actors refused to back down, capitalizing on the utility of sectarianism for “struggles” of various kinds against one enemy or another. Today, the scourge of sectarianism creeps through Persian Gulf societies in multiple dimensions and many forms. Sectarianism only reinforces exclusivist assumptions of regional security that revolve around zero-sum calculations. These calculations, and the institutional arrangements meant to protect and reinforce them, make the region more rather than less insecure. More specifically, excluding Iran from regional security arrangements—as the United States and its chief regional ally, Saudi Arabia, have sought to do—has only made Iran all the more determined to safeguard its security interests in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere in a manner that has been conflictual in relation to the other actors and has often destabilized the region. The ensuing dialogue of the deaf has in turn perpetuated a region-wide security dilemma, the only way out of which appears to be the courage to engage in diplomacy and statesmanship. Held back by their domestic constituents and stakeholders, and even more tightly by their own myopia and tunnel vision, policymakers both in the region and in the United

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States appear singularly incapable of stepping out of and beyond measures that merely aggravate the pervasive insecurity around them. Structures do indeed define the parameters of action. But they are not unchangeable, and policymakers have the agency to act outside what may have become established norms and conventions. Whether or not actors have the foresight or the wherewithal to act outside these constraints is a different matter. The one attempt at regional integration, that of the GCC, resembles more a temporary marriage of convenience fostered by the ebb and flow of external threats than a meaningful institutional means of coordinating the foreign and security policies of its members. There are structural issues that undermine the GCC’s efficacy in the long term and under normal circumstances. By virtue of its size, history, economy, and military power, Saudi Arabia assumes itself to be the first among equals in the GCC, a designation not always accepted by the other members. For the Saudis, the wars in Syria and Yemen have afforded the opportunity to foster a measure of Gulf unity under the auspices of the GCC, a unity cemented further by Iran’s own deliberate sectarian otherness. But civil wars do not last forever, and the collective will of the other five states to yield to Saudi wisdom in matters of security and diplomacy is unlikely to outlast periods of regional crisis. It is unclear whether the GCC can withstand its self-inflicted wounds of 2017. In June that year, sharp chasms emerged within the organization with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain on one side, Qatar on the other, and Kuwait and Oman in the middle. As an institutional forum for summitry and pleasant talk, the GCC is likely to be a long-term feature of the regional landscape. And the organization may even make headway in issues related to uniform taxation, currency exchange rates, and monetary union. Beyond that, however, the GCC is unlikely to transform regional preferences for bilateral trade and security relations into impulses of multilateralism and defense and security coordination. Perhaps the biggest takeaway, the central thesis of the book, is, I am afraid, an unhappy one. Given all that is happening in the region—the deepening hold of sectarianism, the intransigence of the belligerents involved, the pervasiveness of zero-sum calculations, and the perpetuation, rather than receding, of the region-wide security dilemma—the Persian Gulf is likely to remain both heavily militarized and highly insecure

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for the foreseeable future. This is an insecurity with multiple causes and dimensions, unlikely to be remedied by quick fixes or more militarization. It requires sustained attention, buy-in on the part of the many actors and states involved, and, perhaps more than anything else, diplomacy and dialogue. These two necessary ingredients, diplomacy and dialogue, are what the Persian Gulf is currently missing the most.

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The Evils of Polygyny Evidence of Its Harm to Women, Men, and Society

Rose McDermott Edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe Commentary by B. J. Wray, Robert Jervis, and Valerie Hudson

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McDermott, Rose, 1962– author. | Monroe, Kristen Renwick, 1946– editor. | Container of (work): Wray, B. J., 1968– Canadian polygamy reference. | Container of (work): Jervis, Robert, 1940– Polygyny, pastoralism, and violence against women. | Container of (work): Hudson, Valerie M., 1958– Deep structure of collective security. Title: The evils of polygyny : evidence of its harm to women, men, and society / Rose McDermott ; edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe ; commentary by B.J. Wray, Robert Jervis, and Valerie Hudson. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017052531 (print) | LCCN 2017053204 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501714849 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501714757 (ret) | ISBN 9781501718038 | ISBN 9781501718038 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501718045 (pbk ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Polygyny. | Male domination (Social structure) | Women—Violence against. Classification: LCC HQ997.5 (ebook) | LCC HQ997.5 .M33 2018 (print) | DDC 306.84/23—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052531 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

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Contents

Introduction: Polygyny and the Treatment of Women

Kristen Renwick Monroe

1. The Meaning and Meanness of Polygyny

Rose McDermott

2. M aking New Garments from Old Cloth: Reincorporating Clinical and Developmental Psychology into Models of Political Behavior

Rose McDermott and Peter K. Hatemi

3. P olygyny and Violence against Women

Rose McDermott and Jonathan Cowden

4. A ttitudes toward Polygyny: Experimental Evidence from Six Countries

ose McDermott, Michael Dickerson, Steve Fish, Danielle Lussier, R andÂ Jonathan Cowden

Comment 1. The Canadian Polygamy Reference: Demonstrating HarmsÂ to the Court

123

B. J. Wray

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v iii Conte nts Comment 2. Polygyny, Pastoralism, and Violence against Women

140

Robert Jervis

Comment 3. The Deep Structure of Collective Security: Thoughts on McDermott, Smuts, and Sanday

147

Valerie M. Hudson

Afterword: The Easton Lectures and David Easton’s Intellectual Legacy

164

Kristen Renwick Monroe

Acknowledgments 173 About the Authors

175

Index 179

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Introduction Polygyny and the Treatment of Women Kristen Renwick Monroe

Allala was a beautiful young woman, a Somali student in one of my courses at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), a refugee from the ongoing bloodshed that has plagued her country since the 1980s. Allala had been born in Somalia but fled because of the civil war and lived in Saudi Arabia and Kenya, where a refugee agency recognized how intelligent she was and arranged for her to come to UCI on a fellowship. Allala was an excellent student, and we became friendly over the course of the term. Allala spent Thanksgiving of 2015 with us and was in and out of my office during the rest of the year. In one of our conversations she told me about her life and what was expected of her as a young Somali woman, fortunate enough to receive a wonderful education.1 Allala was one of ten siblings. Her older sister was already married, living in the Persian Gulf with her husband, two children, and several of 1.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; I have changed the name and some of the basic facts of Allalaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life story, to protect her privacy. I appreciate her permission to use her story to illustrate the personal aspect of polygyny.

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2 Introduction her siblings. Allala’s father had taken a second wife and had four or five additional children with his second wife. He was pondering whether or not to take a third wife. Allala explained to me that she was expected to take care of all of these people, all her siblings and the half-siblings, in addition to both her parents. Further, she was expected to contract an arranged marriage and have children of her own, whom she also would have to support. As this volume goes to press, Allala has married and is agonizing over whether to have children immediately—as her husband wishes—or to continue her graduate education first. Allala’s situation was fresh in my mind as I read through this volume on polygyny. She brought a human face to a practice that is widespread and overpowering for the individuals who live in it. This book addresses polygyny in the context of a broader subject, one often taboo in political discussions: how we treat women, especially in what is known as the Third World. McDermott and her coauthors boldly address this question on several important fronts. In doing so, they venture into areas in international relations, foreign and domestic policy, and human rights without regard for a political correctness that can stifle honest discussion of divisive topics. Nowhere is this intellectual bravery more evident than in the first chapter, in which McDermott speaks from her heart as a scholar who has devoted nearly two decades of her professional life to studying this pernicious system of marriage. Every member of Congress and the U.S. Department of State should read this chapter, which documents McDermott’s personal interest in polygyny as a topic, how polygyny relates to violence toward women, and how McDermott herself became involved in the collection of statistics on women throughout the world, an extraordinary data set, free to all scholars, and known as WomanStats.2 The first chapter provides a fascinating intellectual history of an idea, an introduction into policy and law and how one person can influence a field in profound ways. Chapter 1

2. Based at Texas A&M, the WomanStats Project (www.womanstats.org) is an institutional and donor-funded research and database project consisting of statistical data on the status of women and children around the world. Under the leadership of Valerie M. Hudson, WomanStats allows scholars to connect data on women with data on the security of states, using a wide range of metrics. WomanStats offers both qualitative and quantitative information on over three hundred indicators of women’s status in 174 countries with populations of at least two hundred thousand. This online data archive is free.

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Polygyny and the Treatment of Women 3 thus also makes excellent reading for anyone contemplating the scholarly life, providing insights on how interdisciplinary work can be done, how scholars can affect people’s lives, and some of the normative and ethical concerns of a scholar in a multicultural world in which the concern for sensitivity brought by political correctness can stifle free and frank discussion and unapologetic and scrupulously honest research. Chapter 2 lays the methodological groundwork for the later empirical analysis. It also highlights David Easton’s concern with methodology, and in particular Easton’s awareness of the extent to which the models we employ to analyze political activity vary and can shape the substantive findings at which we arrive. McDermott and her coauthor, Peter K. Hatemi, note how many critical developments in political-attitude research and survey methodology grew out of research methods and theories that originated in clinical and developmental psychology. While this approach was superseded for a while by behaviorist and rational choice approaches, earlier models of clinical and developmental psychology are now being integrated into recent approaches from a wide range of areas, from behavior genetics to cognitive neuroscience. The intellectual history of the use of developmental and clinical models of psychology and their application to a wide range of new types of substantive work in social and political science will prove extremely useful both for students of the discipline and for more advanced scholars interested in how older techniques can be revised and updated to work well in a wide range of political science venues, as it does here for the later analysis of polygyny. After laying the groundwork methodologically, McDermott and her coauthor Jonathan Cowden begin a more formal analysis (chapter 3) by addressing the difficulties of discussing polygyny in the context of the West’s uneasy relations with the Muslim world. An often-cited explanation for much of these uneasy tensions grew out of the conviction that, after 9/11, the Muslim world “hates us.” Since the destruction of the World Trade Center and the crash at the Pentagon that precipitated the war on terror, politicians, pundits, scholars, policymakers, and other members of the interested public have wondered: “Why do they dislike us so? What have we done to incur such anger?” While acknowledging the extent to which much of the fabled “clash of civilizations” is actually fueled by disputes over material resources—land and power, most particularly—and dramatically divergent political cultures and institutions, McDermott and her

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4 Introduction coauthor focus on what is often a neglected part of the discussion: the extent to which problems between the West and the Muslim world reflect a fundamental tension over the appropriate role of women in society. This clash emerges independently of economic and political contests, although such issues often serve to fuel such conflicts. Because Western values often encourage a foundation of at least legal equality between the sexes, threats to the assumed sociopolitical dominance of men in areas that strongly espouse these traditions provoke systematic hostility and opposition. As a result, the authors in this volume make clear, we are arguing about the wrong questions. Rather than counterposing East against West, arguing about the clash of civilizations in the prototypical Huntington sense (1997), the critical concern should actually revolve around the sources and consequences of violence by men toward women as the root of conflict both within and between nations. (McDermott and Cowden, chap. 3, p. 53)

An underlying theme of this volume, then, holds that unless and until we address the question of violence toward women, including that of a system that tells young women—like Allala—that they must marry whom their elders tell them to and devote their entire lives to serving and caring for others, we will not resolve a whole series of conflicts that plague the contemporary world and that manifest themselves in different ways. This provocative third chapter expands McDermott’s personal statement to raise a whole series of difficult questions on this topic: What are some of the origins of the violence that men direct toward women? Is it simply rooted in male sexual desire for women and the anger and frustration that may result when men hold women responsible for their own drives? Or do men seek to control women simply because they [men] are physically and financially stronger and they are able to get away with exerting power over those with fewer resources? Alternatively, does male violence emerge from a much broader array of social incentives and permissions? And what are the consequences of such violence, not only for women and children, but also for the men who instigate it and for the societies that sanction it? These patterns of violence often begin in the home and serve as models for the assumed hierarchical relationships between the sexes, as well as implicit endorsement for dominance, coercion, and violence as the

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Polygyny and the Treatment of Women 5 proper form of conflict resolution in society more broadly. (McDermott and Cowden, chap. 3, p. 53)

The claim that female financial and social independence are feared because of the threat they pose to the cultural values, status, and personal power of men, especially in developing regions of the world, will not go unchallenged. Indeed, it well may anger many. The scope of the revolution McDermott and Cowden identify confronts stark reality, and the scope of the challenge is vast, since emancipating women will erode male control over their own families. Often this will result in shifts that are potentially humiliating culturally and emotionally painful for men, especially those men emanating from a tradition of strong patriarchy. In short, as McDermott and her coauthors demonstrate, again and again: The prospect of liberated women threatens male status. Further, it often also threatens the position of senior women in these developing societies, women who are allowed to dominate junior women, such as daughters and daughters-in-law, as well as junior men, including sons. (McDermott and Cowden, chap. 3, p. 53)

We should be clear, McDermott and her coauthor write: It is not just men who jealously guard a culture that oppresses women; women actively participate in such repression by refusing to relinquish control over those few cultural areas to which they have been assigned by men, including circumscribing the activities of their female family members. The prospect of female emancipation therefore provides a potent source of male—and sometimes even female—objection to more secular or democratic movements, particularly in more patriarchal societies. The unflinching analysis of the problem McDermott and her co-authors present reveals how the process of control is exacerbated by the common practice of patrilocality, whereby women move to the town, village, or home of their husbands, often leaving behind the fathers, brothers, or uncles who might protect them if they lived closer to home. Without such protection from family members, the only prospect many women have for protection from abusive relatives is to give birth to sons, who are valued by the father’s family. (I think here of Allala’s sister, living far from home and her familial support system. She does not drive a car and is unable to leave the apartment without her husband. In addition to her

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6 Introduction own two children, Allala’s sister also has taken two of her siblings to live with her, thus serving as mother to four children and with little by way of a support system.) These sons, in turn, may prove loyal to these mothers. But such a family structure further erodes the bonds between husband and wife, since the husband’s primary loyalty to a woman often remains with his mother rather than with his wife or his daughters. Such a privileging of parent–child bonds over the marital bond further diminishes the possibility for creating models of equality between the sexes for children of such unions. The analysis of patriarchal cultures, and their patrilocality and polygynist family structures, links the increasing risk for political violence against women to increased levels of many forms of violence in and across these areas. McDermott and Cowden make a convincing case that men’s desire for patriarchal control of women is not so arbitrary that it can be blown away by a good breath of Western logic, education, or liberalism. Its roots in strong traditions and structures, often endorsed by religious beliefs, privilege male power and dominance in all aspects of life. The violent effects emerge from the widespread lifestyle of patriarchy, polygyny, and patrilocality and therefore have continuing significance in many countries today where such practices continue to dominate cultural and economic traditions. McDermott and Cowden trace these origins of male power and note their consequences for the lives and status of women throughout the developing world. Their discussion of the independent effects of patriarchy and polygyny is followed by a detailed analysis of the impact of these forces on a wide variety of manifestations of violence toward women and children using data derived from the WomanStats Project (www.womanstats.org). Chapter 3 concludes by considering the challenges faced by policymakers and human rights advocates who wish to begin to redress such gender inequalities. Chapter 4 confronts a critical aspect of the common practice worldwide, linking polygyny to negative outcomes for women and children throughout the world. McDermott and her coauthors—Michael Dickerson, Steve Fish, Danielle Lussier, and Jonathan Cowden—note that attitudes regarding additional wives offer a microcosm into decision-making authority within the family and thus also echo larger societal values reflecting the prevalence of patriarchal structures. Using an experimental manipulation

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Polygyny and the Treatment of Women 7 embedded in nationally representative samples, McDermott and her coauthors examine the effects of a previous wife’s opinion on approval for a husband taking a second wife, among both men and women. Chapter 4 thus compares results obtained from a total of 9,203 subjects drawn from Lebanon, Jordan, Uganda, Indonesia, Mongolia, and two provinces in India: Bihar and the Punjab. Chapter 4 asks whether the sex of a respondent affects their response to the experimental manipulation. Here McDermott and her coauthors find surprising and significant differences in attitudes toward polygyny that differ by region and speak to significant variance in women’s empowerment and equality around the globe. If wives do not favor their husband’s taking of further wives, this seems strong and stark evidence that they find polygyny untenable and unwanted as a form of living. The volume concludes with comments by B. J. Wray, the lawyer who used McDermott’s work in a successful reference trial on polygyny at the Supreme Court of British Columbia,3 and by two academics—Valerie M. Hudson and Robert Jervis—who are well known in international relations and who locate the importance of these Easton Lectures for international politics. Since this is the first Easton Lecture, an afterword describes the lecture series and notes the intellectual legacy of David Easton. I am delighted that Cornell University Press will be publishing these lectures and am pleased to introduce the lecture series with the work of Rose McDermott.

3. Wray was part of a legal team that defended the constitutionality of the prohibition of polygamy on behalf of the attorney general of Canada. Beginning in the fall of 2010, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia presided over this proceeding into the constitutionality of Canada’s criminal prohibition of polygamy. McDermott’s work was used as part of a voluminous amount of evidentiary records on the impact of polygamy on individuals, communities, and nation-states. The court ultimately found that, as a marital institution, polygamy is inherently harmful.

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Wars of Law

Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict

Tanisha M. Fazal

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fazal, Tanisha M., author. Title: Wars of law : unintended consequences in the regulation of armed conflict / Tanisha M. Fazal. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017054550 (print) | LCCN 2017057125 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501719806 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501719790 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501719813 | ISBN 9781501719813 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: War (International law)—History. | Humanitarian law—History. | Conflict of laws—History. Classification: LCC KZ6385 (ebook) | LCC KZ6385 .F39 2018 (print) | DDC 341.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054550 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Declaring War and Peace

1. The Proliferation and Codification of the Laws of War

2. I nternational Recognition, Compliance Costs, and the Formalities of War

3. Declarations of War in Interstate War

4. Compliance with the Laws of War in Interstate War

109

5. Peace Treaties in Interstate War

131

6. Declarations of Independence in Civil Wars

161

7. Secessionism and Civilian Targeting

192

8. Peace Treaties in Civil War

217

Evasion, Engagement, and the Laws of War

243

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v iii Conte nts Notes 257 References 287 Index 313

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Declaring War and Peace

The United States has neither declared war nor concluded a formal peace treaty since it ended its postâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;World War II occupation of Japan in 1951. In this, the United States is part of a global trend. Since ancient times, instruments such as declarations of war and peace treaties have been commonly used to begin and end wars and to acknowledge that belligerents were in a state of war to which the laws of war applied. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to 1948, half of interstate wars were formally declared, and 70 percent concluded with a formal peace treaty. But since the conclusion of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, only two of thirty-six interstate wars begun have been accompanied by declarations of war; and only six of thirty-eight wars that have ended since 1949 were concluded with a formal peace treaty. The formalities of war have seen equally puzzling trends in the civil war context. Immediately after the founding of the United Nations, about 48 percent of secessionists fighting civil wars issued formal declarations of independence; by 2007, the percent of secessionists in civil wars declaring

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2 Declaring War and Peacen independence had nearly halved. But in contrast to interstate war, civil wars are increasingly likely to conclude with formal peace treaties today. In 1946, none of the civil wars that concluded were accompanied by a formal peace agreement. Ten years after the end of the Cold War, this number had climbed from zero to over 40 percent. Declarations of war and peace treaties are more than mere formalities; they tell us when wars begin and end. They activate and deactivate certain legal rules—the laws of war—that are meant to apply during wartime. In a perverse unintended consequence, it is the proliferation of these laws of war that has altered the incentives of states and rebel groups to adopt war formalities. As the laws of war have grown in strength and number since the mid-twentieth century, states have ceased engaging in formal interstate war; they have all but stopped issuing declarations of war and concluding peace treaties. This is because states increasingly seek to create ambiguity as to the applicability of these new laws of war—in particular, international humanitarian law (IHL),1 the body of international law meant to regulate belligerent conduct during armed conflict—to their wars. In contrast, rebel groups fighting civil wars have been more responsive to the proliferating laws of war. This is particularly true for secessionist rebels— those that seek their own independent state—who require the support of the international community that has authored the laws of war to achieve their political aims. Consider the interstate war fought between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s. The war began without a formal declaration of war by either side. Had either Armenia or Azerbaijan declared war, the declaring state would have been unequivocally obliged to comply with any IHL treaties activated by a declaration of war. In fact, both states signed the 1949 Geneva Conventions during this conflict, which bound them to comply with the laws of war. But there were several plausible accusations of noncompliance with IHL during that war. For example, Azerbaijan is said to have engaged in indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas in Armenia.2 Armenian ground troops reportedly targeted Azerbaijan’s civilians indiscriminately, and forcibly displaced civilians.3 Both sides appear to have violated the laws of war regarding prisoners of war by engaging in summary execution of POWs.4 This war “ended” in 1994, but without a formal peace treaty. In the absence of a peace treaty, hundreds of thousands of Azeri refugees

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Declaring War and Peace 3 remain homeless.5 A critical railroad cannot progress.6 Sour trade relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan have weakened both economies, but especially that of Armenia.7 The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh is one of an increasing number of “frozen conflicts” whose resolution remains undetermined. As these two countries new to the club of states have sought to integrate themselves into the trappings of the international community by signing various IHL treaties, they have simultaneously fought a ground war that appears divorced from these legal obligations. This discrepancy is due in part to the fact that the Nagorno-Karabakh war had no official ending or beginning, which is typical of interstate wars today. States no longer refer to their interstate wars as wars. Perhaps the clearest recent example of this type of pretense is Russia’s role in the invasion of Crimea. On February 28, 2014, hundreds of Russian soldiers took over airports and military bases in Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea.8 Russia had taken pains to create deniability by stripping the insignia off its troops while arguing that any intervention was meant to prevent spillover of radicalism and civil conflict.9 By investing in an international legal fiction, Russia gained at least a fig leaf to cover its lack of compliance with the laws of war regarding the resort to force—jus ad bellum—as well as with those governing belligerent conduct in time of war, or jus in bello. The United States, likewise, today refers to its conflicts as “police actions,” “counterinsurgencies,” or “counterterrorism”—but not war. Interstate war, increasingly, is conducted under the legal radar. Now consider another enduring separatist conflict, this one from the perspective of the separatists. The Kurds have fought a series of civil wars over the past five decades, particularly against the Iraqi government. Iraq’s Kurds are engaged in complex and careful diplomacy that they hope will gain them a state. While they are among the world’s most viable separatists, they have refrained from issuing a formal declaration of independence because they seek to avoid violating the international community’s stated aversion to unilateral declarations of independence. At this writing, Iraqi Kurdistan has recently completed an independence referendum, despite strong opposition from the international community; even so, Iraqi Kurds recognize that a vote in favor of independence cannot on its own get them they state they seek. As a leader of the referendum movement in Iraqi Kurdistan put it, “Statehood takes time.”10 To this end, the Iraqi Kurds

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4 Declaring War and Peacen have publicly rejected a strategy of targeting civilians, in contrast to Iraqi government forces in the past and those of the Islamic State more recently. The evidence suggests that they have kept this promise. Despite their lack of international recognition as an independent state, they have signaled their intention to abide by the constraints of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.11 Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, hosts a regional office of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the group self-designated as a monitor of international humanitarian law (IHL).12 The Kurds have signed a public “deed of commitment” pledging not to use land mines.13 The official program of the Kurdish Democratic Party commits the Kurds to achieving their regional and international goals “by way of general international law and peace” and in accordance with the principles laid out in the UN Charter.14 The Kurdish example is similar to the efforts of many rebel groups in civil war, who are increasingly engaging with the laws of war. In 1960, the Provisional Government of Algeria attempted to accede to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, although it did not yet represent a recognized state.15 The Polisario Front of the Western Sahara has established diplomatic missions in several African states.16 The Eritrean independence movement created a relief organization that gained international legitimacy among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) during the Eritrean war of independence.17 These groups—particularly, among the set of rebel groups in civil war, secessionist rebel groups—must gain the support of the international community, defined here as the group of actors (states and NGOs) committed to the principles enshrined in the UN Charter, to achieve their political goals; this aim gives them incentives to send strong signals of their willingness and capacity to be good citizens of the international community.

