Fall 2018 Edition

Exclusive: A Conversation with the Former CIA Director of Congressional Affairs

Fall 2018

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS REVIEW

POWERHOUSES OF ASIA Agni-V: India’s Nuclear Missile Development

Climate, Economics, the Bhutanese Carbon Sink

Xinjiang’s Journey to a Surveillance State

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Editor’s Note: We are so excited to introduce you to the 21st issue of the International Relations Review and celebrate a new year in our roles as Editors-in-Chief.

Since the inception of the IR Review, there has been a particular fascination with the quickly developing nations of Asia among our submission pool. China in particular captures the international affairs writer’s deep interests: we inevitably turn away several articles each semester in the interest of preserving our diversity. This semester, however, we decided to recognize the strides that these nations have made in the international relations arena in the past year – from the legalization of gay sex in India to the expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative in China to the reform of decades old policy in Saudi Arabia, just to name a few – and dedicate the Fall 2018 issue to the powerhouses of Asia. Largely labeled “developing nations” in post-colonial form, these nations are showing the world just how quickly, effectively, and creatively they can indeed develop.

We are looking ahead to a changing balance in world power and look forward to following these nations as they continue to tackle their many challenges and pave new paths for the rising powerhouses of the “developing world.”

03 Climate & Science 06 Climate, Economics, and the Bhutanese Carbon Sink 09 Our Blue Blooded Angels: Global Medicine and the Horseshoe Crab

12 Human Rights 14 Xinjiang’s Journey to a Surveillance State

18 The Right to Inclusion: Finding a Place for Women in the Syrian Peace Process 21 Linguistic Repression: Forgotten Examples of the Past to Inform the Future 25 “Dear Megumi”: The Abductions That Affect Japanese Diplomacy

Fall 2018

28 Interview

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CONTENTS

28 Germany, Cyber Espionage & The Future: A Conversation with Joseph Wippl, Former CIA Director of Congressional Affairs

42 Diplomacy

44 Unattainable Peace in Kashmir

32 Economics

34 China in the Middle: Hukou Reform Under Threat of Economic Downturn

48 The Future of Somaliland’s Nascent Democracy 51 Agni-V: India’s Nuclear Missile Development 54 Saudi Arabia’s Move Toward Nuclear Weapons 58 The Suidlander Connection: South Africa’s Land and Language Wars

39 Currency Collapse in Turkey: What NATO Means for the Lira

62 Editorials 62 A Post-Colonial Reality Check 64 A Dose of Digital Diligence

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CLIMATE & SCIENCE

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Fall 2018

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Climate, Economics, and the Bhutanese Carbon Sink

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Our Blue Blooded Angels: Global Medicine and the Horseshoe Crab

Photo by Rebecca Giovannetti

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Climate, Economics, and the Bhutanese Carbon Sink Damian Walsh

The world in which we live is progressive, global and interconnected. As a result, the events and problems in one part of the world affect the wider human community. The small Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, nestled between India and China in the Himalayas, is seldom mentioned in international politics. Bhutan secluded itself from the international scene for centuries, guarding its sacred traditions and culture with great care. Only very recently did it begin to slowly open up to globalization. Its temples silhouetted against dense expanses of jungles between stunning mountain landscapes have become an attraction for tourists and soulsearches alike. People who gaze upon the country’s preserved natural beauty often say it feels as though there’s a sort of magic in the air. Perhaps not magic, but there is something quite special about the country other than its culture.

Bhutan is the only carbon negative country in the world, with its sprawling mountain forests absorbing not just all the carbon produced domestically, but also some of the excess greenhouse gasses produced by its neighboring countries. It’s no small feat. In the wider context, several other countries have pledged to eventually achieve carbon neutrality, though none have achieved that goal.

Bhutan’s status as the only carbon negative country on the planet has been slowly put into harm’s way as their economy begins to liberalize and open itself to a more global scale. To be clear, this is not an isolationist’s treatise, but rather anexploration of the relationship between the changing economy of Bhutan and the environment therein.

Cultural interaction, commerce, and global connectivity offer benefits for those involved; it would be unproductive to ignore

the merits of expanding economies.

Hotels, coffee shops, and restaurants have started emerging in urban centers as tourism increases in the region, which has led to increased urbanization that is slowly encroaching upon Bhutanese forestry and culture. This raises the question as to whether the increased economic productivity is worth the environmental cost. Therefore, it is prudent to analyze if this phenomenon is simply a cost of expanding global economic prospects and if carbon negativity is a mutually exclusive end.