Argument of the Book The argument and evidence of this book are presented in three parts. In the first part, which is both historical and theoretical, I review the development of the laws of war. I show that as the number of codified international humanitarian laws has increased dramatically, their character has changed. In 1856, there was one codified law of armed conflict. In 2015,

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Declaring War and Peace 5 there were seventy-two. The earliest laws of war emphasized the rights of belligerents, as in the generous definition of contraband allowed by the 1856 Declaration of Paris. Over the course of the twentieth century, and in particular since the 1949 Geneva Conventions, IHL became much more focused on ensuring protection for civilians. Today, the standards for compliance have risen so high that, some argue, full compliance is impossible even for the best-resourced militaries. This shift has been driven by an increasing split between the “law-makers” and the “law-takers”: the percent of military attendees at the major IHL conferences where these laws are debated and drafted has decreased significantly since the turn of the twentieth century and, particularly, since the passage of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. New proposals for IHL are today made principally by well-intended humanitarians from NGOs and members of the international legal academy, so it is perhaps not surprising that IHL has evolved such high standards for compliance. I also examine whether and why the framers of IHL considered how the laws they drafted would be perceived by rebel groups fighting civil wars. Here I find that, to the extent that the framers of IHL thought about rebel groups, they focused almost exclusively on ensuring that any mention of rebel groups in the laws of war did not accord legitimacy to these groups. This inattention to the behavior of rebel groups reflects the very state-centric nature of IHL, and the fact that states tend not to want to legitimize challengers. It also suggests one lesson for any rebel groups that wish to engage with IHL: it pays to be a state. For the most part, it is the soldiers, civilians, and property of state parties to international treaties that enjoy the protection of IHL. The second part of the argument examines the consequences of the development of IHL for the commencement, conduct, and conclusion of interstate wars. I argue that the proliferation of IHL has created perverse incentives for states engaged in interstate war. The rising costs of compliance with ever-higher standards create incentives for states to avoid stepping over any bright lines that would unequivocally oblige them to comply with the laws of war. I focus on the conditions under which states issue formal declarations of war and conclude formal peace treaties in interstate war, and find that the use of such formalities has declined as IHL has proliferated. The third and final part of the argument focuses on civil wars, and specifically on how secessionist rebel groups—those that seek a new,

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6 Declaring War and Peacen independent state—have engaged with the laws of war. I argue that secessionists are broadly responsive to signals sent by the international community. Compared to other types of rebel groups, secessionists have incentives to be responsive to such signals because approval from the international community is necessary for the realization of their political aims. When the international community objects to unilateral declarations of independence, the proportion of secessionists declaring independence declines. Secessionists are also less likely to target civilians than are nonsecessionist rebels, and this behavior is at least partially driven by their desire to be seen to comply with IHL and thus to please the international community. Finally, and in direct contrast to the declining rate of peace treaty usage in interstate wars, the percentage of civil wars concluded with peace treaties has increased over time; I show that this is in response to the modern international community’s expressed preference for negotiated settlements. The particular history of the laws of war has shaped compliance in both interstate and civil wars. It has also led to divergences in belligerents’ relationship to the laws of war in interstate versus civil wars. If they persist, these patterns may also affect the trajectory of future laws of war. Failure to include the military in future lawmaking efforts could undermine compliance with new laws. And while certain rebel groups have thus far been eager to comply with these laws, if this compliance is not rewarded (and it has not been, to date), then the distance that the framers of IHL deliberately created between the law and non-state actors may backfire.

Why the Laws of War Matter Skeptics argue that any international law, let alone law regulating war, is simply ineffective.18 But states devote enormous resources to creating and upholding international law in general, and international humanitarian law in particular. And the most recent scholarship on the subject suggests that war is, indeed, often conducted within highly regulated constraints.19 Political scientists have sought to understand the conditions under which belligerents comply with IHL. A growing literature on civilian targeting in interstate war has found a strong relationship between certain types of war aims and military strategies, on the one hand, and civilian

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Declaring War and Peace 7 targeting, on the other.20 Territorially ambitious states fighting interstate wars are especially likely to target civilians, as are states whose opponents use guerrilla warfare. Other research has applied these insights to treatment of prisoners of war, with similar findings.21 A recent book on IHL compliance points to the importance of reciprocity, particularly in combination with democracy and joint ratification of major international humanitarian laws, in predicting compliance in the context of interstate war.22 All of this research builds on a foundation laid by scholars of international law more generally, and human rights law in particular, who have examined the relationships between ratification, regime type, and compliance with international law.23 These studies have applied sophisticated methods that allow their authors to account for the possibility that only the most law-abiding states will sign these international agreements, and have still found an important independent effect of signing on to international law on compliance. The extensive political science literature on rebel group behavior such as civilian targeting has focused on the funding structure and disciplinary capacity of rebel groups, their recruitment procedures, their cohesiveness, their degree of territorial control, and their ties to local networks.24 More recent work has begun to probe the effects of the political aims of rebels, as well as their internal governance structures, on behavior that is subject to IHL.25 But few scholars have examined direct links between rebel group behavior and IHL.26 International legal scholars have also weighed in on the debate over the efficacy of international law in general, and the laws governing wartime conduct in particular. Eric Posner argues that international law has become so complex and constraining as to make itself irrelevant. Posner decries the hypertrophy of what he views as toothless human rights treaties, arguing that “human rights law has failed to improve respect for human rights [because] the law is weak—the treaties are vague and inconsistent, and the institutions are balkanized, starved of resources, and unequipped with legal authority.”27 Jens David Ohlin responds by positing that states nonetheless ought to comply because they value the longterm constraining power of international law.28 I build on this previous scholarship and enter these debates by taking the long view of the laws of war, a perspective that has been lacking in the literature. Another innovation of this book is that it analyzes trends in the

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8 Declaring War and Peacen laws of war and war formalities in interstate and civil war side by side. While this strategy is unusual, it is an important angle of approach for three reasons. First, our understanding of the relationship between interstate and civil wars has always been wrapped up in the making of the laws of war. Consider the fact that the Lieber Code, which was drafted to serve as a field manual for the Union Army during the US Civil War, is widely considered to be the foundation of much of today’s codified laws of war. There is a striking disconnect here, in that most modern laws of war were designed with the principal aim of governing belligerent conduct during interstate, and not intrastate, conflict. Second, in a book that engages directly with the history of the laws of war, it is important to follow the historical arc of war itself. Over the time period I cover, war has shifted from occurring primarily between states to within them. To look only at the laws of war as they pertain to interstate wars would be to curtail this project’s relevance to many of today’s conflicts. Conversely, to restrict the analysis to civil wars would leave the work without important historical context, and more generally would undermine the historical perspective that the book offers. Third, I submit that the admittedly unusual decision to include an analysis of interstate and civil wars in the same book is a strength of the project. While scholars of interstate and civil wars may travel in different circles, these disciplinary divisions are often driven more by practical than intellectual reasons and, in fact, may not always make sense to maintain.29 Stepping back and looking at how different forms of war and law have developed over time forces us to bridge those divides, and also affords much-needed perspective on future lawmaking efforts.

Plan of the Book The remainder of this book is organized around the three parts of the argument laid out above. Chapter 1 presents an analytical history of international humanitarian law, drawing on original data on attendees at the major IHL conferences since 1899 as well as a text analysis of the commentaries to these conventions.30 In chapter 2, I develop a theoretical argument based on the evidence presented in chapter 1 by analyzing the costs and benefits of compliance with IHL as it has developed over time. I present specific hypotheses on the use of war formalities, as well

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Declaring War and Peace 9 as compliance with IHL, in both interstate war and civil war. Chapters 3 through 5 cover the empirical ground of interstate war over the past 200 years. I use both quantitative analysis based on original data and a series of case studies based on primary and secondary sources to explain why states have all but stopped declaring war (chapter 3) and to examine levels of compliance with IHL (chapter 4) and the decline of peace treaties in interstate war (chapter 5). The interstate war cases are the 1898 Spanish-American War, the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the 1971 Bangladesh War, and the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War. Chapters 6 through 8 mirror the previous set of chapters but with a focus on secessionist rebel groups that are fighting civil wars. As with the analysis of interstate war, I combine quantitative analysis based on original data with case studies that use primary sources, such as archives and interviews, to explain changing rates in secessionists’ use of declarations of independence (chapter 6) and civilian targeting (chapter 7), and changes over time in the use of peace treaties to conclude civil war (chapter 8). Qualitative evidence from civil wars is based on the cases of nineteenth-century Texas, the 1950 South Moluccan separatist war, and South Sudan’s secessionist conflict from the 1970s to its independence in 2011.31 In the concluding chapter, I address policy implications and unanswered questions. I examine two ongoing lawmaking projects to assess whether historical patterns of IHL lawmaking are evident in today’s efforts to govern cyber armed conflict and lethal autonomous weapons systems (“killer robots”). I also consider the ongoing dilemma that proponents of international law face when dealing with secessionist rebel groups; secessionists seek to please the international community, but this trend is unlikely to last indefinitely if good behavior is not rewarded. Finally, I discuss two sets of contrasts in peace treaty use in interstate and civil war. Peace treaties are less used today in interstate war compared to the past, and more used in civil war. But the evidence suggests that peace treaties are more helpful to an enduring peace in interstate as opposed to civil wars. How ought these trends be reconciled with the international community’s current preference for negotiated settlements in civil wars? The project of international humanitarian law is founded on a desire to limit war’s worst effects. But its own effects have been mixed, blurring the lines between war and peace and states and secessionists. If we are

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1 0 Declaring War and Peacen both never and always at war, then the scope and applicability of the laws meant to govern wartime conduct ought to be revised. If the carrot of statehood is always out of reach for well-behaved secessionists, they will eventually catch on and revert to bad behavior. And if peace treaties in civil wars are considered to be ends in themselves, then there is a real danger that these wars will, in fact, not end. My aim in this book is to expose these questions with the broader goal of uncovering patterns in the development of past and present laws of war that can inform and improve future international humanitarian lawmaking efforts.

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The Geopolitics of Spectacle

Space, Synecdoche, and the New Capitals of Asia

Natalie Koch

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Copyright ÂŠ 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data <CIP to come> Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Spectacular Urbanism and the New Capitals of Asia

1. Approaching Spectacle Geographically

2. From Almaty to Astana: Capitalizing the Territory in Kazakhstan

3. From Astana to Aral: Making Inequality Enchant in Kazakhstanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hinterlands

4. From Astana to Asia: Spectacular Cities and the New Capitals of Asia Compared

107

Conclusion: Synecdoche and the Geopolitics of Spectacular Urbanism in Asia

147

Notes

161

Index

187

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Introduction Spectacular Urbanism and the New Capitals of Asia

It is easy to conjure images of Asia’s spectacular high-rise cities: bustling with life and brimming with gleaming skyscrapers and ultramodern infrastructure. For foreign visitors and ordinary citizens alike, the cities of Asia have become iconic of the region’s state-led modernization agendas and increasing integration with the world economy. Asia’s impressive urbanization can largely be explained by pro-market globalization processes under way since the end of World War II, but also in the wake of collapsing communist regimes across the region since the early 1990s.1 There is, however, a subset of cities whose stunning growth stands apart from this general trend: the new or recently transformed capital cities of the region’s resource-rich states. Political and economic logics well beyond (but not exclusive of) tighter integration with global market capitalism are at work in these cities, seven of which are the subject of this book. The central case is Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana. Other examples in post-Soviet Central Asia include Baku, Azerbaijan, and Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. In the Arabian Peninsula, spectacular capitals can be found in Abu Dhabi in the

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United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Doha, Qatar, and, in East Asia, Naypyidaw, Myanmar, and Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei. Seeking to explain the apparent convergence around spectacular urbanism in Asia’s new capitals, I ask: What makes a city spectacular and for whom? How do spectacular city projects factor into local and regional politics, and what sets them apart from other cities in the region? And more generally, what can they teach us about place, power, and political geography? Most of these cities’ recent building booms have involved transforming the existing urban fabric, while others have entailed developing an entirely new capital (namely, Astana and Naypyidaw). Their differences are important, as we will see. But each is, in one form or another, spectacular. In particular, they have several key commonalities: (1) they are located in nondemocratic and resource-rich states; (2) they have been developed on the basis of strong state planning, quickly, and on an unprecedented scale for their region; (3) they boast lavish built landscapes and celebrations that represent a stark contrast with their surrounding context; and (4) they are designed to display the government’s prosperity and ostensible benevolence in a manner that contrasts significantly with other forms of state austerity and violence found elsewhere. While these capitals are not uniformly successful, these elements all suggest that the image and shape of spectacular cities involves a degree of state intervention and guidance that is atypical of urban development in most cities of the world today.

Spectacular Cities and Their Others Spectacular urban development is not new. Urban landscapes, and those of capital cities in particular, have long been privileged places for political leaders to express the state’s power and their nation’s unity, promise, and modernity. State planners have put their visions of modernity on display through monumental capital city projects in places as diverse as Ankara, Beijing, Brasília, Islamabad, Paris, Rabat, Riyadh, and St. Petersburg.2 When they were first developed, each of these cities was, in one way or another, spectacular—an effect largely achieved through autocratic master planning that was unprecedented for their context. Yet that context was always historically and geographically specific; many people would

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Spectacular Urbanism and the New Capitals of Asia

be hard-pressed to characterize any of these cities as spectacular today. Formerly stunning architectural icons and modernist urban order now look outmoded and fail to visually impress. Not only are visual displays of urban modernity historically and geographically contextual, but also fleeting. As such, to understand how spectacular urbanism works in and across time and space, a decidedly geographic approach is needed. Developing such an approach is the goal of this book. Anyone interested in global politics will readily note that leaders in some countries take statist spectacle far more seriously than in others. For reasons discussed in chapter 1, today it is primarily, though not exclusively, used in highly centralized (“nondemocratic,” “authoritarian,” or “illiberal”) states. Orchestrating spectacle requires substantial resources, which may be financial or political, obtained through coercion or persuasion as well as corrupt or legal means. Indeed, we shall see these variations at work in the case countries considered here, all of which have substantial natural resource wealth and governments that depend heavily on revenues from these extractive industries. In addition to requiring a certain amount of resources, statist spectacle is always the product of mixed agendas. The producers and participants of any given spectacle will invariably interpret and appropriate it in contrasting ways, but state-based elites publicly aim to unify the message that a spectacle is meant to send. This message often centers on broader identity narratives about the nation, the state, or the government itself. In Kazakhstan, for example, the government’s decision in the 1990s to develop a new capital city, Astana, has been at the center of its political leaders’ effort to institutionalize their power and materially inscribe their vision of modernity in the post-Soviet period. Spectacular cities, like Astana, are an example of statist spectacle par excellence. But a central argument of this book is that looking at spectacular cities themselves is insufficient to understand the broader geopolitics of spectacle. As a political tactic, spectacle depends on, and indeed reproduces, deeply political understandings of geography. For something to be deemed spectacular, it must stand apart in space, time, magnitude, perceived experience, or some combination thereof. This also implies that it is only ever spectacular over a defined space, for certain individuals, and in contrast to specific images and experiences of the unspectacular. This relationship between the spectacular and the unspectacular is never fixed; it is always contingent on the perspective of any given observer. While

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these perspectives are also never fixed, geographers seek to discern general patterns in how people make sense of the world and map concepts like spectacular/unspectacular onto certain spaces, places, and experiences. These ways of thinking about space and time are called spatial imaginaries, and they are reproduced in both language and practice, rhetorically and materially.3 Accordingly, to understand the effects of spectacular urbanism as a geopolitical tactic, I examine the spatial imaginaries of individuals who are engaged as spectators, participants, and producers of spectacle. This approach requires discerning who these people are as political actors, but also raises specifically geographic questions about where they are located and how they interact with one another in and through the material spaces that spectacular urban development conjures—and neglects. While my analysis considers the geopolitical relations and conditions that have given rise to Asia’s diverse spectacular capital cities, I am especially concerned with identifying and locating the unspectacular “Others” that make these cities intelligible as a form of spectacle. These are the spaces and social experiences that spectacular urban development neglects, and they take an infinitely varied number of forms and unfold at many different scales and temporalities. To understand the geopolitics of spectacle, we must take seriously the diverse and diffuse Others that give it meaning. Of course, I cannot do this comprehensively for each city discussed in this book. Rather, in illustrating what such an approach would look like, I mean to highlight the value of jointly analyzing spectacle and its Others. In Central Asia, where I have been conducting research since 2005, I argue that the spectacular capital city schemes are largely developed on the basis of marking a radical break with the Soviet past. The three cities considered here, Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, Baku in Azerbaijan, and Astana, are all capitals of Caspian littoral states with access to significant oil and gas reserves in and around the sea. Because of this access to resource wealth, they have been able to set themselves apart from other regional neighbors and to do so through the opulent urban development schemes in their capitals. In these cases, the Soviet past, as well as their poor and politically weak regional neighbors, constitute unspectacular Others. The spectacle of the capital cities in Central Asia is also made possible by the significant social inequalities between ordinary citizens and

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the elites. This is most vividly illustrated in the case of Kazakhstan, where I unite the view from Astana with the view of Astana from the vantage point of rural residents in the environmentally devastated Aral Sea region. In the Arabian Peninsula, I focus on recent urban development in Doha, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, UAE, where I have been conducting research since 2012. Rapid urban development in this region has likewise been made possible by the wealth from local oil and gas extraction for global export. But the UAE and Qatar are quite different from the Central Asian states in that they all have extremely small territories, and an unusually small percentage of their total population has formal citizenship (under 15 percent each). Here I show that a state-centered approach can be a hindrance to locating the social and political Others that make spectacle possible in these two monarchies. Doing so requires a wider understanding of the Arab Gulf capitals’ hinterlands as extending well beyond the state boundaries to touch many countries across Asia and Africa where large numbers of migrant workers in the Arabian Peninsula originate. From this perspective, the center-periphery relations that are conjured through the spectacular city schemes in the Arabian Peninsula, including similarly dramatic social inequalities, begin to look more like those considered in Central Asia. Last, in East Asia, I consider the capitals of Naypyidaw in Myanmar and Bandar Seri Begawan in Brunei, where I conducted fieldwork in 2015. These two cities represent the biggest contrast to the other cases insofar as planners have not oriented recent developments around crafting an iconic image of the capital. That is, while Naypyidaw and Bandar Seri Begawan are spectacular capitals, they have not been designed around projecting a coherent image of the city to circulate internationally, or even domestically (as we find with the intense city-branding exercises in places like Astana or Doha). The more decentralized planning of Bandar Seri Begawan, for example, pushes against iconicity, while Naypyidaw has actually been closed to the media and foreigners until very recently. In both cases, however, the cities draw much of their spectacular nature from the visual order of modernist urban planning that works to “other” the past and older urban forms (such as the prevailing water village settlements in Brunei). In Brunei and Myanmar, we also find that the spectacular cities are made possible by the state’s monopolization of wealth from the country’s rich natural resource reserves—resulting in a grossly unequal distribution

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of wealth justified through paternalist assertions of benevolent rule and a passively accepting population.

Approaching Spectacle Geographically Spectacle has long been a subject of academic concern, but scholars have not yet sought to theorize it geographically. A geographic approach is important because spectacle has both spatial and temporal dimensions. Typically defined as a large-scale show or display, it is spatially pointbased. This means that, while it unfolds at any scale, it is staged at one particular location, such as a city as a whole or a public square within a city. Spectacle is also temporally exceptional: it happens sporadically, occasionally, or only once. Since time and space are relative, so too is spectacle: what is spectacular in one context may be entirely unspectacular in another. Most academic analyses gloss over the relative nature of spectacle, as they tend to focus inward—that is, considering a spectacle itself rather than its place in a broader context. The failure of scholars to adopt a wider lens, however, may be less a theoretical oversight than an indication of a major analytical challenge in studying spectacles: they do not have an easily measurable set of political outcomes. They are spatially diffuse, are experienced contingently, and extend across uneven temporalities. Focusing on the contextual nature of spectacle thus raises important theoretical questions about how to define its Others—those spaces, activities, temporalities, routines, and affects that inform how people draw borders between the spectacular and the ordinary. The relational approach to spectacle I develop spotlights these questions and works to account for a spectacle’s diffuse Others beyond the singular site or event. As a study in political geography, this book emphasizes the power relations that shape and are shaped by spectacle. While spectacle is certainly not confined to state-led events or projects, my analysis is limited to state-sponsored (or “statist”) spectacle.4 This is because, when employed by government leaders, it takes on special geopolitical significance. At the most general level, statist spectacle has two variations: celebratory and punitive.5 Whereas punitive spectacle may include public torture or executions, celebratory spectacles include parades, festivals, capital city

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development schemes, engineering mega-projects, or iconic buildings such as ultra-tall towers or palaces.6 Both celebratory and punitive variants tend to be at work in any given political system, albeit to varying extents. A handful of studies, in political contexts ranging from the Dominican Republic under Trujillo to the Soviet Union under Stalin, have considered the role of state violence as a sort of spectacle, but few do little more than note the apparent contradictions of regimes that simultaneously engage in spectacular forms of state violence and ostentatious celebration culture.7 Yet even under the most brutal regimes, leaders will seek to minimize public discussion of the state’s most punitive tactics. In such cases, where state violence is truly pervasive and the general population is well aware of it (as with Stalinist and Nazi persecution), open conversation about it is nearly always off limits. Public discussion about state benevolence, by contrast, is usually vigorously promoted. Using the full range of public relations and ideological tools, repressive regimes tend to amplify the significance of celebratory spectacles and their nonpunitive policies. In their efforts to control and guide popular discourse, authoritarian elites are logically concerned with the spatial manifestation of state benevolence vis-àvis state violence. This is not merely about grabbing their subjects’ attention and putting celebratory spectacle in their direct line of vision; by making expressions or metaphors of beneficence more visible, a regime can make accusations of violence and austerity appear less credible—sometimes casting them as fictitious or exaggerated claims of its opponents. In both the Dominican and Soviet cases, for example, the state’s repressive tactics were seen most intensely in the peripheral reaches of their territory, far from the symbolic centers in their capital cities. And even today, some citizens will question the historical record of those repressive governments’ crimes. This is to simplify the matter greatly, but it does point to key questions about the geography of spectacle and pushes scholars to ask not only who uses it and with what effect but also where. Given its etymology, spectacle raises the question of spectatorship and how to account for its necessarily multiple and ever-changing audiences. I consider the primary case of Astana from several different vantage points, asking how the iconic development project has been projected across Kazakhstan. Set next to hardship and poverty found elsewhere in the country, spectacular urbanism in Astana is exemplary of how authoritarian governments work to make “inequality enchant” through the use

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of spectacle of the center.8 It also illustrates how highly centralized governments are founded on unspectacular spaces, temporalities, embodied experiences, and forms of slow or structural violence—the impacts of which are felt most in the territorial peripheries and among marginalized populations. The local context in Kazakhstan, detailed in chapters 2 and 3, is essential to understanding the political geographic implications of the spectacular city project in Astana. Spectacle is fundamentally geopolitical. This is in no small part because it is consistently entangled with normative readings of political regime types and modes of government in the international community. In the Western press, for example, state-promoted spectacle is often caricatured as the staple of megalomaniac autocrats. Its significance is dismissed because of its very theatricality—exemplified in the bemused but disdainful tone of reports on North Korea’s Mass Games or Turkmenistan’s Novruz celebrations. Such reporting typically implies that participants and audiences do not actually believe in the message on display, but are forced to participate against their will. They are painted as mere pawns following the orders of a megalomaniac autocrat. These simplistic accounts of state-led spectacle stem from, at best, a misunderstanding and, at worst, a deliberate stigmatization of authoritarian states. Ultimately, though, they are rooted in the false assumption that authoritarian states are largely devoid of competitive politics. While autocratic leaders do not stake their legitimacy in competitive elections, their polities have just as many spaces for political contest as in liberal democracies—albeit differently configured. Through the case of spectacular capital city schemes in Asia, I show that the city is one such site of contestation. Taking these cities seriously means taking authoritarian states seriously.9 It also requires accounting for the agency of ordinary people in authoritarian contexts. In the West, prevailing stereotypes about nondemocratic states frame these countries as consisting of victimizers and victims, conjuring the image of a thoroughly repressive state apparatus quashing passive citizens. As scholars of authoritarianism have long argued, however, and as I show in this book, a clear-cut division between victimizers and victims is more myth than reality.10 Furthermore, in writing on spectacle in classical Bali, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has stressed, “Whatever intelligence it may have to offer us about the nature of politics, it can hardly be that big fish

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eat little fish, or that the rags of virtue mask the engines of privilege.”11 Although he was writing almost forty years ago, his point about common interpretations of spectacle remains apt: discussions still rapidly descend into mere assertions that the rich and powerful take advantage of the poor and misguided. The result is that observers end up floundering over questions about whether citizens either are dissimulating or are “true believers.” Finding an either-or approach untenable, social scientists informed by poststructuralist theory examine the role of spectacle in shaping certain subjectivities and regimes of governmentality rather than lingering on the question of belief. In addition to dismissing statist spectacle as a form of fictional theater, Western accounts frequently discount it as something of the past. These observers frame it as outdated and irrelevant for “our” modern, reason-based times, or, in other cases, as an overwrought effort to claim modernity while masking a certain backwardness. This is particularly evident in mainstream press accounts of Asia’s spectacular cities. In writing about Astana, for example, Western journalists have given the city a wide range of labels that point to its allegedly false claims to modernity, such as “the Jetsons’ hometown,” “Disneyland of the steppe,” “Nowheresville,” and “Tomorrowland.”12 Or in the words of one writer: “To look at, Astana is so strange that it has one grasping for images. It’s a space station, marooned in an ungraspable expanse of level steppe, its name (to English speakers) having the invented sound of a science fiction writer’s creation.”13 Mike Davis’s description of Dubai is similarly Orientalizing: “The result is not a hybrid but an eerie chimera: a promiscuous coupling of all the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jon Jerde, Steve Wynn and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Although compared variously to Las Vegas, Manhattan, Orlando, Monaco and Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation and mythologization: a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly.”14 This Orientalist rhetoric is of course problematic in itself, but it also grossly oversimplifies the complexity of spectacular urbanism. In addition, these accounts normatively demarcate illiberal states as bizarre and essentially foreign. They position statist spectacle as an index of backwardness— something characterizing only fundamentally unmodern people and places. Dubious as they may be, caricatures of spectacle in authoritarian

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states are not just clichéd journalism in poor taste. They run deep in political and academic imaginations about global political geographies. For example, the French theorist Michel Foucault even suggests that spectacle is a thing of the past (“Antiquity had been a civilization of spectacle”), which he contrasts with more recent techniques of discipline and biopolitics. These, he claims, extinguish the relevance of spectacle in modern polities: “The pomp of sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular manifestations of power, were extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance, in a panopticism in which the vigilance of intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the eagle and the sun.”15 The irony of this quotation cannot be lost on anyone familiar with the state flag of Kazakhstan, which depicts a steppe eagle soaring underneath a large golden sun (see figure I.1). Indeed, through a focus on Kazakhstan, this book shows that the eagle and the sun are not at all useless, but that the “pomp of sovereignty” still matters today. Contra Foucault, whose work otherwise deeply informs my approach in this book, I argue that as new governmentalities have arisen, spectacle has certainly not faded in relevance. Spectacle continues to sit squarely at the center of normative mappings of “proper” political configurations that define geopolitical imaginaries and foreign policies the world over. Critical scholars would be mistaken to confine it to the past or to approach it as a mere aberration

Figure I.1 The flag of Kazakhstan. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

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characteristic of allegedly backward governments. Understanding contemporary uses of spectacle is essential to understanding power, politics, and space—not only in authoritarian settings but also in ostensibly liberal or democratic settings. It is especially important to examine the overlaps between liberal and illiberal forms of government if we are to resist simplistic accounts of authoritarianism as something bizarre and foreign, and to open up larger questions about how geopolitical maps of liberalism and illiberalism are written and contested, by whom, and with what effects.

Illiberal Government and Practice-Centered Analysis Spectacle appears to be perennially salient in the full range of polities— from empires, monarchies, fascist dictatorships, and sheikhdoms to authoritarian regimes and democracies.16 Yet certain governments have historically exhibited a particular penchant for spectacle. Writing on post-Soviet Uzbekistan, Laura Adams has termed such cases spectacular states—that is, states where, “more than in most countries, politics is conducted on a symbolic level,” and where “spectacle is a technique of mobilization.”17 Geertz describes a similar dynamic in his classic work on Bali. The early Balinese state, he argues, was not organized around a rationalist form of government but pointed instead “toward spectacle, toward ceremony, toward the public dramatization of the ruling obsessions of Balinese culture: social inequality and status pride.”18 In Geertz’s reading of precolonial Bali, lavish and costly ceremonies were not a means toward political ends, but “ends themselves, they were what the state was for. Court ceremonialism was the driving force of court politics; and mass ritual was not a device to shore up the state, but rather the state, even in its final gasp, was a device for the enactment of mass ritual. Power served pomp, not pomp power.”19 The “spectacular state” and “theater-state” concepts offer a useful entry point to examine the specific political dynamics in post-Soviet Uzbekistan and nineteenth-century Bali. But it is hard to generalize from these cases, as the French historian Paul Veyne argues, “unless we allow specifications, historical accidents, and ideological influences to proliferate, at the price of endless verbiage.”20 That is, by putting the state at the center of the analysis, such taxonomies invariably fail in the face of

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INTIMATE VIOL ENCE Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg

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Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of Americ a Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kopstein, Jeffrey, author. | Wittenberg, Jason, 1963–author. Title: Intimate violence : anti-Jewish pogroms on the eve of the Holocaust / Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017048064 (print) | LCCN 2017051368 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501715266 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501715273 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501715259 | ISBN 9781501715259 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Persecutions—Poland—History—20th century. | Pogroms—Poland—History—20th century. | Antisemitism—Poland— History—20th century. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Poland. | Poland—Ethnic relations. Classification: LCC DS134.55 (ebook) | LCC DS134.55 .K68 2018 (print) | DDC 305.892/4043809041—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048064 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.c ornell.e du.

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Contents

Preface

Why Neighbors Kill Neighbors

Ethnic Politics in the Borderlands

Measuring Threat and Violence

4. Beyond Jedwabne

Ukrainian Galicia and Volhynia

Pogroms outside the Eastern Borderlands

114

Intimate Violence and Ethnic Diversity

127

Appendix: Pogroms in the Eastern Borderlands, Summer 1941 Notes References Index

137 143 153 000

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1 WHY NEIGHBORS KILL NEIGHBORS

Two tragedies befell the Jews of Eastern Europe after the outbreak of World War II. The first and by far the best known and exhaustively researched is the Holocaust, the Nazi extermination effort. The second is “the violent explosion of the latent hatred and hostility of local communities” (Żbikowski 1993, 174). With the Soviet army retreating, the German army advancing, and government authority collapsing, civilian populations across hundreds of villages and towns stretching from the Baltic states in the north to Romania in the south committed atrocities against their Jewish neighbors. T hese often gruesome and sadistic crimes ranged from looting and beatings to public humiliation, rape, torture, and murder. One of the most widely known such incidents occurred in the town of Jedwabne, Poland, on July 10, 1941. In a day-long rampage under the approving eyes of the Germans, Poles committed mass murder. The Jews w ere ordered to gather in the town square, where among other humiliations they were forced to clean the pavement, smash the monument to Lenin, and hold a mock “religious” funeral on his behalf. Those who attempted to flee were hunted down and clubbed, stoned, knifed, and drowned, their bloodied corpses often left in pits. Apparently dissatisfied with such inefficient methods of murder, the perpetrators herded hundreds of remaining Jews—women, children, the old, and the sick—into a barn that was doused with kerosene and set alight (Gross 2001). Ethnic violence is never easy to comprehend, but it is especially puzzling when the perpetrators are civilians and the victims are their neighbors (Fujii 2009; Straus 2006; Kalyvas 2006). This book investigates the reasons for such “intimate” violence. The 1941 pogroms are a particularly interesting instance of such violence for two reasons. 1

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First, they happened under conditions of state collapse. Many who study ethnic violence emphasize the key role of state elites in orchestrating conflict (e.g., Brass 2003; Gagnon 2004; Lambroza 1992; Wilkinson 2004). But state actions cannot explain the 1941 pogroms because state institutions in the areas of Poland under Soviet control had all but collapsed by the time they occurred. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, but did not establish full political authority on Polish territory that had been annexed to the Soviet Union u ntil at least September (Żbikowski 2007, 315; Snyder 2008, 96). In the period between Soviet and German rule, there was no central government in this region. To the extent anyone was in control, it would have been the Germans, but, as we argue later in this chapter, they did not yet function as a de facto state elite. Although the Germans did try to incite pogroms, they met with only limited success. Pogroms occurred both with and without the Germans being present. Like Kalyvas (2006) and Petersen (2002), we seek to understand ethnic violence under conditions of state collapse such as can occur during periods of war, civil war, regime change, and the collapse of empire. Second, the scale of the attacks demonstrates that ethnic violence is not an inherent feature of intergroup life under anarchic conditions even with relationships as long-standing and conflictual as t hose between Jews and non-Jews. Given the long history of restrictions, attacks, and expulsions directed against Jews in Eastern Europe, it is easy to believe that non-Jews must have eagerly assaulted their Jewish neighbors when the Nazi onslaught on the Soviet Union presented an opportunity. A fter all, the Germans w ere, if anything, sympathetic to those who wanted to attack Jews, and in the absence of a state the “clouding features of legal restraint” (Petersen 2002, 12) disappeared and p eople were freer to act on their desires. As Kalyvas (2006, 389) notes in regard to civil wars, chaotic and uncertain circumstances offer “irresistible opportunities to harm everyday enemies.” Where violence did occur it was often quite gruesome and could include beheading, the chopping off of limbs, rape, and the ripping of fetuses from the wombs of pregnant women.1 Yet pogroms w ere relatively rare events. According to our data, in the six regions composing most of the eastern Polish borderlands that had been occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939 and by Germany following the outbreak of war in 1941—Białystok, Lwów, Polesie, Stanisławów, Tarnopol, and Volhynia—pogroms occurred in 216 localities, making up just 9 percent of all localities in the region where Jews and non-Jews dwelled together. Most communities never experienced a pogrom and most ordinary non-Jews never attacked Jews. Such a pattern is not limited to Poland. Tolnay and Beck (1995, 45), for example, report that more than one-third of counties in the U.S. South never experienced a lynching. Varshney (2002, 6–7) notes that only eight cities in India accounted for just over 45 percent

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of all deaths in Hindu-Muslim violence. Our data show that ethnic violence is situational rather than inherent. The task for researchers, one we undertake in this book, is to identify and characterize the local contexts that stimulate or inhibit ethnic violence in societies with long histories of animosity. Our central question is, Why did pogroms occur in some localities but not others? Our results demonstrate the limitations of some of the most commonly believed explanations for pogroms. The 1941 pogroms were not orchestrated by the state, and in general did not occur where economic competition between Jews and non-Jews was fiercest or where Jews w ere the most sympathetic to communism. None of these accounts explain the relative rarity of the violence. Anti- Semitism may have been a necessary background condition, but the more robust explanation is that pogroms were rooted in competing nationalisms. We contend that the pogroms represented a strategy whereby non-Jews attempted to rid themselves of those whom they thought would be future political rivals. Pogroms were most likely to occur where t here w ere lots of Jews, where t hose Jews advocated national equality with non-Jews, and where parties advocating national equality were popular. In the following section, we review existing explanations for municipality-level variation in ethnic violence and then expand on our own explanation that focuses on political threat.

Explanations for Pogroms Revenge As a consequence of secret protocols to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact concluded between Germany and the Soviet Union, the two countries divided Poland between them. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, a fter a two-week period of confusion, it pulled back to its allotted territories in the west. The Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, and occupied the eastern borderlands, or kresy, with the intention of incorporating this territory into the Soviet state. During the roughly two years between the Red Army’s arrival and its retreat in the wake of the June 1941 Nazi invasion, the Soviets ran a brutal occupation regime. The Jewish collaboration hypothesis (e.g., Musiał 2004) posits that pogroms served as revenge for Jewish support of the Soviet occupation. This hypothesis is both logically plausible and consistent with some aspects of the historical record. First, although it is impossible to know the entire distribution of attitudes t oward Soviet rule on the eve of the occupation, most scholars agree that a common Jewish reaction to the arrival of Soviet soldiers was one of relief. Having experienced open discrimination and many pogroms in interwar Poland, Soviet rule, harsh as it might have been expected to be, offered at

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least the prospect of civic equality. It was certainly preferable to the Nazi rule in western Poland. In the words of Moshe Levin, it was “the lesser of two evils,” a sentiment some Jews were known to have voiced openly. For example, according to Henryk Szyper, whose memoir was written just a fter the war, a Jewish director of a store would say to a Pole who complained, “There is no more free Poland, your time is over. It is our time” (AŻIH 301-4654). Such attitudes, however rarely expressed, could only have inflamed Poles, for whom the occupation meant the end of national sovereignty. Second, although all national groups suffered u nder Soviet rule (collectivization, nationalization, and deportation, for example, touched all corners of society), the de jure removal of barriers that had impeded Jewish integration in interwar Poland meant that the status of Jews increased relative to that of Poles, who were no longer the ruling Staatsnation; and also to that of Ukrainians, whose nationalist aspirations, already frustrated by Poland, the Soviets brutally repressed. Positions within the Soviet apparatus were in theory as open to Jews as they were to Poles or Ukrainians, and at the lower levels of the administration, the regime found many Jews willing to serve. As Brakel (2007) reports in his study of the Baranowicze region in northeast Poland, Jews worked in the Soviet administration, ran for office, were members of the newly created communist youth organ ization, and were even among t hose more trusted vostochniki (easterners) brought in from other parts of the Soviet Union to help administer the new territories. The fact that low-level state bureaucrats would have had the most contact with the local non-Jewish populations meant that Jews were visibly associated with the Soviet regime. According to one observer, “Offices and institutions that never saw a Jew on their premises abound now with Jewish personnel of all kinds” (cited in Pinchuk 1990, 50). In the words of Szyper (AŻIH 301-4654), an unquestionable achievement of Soviet rule was “factual emancipation and equalization of politi cal citizenship.” For Petersen (2002), Polish and Ukrainian resentment at their relative loss of status was a prime driver of pogrom violence, regardless of w hether the Jews actively had a hand in the reversal of Polish and Ukrainian fortunes. Third, there is ample anecdotal evidence that local non-Jewish populations blamed the Jews for the Soviet occupation. We agree with Żbikowski (2007) that no “uniform pogrom scenario” existed, but eyewitness accounts of how pogroms actually occurred do reveal some recurring themes. One of t hese is the ritual humiliation of the Jewish victims in ways that clearly associate them with the Soviet regime. For example, in the towns of Kolno and Jedwabne, locals forced the Jews to remove the statue of Lenin and bury it in the ground. In Kolno, the Jews then had to sing and pray for the buried monument; in Jedwabne, the Jews w ere subsequently beaten to death and thrown into the same grave.2 In Siematycze, the Jews had to dismantle the Lenin statue with hammers and sickles.3 In Radziłow,

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Poles made the Jews sing a Soviet song, Moskva Moia, and in Kościelne, as the Lenin statue was being thrown in the w ater, the Polish police forced a local Jew to give a dictated speech in which, among other t hings, he said, “Lenin, you gave us your life and you give us death, you’ll never rise again.”4 We also know that the perpetrators of many pogroms had previously been incarcerated in Soviet Secret Police (NKVD) prisons.5 Chapters 4 and 5 will investigate the consistency of the connection between local perceptions of Jewish collaboration and the distribution of pogroms. Although we have no systematic data by locality on Jewish presence in the Soviet administration, it stands to reason that sympathy for the Soviet regime would be highest where support for communist parties was strongest. Therefore, if pogroms constituted punishment for collaboration with the Soviet occupation, then the probability of a pogrom should be positively related to prewar communist support. We find no such systematic relationship between pogrom outbreaks and the vote given to communist parties during the interwar period. We can also challenge the degree to which the locals’ beliefs w ere warranted given actual evidence of collaboration. Such a challenge is important because it provides leverage on the crucial issue of perpetrator culpability. The pogroms were barbarous and unlawful, but there is still a difference between punishing those who are guilty of traitorous acts and scapegoating a vulnerable minority for acts it either did not commit or were committed by members of other groups. In the former case, we might condemn the perpetrators for the manner in which punishment was delivered but concur with the principle that treachery deserves punishment. In the latter case, the perpetrators are guilty of both inhumane punishment and persecuting the innocent. In fact, a balanced consideration of the historical record casts significant doubt on the Jewish collaboration hypothesis. First, if one component of the humiliation ritual during a pogrom involved having Jews dispose of a Soviet statue, another had them assume “Jewish” roles while doing it. In Kolno, for example, the blacksmiths who broke up the Lenin monument had to sing Hatikvah, a song associated with the Zionist movement that would later become the national anthem of Israel. The broken monument was placed on a cart, and other Jews, dressed in prayer shawls, had to pull the cart to the Jewish cemetery for “burial.”6 In Kościelne, it was Hatikvah-singing Jews that carried the Lenin statue from the center of town to the river.7 In Siematycze, all the Jews had to wear prayer shawls while they dismantled the symbols of Soviet rule.8 Second, although some Jews certainly collaborated, so did some non-Jews. Indeed, as many have noted, the common non-Jewish perception—that most Jews were sympathetic to communism and supported the Soviet occupation and that most of the collaborators were Jews—is not borne out by actual facts. We do not

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have numbers to prove this for the kresy as a w hole, but regional studies clearly bear this out. Consider, for example, the Białystok voivodship (province) in northeast Poland, which according to the 1931 census was roughly 67 percent Polish, 16 percent Belarusian, and 12 percent Jewish (just over 150,000 Jews). According to Jasiewicz (2001, tables 7–16, 1119–1134), in 1940 Jews composed 1.2 percent of 238 chairpersons of rural committees, 9 percent of 297 people in communist youth organization (Komsomol) management, 5.4 percent of 10,045 government candidates, and 4 percent of 8,885 (Communist Party) cadres. Not only are t hese rates of participation well u nder the Jewish proportion of the population, but in absolute terms represent a miniscule proportion of even the working adult Jewish population. Only among “local careerists” (wydwiżency) was there disproportionate Jewish presence, with Jews constituting just over 19 percent of 5,404 people. Brakel (2007) reports similar findings for the Barnowicze region. Moreover, to the extent t here was a Jewish presence, it was more pronounced at the lower rather than the upper levels of Soviet administration. For example, in the March 1940 elections to the Supreme Soviet, not a single Jew was among the representatives of the newly incorporated provinces of eastern Poland. The Galician city of Lwów was roughly 30 percent Jewish, yet Jews made up a far lower percentage of its soviet. Some other towns with Jewish majorities nonetheless had non-Jewish mayors (Pinchuk 1990, 49; Yones 2004, 48). In short, although the face of the Soviet regime may have had more Jews than non-Jews were accustomed to seeing, on the whole it would appear Jews were underrepresented in the administration both in absolute and relative terms. Those in more influential positions, who thus bore greater responsibility for Soviet crimes, were overwhelmingly non-Jewish. We can conclude two things from these observations. First, if pogroms w ere really about collaboration, then t here o ught to have been retaliation against non-Jewish collaborators. Yet t here are exceedingly few such instances. Żbikowski (2007, 348) thus writes of the “discount” generally applied to Polish and Belarusian collaborators. According to one eyewitness, in July 1941, soldiers returning to Bolechów (in Galicia) wearing Soviet uniforms after the departure of the Red Army w ere killed only if they w ere Jews (Men9 delsohn 2006, 195). Similarly, regarding the city of Lwów, Syzper observes that “somewhat tacitly all Ukrainians agreed to peace. Nobody [i.e., no Ukrainians] was attacked for participating in the Soviet administration” (AŻIH 301-4654). If there were pogroms against communities of non-Jews in retaliation for collaboration, no one ever reported them. Anti-Jewish sentiments outweighed the anti-Soviet ones when it came to retaliation. Second, given the tenuous relationship between non-Jewish perceptions of Jewish collaboration and actual Jewish collaboration, it is difficult not to conclude, along with Mick (2007) and Brakel