There exists, of course, a multitude of factors that influence the sustainability of Bhutanese carbon negativity. Bhutan, in 2008, amended its constitution to specifically include environmental provisions that are meant to protect its natural resources and forests. Under Article Five of the Bhutanese Constitution, the

Photo by Natalie Carroll

Fall 2018 “The Government shall ensure that, in order to conserve the country’s natural resources and to prevent degradation of the ecosystem, a minimum of sixty percent of Bhutan’s total land shall be maintained under forest cover for all time.” Presently, approximately 71% of Bhutanese land is made up of forest cover, consisting of more than an estimated 800 million trees which constitute Bhutan’s carbon sink. The relatively small population paired with the implementation of pro-environmental policy has allowed Bhutan to attain its status as carbon negative. Other countries with larger populations such as Finland have similar percentages of forestry, but emit much more carbon dioxide per capita. Finland, which has pledged to be entirely carbon neutral by 2045, emits 6.7 times more carbon per capita compared to Bhutan. However, this phenomena can be correlated to the economic output and industrialization of Finland in comparison to Bhutan; Finland is highly industrialized and more involved in the global free market than Bhutan. If the government of Finland follows its “Climate-Smart Day-to-Day Living” plan, though, this will allow it to achieve its planned neutrality while maintaining its global role.

However, it is unclear whether that goal will be met within the time period designated. Humanity, it would seem, is working against the proverbial clock in the race to prevent long-term climate related disaster.

Globally, a combination of deforestation , the burning of fossil fuels, and agricultural processes have exacerbated climate change. In the twenty-eight years since 1990,

7 deforestation has claimed an area approximately the size of South Africa.

These human factors that have catalyzed climate change over the past century now threaten smaller nations in areas vulnerable to natural disasters caused by climate change. Island nations, such as Kiribati, are already being

“There is something quite special about the country other than its culture” affected by sea level rise caused by melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Climate change is an interconnected global crisis. Human beings are actively being displaced from the lowlying atolls of Kiribati in the Pacific Ocean, but the effects are not localized. Inhabitants of one island must seek refuge on another, creating logistical issues of space in places like Fiji. As time goes on, these disasters can only be expected to increase in frequency and intensity.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with current emissions remaining unchanged, humanity has less than fifteen years before the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is exceeded. At which point, the effects of climate change will be almost irreparable.

The interconnected nature of the world means that the effects of climate change are not confined to sole nations. Extreme weather

and natural disasters intensified by global climate change pose a challenge for connected or neighboring parts of the world. The Himalayas too have been suffering the consequences of climate change, and Bhutan is no exception. Melting glacial formations have created new rivers which are prone to flooding farms and small towns in the region.

The changing ecology can disrupt existing ecosystems and ultimately displace human populations.

Humanity is at a critical junction in its history. As UN SecretaryGeneral António Guterres said in remarks made on September 10th, 2018, “Climate change is the defining issue of our time – and we are at a defining moment. We face a direct existential threat.” The Secretary-General’s remarks are not meant to be alarmist or overzealous, but rather an assessment of the state of the world. There is no escaping the reality at hand and to simply deny that humanity has a role in its future is an unproductive way of addressing the perennial problem that climate change will produce for not just small nations but for each and every human being on this earth.

This all, of course, relates back to the growing economy of Bhutan.The solution, or rather the impetus of finding a solution to the climate crisis is, at its heart also an economic issue. According to a 2017 Renewables Global Status Report, the world invested approximately 279.8 billion American dollars in renewable power that year. To be clear, that is only one aspect of the sector, which is still emerging in some parts of the world, and the growth of renewables. The growth of these sectors represent an economic incentive to solve the

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8 issue of climate change. In a report entitled “Fossil Fuels,” Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, writers for Our World in Data, an organization geared towards expressing statistical changes in the modern world, note, “The world must therefore balance the role of energy in social and economic development with the need to decarbonize, reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, and transition towards lower-carbon energy sources.” Bhutan, being nestled between two of the world’s largest polluters, China and India, stands counterpoise to its neighbors, and represents something to which the rest of the world can strive. As Bhutan slowly opens itself to the world, it becomes a larger influence

on the global conversation about climate change.

From Kyoto to Paris, nations across the globe have united to attempt to forge a sustainable path forward, but these plans have fallen victim to politicization and rely on the goodwill of many nations fulfilling their obligations.

Someday, that may help mitigate the consequences of climate change. In the short term, though, there is no panacea for the environmental problems humanity has created for itself, it is only through serious global coordination that the climate crisis will be solved.

Bhutan serves as a reminder of the serene beauty that comes with the conservation of the natural world.

As global temperatures continue to rise and ice sheets continue to melt, the environment of Bhutan and the wider world will continue to be imperiled. It is clear that global commerce and smart environmental policy can coexist, and even thrive, when executed with care. As with most issues, there is a careful nuance that should be observed in determining the future of the global economy and human race. If Bhutan is any indication, it is entirely possible to strike a balance between globalization and environmental protection, which inspires at least some hope for the future of the planet.