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(2007), that t hese perceptions have more to do with anti-Semitic stereotypes that predate the Soviet occupation than with the occupation itself. This brings us to another important proposed explanation for the pogroms, anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitic Hatred Among those who see the 1941 pogroms as simply yet another manifestation of a long history of anti-Jewish discrimination and violence, anti-Semitic hatred is an obvious explanation. How e lse to explain the brutality, the humiliation, the desecration of religious objects, and the victimization of c hildren, who could not possibly have collaborated? A fter all, these w ere hardly the first pogroms to have struck Poland, even in the twentieth c entury. There were a few scattered pogroms during the period when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in September 1939 (Himka 1997, 182) and a major wave of anti-Jewish violence between 1935 and 1937. For example, in 1936 there were 21 pogroms and 348 “outbreaks” in the Białystok region (Tolisch 1937). In August 1937 alone, Jews in 80 different localities suffered attacks (Melzer 1997, 66). Less widespread violence occurred in the early 1930s in universities, where some students hoped to pressure the government to limit the number of Jewish pupils (Michlic-Coren 2000, 35). Hundreds of pogroms occurred between 1918 and 1920 in Polish-and Ukrainian- inhabited areas in the southeast, where Jews were caught in the middle of a Polish-Ukrainian struggle for political supremacy. During the November 1918 Lwów pogrom, Polish perpetrators destroyed Torah scrolls and humiliated religious Jews, foreshadowing the widespread ritualized violence of 1941 (Hagen 2005, 137–138). Other pogroms, resulting in hundreds of deaths, occurred in the Russian part of Poland between 1903 and 1906 (Lambroza 1992). Nor were pogroms the only means by which Jews were attacked. Although Jews participated in most aspects of interwar Poland’s economic, social, and political life, they also suffered discrimination, both formal and informal. As detailed by Rudnicki (2005), the last legal restrictions against Jews left over from the partition era (before World War I) w ere lifted only in 1931, a decade after the establishment of independent Poland. But Jews still had to contend with the efforts of right-wing Polish nationalists to curb Jewish rights and circumscribe Jewish influence. In the 1930s, for example, nationalists organized boycotts of Jewish businesses and portrayed the Jews as an “alien element” that was incompatible with Polish national life (Rudnicki 2005, 160). They made numerous political proposals, such as to deny Jews equal political rights, to prevent them from entering military service, and to bar them from employment across a range of professions. Though these proposals never made it very far politically, both Jews and non-Jews

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who wanted to protect equal rights were forced into a position of having to argue against them. Other measures, less overtly discriminatory against Jews but with barely disguised (and sometimes undisguised) anti-Jewish intent, w ere popular enough to become law. T hese included a ban on “inhumane” (read: kosher) animal slaughter, a more restrictive citizenship law, and various measures empowering state officials to regulate their spheres of activity in ways that ultimately resulted in a reduced Jewish presence (Melzer 1997, 81–94). Among the better known of these measures pertained to higher education. Under pressure from nationalist students and their allies, in 1937 the Ministry of Education issued regulations that segregated seating areas for Christians and Jews across higher education, with punishment for those who failed to comply. These “ghetto benches,” as they were known, resulted in a drastic decline in Jewish enrollment (Rudnicki 2005, 166; Melzer 1997, 71). To these we can add what authors have referred to as non-Jewish “folk culture” or “folk prejudice.” Generalizations are hazardous given the dearth of systematic evidence, but t here is some consensus that ordinary non-Jews viewed Jews as something of an alien element in their midst, not necessarily mortal enemies but certainly not as one of their own. Before the advent of modern political anti- Semitism, Jewish difference was construed primarily in religious terms, with Jews cast as Christ-killers and enemies of the church. For Gross (2001, 122–124), this image of the Jews lay b ehind the 1941 pogroms in Radziłow and Jedwabne, where “peasant mobs,” imbued with deeply ingrained beliefs about the Jewish need for the blood of Christian children to prepare the Passover matzo, swooped in for primitive slaughter and plunder. Over time, especially as religious anti-Semitism evolved into modern Jew hatred, other stereotypes were added to the religious one: Jews as swindlers, as atheists, as archcapitalists, as communists. In the case of Ukrainians, Himka (1997, 182) argues that within the Galician peasantry there existed a belief that “a day of reckoning was coming when all the Jews would be slaughtered.” Whatever the particular stereotype, Jewish “otherness” meant that, however cordial the relationship might be between Jews and non-Jews at times, in the end non-Jews would not feel the same solidarity with Jews that they felt toward one another (Struve 2012, 271–272; Weeks 2005, 29–30). Neither successive Polish governments nor the Roman Catholic Church condoned physical violence against Jews, and, indeed, at the highest levels both explic itly condemned such violence. At the same time, however, many influential political and religious leaders sympathized with the idea of defending Polish interests against a perceived Jewish threat. A full accounting of either the evolving state attitude toward or Roman Catholic views of the Jews is beyond the scope of this

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study. Instead we provide only some illustrative examples. In June 1936, Prime Minister Sławoj-Składkowski all but expressed support for the nationalist boycotts, stating that “[If you want] an economic struggle, then by all means go ahead.”10 By 1938, acting as minister of internal affairs, he was less equivocal, claiming that the struggle against the Jews was “a struggle of economic necessity.”11 In 1936 both Roman Catholic Primate August Hlond and Archbishop of Cracow Adam Sapieha issued pastoral letters that condemned violence but also endorsed the boycotts and accused Jews of a host of other threats to Poland, such as atheism, bolshevism, and corruption (Michlic 2006, 122–123). The portrayal of the Jews as what Michlic (2006) refers to as a “threatening other” was also vis ible in the Catholic press (Landau-Czajka 1994, 146–175) and in the attitudes of portions of the lower Catholic clergy (Libionka 2005, 234–237). There is no question that antagonism toward Jews has had a long history in Polish lands; that during the interwar period the atmosphere became increasingly hostile and, indeed, violent t oward Jews; and that in summer 1941, many pogrom perpetrators w ere animated by hatred or rage (or both). Nonetheless, we should not be too quick to infer that the wave of pogroms in summer 1941 can be reduced to anti-Semitism. First, the number of pogroms that occurred is not consistent with a one-sided portrayal of interwar Poland as uniformly hazardous for Jews. As noted earlier, pogroms occurred in roughly 9 percent of localities where Jews and non-Jews dwelled together. Even one pogrom is one too many, but over 90 percent of the places where a pogrom could have occurred experienced no pogrom at all. Despite the increased opportunity offered by the German invasion and the collapse of state authority, the vast majority of Poles and Ukrainians did not perpetrate pogroms, and the vast majority of Jews were not victims of them. ere as riven with anti-Semitism as the “pessimistic” view If interwar Poland w would have it and anti-Semitism were indeed the primary motive behind pogroms, then we would expect far more pogroms than we actually observe.12 The relative rarity of pogroms thus implies one of two t hings: either violent anti- Semitism was not as widespread or deeply held as in the pessimistic view, in which case its more limited distribution might (or might not) account for the pogroms that we observe; or violent anti-Semitism was widespread and therefore could not have accounted for the pogroms. We dissent from the pessimistic view, which tells only part of the story, though no doubt the dominant one. Although Jews in interwar Poland certainly experienced discrimination and violence, their story is not one of unremitting doom, even in the 1930s. For example, Jewish commerce survived and, in the case of large enterprises, in some ways even thrived, despite nationalist boycotts and acts of violence (Marcus 1983, 243–245). Although small traders suffered far more,

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even at the end of 1938, half of such traders were still Jews. Moreover, for all of interwar Poland’s faults, Jews enjoyed many freedoms permitted under the Polish system (Mendelsohn 1986, 138). They formed their own political parties that competed and won seats in elections and served as representatives of other parties. They had a lively cultural and civic life, including Hebrew, Polish, and Yiddish presses, a system of schools, and sundry religious and other volunteer organizations. Jews were free to be Hasidic or Zionist or Socialist or Marxist or even Polish. Mendelsohn (1986, 139) lauds “the extraordinary creativity of Polish Jewry.” Although more radical Polish nationalist views of Jews spread among the elite as the 1930s wore on, not all non-Jewish leaders w ere hostile, and some, albeit a distinct minority, actively promoted joint cooperation between Jews and non- Jews. For example, the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and (Jewish) Bund organized various joint actions in protest against anti-Jewish initiatives. The PPS stood alone in the late 1930s as the only major (non-Jewish) political party that did not openly advocate a Poland free of Jews, and some of the leadership explicitly condemned the rising anti-Jewish tide (Brumberg 1989, 82–89; see also Holzer 1994, 202; Melzer 1997, 24–25). There were similar liberal currents within the Catholic Church, though before the war they never influenced church policy (Polonsky 1997, 209; Connelly 2002, 653). Michlic (2006, 77–78) lists a number of other prominent non-Jewish political and intellectual elites who denounced the vio lence and the idea that Jews were the enemy of Poles. Moreover, notwithstanding a prevailing folk prejudice with its stereotypical image of Jews, there is little actual evidence that the nationalists’ more sinister views w ere even close to universal at the mass level. Consider the boycott of Jewish businesses, a key nationalist demand that by the late 1930s was being encouraged even in pastoral letters of the Catholic Church. According to Marcus (1983, 244– 245), the vast majority of peasants nonetheless patronized Jewish traders because their prices were lower. That decision hardly implies a love for the Jews, but it is consistent with Weeks (2005, 29), who notes that the most important anti- Semites were middle class and did not effectively sell their program to the peasants even in the interwar period. The overview of memoirs in Bronsztejn (1994) illustrates that there were many non-Jews that had sympathy for Jews or judged them as individuals by the same standards that they judged other non-Jews. Jolluck (2005) analyzes the testimonies of thousands of Polish w omen who during the Soviet occupation were considered “harmful” by the authorities and thus deported to the Soviet Union. Even among this sample, which was almost certainly more nationalist in orientation than Polish society as a w hole, roughly one-third expressed e ither positive or neutral views of Jews. Therefore, the baseline assumption of ubiquitous hatred toward Jews does not capture the truth.

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The second reason for caution in prematurely reducing the 1941 pogroms to anti-Semitism concerns what gets counted as anti-Semitic acts. At risk of oversimplification, we can identify both broad and narrow understandings. In the broad understanding, anti-Semitism is something of a grab bag of different kinds of hostility (e.g., Brustein 2003; Gross 2006; Michlic 2006). It includes cases in which the primary target happens to be Jews for incidental reasons, as for example, the economic boycott organized by the National Democrats party, also known as Endecja. Given the Jews’ position in the Polish economy (to be discussed further in this chapter), the nationalists’ desire to claim a commanding position for Poles in commerce was bound to have the largest effect on Jews because of their proportionally large commercial role in comparison with other minority groups. It includes cases where the primary target could well have been other groups, but the Jews were singled out, as in beliefs that Jews were uniquely enthusiastic in their support for the Soviet occupation. Poles might well have pinned the accusation on Belarusians but did not. It includes cases in which the target could only be Jews, as in accusations of deicide or the ritual murder of Christian children. The narrow understanding of anti-Semitism, by contrast, excludes scenarios in which Jews are targeted in their role as prosperous traders, sympathizers with communism, or supporters of the Soviet occupation. In the narrow view, anti-Semitism refers only to instances in which Jews are targeted for being Jews. For example, Blobaum (2005, 4) contrasts the anti-Semitic 1918 Lwów pogrom, where, as noted previously, religious Jews w ere humiliated and religious objects desecrated, with the 1898 Galician pogroms (Stauter-Halsted 2005), where the victims were Jews but were targeted “as owners of inns, taverns, and distilleries.” In the former case, the pious could have avoided injury only by ceasing to be Jews; in the latter, the victims’ Jewish identity was seen to be ancillary. We take no position on w hether anti-Semitism ought to have the broad or narrow interpretation except to say that for our purposes it is better to “split” rather than “lump.” We would like to know which purported motive for the 1941 pogroms best accords with the observed distribution of those pogroms. W ere the pogroms revenge for alleged Jewish support of the Soviet occupation? Were they about robbery and the opportunity to get rid of economic rivals? Were they about ridding the nation of an alien and fundamentally unassimilable group? For analytic clarity, we refer only to the last question as implying anti-Semitism. We make local-level anti-Semitism operational by using the interwar vote for nationalist parties that espoused the narrow view of anti-Semitism. These parties are described in more detail in chapter 2. Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate that at best there is a middling relationship between the distribution of mass anti-Semitic attitudes and pogrom occurrence.

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PARTICIPATION WITHOUT DEMOCRACY Containing Conflict in Southeast Asia Garry Rodan

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CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

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Contents

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms Acknowledgments Introduction: Struggles over Political Representation

vii xi 1

1. Theorizing Institutions of Political Participation

and Representation

2. Ideologies of Political Representation and the Mode

of Participation Framework

3. History, Capitalism, and Conflict

4. Nominated Members of Parliament in Singapore

5. Public Feedback in Singapore’s Consultative

Authoritarianism

6. The Philippines’ Party-List System, Reformers,

and Oligarchs 7. Participatory Budgeting in the Philippines

116 139

8. Malaysia’s Failed Consultative Representation

Experiments 9. Civil Society and Electoral Reform in Malaysia

162 186

Conclusion: Capitalism, Institutions, and Ideology

211

Notes References Index

223 237 000

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Introduction

STRUGG LES OVER POL ITIC AL REPRES ENTAT ION

In this book, two s imple propositions are made. First, the development of mar ket capitalism with its deepening inequalities and its disruption of established patterns of social power and interest generates new political challenges for both entrenched elites and those at the political margins. Second, the struggles for power unleashed within t hese processes do not simply take the form e ither of elites ramping up the instruments of authoritarian control or of broader populations seeking to enforce and to extend existing models of representative democracy. Rather, both elites and their opponents are moving beyond these institutional paradigms to construct or pursue their own models of participation, representa tion, and democracy with vastly different objectives in mind. For many entrenched elites, these initiatives are designed as political instruments to enforce and con solidate deepening concentrations of power and wealth and to domesticate opposi tion. For those on the margins of power, they are intended as the political vehicles for these concentrations to be dismantled. This study examines the central paradox in this general institutional recalibra tion of politics; namely, that expanded political representation—in both its democratic and nondemocratic forms—is serving more to constrain political con testation than enhance it. It will refer specifically to Southeast Asia, where these broad processes have been an important aspect of recent institutional change. H ere, it is argued, structures of increased political participation have tended to intensify political fragmentation among anti-elite forces, militating against broad reformist coalitions. Ideologies favoring a depoliticization of conflicts either emanating from

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2 Introduction

the uneven effects of capitalist development or compounded by them have also been institutionalized.

The Study’s Wider Significance

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Southeast Asia presents as an excellent locus for this study not because it is dis tinctive or different. On the contrary, it can serve as a theoretical laboratory for understanding dynamics between capitalist development and political regimes in general. These dynamics are not just shaping conflicts in Southeast Asia but across the globe. Political and social crises linked to the effects of capitalist development are being played out in the populist politics that have characterized Donald Trump’s controversial presidential victory in the United States and in the majority sup port in Britain to withdraw from the European Union. They are also at the heart of the rise over recent decades of right-wing anti-immigration populist parties in Europe and left-wing redistributive populist movements in Latin America, the anti- globalization Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, and equivalents elsewhere following the global financial crisis of 2008. Analysts identify a “hollowing out” or diminishing of democracy in Western Europe (Hay 2007; Mair 2013; Streeck 2014) and a fundamental “disconnect” in the United States between an unrepresentative political class and citizens (Fiorina and Abrams 2011). Meanwhile, delayed but sweeping capit alist transformations elsewhere have failed to generate the democratization anticipated. Indeed, capi talism and authoritarianism in China and Russia, among other places, have be come a demonstrably v iable combination for the foreseeable future. In an analysis encompassing both established liberal democracies of advanced capitalist societies and those in Spain, Brazil, and Turkey, where capitalist devel opment and democracy have more recently combined, Tormey (2015) provoca tively hypothesized the “end of representative politics.” It is argued in this book, however, that the emergence of new nondemocratic forms of representa tion as a mechanism for narrowing the space for political contestation is at least as significant as, if not more than, the bypassing of representation altogether. Across a wide range of democratic and authoritarian regimes around the world there has been a proliferation of diverse new forms of political participation and assorted exhortations about “active citizenship,” “empowerment,” “participatory democracy,” and “delegative democracy.” However, meanings and purposes at tached to these concepts vary, as competing forces struggle over the extent and nature of permissible political conflict through these new institutions. Different ideologies of political representation are integral to the aims, strategies, and out comes between contending forces.

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Introduction

The global rise of participatory budgeting over recent decades is emblematic of this struggle. In various ways, this has created opportunities for citizen involve ment in decisions about how public budgets are spent. This includes in established liberal democracies such as in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, France, and Germany, as well as in more recent democracies and postauthoritar ian societies such as Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and even in authoritarian regimes such as China, Mozambique, and Albania. However, who can participate in these deliberations, how, and on what particular questions about the budget are contested and/or tightly controlled matters within these countries. The same applies to myriad other creative—often distinctive—initiatives in public policy consultation or feedback involving popular forces and/or technical experts outside of government. In the process, democratic representation can either be bolstered, introduced, or substituted with nondemocratic alternatives. Popul ism’s recent resurgence has exposed the limits of many new forms of pub lic political participation to contain conflict. It has also intensified unresolved nor mative contention over appropriate political participation and representation in complex, globalized capitalist market systems, and their increasingly unequal ma terial and social outcomes. Recent radical institutional reform prescriptions from egalitarian, elitist, and other worldviews highlight this. In Against Elections, van Reybrouck (2016) attributes widespread political resentment, cynicism, and/or disinterest among citizens to the dominance of powerful elite interests over electoral politics and institutions of representative de mocracy. Van Reybrouck’s solution lies in a return to the principles of Athenian participatory democracy to ensure direct and meaningful popular power. By con trast, in Against Democracy, Brennan (2016) advocates the introduction of a struc tured epistocracy to restrict the influence of what he sees as ignorant and irrational voters. His critique of democracy has partial resonances with the meritocratic elit ism championed by former Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, which has long enjoyed some appeal in the West from varying interests and technocratic and conservative ideological perspectives (Rodan 1996b; Micklethwait 2011). Meanwhile, libertarians have seized on populism and the concerns underlying it, their solution being to radically shrink the ambit of state authority to make government—and democracy—less relevant to individual goals or decision mak ing. This is especially evident in the United States, where the ideas and strategies of the Heritage Foundation think tank have been influential. Trump appointments to the executive, statutory bodies, his economic advisory councils, and his budget reflect this (T. Anderson 2017). This influence should not be overstated, however, since it is mediated by the complex and contradictory coalitional interests— including those aligned with economic nationalism—surrounding the Trump administration. Indeed, in August 2017, Trump dissolved two advisory business

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4 Introduction

councils—the Strategic and Policy Forum and the White House Manufacturing Jobs Initiative—after seven corporate leaders resigned in protest over the president’s failure to condemn white supremacists involved in a violent demonstration at Charlottesville that month (Jacobs 2017). This book is intended therefore as a contribution to analysis of a general phe nomenon where elites and popular forces alike are searching for new institutional solutions to new political problems. It draws on examples from Southeast Asia, where innovative forms of political participation and representation are being generated both to serve consolidation of power and to break open the doors of privilege. This study looks in particular at three specific forms or models of this process. In the first, technocratic elites seek to politically absorb and contain increas ingly diverse social forces so as to contain independent civil society. Here, Singa pore has led the way in the most extensive and creative formal and informal initiatives in state-controlled avenues for increased political participation and public policy feedback. In a second model, perhaps best illustrated in the case of the Philippines, power ful private oligarchs struggle with both technocratic and more popular reform forces in the b attle to reconstruct democracy following the authoritarian phase under Ferdinand Marcos. The latter variously look to local-level community par ticipation, party lists for congressional elections, and populist leaders to transcend the limitations of existing elite rule—including authoritarian populists such as President Rodrigo Duterte. Yet it is in another model, Malaysia, where the struggle over political institutions is most polarized and elite options most constrained. The continued centrality of race, ethnicity, and religion to rationalizing authoritarian elite rule limits the scope for innovative state-based initiatives in popular political participation. In stead, direct political participation through independent civil society activism and street protests demanding reform to electoral institutions has escalated.

Limits of Existing Theory

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Of course, this book’s central propositions fly in the face of entrenched theories that link democratization with a deepening of market capitalism or explain seem ing diversions as aberrations and hybrid regime political systems. However, it is argued here that this presumed link is not so clear. Capitalism may mature and flourish in a varied range of political institutions—including those that are authoritarian in nature. Nor, it is argued, do democratic or representative insti tutions naturally serve the values or goals of equality and accountability. These

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Introduction

institutions take many and varied forms and can just as easily be the instruments of oligarchy and despotism (see Robison and Hadiz 2004). To be sure, since Huntington’s (1991) influential thesis on a “third wave” of democratizations accompanying capitalist globalization, there has been a reas sessment of the pace, scale, and prospects of such transitions. However, it is one thing to declare the end of the democratic transitions paradigm—a declaration grounded in various conscious and unconscious assumptions about how liberal democracy constitutes “real” and “natural” political change—as Carothers (2002) did a decade and a half ago. It is quite another t hing to develop an adequate theo retical and conceptual framework to better identify, understand, and explain regime diversity—especially the emergence of various new forms of political representation. There has been no more influential concept in trying to grapple with the real ity of regime diversity at odds with earlier modernization theory than that of the “hybrid regime,” understood as a mixture of authoritarian and democratic elements (Case 1996, 2002; Levitsky and Way 2002, 2010; Schedler 2002, 2006; Ottaway 2003; Croissant and Merkel 2004; Merkel 2004). However, here the influence of the transition paradigm persists through evaluation of predominantly formal in stitutions against liberal democratic ideal types. This also diverts analysis from how wider political economy relationships and conflicts concerning the owner ship, control, and distribution of resources help shape institutions. A major limitation of the hybrid regime approach is that we learn much about what these regimes do not do, but much less about what they actually do. By con trast, this book poses more fundamental and open questions than t hose preoc cupying hybrid regime theorists, namely: What forms of political participation and associated representation are emerging, why, and what does this mean for regime directions? Integral to such inquiry are the questions of who promotes, supports, or opposes specific initiatives in, or reforms to, political representation and why. We need to understand particularly the significance of new forms and ideologies of representation for the ways that political regimes set the boundaries of institutionalized conflict. Precisely because institutions structure political participation, they invariably privilege some interests and conflicts over others (Schattschneider 1975; Mair 1997). This includes w hether independent collective organizations are incorpo rated or bypassed in favor of attempts to promote more individualized and/or seemingly less politicized forms of group representation. Indeed, what is funda mentally at stake everywhere in struggles over institutions of political participa tion and representation is not the democratic integrity or functionality of political institutions per se. It is instead which interests t hese institutions serve.

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6 Introduction

A New Approach

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The distinctive theoretical approach of this book conceptualizes political regimes as comprising modes of participation (MOPs) s haped by the following fundamental interrelated dynamics: social conflicts over power and the interest coalitions that form around them u nder capitalist development; the institutional manifestations of these struggles as contending forces variously attempt to contain or expand the scope for legitimate political conflict; and the mediating influence of ideology shaping the conduct and outcomes of these struggles. In sharp contrast with liberal pluralist understandings, the MOP framework views political institutions within the context of a wider exercise of state power inseparable from deeply rooted social conflicts. T hese conflicts of course vary in nature and intensity across and within countries. However, the framework em phasizes that tensions over, and coalitions of interest attached to, historically spe cific forms of capitalist development are pivotal in struggles over participation and representation. We cannot understand which conflicts emerge as most con tentious, nor the key b attle grounds over institutional and ideological responses to them, without this analytical emphasis. Therefore, the MOP framework inquires into how and why institutional struc tures and ideologies shape the way different actors and conflicts are included or excluded from parliamentary and extraparliamentary politics. T hese modes condition who gets what, when, and how—the definitive questions of politics everywhere, according to Lasswell (1936). They are pivotal to whether and how conflict over material inequalities, corruption, environmental degradation, or human rights abuses, for example, is addressed, contained, or compounded. The MOP framework particularly highlights the rise of new state-sponsored or state-controlled modes that have emerged in both democratic and authoritarian regimes, and their fundamental importance to influencing these different possible outcomes (Jayasuriya and Rodan 2007). An especially original aspect of the MOP framework developed here is the in troduction of two concepts of nondemocratic ideologies—consultative and particularist—alongside more established categories of democratic and populist ideologies. Consultative ideologies are imbued with a technocratic, apolitical no tion of participation as problem solving, and eschew political competition. Par ticularist ideologies emphasize the rights to representation of discrete identities and communities based on ethnicity, race, religion, geography, gender, and cul ture. These ideologies loom large in elite strategies to foster depoliticization and the political fragmentation of their critics and opponents. Typically, the sorts of institutions that these two ideologies give rise to eschew independent class-based

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Introduction

organizations, such as independent trade unions, or seek to dilute class conflict by fostering different bases of political representation, for example with region- based identities. Consultative ideologies principally provide support for a wide range of state- based or state-sponsored advisory and public policy feedback bodies as well as local level participatory institutions established in conjunction with international aid agencies to address problems of social and economic development. These ide ologies have a remarkably wide appeal and tactical political utility. Technocratic authoritarians, liberals, and leftist radicals alike have either embraced or sought to exploit consultative ideologies to reproduce or recast the institutional limits to political contests. This book provides detailed analyses of these ideological strategies and con tests within Southeast Asia to demonstrate the general analytical power of the MOP framework. Comparable contests over institutions for participatory budgeting and other feedback mechanisms occur across regions and regimes around the world. Local strategic partnerships in the United Kingdom, for example, routinely incorporate business and community activists, local agencies, and voluntary organ izations in public service delivery consultations. Initiatives in public policy consul tation can also take a concentrated one-off form. The 2008 two-day 2020 Summit in Australia under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is such an example, attracting a mix of business leaders, experts, and prominent public figures—including actors Kate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman—to advise on policy challenges. Particularist ideologies have been important in rationalizing the incorporation into parliamentary institutions of assorted discrete ethnic, religious, and other groups, both through elected party-list systems and various forms of appointed membership of parliament. Parliamentary seats have been reserved for ethnic minorities or indigenous communities in Croatia, Singapore, Jordan, Western Samoa, Colombia, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority, New Zealand, Norway, Finland, and Denmark. In Belgium, Canada, Northern Ireland, and the Nether lands, there is also guaranteed parliamentary representation for regional, linguis tic, and religious-based interests (Bird 2005; Protsyk 2010; Bird, Saalfeld, and Wüst 2011; Simon 2012). Particularist ideologies also provide the basis for select inclusion into various public policy consultative institutions, such as those established to maintain reli gious or ethnic harmony, which can isolate wider social forces from deliberations over the causes and solutions to ethnic and religious friction. No less importantly, these ideologies can be pitted too against institutional initiatives promoted by incumbent elites. Separatist movements, such as Muslim demands for an au tonomous Bangsamoro region of Mindanao in the Philippines and similar calls by Muslim minorities in southern Thailand, are examples of this.

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8 Introduction

To be sure, consultative mechanisms or particularist affirmative action can serve as a complement, or an alternative, to democratic representation. Yet, while vari ous new modes of participation may fall short on democratic criteria, this in no way diminishes their importance. They are vitally important precisely because in many instances they are integral to strategies by elites to perpetuate their rule and/ or to intra-elite struggles that shape the boundaries of permissible conflict. T hese new modes can also have unintended consequences, such as heightened scrutiny of, and pressures on, elite governance strategies, as some forces attempt to exploit official ideologies about opening up politics. Because specific sociopolitical coali tions of interest and ideology vary across models of capitalist development, though, so too do the forms and outcomes of different struggles over representation.

Book Structure and Chapters

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here are good reasons for the focus on a selection of countries from Southeast T Asia for demonstrating the general explanatory power of the MOP frame work. First, the region occupies an important and growing place within the burgeoning hybrid regime literature (see, for example, Morlino, Dressel, and Pelizzo 2011). Second, parliamentary and extraparliamentary political institutions are both understudied and yet to be subjected to sustained comparative analysis in the literature on Southeast Asia. Third, Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia have sufficiently different histories and/or political economies to demonstrate the universal applicability of a framework meant to explain the variation in institu tions and ideologies of political participation and representation that have emerged and the reasons for that variation. Methodologically the book examines institutional innovations to provide sep arate chapters on parliamentary and extraparliamentary institutions for each coun try and the struggles thereof. Interviews with actors involved in t hese institutions have been important to many of the analyses. They are often essential for trying to more fully understand who promotes, supports, or opposes specific initiatives in, or reforms to, political participation and why. Before proceeding with case studies of initiatives in parliamentary and extra parliamentary modes of participation, chapter 1 more fully explains the rationale for, and distinctive elements of, the theoretical approach referred to above and adopted throughout this book. The chapter draws analytical links between social conflicts, political institutions, and the dynamic, contradictory, and socially trans formative impacts of capitalism. This is complemented by chapter 2, where the MOP conceptual framework of analysis is detailed and illustrated. It explains the importance of different ideologies of representation—nondemocratic and

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Introduction

democratic—to the mediation of struggles over who should be represented, how, and why in parliamentary and extraparliamentary political institutions. How do we apply these insights to the three countries of this book where there are significant points of intersection and departure in the extent and nature of recourse to new MOPs? In chapter 3 it is explained that in Singapore, the Philip pines, and Malaysia legacies of Cold War political repression, reinforced by the impacts of economic globalization, have been conducive to the political fragmen tation of social forces seeking political participation. Consequently, strong inde pendent collective organizations and coalitions thereof have been conspicuously absent from formal representative party politics and civil society more gener ally. To the extent that this vacuum has been filled, it has tended to be by small, single-issue nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and a plurality of political identities, including in articulation with race, religion, region, and gender. Yet, there are also profoundly important differences to the ways that capitalism is organized and the interests most benefiting from these arrangements. Conse quently, there are variations in the nature and intensity of conflicts over the distribution of the benefits and costs of capitalist development in each country. Elite political strategies attempting to contain this conflict through new MOPs, and their effectiveness, also necessarily diverge. In particular, as specific concerns over rising material and social inequalities have mounted in each country, recourse to and the impact of consultative and particularist institutions and ideologies of representation are far from uniform. Consultative ideologies resonate strongest with the interests of technocratic politico-bureaucrats under state capitalism and authoritarian rule in Singapore, where state-sponsored participation has most proliferated. In the Philippines, private concentrations of wealth and power by capitalist oligarchs enable these interests to exploit electoral institutions and ideologies of representation, some times fused with particularist ideological appeals. Yet acute oligarchic political dominance also periodically fuels coalitions of liberal technocratic elites and middle-class NGO activists pursuing governance reform and community par ticipation, variously embracing or tactically exploiting consultative representa tion ideologies. In Malaysia, particularist ideologies of ethnicity, race, and religion are pivotal to rationalizing a coalition of interests between ethnic Malay political, bureaucratic, and economic elites. The primacy of ethnic Malay politi cal supremacy and related state patronage of a Malay bourgeoisie have rendered technocratic institutions and ideologies of consultative representation much more problematic for the Malaysian political regime. Nowhere has it been more emphatically demonstrated that capitalist develop ment and authoritarian rule can be v iable partners than in Singapore. Yet the part nership has faced challenges and involved creative new elite strategies to contain

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10 Introduction

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conflict. Capitalist development combining economic globalization and state cap italism had, by the 1980s, resulted not just in extended resources and powers of politico-bureaucrats across economic, social, and political spheres. There was also significant expansion of the professional m iddle class. Meanwhile, competitive pressures on labor and domestic business associated with Singapore’s niche in global manufacturing processes w ere exposing the limitations of established forms of political co-option. The P eople’s Action Party (PAP) therefore introduced new structures and ideologies of consultative representation to reduce the attraction of opposition parties and to bypass or control independent intermediary organ izations in general. This was a project of expanding the political space of the PAP state, as chapters 4 and 5, respectively, analyze through case studies on the in troduction of nominated members of parliament (NMPs) and then on new mechanisms for policy feedback and suggestions by the public. Introduced in 1990, Singapore’s NMPs are appointed by a parliamentary com mittee after receiving public nominations meeting specified criteria. The scheme reflected PAP concerns about rising electoral support for opposition parties, a pattern that appeared to be subsequently arrested or contained. However, rising material and social inequalities and questions about the environmental sustain ability accompanying capitalist growth would lead to increased opposition elec toral support by the turn of the century. NMPs nevertheless remain an integral and effective part of the PAP’s broader and evolving strategy of consolidating political fragmentation in order to organizationally and ideologically contain political conflict through consultative representation. That strategy includes the public policy feedback institution—the Feedback Unit, which was introduced in 1985 and renamed Reaching Everyone for Active Citizenry @ Home (REACH) in 2006—providing individuals and selected social groups opportunities for participation. Following the 2011 election, a new initia tive in state-controlled public policy dialogue also emerged—Our Singapore Conversation (OSC)—in an attempt to bolster the avenues for, and appeal of, consultative representation. Government policy adjustments to arrest its electoral drift were depicted by PAP leaders as informed by OSC feedback—not a re sponse to greater voter support for opposition parties. Interpreting a 9.8 percent swing back to the PAP at the 2015 polls as evidence of the success of t hese strat egies, the PAP has projected more expansive and diverse forms of state- sponsored and state-controlled public feedback. In the postauthoritarian Philippines, oligarchic elites have sought not to consolidate a cohesive and tightly controlled form of state power as technocratic elites did in Singapore. Their challenge is instead how to blunt reformist forces critical of informal networks of oligarchic power over state power. The new MOPs

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Introduction

that have emerged, though, are as much sites of struggle between reformers of dif ferent ideological orientations as they are for attempts to rein in oligarchic powers. Unlike in Singapore, the introduction in the Philippines of a Party-List System (PLS) of representation in congress involved democratically elected rather than appointed representation. Yet the PLS was, and remains, an institutional initiative for both containing and expanding the extent and scope of permissible conflict under democratic politics: a compromise by elites in the face of popular disen chantment with the rapid reassertion of oligarchic elite power following the collapse of the Marcos administration and authoritarian rule. As chapter 6 explains, elites looked to the PLS to contain the possibility of unpredictable pop ulist alternatives amidst widespread popular concerns about acute poverty and corruption accompanying capitalist development in the Philippines. Moderate and radical reformist forces, by contrast, hoped to eke out some influence within congress to air these concerns. Entrenched elite interests have generally prevailed in this struggle, exploiting the PLS to increase their representation and power in congress. Meanwhile reformist forces have politically divided through multiple small parties and policy foci promoted by the PLS. The tightened grip of oligarchic power over congress and the limits this places on economic and social reform help explain the emergence of new modes of ex traparliamentary participation in the Philippines. Poverty alleviation strategies of the World Bank and other multilateral aid agencies struck a chord particularly with select technocratic reformers in government and elements of the NGO com munity seeking opportunities for direct participation in development projects. With the 2010 election of Benigno Aquino III as president and the introduction of Bottom-up Budgeting (BUB), this direction was reinforced through popular participation in the selection of publicly funded local government projects to com batting corruption. However, chapter 7 demonstrates that BUB supporters dif fered over which civil society forces should be empowered, how much, and on what issues. Particularly contentious was the extent to which organizations rep resenting workers and peasants and advocating radical reforms were encouraged or excluded from participation. Significantly, one of the first decisions in 2016 under the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte was to abandon BUB. In Duterte’s pop ulist ideology, greater store is placed on his direct representation of the poor rather than on the building up of intermediary organizations, whether justified through democratic or consultative ideologies. Significantly, in struggles over representation in both authoritarian Singapore and in the Philippines, where there is more contested political space, consulta tive ideologies have been and remain integral to struggles over representation. This is despite the challenge elites face in both regimes of trying to manage or avert

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12 Introduction

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unintended consequences from promoting consultative ideologies and institutions of representation. In sharp contrast, though, these technocratic ideologies have not sat comfortably with the interests and racial rationale underlying economic and political regimes in Malaysia. Elites have thus been less a dept at depoliticiz ing conflict through new MOPs. This has been exposed with increased urbaniza tion, rising material inequalities, and intensified public concerns about state corruption accompanying capitalist deepening. To be sure, Malaysia’s Barisan Nasional (BN, National Front) governments have undertaken significant but failed experiments in consultative representation, most notably through the 1989–1990 and 1999–2000 National Economic Consultative Councils (NECCs). The NECCs—the main focus of chapter 8—incorporated a range of party-political, NGO, and civil society organization (CSO) actors to ad vise the cabinet on major development plans. However, the cabinet acted very se lectively on NECC recommendations, eschewing governance reform proposals that could compromise the discretionary powers and patronage systems integral to the political supremacy of the BN lead party, the United Malays National Organ ization (UMNO), and the promotion of an ethnic Malay bourgeoisie. By the end of the first NECC, popular expectations and hopes for reform through this new mode of participation had diminished. The second NECC confirmed this. There after, the institutional and ideological significance of consultative representation for engaging popular forces was substantially diminished, although it would re tain some periodic importance for managing intra-elite conflict over economic governance. Technocratic administrative incorporation of select experts into state nder President Najib to try and policy deliberations would also be explored u contain wider conflict and structural problems of the capitalist development model, but with no greater success. The failure of the NECCs increased the likelihood of alternative MOPs emerg ing to contest the limits of political contestation intended by the BN. This is ex actly what transpired, and in such a way that it was doubly threatening for the existing authoritarian regime—as chapter 9 explains. Not only would reformers focus on the need to ensure the democratic integrity of electoral institutions, but mass demonstrations would also become an integral alternative MOP for advanc ing this agenda. Most alarmingly for the BN, when the independent civil society movement Bersih (Gabungan Philihantaya Bersih dan Adil, Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections) emerged in 2007, it comprised new multiethnic coalitions of BN opponents and critics. There was also a push from various civil society and party political forces for the reintroduction of local government elections, dis continued in 1965 in favor of state-appointed councilors. Yet both the Bersih movement and the local elections reform coalition contained their own contradictions that made it difficult to forge a sustainable

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Introduction

ideological agreement on the purpose and content of democratic political repre sentation reform. Focus on procedural reform to electoral and related institutions could not resolve underlying tensions between liberal emphasis of meritocracy and political liberties on the one hand, and concerns about social and material inequality on the other. In the absence of an alternative social redistributive re form agenda, ethnic Malay support for Bersih, as well as for the reintroduction of local elections, remained vulnerable to the appeal of particularist ideologies and ethnic-based affirmative action policies of the BN government. Consequently, Bersih fractured in 2015 at the very moment that a corruption scandal involving Prime Minister Najib and a state development company generated political crisis and polarization. Individually and collectively, the case study chapters highlight how the emer gence, reproduction, and attempts to change modes of participation within the state can only be understood in relation to wider social conflict over what inter ests should be advanced or blocked through political institutions. They also show that ideologies of political representation are integral to the struggle between competing social and political forces over containing or expanding the space and nature of conflict permissible within those institutions. In particular, these case studies shed light on how and why a range of nondemocratic institutions and ideologies often enjoy support from various forces—within and beyond elites. These institutions may appear to be dysfunctional from a “quality of democracy” perspective, but certainly not to the forces and interests instigating and/or defend ing them. The conclusion returns to the wider applicability beyond Southeast Asia of the MOP framework adopted in this book. This includes its relevance for analyzing struggles over representation in established democracies of early developing capitalist societies and for understanding the rise and significance of populism, which, by definition, is less about reforming or creating political institutions— the particular focus in this study—than about bypassing them.

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Alcohol and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia: Public Health and Informal Networks

Anna L. Bailey

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: The Contradictions of Alcohol Policy

1. Feeding the State: Vodka from Tsarism to Communism

2. Soviet Policy Doublethink

3. The Parasites Feed: State Capture under Yeltsin

4. Regaining State Control under Putin

5. The Judo Gang: Informal Networks and Perceptions of Power

6. An All-Powerful Regulator

7. Beer: The New Pretender on the Russian Alcohol Market

8. The Brewers’ Nemesis in the Duma

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v i Contents

9. “Vodka Is Our Enemy, but Who Said W e’re Afraid of Enemies?” 100 10. From Illegality to Demography: Alcohol Policy Paradigms

116

11. The New Antialcohol Network

131

12. Medvedev and the Antialcohol Initiative

147

13. Alcohol Policy as Battleground: The 2011 Alcohol Law

158

14. The Campaign Is Over, but the Battle Continues

173

Conclusion: What Alcohol Tells Us about Russian Politics

179

Appendix 1: Methodology and Research Methods

187

Appendix 2: List of Respondents and Statements in the Public Domain 191 Appendix 3: List of Interview Questions

199

Notes 205 Bibliography 233 Index 000

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Introduction The Contradictions of Alcohol Policy

“You know just how serious a problem alcoholism has become for our country. Frankly speaking, it has taken on the proportions of a national disaster.”1 So declared Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in 2009, prior to launching a new government initiative to lower alcohol consumption. The media quickly labeled the new policy direction an “antialcohol campaign,” drawing parallels with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s notorious dry law in the final years of the USSR. Alcoholic beverage producers braced themselves for new restrictions on one of the world’s most lucrative alcohol markets. It seemed natural that Russia should have an antialcohol campaign. The old superpower was experiencing a demographic crisis: a falling population and male life expectancy at just sixty-three years. One of the country’s leading narcologists estimated that 26 percent of all deaths (30 percent of male and 17 percent of female deaths) were associated with alcohol.2 Case studies by Western academics had produced similarly horrifying figures. Forty- three percent of deaths in men aged twenty-five to fifty-four years in the typical Russian city of Izhevsk were found to be due to “hazardous drinking.”3

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2 Introduction

Another highly publicized study found that, over the period 1990–2001, 59 percent of all male deaths and 33 percent of all female deaths in the age group fifteen to fifty-four years were attributable to alcohol.4 It was logical that the Russian authorities would wish to take action to preserve the population and reduce excessive alcohol consumption. Or was it? At this point, history presents us with a problem. If the new antialcohol policy direction was a direct response to excessive consumption, why did it begin only in 2009 rather than ten or fifteen years earlier, when consumption was even higher? Digging a little deeper, we can begin to question some of the assumptions underlying this naive view of policy formation, according to which governments act to remedy self-evident problems in society. Why should we assume that a government has a vested interest in halting population decline or, indeed, that governments always act in the best interests of their people? Who decides which states of affairs constitute prob lems and how best to tackle them? What if the various actors within government are themselves divided on which policy direction to take? Political science provides the tools to analyze these complex f actors shaping the realities of policy formation. This book combines insights from policy studies, comparative politics, and sociology to provide a more nuanced account of the oing so, it directions that alcohol policy has taken in post-Soviet Russia. In d reveals the complex web of interests, attitudes, and influence shaping policy formation under the Putin regime.