Photo by Natalie Carroll

Fall 2018

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Our Blue Blooded Angels:

Global Medicine and the Horseshoe Crab Rachel Petherbridge

Photo by Natalie Carroll

It’s a full moon in early summer at the Delaware Bay and millions of horseshoe crabs have washed ashore. Their intention?

To spawn the next generation of horseshoe crabs through a massive night of mating rituals. The intention of the scientists walking along the beaches? They are looking to steal these frolicking crabs, transport them thousands of miles away, and bleed them for a third of their baby blue blood. The crabs that survive are released back into the ocean. They are dropped off far from their origin to ensure that they are not mistakenly bled multiple times. The extracted blood is then shipped to laboratories across the southern United States where it is transformed into one of the world’s most important pharmaceutical products.

Horseshoe crabs, at 450 million years old, are living fossils.

Their name derives from their

appearance, being flat and circular, similar to that of a horseshoe.

There are currently four species of these crabs worldwide: the American Horseshoe crab, (Limulus polyphemus), which occupies shores all along the east coast of the United States and Mexico, and the three Southeast Asian species, (Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda, Tachypleus tridentatus, and Tachypleus gigas). When horseshoe crabs are stolen from their night mating rituals on the coasts of the United States and Asia, they are transported to facilities where they are scrubbed clean of barnacles and inserted with stainless steel needles through a weak spot on their shell to draw blood. Once harvested, their amoebocytes, a type of blood cell, are burst open to extract a protein called coagulogen. This elusive protein holds the horseshoe crab’s super power. When in the presence of bacterial endotoxins

(or bits of dead bacteria) at concentrations as low as 1 part per trillion, coagulogens increase the viscosity of their medium to form a gel around the endotoxins stable at room temperature. The burstcell mix containing these proteins is marketed as either Limulus or Tachypleus amoebocyte lysate (LAL or TAL respectively), depending on the species of crab the protein was taken from.

This blue blood is gold when it comes to bacterial endotoxin detection. To put their demand in perspective, in 2017, over $390 billion worth of medical devices and $1.1 trillion in pharmaceuticals were sold worldwide. Almost every device or medication that directly contacts the bloodstream must be tested for bacterial endotoxins prior to marketing. This means that approximately 25% of the global medical device market is dependent on LAL/TAL for endotoxin

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10 detection prior to marketing. This means that approximately 25% of the global medical device market is dependent on LAL/TAL for endotoxin detection, ranging from pacemakers to catheters. Although vaccines are only a small portion of the total pharmaceutical market, their global sales are expected to reach $100 billion by 2025. Every individual vaccine batch worldwide must be tested for bacterial endotoxins. Without the horseshoe crab, the global pharmaceutical market would collapse.

Prior to approval of LAL/ TAL for bacterial endotoxin testing (BET), we were already well aware of the dangers of ignoring potential endotoxin contamination. Doctors from as early as the 19th century recorded cases of “injection fever” where patients given sterile, hypodermic shots would still develop fever, leading to sepsis and death.

The Rabbit Pyrogen Test (RBT) became the standard for testing for bacterial endotoxins. The test involves injecting pharmaceuticals into rabbits and checking their temperature every 30 minutes for three hours, looking for signs of fever to indicate possible endotoxin contamination. In addition to being a clear affront to medical ethics, this test was also slow and expensive.

When LAL/TAL was approved as a more accurate and cheaper test, much of the industry quickly adopted it despite costing $15,000 per quart. Thirty-five years after its introduction, LAL/TAL is still the cheapest and most accurate test on the market.

In response to the demand for the lucrative LAL/TAL test, an industry has sprung up around capturing and bleeding horseshoe

crabs, for which specific regulations and standards surrounding horseshoe crab harvesting have been instituted. The United States, for instance, has tight regulations on bleeding these crabs for their coagulogens. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), a body that promotes

“This blue blood is gold when it comes to bacterial endotoxin detection.” near-shore fish conservation in Atlantic states, is in charge of implementing an Interstate Fishery Management Plan (FMP) for the horseshoe crab. In 1998, a biomedical mortality threshold was established in the FMP to prevent the over-harvesting of crabs, which also allowed the Management Board of the ASMFC to take action in scenarios where the threshold is exceeded. The FMP has proved valuable according to a 2013 stock assessment, which found that the ailing horseshoe crab population had increased along the Atlantic seaboard. Another stock assessment is expected in Spring 2019.