The Complexities of Policy Formation

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The idea that tougher policies on alcohol were a straightforward result of the Russian authorities’ desire to tackle a population-level health crisis rests on a rather naive view of policy formation. In reality, policymaking is much more complex, combative, and haphazard than such a simplistic model would allow for. Public policy is formed through the competitive interaction of all those with an interest in that policy. A useful way to model this process is provided by the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) of policy formation. The ACF represents the competitive interaction of policy actors as forming a “policy sub-system.”5 Actors that share similar beliefs and policy preferences form “advocacy coalitions,” which compete within the policy subsystem to try to get their preferred policy enacted.6

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Introduction 3

Rather than consensus on policy within the state, we should actually expect disagreement. This is because the state is not a single, unified actor but made up of individual departmental bureaucracies that, by definition, have narrow sectoral interests (for example, finance, law and order, health). Dif ferent departments and agencies compete with one another to pursue policies that promote their own interests and departmental ideologies7 and to protect their policy territory or turf from encroachment by other bureaucratic departments.8 Governments and bureaucrats are thus neither neutral arbiters of other actors’ policy preferences nor benevolent guardians seeking to promote an agreed-upon national interest, but are actively pursuing interests and preferences of their own.9 Numerous examples of this phenomenon are presented throughout the book. For example, the antialcohol campaign of the Gorbachev era was undermined by departmental interests within the state. The current federal alcohol regulator, Rosalkogolregulirovaniye, is a law unto itself, and has been accused of acting to skew the market in favor of certain business interests. A major 2011 law on alcohol was subject to such interdepartmental wrangling that it took nearly two years to enact, as individual ministries fought bitterly to ensure their preferred policy stances w ere the ones adopted. The competitive wrangling of advocacy coalitions—including bureaucratic departments—is just one reason why high alcohol consumption does not automatically lead to a policy response. Another factor is how exactly that consumption is problematized. Social problems are not objective phenomena but rather are ways of thinking about and understanding certain real-world conditions.10 The same state of affairs can be viewed and interpreted in many different ways. Even the ways in which Western academic and medical communities have problematized alcohol have changed over time, from a focus on alcoholism as a disease in the immediate postwar de cades to a public health concern with average per capita consumption that emerged from the 1970s onward.11 Thus, viewing high alcohol consumption as a demographic threat is only one of many possible interpretations of that phenomenon. Indeed, public health is still a relatively new and developing field in Russia compared with Western countries—a legacy of its neglect by the Soviet regime.12 As chapters 1 and 2 show, alcohol consumption was problematized in various ways throughout the Soviet period, including as a challenge to state power, a public order problem, and a threat to economic productivity—but public health concerns were notably absent. Unsurprisingly, this legacy continued to shape alcohol policy in the post-Soviet era.

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4 Introduction

Policy responses to perceived problems are also shaped by the fact that policy space is limited. That is to say, a potentially infinite number of circumstances could be characterized as problems in need of state action, but decision makers have the time and resources to consider only a small proportion of them.13 Thus, as a very minimum precondition for state action on alcohol consumption, that consumption would need to be interpreted as a priority problem area by an influential policy actor. As chapter 10 shows, this was not the case in post-Soviet Russia u ntil at least the mid-2000s, partly because the transition from communism was bedeviled by a succession of acute political and economic crises.

The Ambivalence of Alcohol

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So far we have considered the policymaking process in general. But alcohol as a product has one fundamental attribute that affects the development of policy regulating it: the ambivalence of its effects. That is to say, alcohol consumption has both positive and negative consequences, and this results in mixed attitudes t oward it among both the general public and policymakers. This uncertainty is reflected in indecisive, uncohesive, and sometimes contradictory state policies. The ambivalence of alcohol starts at the level of the individual. It is well documented that alcohol consumption can contribute to a range of health conditions, including cancers, cardiovascular conditions, liver cirrhosis, and diabetes.14 But the balance of scientific evidence suggests that total abstention results in worse health outcomes than moderate consumption. There is a “well-established finding in the medical literature” that moderate drinking reduces the risk of coronary heart disease, and from middle age extends overall life expectancy.15 Alcohol can act not only as a relaxant but also as a depressant and has been implicated in suicides.16 At a societal level, drinking is linked with numerous aspects of communal well-being, including sociability, in-group identification, social rituals, celebration, relaxation, and the enjoyment of food.17 However, it is also associated with violence, crime, and other forms of antisocial behavior.18 This ambivalence of alcohol is reflected in public opinion toward drinking: the Russian opinion polls analyzed in chapter 9 reveal hugely contradictory attitudes toward it. Drinking is seen as a problem, yet robust measures to

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Introduction 5

tackle it are unpopular. It would seem that people can neither live with alcohol nor live without it. That alcohol consumption reaches into many areas of life means that issues related to alcohol are handled by a range of departments and levels of government, even when they are not explicitly recognized as alcohol issues.19 The state’s interests in alcohol can be categorized into four broad areas: fiscal (revenues raised for the exchequer from excise duty and other taxes); economic (production, trade, and inward investment); social policy (including health and demographics); and public order (crime and the maintenance of law and order).20 The wide-ranging nature of the state’s interests in alcohol means that alcohol policies tend to be highly differentiated across government structures. In 2009, regulation of alcohol in the Russian Federation was the responsibility of no fewer than seven separate ministries and departments.21 There is nothing exceptional about this figure: one study of British alcohol policy identified sixteen national government departments as having some responsibility for alcohol issues.22 Thus, state alcohol policies tend to be highly ambivalent in their aims and effects. It is often doubtful whether a single alcohol policy can be said to exist, as different sections of the state bureaucracy have different priorities, interests, and departmental ideologies and so often act in unilateral and contradictory ways.23 In particular, the exchequer tends to have an interest in high consumption due to the revenues generated, while law and order and health departments have an interest in reducing consumption due to the externalities it creates. This problem is not confined to modern states. The vodka historian David Christian noted that the conflict within the state between reducing consumption and increasing government revenues had resulted in “contradictory and ambivalent” alcohol policy in Russia since the seventeenth c entury.24 Christian was writing in 1990, just before the fall of the Soviet Union, but as w ill be shown throughout this book, these inherent tensions in state alcohol policy have remained present during the post-Soviet era. This brings us back to the task of explaining the initiative to reduce consumption launched by the Russian government in 2009. It turns out that this single policy development cannot be understood in isolation. Rather, it needs to be analyzed in the context of an ongoing history of Russian state policy toward alcohol, and Russian political economy more generally. The analysis contained in this book reveals the many ambivalences in Russian alcohol policy: the conflicting interests within the state, the effect of informal power

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6 Introduction

networks in shifting policy away from official goals, and the need to respect the Russian population’s own contradictory attitudes t oward drinking.

Overview of the Book

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For better or worse, the legacy of Soviet alcohol policy has continued to influence Russian thinking on alcohol policy throughout the post-Soviet period. One cannot fully comprehend these attitudes without understanding their historical roots. Throughout Russian history, alcohol revenues consistently provided a major share of the state’s income. How, then, can we explain the various points in history (1914, 1958, 1972, 1985) where the state (to a greater or lesser degree) chose to cut off a key revenue source by dramatically cutting the supply of alcohol? And why, having been passed, did these dry periods tend to be so short-lived? T hese issues are addressed in chapters 1 and 2. The newly independent Russian state’s surrender of control over the alcohol market in the early 1990s can hardly be considered a dry period. Indeed, it is widely regarded as the opposite—the lifting of controls and the dismantling of the state monopoly on alcohol flooded Russia with cheap vodka. But this development shared one important similarity with the fleeting Soviet dry periods: it again represented the voluntary sacrifice by the state of its alcohol revenues. Chapter 3 shows how, from 1993 onward, the dominant theme in Russian alcohol policy was the state’s attempt to regain control over the alcohol market that it so hastily surrendered in 1991–92, and thereby restore those revenues. But these efforts were severely undermined by a phenomenon of 1990s Russia that political economists have labeled “state capture”: private individuals, firms, and groups (including the mafiya) extracting enormous privileges, or “rents,”25 from the state due to its institutional weakness. Chapter 4 describes how a significant change in the Russian political economy took place around 2000, coinciding with Vladimir Putin’s election as president. State capture gave way to increased state control in the economy, as Putin’s government moved against noncompliant oligarchs and seized control of strategically important industries. The state holding com pany Rosspirtprom was formed to recover federal control over alcohol assets, a move that can be seen as part of President Putin’s reestablishment of the

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Introduction 7

“power vertical” (centralized federal control) in view of the high value of alcohol revenues to regional authorities. Yet formal state ownership of alcohol production assets was far from the only way in which economic interests and alcohol policymaking collided under Putin. Chapter 5 provides a case study of the complex kleptocracy in the Russian political economy. The interests in vodka production of some of Putin’s most high-profile cronies—and their perceived influence on state policy—are analyzed in the context of sistema, the informal network-based system of governance in Russia through which allies of Putin are rewarded with business rents.26 Understanding the interaction between the formal and informal aspects of the alcohol political economy in Russia is crucial to explaining the actions of the federal alcohol regulator Rosalkogolregulirovaniye (RAR) (chapter 6). Despite the enduring popularity of vodka in Russia, a new beverage has enjoyed a dramatic growth in popularity in the twenty-first century: beer. This development has had a huge impact on alcohol policy formation, with the struggle between the vodka and beer industries for market share in Rus sia giving rise to lobbying and counter-lobbying (chapter 7). A further twist in this tale is provided by United Russia Duma deputy Viktor Zvagelskiy, who represents a fascinating case study of an alleged “vodka lobbyist” operating at the highest levels of lawmaking (chapter 8). How much do Russians actually drink, and why are antialcohol policy measures popular in theory but not in practice? The difficulties in satisfactorily answering these questions are the subject of chapter 9. Chapter 10 looks at how alcohol has been constructed as a social problem in Russia, and why the large consumption peaks in 1994–95 and 2002–3 failed to provoke alarm among the ruling elite at the time, in spite of efforts by public health activists to problematize the issue. In the mid-2000s, a new small but influential antialcohol movement emerged: an alliance of key members of a civil society elite including the Russian Orthodox Church, Public Chamber, and public health professionals. Chapter 11 shows how this new elite was able to seize cultural authority over the definition of the alcohol problem and thus set the antialcohol agenda where previous attempts by public health lobbyists had failed. It is vital to the survival of the political superelite that they are seen to act in the national interest. Once the “alcohol as demographic problem” was in the public eye, this included taking action against drinking. This led to the launch in 2009

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8 Introduction

of a new antialcohol initiative overseen by President Medvedev, which is analyzed in chapter 12. Brewing executives working for companies that have major stakes in the Russian market, such as Carlsberg and Heineken, may legitimately wonder why rafts of increasingly restrictive legislation on the production and sale of beer have been passed by the Russian parliament. The commonplace explanation is that the government ordered such legislation as part of the so-called antialcohol campaign of 2009. However, this would be to fundamentally misunderstand the mechanisms of policy formation in Russia. The development and passage of the major 2011 law on alcohol regulation provides a pertinent illustration of this. The law did indeed implement many of the policies instructed by President Medvedev as part of the drive to reduce alcohol consumption. But crucially, the finer details w ere a perpetual battleground between the numerous policy stakeholders, and the final version impacted the beer industry much more harshly than originally anticipated. The stages of the bill’s passage provide a case study of how the alcohol regulator RAR seemingly worked in tandem with Zvagelskiy to push its preferred policies, and how antialcohol rhetoric was used to provide moral cover (chapter 13). Chapter 14 shows how, even after the passage of the 2011 law and the fading away of the alcohol problem from public discourse, the same fiercely contested policy b attles between advocacy coalitions have continued to shape alcohol regulation in Russia. I conclude by assessing how the case of Russian alcohol policy can improve our understanding of policy processes, and what it can tell us about Russian governance more generally. On the evidence provided in this book, merely studying formal institutions and policy channels is insufficient for a full understanding of public policy in contemporary Russia. Rather, the kleptocratic nature of the Putin regime means that analysis of vested interests and informal sources of power—and how they interact with formal institutions to produce real-life policy outcomes—is essential.

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The Smile of the Human Bomb New Perspectives on Suicide Terrorism Gideon Aran Translated by Jeffrey Green

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Contents Preface: Anna and 'Abed Glossary 1. Suicide Terrorism Revisited â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Introductory Notes 2. Accidental Monsters, Unlikely Heroes (A) 3. Accidental Monsters, Unlikely Heroes (B) 4. Anatomy of Suicide Operation 5. Passing - Overlooked Aspect of Suicide Terrorism 6. Middle Eastern Twist 7. Ritual Coproduction - Victimizer, Victim and Sacrifice 8. Research Strategy 9. Concluding Analytical Notes Afterword: Two Attacks on Our Moral Order Notes Index

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Preface: Anna and 'Abed <A>Macabre Intimacy Anna was fifty-four, a pleasant woman, nice-looking and honest. She enjoyed reading novels and poetry, was well-informed about world culture, and was liberal and dovish in her outlook. She had studied humanities at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was active in organizing artistic events, and translated films from English to Hebrew professionally. She was a friendly person but had met with disappointment in her efforts to form a permanent conjugal relationship. She lived modestly, in slight sadness. On June 11, 2003, Anna was returning home from a visit to her elderly parents. She boarded the 14 bus at the Central Station, on her way home to her tiny apartment in southern Jerusalem. Her friends knew that, despite her limited means, she usually treated herself to a taxi ride home. Apparently though, because of the heavy traffic, this time she was forced to ride the crowded public bus, which slowly crossed the commercial center of the city. At the second stop, on the edge of the public produce market, a young Palestinian man stood on the long line, pushed into the crowded bus, and, after a while, at exactly five-thirty pm, blew himself up with a charge of dynamite, intensified with nails and steel balls. The explosion took place in the main street of the city, close to a busy intersection and, along with the suicide terrorist, seventeen Israeli passengers were killed, and more than a hundred people were injured. Anna's charred and battered body, when it was extricated from the fire and fragments of steel, was hard to identify, and her death was announced to her relatives only a day later. Anna was a close family friend of ours. To this day a book of poetry by Yehuda Amichai that belonged to her stands in our bookcase. Anna greatly admired his work and was personally acquainted with him. After her funeral, my wife helped clear out her apartment and took the book to remember her by. For us those beautiful love poems will always be connected to the traumatic attack. Suicide terrorism has preoccupied me since then. The shock passed, and after it came pain and anger, and, in time, they, too, subsided. Only the mystery remained, and it is still unsettling: Who killed her? Why? What did they have to do with each other? Again and again my thoughts return to that bus on that horrible afternoon, concentrating on the aisle near the rear door at five-twenty-nine. Immediately after the attack, Hamas took responsibility for it. On its home page the organization published information about the human bomb: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Abed al-Mu'ati Shabana, who acted in the service of the Izz a-Din al Qassam Brigades. He was defined as a shahid, who had volunteered and was sent on his mission of revenge, to deal a decisive blow against the Jews. Afterward his mother was interviewed. She expressed joy and pride for his deed. The next day we all viewed the videocassette that was released by the organization for television broadcast, containing his will or testament, recorded before he went out on his assignment.

Still photographs of him were also released, showing him posing in firing position with an assault rifle and wearing a green bandanna, with the Arabic words on it, “There is no God but Allah.” Somewhat later a photo-montage was added to the collection, showing the living human bomb at the arena of the attack, as it were, while the rescue teams were still removing the bodies of the Israeli victims from the ruins of the bus. <Insert Figure 1 here> A few years after the attack, I tried to obtain more information about the man who had killed Anna. Below are some of the facts I elicited from the investigations of the security forces, which were once classified, from Hamas publications, from the Palestinian press, from the minutes of the trial of his handlers, as well as interviews with those involved in the event and its aftermath.1 'Abed was eighteen, dark-complected, solidly built and with a serious gaze. He was a student from Hebron at the local branch of the Palestinian Polytechnic College and grew up in the Tel-Rumaida neighborhood, which is adjacent to the activist Jewish settlement there – among the most extreme national-religious settlers. He was a fairly talented soccer player on the team that contended for the championship of the local league. Several suicide terrorists were recruited both from his soccer team and from its rival, the team of the Jihad Mosque.2 Researchers have taken note of this fact to demonstrate the importance of social networks in recruiting suicide terrorists.3 In an interview with Palestinian researcher his mother added: "I did not expect my calm son to do what he did. I thought he was going to bring homework exercises in order to prepare himself for the secondary school (Tawjihi) tests. He insisted that I will pray and ask God to make him succeed in his coming exam. I was surprised how he was able to carry out this operation. I don't remember that he ever entered Jerusalem. He used to staying at home."4 She spoke also of his love of sport. It might be possible to gain an approximation of his state of mind as he executed the attack from the testimony of a Palestinian with almost the same profile, who was caught somewhat earlier, just as he was about to commit a suicide terrorism in rather similar circumstances. He said, “The feeling is that you are floating in the air, flying..."5 'Abed's three handlers, who were later arrested and put on trial, provided the dynamite vest and guidance. Before he set out on his mission, they bought him a kippah (skullcap) and tzizit (ritual fringes) in a Jerusalem shopping center, to enable him to disguise himself as an ultra-orthodox (Haredi) Jew and meld into the mass of Israelis. He did not even arouse the suspicion of the security guard on duty at the bus stop. Bitter fate made Anna meet 'Abed. The explosion literally joined them together: their blood was mingled, their bodily tissues and clothing were interchanged, and

their limbs were fused together. Some observers maintained that their souls rose to heaven together in a blazing fury. The task of separating the fragments of 'Abed's body from the shattered limbs of his victims was so complex that it was hard to determine the final number of victims with certainty. There was a disturbing post-mortem intimacy between the attacker and his victims. Most likely something of the macabre proximity that was created between Anna and 'Abed in the immediate aftermath of the attack was also shared by them in the final moments before the explosion. Exactly what happened in the interval between 'Abed's boarding of the bus and his pressing the switch that also killed Anna? Only a few inches separated them. In the heavy crowding, did their garments brush against each other? Maybe he even put out a hand instinctively for a moment to help her keep her balance, as sometimes happens when a bus pulls out into the street, or else they might have been thrown against each other by a sudden stop. Sometimes the crazy thought sneaks into my feverish mind that, just before the explosion, with a sharp and sudden movement, 'Abed placed his arms around Anna, encircled her slender body, and hugged it tightly as he shouted, “Alla hu akhbar.” After all, this isn't entirely unlikely, and things like this have happened. I remember the later testimony of a young Israeli who was miraculously saved in a similar suicide attack by Hamas, less than a year before the horrible encounter between Anna and 'Abed (the 361 bus from Acre to Safed, August, 2002). Eyel, who was then twenty, was wounded severely in the attack and left blind and deaf. He cannot forget: “I was sitting next to [the one who later proved to be] the human bomb. When the bus stopped [near Mount Miron], I got up and walked toward the door. There were two people between us. When the driver opened the door, I heard him shout something [maybe “Alla hu Akhbar”]. I looked behind me and saw him standing and hugging one of the passengers, and then there was an explosion.”6 We will return to the attacker's embrace of his victim throughout the book. Anna and Abed almost certainly stood face to face. The police investigators determined that the explosive charge was belted to 'Abed's stomach and chest, and it is known that suicide terrorists face in the direction of their victims and approach them, to increase the murderous effect of the explosion. Perhaps their gazes met. Yes, their gazes. After all, those were days of gazes. In the rising tide of suicide terrorism that summer, everyone suspected everyone, examined everyone very closely, and feared lest the person beside them was planning to kill them, despite his innocent appearance.7 Several minutes had passed from the time 'Abad was swallowed up in the crowd of passengers, and for a while nothing happened. A community formed in the bus: at every stop the mutual trust among the veteran passengers was suspended, and they carefully inspected the new arrivals on board. Fear and suspicion

increased, and for a short time they dissipated, until the next stage of insecurity. Perhaps Anna surveyed 'Abed's appearance, and when she detected no suspicious signs, she relaxed slightly and trusted him. Would he betray her and her fellows on the bus, among whom a covenant of reserved confidence had been formed? Perhaps 'Abed noticed that Anna was alert and concentrating her gaze on his face and felt pressured and was impelled to shout “Alla hu akbar” (now she certainly knew an explosion was imminent) and activate the charge. And perhaps, only perhaps, he smiled at her. It could have been a mocking smile, the mockery of someone who knows everything about someone else's fate, and it might have been an embarrassed smile, the embarrassment of some apologizing for violating trust. A severely injured survivor of the Dolphinarium suicide attack reported that he clearly remembers the human bomb's smile (Tel Aviv, June 2001, 21 casualties).8 Once an Israeli border policeman attacked a man who was approaching him and killed him because something in his behavior aroused his suspicion. Indeed, an explosive charge was found on the man's body. In his testimony, the suspicious killer said, “He came toward me, put his hand in his pocket, and smiled. I immediately realized he was a suicide terrorist.” From the moment the human bomb with a false identity reaches his chosen target and mingles with the crowd in his target, until he finds the appropriate situation for blowing himself up, thereby revealing his true identity, some time passes, from a few seconds to long minutes, even hours. In that time it is likely that a sort of solidarity develops, or some interaction – usually unspoken – between him and his surroundings. This suspended and fictitious coexistence is probably laden with feelings and thoughts of each of the passengers about his fellows: fears, shame, hopes, various sorts of fantasies. Suicide attacks differ from each other, among other things, by the length of time between the arrival of the human bomb at his target – the crowded market or the busy restaurant - and the explosion. In retrospect it is relatively easy to estimate the time between the human bomb's boarding of the bus until his activation of the charge, by the number of stops that he shared with the other passengers. ISA investigators categorize terror attacks in buses by the length of the trip with the ticking bomb. Among local counter-terrorism experts, the Jerusalem record is held by Ja'ara, the suicide terrorist of the 19 bus (January 2004), who boarded it at a shopping mall on the southern edge of the city and exploded himself as it entered the center of the city, near the Prime Minister's house.9 In this respect, Anna's terror attack was near the official average. Members of the Israeli rescue forces who removed the bodies of the victims from Anna's bus and its surroundings told me that Abed's head was thrown far from the scene and remained intact (as frequently occurs to the head of human bombs). They could not help being fascinated by his frozen and petrifying gaze. They tried to

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decipher his expression and tended to think it projected lofty contempt. In response, one of the Jewish workers stuck his tongue out at the severed head. The thought of the exchange of gazes, before and after death, reminded me of the legend of the Medusa, a Greek myth that my mother told me when I was a child. In brief: Athena transformed Medusa’s beautiful hair into serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that gazing directly upon her would turn unwary onlookers to stone. Later Perseus was sent to kill her and bring back her head. He was provided with a mirror shield and warned that if he looked directly at her he would die. He accomplished the impossible mission of beheading the monster while looking at Medusa’s reflection from his mirrored shield thus avoiding her lethal gaze. Thereafter he used her severed head – still terrifying - to put his enemies to death. The Medusa's gaze has been widely discussed in the humanities as a representation of horror, and it has become a synonym for dread and cruel death.10 This mythological gaze is described as terror incarnate.11 Let us briefly consider three motives in the image of Medusa. First, she has a deceitful element. Her deadliness is hidden behind beauty and charm. She has a cunning double identity, since nobody expects her to kill. Similarly, Palestinian suicide terrorists pass as Israelis until they disclose their true selves by detonating the explosives concealed under their stereotypically Jewish attire. Second, the look of Medusa, so famous for its mesmerizing attraction, is not just inspiring terror but conveys the state of being terrorized as well. This is precisely the way it was ingeniously depicted by the master artists Caravaggio (1596) and Rubens (1618) who portrayed Medusa’s face as terribly startled and shocked. The killer knows he is doomed to be killed very soon. Medusa, as an archetype of the human bomb, is terrified no less than terrifying, both aggressor and victim. Medusa's look implies and causes death, but it also gazes upon death. Similarly, whereas the Israeli victims of suicide terrorism have seen death without knowing it, the suicide terrorist has seen death with acute awareness. Third, Perseus did not look directly at Medusa but at her reflection, and she looked at his reflection looking at her reflection. Thus, a closed system of mirror images was created: a loop in which images mirror each other ad infinitum. Who, then, is the viewer and who is being viewed? Who is the subject and who is the object – Medusa or Perseus, the aggressor or the victim – the human bomb or his targets?12 The Middle Eastern cycle of bloodshed has the same dynamic. Anna and 'Abed, the regional victims and aggressors are hopelessly caught in each other's lethal embrace. Neither has existence and meaning without the close and mutual relationship with the other. The tragic dialectic and morbid interaction between the Palestinian suicide terrorist and the Israelis he attacks hint at a solution to the mystery concentrated at the site of the explosion.13

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<A>Lacuna in Suicide Terrorism Studies The phenomenon of suicide terrorism has become extremely prominent in recent decades, throughout the world, and it has influenced our lives by sowing grief, fear, and disorientation. To this day suicide terrorism has significant influence on our minds, our habits, our policies, and our economy. Almost everyone has been exposed to suicide terrorism, either directly or through the media and politics. It has cast a shadow of dread and perplexity upon our lives.14 Against this background, quite naturally a vast publication industry has developed, producing books and articles on terrorism in general and on suicide terrorism, which is regarded as the most severe challenge for understanding and combating. The first wave of publications – which was both urgent, and, to a degree panic stricken – has died down. Now the time has come to take a retrospective look and to reopen the discussion. A significant portion of the literature on suicide terrorism is either journalistic15 or fictional,16 and it is possible, with caution, to glean vital information and stimulating insight from it. Other publications are more pragmatic, with no theoretical pretensions: intelligence surveys and political analyses that lead to proposals for preventing suicide terrorism, combating it, and dealing with its consequences.17 Along with many studies with operational potential, representing the interface between the universities, governments, and defense establishments, there are also examples of humanistic and philosophical discussions, mainly of the polemical and moralistic variety.18 Similarly, scholarly essays about suicide terrorism have appeared, some of which are ambitious, brilliant, and thought-provoking, though they are basically speculative and not necessarily based on reliable research.19 The more scientific literature about suicide terrorism naturally belongs to the field of political science, international relations and strategic studies, and also psychology, and, to a lesser degree, analysis of the social and cultural aspects of suicide terrorism. Meanwhile, there have been only the first stirring of anthropological and sociological interest in terrorism.20 It still lacks, on the one hand, a soft analysis, close to the field, of the ethnographic type, and on the other side, an integral theoretical framework. Most books and articles on terrorism are based on secondary or official sources, largely reports issued by counter-terrorism agencies, on the more or less authorized pronouncements of the leaders and representatives of terrorism, and on (Western) media reports.21 All these sources tend to be tendentious and distorted. Most of the publications that appeared in academic journals, especially in the social sciences, deal with particular aspects of suicide terrorism – analysis from the psycho-pathological,22 economic,23 criminological24 angles, as well as organizational studies,25 or communication studies26 – and there is an impressive repertoire of prominent studies that offer a comprehensive view of the phenomenon.27

Regarding the perpetrators of suicide terrorism â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the human bombs themselves and the organization for whom they acted, I have found an abundance of material, as well as on their political, social and cultural context. I have also found interesting material about the target community of suicide terrorism: the individuals, groups and institutions who are directly or indirectly injured.28 However, I have not found anything about the link between the two.29 In reality, of course, there can be no suicide terrorism without victims and no victims of suicide terrorism without an attacker. What is violence, if not a relationship between attacker and victim? Yet the study of terrorism and suicide terrorism tends to discuss each side separately, as if it were independent of the other. Suicide terrorism is inherently the outcome of the close contact between the two. Nevertheless, the literature virtually ignores the critical situation in which the attacker and the victim meet.30 Furthermore, the tendency of academic study to focus either on the precipitants of suicide terrorism or on its consequences has never been challenged. On the one hand, the literature looks at what preceded and ostensibly led to the attack (i.e. the human bombâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s psychological and social profile, his/her motivations and the organizationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ideology, his/her recruitment and indoctrination, the structure of the terrorist cell, the socioeconomic conditions that give rise to suicide terrorism, the policies and military actions that elicit it, and the culture that embraces suicide terrorism and praise the human bomb). On the other hand, the literature has examined what happens after the attack and as a result of it (i.e. state responses to terrorism including counter-terrorist measures, reorganization of the targeted group, the rehabilitation of the injured, post-traumatic syndrome, the media processing of the event, the ensuing public discourse on terrorism, and the formation of collective memory in both opposing communities). Academic studies do not connect these two bodies of knowledge. There are experts in pre- and postterrorism but none in what happens in between. The study of suicide terrorism turns away from the thing itself. In other words, studies of suicide terrorism deal with everything except the arena in which the attack takes places.31 However, that arena is in fact the heart of the phenomenon, and there, too, as I claim, are hidden the keys to understanding it. I was drawn to the arena, the site of the explosion at the time of the explosion, and its immediate surroundings, and this study focuses on it. <A>ZAKA I tried to reach the arena of suicide terrorism indirectly, by analyzing the testimonies of failed suicide terrorists, or of survivors of suicide terrorism. However, the results were disappointing. Interviews of jailed would-be human bombs elicited quite standard laconic confessions or the rote recitation of wellrehearsed slogans, both of which have been extensively documented. Recorded

interviews, clearly constrained by the censorship exercised by the leadership of the terrorist organizations or by its agents in prison, yielded little more than mere propaganda, or trivial – often miserable - life stories, without nuance or personal reflection. Thus, for example, many of the Palestinian prisoners who intended to commit suicide attacks strongly insisted that they regretted “not becoming martyrs.” It is difficult to determine how sincere they were in declaring vehemently that they would rather have died, for these are clearly formulaic declarations, part of their effort to cloak themselves in heroism, no matter what may have been the circumstances of their failure to accomplish their missions and of their arrest. The same holds true for interviews with the human bomb’s relatives and acquaintances. The familiar statements by the mothers and fathers of Palestinian suicide terrorists that they are pleased to have had the privilege of being the parents of a shahid, are of dubious credibility, though they are interesting in themselves, as evidence of the mood of the community and of the social pressure exerted at that time. Only a few family members dared to reveal, in secret, something of their deep sorrow for the loss, and sometimes anger at those who sent their sons to their deaths. My attempts to obtain insight into the essence of suicide terrorism from other informants, especially by talking with survivors of attacks, also produced only a limited repertoire of clichés. I might also have stood in the center of the city at rush hour and waited for a suicide attack. But this strategy would have entailed endless, boring hours of expectation, with virtually no chance of success. Of course, if, against all probability, I did manage to be close to a suicide terrorist attack, I would not survive to report about it. The danger of physical or mental suffering as well as statistical logic, and perhaps ethical reservations as well, make direct (participant) observation on suicide terrorism practically impossible. These obstacles can be partially overcome only through sophisticated methods of simulation, reconstruction, and proximation.32 The arena at the moment of explosion will probably forever remain enigmatic and necessarily elude the investigator. The scholar’s only recourse is a systematic study of the scene during the minutes immediately after the attack and the following hours. Such study will at least provide a foundation for conjectures. But how can this be accomplished? A curiously practical way of getting as close as possible to a suicide terrorism act, both in space and in time, is offered by ZAKA. Anyone who has viewed footage of a suicide attack in Israel will have seen bizarre bearded men busily working at the center of the gruesome site. At first their fluorescent safety vests are marked “medic,” but when they have finished evacuating the wounded and begin dealing with the dead, they turn the vests inside out. Now they display the Hebrew acronym, “Zaka,” which stands for Identifying Disaster Victims. Zaka is an organization of Jewish Ultra-

Orthodox (Haredi) volunteers, which has gained the monopoly on dealing with the bodies of victims of terrorism in Israel. It operates a network of a few hundred well-trained and well-equipped personnel throughout the country. These men can arrive at any terrorism site rapidly, offer first aid, and then turn to their central task—caring for the bodies in keeping with traditional Jewish respect for the dead. At the site of the attack they evacuate the corpses, collect severed limbs and organs, assign them to their bodies, mark the pieces, and pack them up. They search out and scrape up small pieces of flesh and tissue and soak up every drop of blood they can. Their purpose is both to identify the bodies and to ensure that all are buried in accordance with orthodox Jewish law. For the last several years, as Palestinian terrorism has waned, Zaka has turned its attention and resources to other forms of unnatural death, as well as to rescue projects. While most of its time and energy is now devoted to automobile accidents, suicides, and other routine tragedies, its work at the sites of suicide terrorism remains its peak experience. Recently some volunteers secretly admitted to me that they miss the glory days of the Intifada, the finest hour, so to speak, of the human bombs and those who deal with their bodies. Although terrorism has become a global phenomenon, Zaka, with its specialty of caring for the bodies of the dead killed in terrorist acts, is unique. While extensively covered by the Israeli and world media, it has been the subject of little systematic research.33 Zaka's work falls under the rubric of emergency services such as first aid and firefighting, and it bears some similarity to the work of the explosives experts and intelligence agents who hasten to the site immediately following an attack. Zaka can also be likened to agencies that deal with the less tangible and immediate consequences of terrorism attacks, such as social workers, psychologists, counter-terrorism personnel, and even clergy. Zaka is one more kind of “Terrorism Specialist.” 34 Such interventionist elements – the organizations that play a role in the aftermath of terrorist acts, must be included in any study of the phenomenon. They constitute an inseparable part of the scene of terrorism and have an important influence on its effects. A young Palestinian man brandishes an assault rifle in one hand and holds a Quran in the other. He is photographed against the background of the golden Dome of the Rock – this is the icon of the Middle Eastern suicide terrorist. A bearded Jewish man, wearing a skullcap, leans over a body lying in a pool of blood, among vegetable stands that have been overturned. He holds a plastic bag in one hand and pincers in the other – this is the parallel and complementary icon of the Middle Eastern suicide terrorist. In collective memory and especially in the visual archives of both parties to the Middle East conflict, alongside the human bomb, the Zaka volunteer stands out. Both in the Palestinian mythography, which glorifies the spectacle of suicide terrorism, and in Israeli mythography, which has not succeeded in repressing the trauma of suicide terrorism, we find the images

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of the ultra-orthodox men, gathering severed limbs, continually rekindling the nightmarish imagination of the people of the region. These two figures are champions of hostile tribes, priests of gruesome death who bring the macabre to center stage after it has been thrust to the hidden margins. Two breeds of fundamentalists try to impose their political agenda, mythical-historical precedents, and cultic norms from their holy books, and to bring the regional, ethno-national conflict down to a deeper, religious level. This is the bloody project both of the Hamas suicide terrorists and of the men of Zaka, defined as holy work by the societies that sent them. A brief warning against a possible misreading of my argument is in order here. No ethical conclusions may be drawn from emphasizing the closeness between the attacker and his victim, from pointing out the interdependence of the Palestinian who commits the violence and the Israelis who deal with the bodies he has murdered. Clearly, by the central place I give to Zaka in this book on suicide terrorism, and, furthermore, by juxtaposing the Zaka volunteers with the suicide terrorists, while pointing out the similarities between them and the reciprocity, even tacit cooperation between them, I do not wish to imply that human bombs and Zaka volunteers are morally equivalent. Nor do I wish to in any way minimize the responsibility and the ghastly murderous brutality of the former or to disparage the compassionate work of the latter. On the contrary, viewing the two as macabre twins would be wholly intolerable—and pointless— without recognizing the moral abyss that separates them.35 Nevertheless, suicide terrorism does bring the Palestinian terrorist and the Haredi Zaka volunteer together in a Gordian connection. It turns out that they are alike in some ways, and there is a two way relationship between them. I address their common ground and mutuality at length elsewhere.36 Suffice it to say here that their reciprocal association is not limited to mutual disdain and hatred. The human bomb and the member of Zaka are prominent figures in their communities, objects of admiration and emulation. Not only is there a similarity between a suicide terrorist and a member of Zaka, there is also a mutual awareness and relationship. Each of them appears as the dominant counterpart in the consciousness of the other and fills a complementary role in the other's repertoire of images. They are even fascinated by each other. In many of the suicide terrorists' testaments, they express clear awareness of what they expect to happen to their bodies after the explosion, and in some cases they refer explicitly to the way Zaka will deal with their body parts. In the videotape recorded just before he set out on his mission, a Hamas human bomb cheerfully addressed his parents promising they would be joyful and proud when “thousands of pieces of [his] body’s flesh disperse and are smeared on sidewalks and treetops, to be scraped up and gathered in plastic bags by pious Jews.”37 On the other side of the barrier, the Zaka volunteers carry photographs of the human bombs whose

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bodies they have treated in their wallets. They also speak about them a lot and say that they even dream about them. In addition to representing the target of terrorism in the Middle East, Zaka plays an active role at the scene of the terrorism attack itself. Although it responds ex post facto to the explosion, nevertheless it has significant input in defining the nature, status and imprint of the attack. With all due reservations, it could be said that Zaka is a partner in the Middle Eastâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cycle of violence. During the al Aqsa Intifada (2000-2006) I joined the ranks of Zaka unofficially to become a participant-observer in the suicide terrorism scene. I formed connections with the volunteers, I was included in their radio call-ups, and I rode in their ambulances. In that way I arrived at the arena of terrorism while it was still bleeding and smoking. In the course of my extensive field study of suicide terrorism, Zaka proved to be not only an ingenious and indispensable medium by which I could investigate the arena from close range in real time, but also an organic part of the arena that played an active role in the regional suicide terrorism scene. Zaka was at the same time a useful methodological tool and a fruitful heuristic medium. Not only did my membership in Zaka make first-hand observation of the scene possible, but Zaka volunteers proved to be clever, sensitive and original observers of the scene, providing authentic testimony and intelligent commentary about suicide terrorism. By means of Zaka I was able to penetrate the arena of suicide terrorism immediately after the explosion. My findings there provided the key for understanding the human bomb and those who dispatched him before the explosion. I will present one example here of this retrospective understanding, which I admit is somewhat tentative. According to the testimony of some of those who dealt with the mutilated bodies of suicide terrorists, their sexual organs were wrapped in rags and rolls of toilet paper.38 Just as with Muhammed Ata, the leader of the September 11 terrorists, it is clear that the thoughts of the Palestinians sent on a suicide mission by Hamas, were focused on that part of their body. In talk with Zaka volunteers this phenomenon was frequently discussed, and, as expected, it was also the subject of jokes. They could not help connecting it with the information they had about the Palestinians' beliefs in the promised union with seventy-two virgins after their death as shahids. Perhaps this is an indication of the prominence, ingenuousness, and concreteness of the suicide terrorists' conceptions of the paradise they would enter after the explosion. The information and explanation offered by Zaka shed light on factors that had been in shadow at the scene of suicide terrorism, and it gave a voice to the silent participants in discourse on suicide terrorism. As a witness and interpreter and especially as a vital protagonist in the arena, Zaka maintained a dialogue with the human bomb. Central insights offered in this book draw upon the unique encounter between the believing Muslim suicide terrorist â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or his

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Many details concerning this suicide attack are drawn from the interrogation of Abed's accomplices and their trial. E.g. Jerusalem Police Department protocol, July 2 2003; Hebron IDF military court protocol, June 19 2005. 2 Such as the two terrorists who struck a supermarket in Dimona (February, 2008). 3 Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger,”The Changing Nature of Suicide Attacks: A Social Network Perspective,” Social Forces 84, 4 (2006). Apropos of social networks and suicide terrorism, 'Abed came from the large Qawasmeh clan. Some members of this extended family are leaders in the Hamas movement in the area and involved in terrorism against Israel. Indeed, his cousin was also a human bomb, while years later, two other relatives murdered three kidnapped young Yeshiva students (June 2014). His mother said that "he felt great sadness when he saw the scenes of the armed conflict with the Israelis, the last of which was the martyrdom of his friend Hamza al-Qawasmeh who was studying with him in the same school." 4 Bassam Banat, "Palestinian Suicide Martyrs: Facts and Figures," (PhD diss. University of Granada, 2010) 291 5 Amira Hass, “Interview with a Suicide Bomber,” Haaretz, April 5, 2003 (Hebrew). 6 Reprinted in the daily Yediot Aharonot, January 2, 2015 (Hebrew). 7 Cf. Juliana Ocks, Security and Suspicion: Ethnography of Everyday Life in Israel ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 8 Vered Lee, "Homeless," Haaretz weekly magazine, April 3, 2015 (Hebrew). 9 A policeman, age 24, from al Arub refugee camp, sponsored by al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade (Fatah). 10 Cf. Adriana Cavavero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, (NY: Columbia University Press 2009). Medusa’s gaze has been discussed mostly by literary scholars, social critics, and psychologists. E.g., Marjorie Garber and Nancy Vickers, eds., The Medusa Reader (Abington: Routeledge 2003) 11 Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991) 12 "Influenced by Jacques Lacan many recent readers have interpreted Medusa’s horror as a kind of mirror stage, in which the gazer and the gazed are locked in a dialectic of mutual reflection.” Garber and Vickers, The Medusa Reader: Introduction. 13 Cf. Meir Vigoder, "The Story of the Head: The Suicide Bomber, the Medusa and the Aesthetics of Terror in Photography," Third Text 20, 3/4 (2006). 14 Note the distinction between Trauma and Secondary Trauma. 15 Two outstanding examples: Christophe Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2004); Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg, The Road to Martyr’s Square: A Journey into the World of Suicide Bomber (NY: Oxford University Press 2006). 16 E.g. Chris Cleave, Incendiary (NY: Knopf 2005); John Updike, Terrorist. (NY: Random House 2006); Martin Amis, “The Last Days of Muhammed Atta,” New Yorker April 24 2006. 17 E.g. Boaz Ganor, The Counter-Terrorism Puzzle: Guide for Decision Makers (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction 2005); Howard Russell and Sawyer Reid, eds., Terrorism and Counter- Terrorism: 1

Understanding the New Security Environment (Dubuque Iowa: McGrew Hill 2006). See also: The 9/11 Commission Report. www.9-1mmission.gov/report/index.htm 18 E.g. Ted Honderich, “After the Terror” Journal of Ethics 7, 2 (2003). 19 Notably, Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing. (NY: Columbia University Press 2002). 20 E.g. Atran, Scott, “Genesis of Suicide Terrorism.” Science. 299 2003; Mohammed Hafez, “Rationality, Culture and Structure in the Making of Suicide Bombers,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29, 2 (2006); Huseyin Cinoglu and Suleyman Ozeren, “Classical Schools of Sociology and Terrorism,” Eskişehir Osmangazi Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 11(2) ND. 21 Cf. Adam Dolnik, ed., Conducting Terrorism Field Research: A Guide (Abington: Routledge 2013). Esp. 188, 199 22 E.g. Jerold Post et al. “The Psychology of Suicide Terrorism,” Psychiatry. 72, 1 (2009). 23 E.g. Efraim Benmelech, Claude Berrebi and Estaban Klor, “Economic Conditions and the Quality of Suicide Terrorism,” MBER Working Paper No. 16320 (Harvard. August 2010) 24 E.g. Maria Alvanou, “Criminological Perspectives on Female Suicide Terrorism,” In Female Suicide Bombers: Dying for Equality?” Yoram Schweitzer, ed., (Tel Aviv: Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies Memorandum No. 84. 2006) 25 E.g. Assaf Moghadam, “Palestinian Suicide Terrorists in the Second Intifada: Motivations and Organizational Aspects,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 26, 2 (2003) 26 E.g. Matthew Bradley, "Terrorism as an Alternative Form of Political Communication," Political Studies Association (U.K.) Annual Meeting Proceedings, 2008 (Online) 27 A sample of major contributions to the study of suicide terrorism: Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge Ma: Polity 2005); Ami Pedahzur, ed., Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism (NY: Routeledge 2006); Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terrorism (NY: Columbia University Press 2005); Boaz Ganor, ed., Countering Suicide Terrorism: International Conference (Herzeliya: IDC 78, 2001); Diego Gambetta, ed., Making Sense of Suicide Terrorism. (NY: Oxford University Press 2005); Ariel Merari, Driven to Death: Psychological and Social Aspects of Suicide Terrorism (NY: Oxford University Press 2010); Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (NY: Random House 2005); Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (NY: Columbia University Press 2005); Riaz Hassan, Life as a Weapon: The Global Rise of Suicide Terrorism (NY: Routledge 2014); Mohammed Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs (Washington DC: US Institute of Peace 2006); Shaul Shay, Shahids: Islam and Suicide Attacks (New Brunswick NJ: Trsnsaction 2004); Meir Hatina, Martyrdom in Modern Islam: Piety, Power and Politics (NY: Cambridge University Press 2014); Hugh Barlow Dead for Good: Martyrdom and the Rise of Suicide Terrorism (London: Paradigm 2007); Martha Crenshaw, “Explaining Suicide Terrorism: Review Essay,” Security Studies 16 2007; Rashmi Singh, Hamas and Suicide Terrorism: Multi Causal and Multi Level Approach (NY: Routledge 2011); Mary Sharpe, Suicide Bombers: The Psychological and Religious and Other Imperatives. (Washington DC: IOS Press 2008); Apdesh Kumar and Manas Mandal, Understanding Suicide Terrorism: Psycho-Social Dynamics. (LA: Sage 2014); Forad Khosrokhovor, Suicide Bombers: Allah’s New Martyrs. (Ann Arbor: Pluro Press 2005); Jeffrey Lewis, The Business of Martyrdom: A History of Suicide Bombing (Annapolis MD: Naval Institute Press 2012); Assaf Moghadam, The Globalization of Martyrdom. (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 2008); David Cook and Olivia Allison. Understanding and Addressing Suicide Attacks: The Faith and Politics of Martyr Operations (Westport

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CT: Prager 2007); Eli Berman, Radical, Religious and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism (Cambridge Mas: MIT Press 2009). 28 There is a kind of division of labor among the authors. Most publications about the attacking side come from the fields of political science and psychology, whereas most of those who write about the victims are anthropologists. 29 Exceptional to this are the arguments about the connection between aggressor and victim in domestic violence. 30 A remarkable exception is Randall Collins’ book that seeks to understand violence in terms of the situation in which the attacker and victim meet. This is parallel to my call to concentrate on the arena, but different in essential ways that will be detailed later. Violence: Micro-Sociological Theory, (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2011). 31 Cf. Andrew Silke (ed.) Research on Terrorism: Trends, Achievements, Failures (London: Frank Cass 2004). 10. 32 On the difficulties of fieldwork in terrorism in general, see Adam Dolnik, “Conducting Field Research on Terrorism”. Perspectives on Terrorism. 5, 2 (2011): 3-35. 33 For an exception, see Nurit Stadler, Eyal Ben Ari, and Einat Mesterman, “Terror, Aid and Organization: The Haredi Disaster Victim Identification Teams in Israel,” Anthropological Quarterly. 76, 3 (2005). 34 Note, for example, the recent emergence of Terrorism Medicine specialty. 35 See Afterword of this book for elaboration of this point. 36 Gideon Aran, The Cult of Dismembered Limbs (In writing). 37 Mohammed al-Hindi, 21, exploded in bus #25 in Jerusalem, July 1993. Oliver and Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs' Square, 148. 38 This information has been confirmed also by one of my interviewees in Israel Institute of Forensic Medicine. However, another source casts some doubts about it. Note the particular items in Muhammed Atta’s will found in the aftermath of 9/11 that indicate his obsession with the treatment of his penis after his death.

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A Volume in the Series Cornell Studies in Security Affairs Edited by Robert J. Art, Robert Jervis, and Stephen M. Walt A list of titles in this series is available at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Unrivaled Why America Will Remain the Worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sole Superpower Michael Beckley

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Contents Acknowledgments 1. Why America? 2. The Pillars of Power 3. Economic Trends 4. Military Trends 5. Future Prospects 6. Implications for World Politics and U.S. Policy Notes Works Cited Index

Chapter 1. Why America? By most measures, the United States is a mediocre country. It ranks seventh in literacy, eleventh in infrastructure, twenty-eighth in government efficiency, and fifty-seventh in primary education. i The United States spends more on healthcare than any other country, but ranks forty-third in life expectancy, fiftysixth in infant mortality, and first in opioid abuse.ii More than 100 countries have lower levels of income inequality than the United States, and 12 countries enjoy higher levels of gross national happiness.iii Yet in terms of wealth and military capabilities – the pillars of global power – the United States is in a league of its own. With only five percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for 25 percent of global wealth, 35 percent of world innovation, and 40 percent of global military spending.iv It is home to nearly 600 of the world’s 2,000 most profitable companies and 50 of the top 100 universities.v And it is the only country that can fight major wars beyond its home region and strike targets anywhere on earth within an hour, with 587 bases scattered across 42 countries and a navy and air force larger than that of the next ten nations combined.vi According to Yale historian Paul Kennedy, “nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing.” The United States is, quite simply, “the greatest superpower ever.”vii Why is the United States so dominant? And how long will this imbalance of power last? In the following pages, I argue that the United States will remain the world’s sole superpower for many decades, and probably throughout this century. We are not living in a transitional post-Cold War era. Instead, we are in the midst of what could be called the unipolar era – a period as profound as any epoch in modern history. This conclusion challenges the conventional wisdom among pundits, policymakers, and the public.viii Since the end of the Cold War, scholars have dismissed unipolarity as a fleeting “moment” that would soon be swept away by the rise of new powers.ix Bookstores feature bestsellers such as The PostAmerican World and Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline; x the U.S. National Intelligence Council has issued multiple reports advising the president to prepare the country for multipolarity by 2030;xi and the “rise of China” has become the most read-about news story of the twenty-first century. xii These writings, in turn, have shaped public opinion: polls show that most people in most countries think that China is overtaking the United States as the world’s leading power.xiii How can all of these people be wrong? I argue that the current literature suffers from two shortcomings that distort peoples’ perceptions of the balance of power.

First, the literature mismeasures power. Most studies size up countries using gross indicators of economic and military resources, such as gross domestic product (GDP) and military spending. xiv These indicators, however, tally countries’ resources without deducting the costs countries pay to police, protect, and provide services for their people. As a result, standard indicators exaggerate the wealth and military power of poor, populous countries like China and India – these countries produce vast output and field large armies, but they also bear massive welfare and security burdens that drain their resources. To account for these costs, I measure power in net rather than gross terms. In essence, I create a balance sheet for each country: assets go on one side of the ledger, liabilities go on the other, and net resources are calculated by subtracting the latter from the former. When this is done, it becomes clear that America’s economic and military lead over other countries is much larger than typically assumed – and the trends are mostly in its favor. Second, many projections of U.S. power are based on flawed notions about why great powers rise and fall. Much of the literature assumes that great powers have predictable life-spans and that the more powerful a country becomes the more it suffers from crippling ailments that doom it to decline. xv The Habsburg, French, and British empires all collapsed. It is therefore natural to assume that U.S. primacy, too, is destined for the dustbin of history. I argue, however, that the laws of history do not apply today. The United States is not like other great powers. Rather, it enjoys a unique set of geographic, demographic, and institutional advantages that translate into a commanding geopolitical position. The United States does not rank first in all sources of national strength, but it scores highly across the board whereas all of its potential rivals suffer from critical weaknesses. The United States thus has the best prospects of any nation to amass wealth and military power in the decades ahead. For the foreseeable future, therefore, no country is likely to acquire the means to challenge the United States for global primacy. This is an extraordinary development, because great power rivalries have plagued world politics for millennia. In the past 500 years alone, there have been 16 hegemonic rivalries between a ruling power and a rising power, and 12 of them ended in catastrophic wars. xvi In the first half of the twentieth century, for example, when the world was multipolar, Germany twice challenged Britain for European primacy. The result was two World Wars. In the second half of the twentieth century, under bipolarity, the Soviet Union challenged the United States for global primacy. The result was the Cold War, a conflict in which the superpowers spent between 6 and 25 percent of their GDPs on defense every

year, fought proxy wars and fueled civil conflicts that killed millions of people, and brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Today, by contrast, unipolarity makes a comparable level of great power competition impossible and, thus, makes a comparable level of conflict highly unlikely.xvii <A>Not The Argument Before elaborating on the points above, let me be clear about what I am not arguing. First, I am not arguing that U.S. dominance is guaranteed or will last forever. The United States could easily squander its geopolitical potential. It could, for example, gut its demographic advantage by restricting high-skill immigration. It could allow demagogues and special interests to capture its political institutions and run the country into the ground. Or it could fritter away its resources on reckless adventures abroad. In addition, there are any number of exogenous shocks (e.g. a nuclear accident, natural disaster, or disease outbreak) that could disproportionately devastate the United States. The purpose of this book is not to argue that unipolarity is set in stone, but rather to make an educated guess about how long it will last based on present trends and current knowledge about why great powers rise and fall. Second, I am not arguing that the United States is invincible or all-powerful. There are more than 200 countries, 7 billion people, and 197 million squaremiles of territory on earth. The United States cannot be present, let alone dominant, in every corner of the globe. Weaker nations can “route around” American power, doing business and calling the shots in their home regions while ignoring the United States.xviii They also can “tame” American power by, among other things, denying the United States access to their domestic markets, suing the United States in international courts, bribing American politicians, bankrolling anti-American terrorist groups, hacking U.S. computer networks, meddling in U.S. elections, or brandishing weapons of mass destruction.xix Unipolarity is not omnipotence; it simply means that the United States has more than twice the wealth and military capabilities of any other nation. To turn those resources into influence, the United States will often have to collaborate with regional players. Third, I am not arguing that unipolarity constitutes a Pax Americana, in which U.S. primacy guarantees global peace and prosperity. Unipolarity implies the absence of one major source of conflict – hegemonic rivalry – but it allows for, and may even encourage, various forms of asymmetric conflict and domestic decay. xx The United States still faces serious threats at home and abroad. The purpose of this book is to clarify the scope of these threats, not to deny their existence.

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Finally, I am not arguing that Americans are inherently superior to other nations or that the United States is the most wonderful place on earth. I assume that people are basically the same all around the world, and I know for a fact that citizens of some rich nations enjoy a higher quality of life than the average American. My argument, therefore, is not that Americans are exceptional or that the United States is the greatest country in the world. Instead, I argue that the United States has been blessed by exceptional circumstances that all but guarantee that it will be the most powerful nation. One implication of this conclusion, as I explain later, is that the United States can afford to devote a bit more of its immense resources to improving the lives of its citizens. <A>Plan of the Book The plan of the book is straightforward. First, I develop a framework for measuring power and use it to assess current trends in the balance of power. Then, I develop a framework for predicting trends in the balance of power and use it to assess the future prospects of today’s great powers. Finally, I discuss the implications of my findings for world politics and U.S. policy. The Pillars of Power Chapter 2 defines power and explains how to measure it. I start by showing that standard indicators exaggerate the power of populous countries because they ignore three types of costs that drain countries’ economic and military resources: production, welfare, and security costs. Production costs are the price of doing business; they include the raw materials consumed, and the negative externalities (e.g. pollution) created, during the production of wealth and military capabilities. Welfare costs are subsistence costs; they are the expenses a nation pays to keep its people from dying in the streets and include outlays on basic items like food, healthcare, education, and social security. Finally, security costs are the price a government pays to police and protect its citizens. Needless to say, these costs add up. In fact, for most of human history, they consumed virtually all of the resources in every nation. Even today, they tie down large chunks of the world’s economic and military assets. xxi Thus, analysts must account for these costs to accurately assess the balance of power. To illustrate these points, I show that the rise and fall of the great powers and the outcomes of hundreds of international wars and disputes during the past 200 years correlate closely with variations in countries’ net stocks of economic and military resources – not with gross flows of resources. China and Russia, for example, had the largest GDPs and military budgets in the world during much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but both countries

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suffered from severe production, welfare, and security costs that condemned them to defeat at the hands of smaller but more efficient nations. After reviewing this history, I develop a framework for assessing the current balance of power. I also explain why China is the most potent challenger to U.S. primacy and, thus, why I focus on the U.S.-China power balance in the following two chapters. Economic Trends Chapter 3 analyzes economic trends for the United States and China. The main conclusion is that the United States is four to five times wealthier than China, and the gap is growing. China’s economy is big but inefficient. It produces great output but at high costs. Chinese businesses suffer from chronically high production costs, and China’s 1.3 billion people generate massive welfare and security burdens. The United States, by contrast, is big and efficient. American workers and businesses are seven times more productive than China’s on average, and with four times fewer people than China, the United States has much lower welfare and security costs. GDP and other popular indicators create the false impression that China is overtaking the United States economically. In reality, China’s economy is barely treading water as the burden of propping up loss-making companies and feeding, policing, protecting, and cleaning up after one-fifth of humanity erodes China’s stocks of wealth. Military Trends Chapter 4 analyzes the U.S.-China military balance, both overall and within East Asia. The results are stark: the United States has 5 to 10 times the military capabilities of China, depending on the type of capability in question, and maintains a formidable containment barrier against Chinese expansion in East Asia. In a war, China could potentially deny the U.S. military sea and air control within 500 miles of China’s territory, but China cannot sustain major combat operations beyond that zone, and the United States retains low-cost means of denying China sea and air control throughout the East and South China Seas as well as preventing China from accomplishing more discrete objectives, such as conquering Taiwan. The widespread perception that China is poised to dominate East Asia and close the military gap with the United States stems from a neglect of production, welfare, and security costs. My analysis takes these factors into account. I show, for example, that Chinese platforms and munitions are roughly half as capable as the United States’ on average; Chinese troops, pilots, and sailors receive less than half the training of their American counterparts and have limited operational experience and no combat experience; China’s

personnel costs are at least 25 percent higher than the United States’; and homeland security operations consume at least 35 percent of China’s military budget and bog down half of China’s active-duty force, whereas the U.S. military outsources such operations and their costs to civilian agencies. The U.S. military, of course, disperses its assets around the world whereas China’s are concentrated in East Asia. The United States, however, is involved in most regions by choice and can redeploy forces from one area to another without seriously jeopardizing its security. China, by contrast, has to keep most of its military on guard at home, because it suffers from twice the level of domestic unrest as the United States and shares sea or land borders with 19 countries, five of which fought wars against China within the last century and 10 of which still claim parts of Chinese territory as their own. Crucially, many of these countries have developed the means to deny China sea and air control throughout most of its near seas – even without U.S. assistance. In sum, despite much talk of the rise of China, the United States maintains a huge economic and military lead, and the trends are generally in its favor. For China or any other nation to catch up to the United States, they will need to grow their power base much faster than they currently are. How likely is that? Future Prospects Chapter 5 analyzes the future prospects of the great powers and shows that the United States has the best foundation for future growth. I begin by critiquing two theories that currently dominate discussions about why great powers rise and fall – balance of power theory and convergence theory. Both of these theories suggest that unipolarity will be short-lived. xxii Balance of power theory holds that weak states usually gang up on strong states and force a redistribution of international power.xxiii Convergence theory holds that poor countries grow faster than rich countries, thus rising challengers inevitably overtake reigning hegemons.xxiv I argue that these theories do not apply today. Balance of power dynamics are muted, because the United States is too powerful and far away for other major powers to balance against.xxv Until other countries catch up economically to the United States, they will be unable to mount a sustained military challenge to U.S. primacy. And because all the potential challengers to U.S. primacy are packed together in Eurasia, they are more likely to fight with each other, and seek U.S. help in these fights, than band together to oppose U.S. hegemony.xxvi To support this argument, I show that balancing against the United States has been sporadic for the past 25 years while bandwagoning has been widespread. Convergence theory, on the other hand, is underspecified. xxvii Sometimes poor countries grow faster than rich countries and sometimes they fall further behind. In the late-nineteenth century, for example, Germany, Japan, and the

United States rose relative to Britain whereas Austria-Hungary, France, Russia, China, India, and the Ottoman Empire declined. These and other historical examples show that convergence is conditional; it depends on additional factors that, so far, have not been incorporated into theories of international change. To address this shortcoming, I develop a new framework for projecting the rise and fall of nations. Drawing on studies from the field of economics, I show that sustained economic growth depends on three broad factors: geography, institutions, and demography. The ideal geography for growth is one with abundant natural resources, transport infrastructure, and buffers from enemies.xxviii The ideal government is one that is capable yet accountable, meaning that it is strong enough to provide services and maintain order, but sufficiently divided to prevent corruption and the violation of private property rights.xxix Finally, the ideal population is large, young, and educated.xxx After presenting the evidence linking each of these factors to economic growth, I use indicators of each to assess the future prospects of the eight most powerful countries: the United States, China, Russia, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and India. I find that the United States has, by far, the best growth fundamentals. Geographically, the United States is a natural economic hub and military fortress. It has enormous stocks of natural resources, more natural transport infrastructure than the rest of the world combined, and is surrounded by “friends and fish” (Canada, Mexico, and two huge oceans) whereas all the other major powers are surrounded by powerful rivals. Institutionally, the United States is the most democratic great power. The small and divided U.S. state does a poor job redistributing wealth, but it fosters entrepreneurship and upward mobility; spurs reform after policy blunders; and helps the United States suck up investment, technology, and human capital from other nations. Demographically, the United States has the most productive population, and its working-age population is set to grow during this century, unlike the populations of its competitors. Potential challengers each have several weaknesses. China, the only country that is anywhere close to challenging U.S. primacy, has especially dismal growth prospects. In the coming decades, China’s population will age faster than any society in history, with the ratio of workers-to-retirees shrinking from 8-to-1 today to 2-to-1 by 2040; its institutions fuel corruption, stifle entrepreneurship, and stymie reform after policy mistakes; its natural resources have dwindled due to overuse and pollution; and it is surrounded by more than a dozen hostile countries. Russia has vast stocks of natural resources, but its institutions are more corrupt and less effective than China’s and it has a declining and

extremely unhealthy population and a vulnerable geographic location. Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom have slightly more effective and less corrupt institutions than the United States (France lags behind), but they have small and shrinking populations and few natural resources. India will soon have the largest and youngest population among the great powers, but it lags behind the other great powers in virtually every other category. In sum, the United States has the most potential for future growth, in addition to an enormous economic and military lead. Unipolarity is not guaranteed to endure, but present trends strongly suggest that it will last for many decades. Implications Chapter 6 concludes by discussing the implications of unipolarity for world politics and U.S. policy. The most important implication is the absence of hegemonic rivalry. During the past 500 years, there has been a hegemonic competition between a rising power and a ruling power every 30 years on average.xxxi Seventy-five percent of these feuds ended in war, and even many of the “peaceful” cases were brutal cold wars. Today, by contrast, the United States does not face a peer competitor. As a result, there is less warfare in the world than in any period in modern history.xxxii Unipolarity, however, is not totally conducive to peace and prosperity. In the remainder of chapter 6, I highlight several dangers. First, unipolarity may undermine crisis stability between the United States and weaker nations. xxxiii U.S. military superiority could embolden the United States to stand firm in a crisis while simultaneously encouraging weaker nations to shoot first, before the United States can wipe out their offensive forces. This “use it or lose it” dynamic can turn minor incidents into major wars. I discuss how the United States can avoid such scenarios with China, Russia, and North Korea. Second, unipolarity will tempt the United States to fight stupid wars of choice in areas of little strategic value. xxxiv I explain where and when such imperial temptations will be most severe and describe ways to contain them. Third, without a superpower rival, American national unity may dissolve, and special interests may capture the country’s institutions and stifle reform and innovation.xxxv The analyses of U.S. institutions in chapter 5 suggest that polarization, gridlock, and corruption are already infecting the American system of government. I highlight these trends and assess various proposals to reverse them. Finally, unipolarity could undermine international cooperation on transnational issues, such as free trade, climate change, and nuclear nonproliferation. xxxvi As the world’s sole superpower, the United States is more

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capable of leading international coalitions than any other nation, but it also has less incentive to do so given its secure location and vast stocks of wealth. For the past 70 years, the United States has orchestrated multinational movements to expand free trade and check nuclear proliferation. In the coming decades, however, the United States could become a global power without global interests, turning inward while leaving others to deal with transnational problems.xxxvii Arms buildups, insecure sea-lanes, and closed markets are only the most obvious risks of a return to U.S. isolationism.xxxviii Less obvious are problems, such as climate change, water scarcity, refugee crises, and disease, which may fester without a leader to rally collective action. I discuss these threats to global security and explain why the United States can and should help address them.

Strauss 2016; World Economic Forum 2016. United Nations 2015; United States Central Intelligence Agency 2015; Humphreys 2017. iii World Bank 2016; Helliwell, Layard, and Sachs 2016. iv United Nations University International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (UNU-IHDP) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) 2014; National Science Board 2016; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 2017. v “The Global Forbes 2000,” http://www.forbes.com/global2000/; Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, “Academic Ranking of World Universities,” http://www.shanghairanking.com. vi U.S. Department of Defense 2015; Brooks and Wohlforth 2015/16. vii Kennedy 2002, 12. viii For works that challenge this conventional wisdom, see Brooks and Wohlforth 2015/16; Nye 2015; Christensen 2015; Zeihan 2015; Joffe 2014; Lieber 2012; Kagan 2012; Beckley 2011/12; Norrlof 2010; Johnston and Chestnut 2009. ix Krauthammer 1990/91; Waltz 1993; Layne 1993; Huntington 1999. x Zakaria 2012; Rachman 2017. See also, Allison 2017. xi National Intelligence Council 2017; 2012; 2008. xii “Top News Stories of the 21st Century,” Global Language Monitor, http://www.languagemonitor .com/top-news/bin-ladens-death-one-of-top-news-storiesof-21th-century/. xiii Pew Research Center 2016. xiv For a few of many examples, see Allison 2017; Rachman 2017; National Intelligence Council 2012; Subramanian 2011. xv For seminal works, see Gilpin 1981; Kennedy 1987; Layne 1993; Modelski 1978. xvi Allison 2017. xvii Wohlforth 1999. xviii Barma, Ratner, and Weber 2014; Zakaria 2012. xix Walt 2005. i

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Monteiro 2014. Morris 2010. xxii Layne 1993; Gilpin 1981. xxiii Waltz 1979. xxiv Gerschenkron 1962; Baumol 1986. For applications of the theory to world politics, see Subramanian 2011; Layne 1993; Modelski 1978; Kennedy 1987; Giplin 1981. xxv Walt 1987; Wohlforth 1999; Levy and Thompson 2010; Mearsheimer 2014a. xxvi Wohlforth 1999; Brooks and Wohlforth 2008; Walt 2005; Pape 2005; Lieber and Alexander 2005. xxvii Pritchett 1997; Rodrik 2013; Sharma 2016a. xxviii Mitton 2016; Zeihan 2015; McCord and Sachs 2013; Gallup, Sachs, and Mellinger 1999. On natural resources, see Brooks and Kurtz 2016; Wrigley 2010; Allen 2009a; Pomeranz 2000; Wright and Czelusta 2004. On transport infrastructure, see Emran and Hou 2013; Storeygard 2016; Zeihan 2015; Redding and Turner 2014; Limao and Venables 1999; Romer 1996; Rappaport and Sachs 2003. On buffers, see Walt 1987; Mearsheimer 2014a, 114-128; Levy and Thompson 2010. xxix Acemoglu and Johnson 2012; Acemoglu et al 2015; Beaulieu, Cox, and Saiegh 2012; Schultz and Weingast 2003; Friedberg 2000; Haggard and Tiede 2010. xxx On population age, see Sharma 2016c; Bloom, Canning, and Sevilla 2003. On health, see United Nations University International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change and United Nations Environment Programme 2014; Strittmatter and Stunde 2013; Lopez-Casasnovas, Rivera, and Currais 2005; Carstensen and Gundlach 2006. On education, see Becker, Hornung, and Woessman 2011; Goldin and Katz 2010, chap. 1. xxxi Allison 2017. xxxii Jervis 2002. xxxiii Monteiro 2014; Goldstein 2013; Christensen 2015, chap. 4. xxxiv Jervis 2003; Jervis 2006; Betts 2012; Snyder 2003; Kennedy 1987; Gilpin 1981. xxxv Walt 2016; Desch 1996. xxxvi Christensen 2015, chap. 5. xxxvii Zeihan 2017. xxxviii Brooks and Wohlforth 2016; Lieber 2016; Brands 2015. xx

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