Nevertheless, the horseshoe crab population is still significantly less in 2018 than in the early 1990s, before the crabs experienced a sharp decline in population. While legal harvesting operations respect horseshoe quotas, many horseshoe crabs are also accidentally lost to trawling operations and or get stuck in water intake pipes for shoreline

power plants. Further, horseshoe mortality during bleeding has only been slightly mitigated. With a third of an individual crab’s blood taken during a bleeding, crab mortality during such procedures ranges between 8-15%. Most significantly, destructive human activities such as climate change, habitat degradation, habitat pollution, and accidental introduction of invasive species have significantly impacted the horseshoe crab population. Thus, while the horseshoe crab population is now stable, it is still classified on the Red List as “vulnerable,” and global demand for horseshoe crab blood in support of the pharmaceutical industry will only increase in the future.

Where the U.S. effort to protect their horseshoe crabs is imperfect, Asian efforts are nonexistent. Tachypleus horseshoe crabs have mating grounds in over ten Southeast Asian countries and in India, each with different economic and environmental protections for the horseshoe crab.

In general, however, Southeast Asian governments have not placed the same amount of emphasis on protecting the horseshoe crab as the U.S., despite their current and future importance in biomedical industry. In mainland China and southeast Asia, horseshoe crabs are predominantly harvested in pairs and bled to death; the dry bodies are then sold to secondary markets for food or fish bait. Further, Asian horseshoe crab breedings grounds have been all but destroyed through coastal development and other anthropogenic activities.

Unfortunately, there is a severe lack of information on the exact locations of horseshoe crab breeding grounds,

Fall 2018 which complicates conservation efforts. China, in particular, is a black hole of information regarding the horseshoe crab. While we know general breeding ground locations and conservation legislation (or lack thereof) for all the other Southeast Asian countries, there is no information available on Chinese regulation involving the horseshoe crab. Although it is estimated that Asian horseshoe crab species are declining faster than their Limulus cousins, the lack of information on their population sizes and habitats make it so that they are simply categorized under the Red List as “data deficient.”

Currently, China is the only producer of TAL, and the TAL test is primarily used in China, Russia, India, South Korea and Japan.

Chinese international pharmaceutical companies that sell worldwide still use the global standard, LAL for bacterial endotoxin testing; however, with 1.3 billion people, China has a sizeable health care market such that reliance on TAL over LAL is projected to increase. In the meantime, the growing biomedical industry is placing increased pressure on the American horseshoe crab. While shortages are not dire as of yet, the E.U.’s European Pharmacopoeia Commission have both reduced the types of devices and medicines that must be subjected to BETs, along with the concentration of LAL/ TAL needed to perform a test.

Clearly, government intervention will not solely save the horseshoe crabs. Fortunately, there are numerous conservation efforts from both biomedical companies reliant on LAL/TAL and nonprofit movements. The

11 U.S. based Ecological Research and Development Group is a nonprofit whose sole focus is on the conservation of horseshoe crab species. Since their founding in 1995, they have created a number of programs revolving around education and individual preservation of the American horseshoe crab. One program in particular, known as Just Flip ‘EmTM, encourages beach goers to flip stranded horseshoe crabs right-side up. Another program, Backyard StewardshipTM, pushes coastal communities to create their own horseshoe crab sanctuaries.

Further, nonprofit conservation groups aimed at preserving some Atlantic shorebirds, which stop at Delaware Bay on their 8,000 mile journeys from South America to the Arctic, have aided the American horseshoe crab population by pushing legislators to decrease horseshoe crab harvest quotas. Pharmaceutical giants like Lonza have also been active in horseshoe crab conservation, promoting stewardship programs, altering legislation and looking for alternatives to test medication.

While conservation groups in Asia are not as common or as wellfunded, their impact on horseshoe crab populations should be noted. A conservation group in Hong Kong, for instance, has begun a juvenile horseshoe crab rearing program, a population count initiative, and several outreach initiatives to discourage the purchase of horseshoe crabs. While these private and non-profit initiatives are imperative to restoring the population of the horseshoe crab, it still may not be enough. What we need is a new test.

Technically, we do not need the entire blood mixture in LAL to detect bacterial endotoxins; all we need are the coagulogen proteins, or better yet, the protein that begins the coagulation cascade. For decades, scientists attempted in vain to aquaculture horseshoe crabs and establish an immortal horseshoe crab amoebocyte cell line from which we could harvest Factor C, the protein that begins the coagulation cascade. Finally, in 2000, Factor C was successfully incorporated into a one-step bacterial endotoxin test that exhibits a lower rate of false positives than LAL/TAL. It took 12 years for the FDA to approve it as a viable alternative to LAL/TAL, and it is still not widely accepted in the global market. Differing intellectual property laws across countries, and a status quo mindset in the biomedical industry can apparently be blamed for the slow adoption of this alternative test, but it is no excuse Factor C -based tests could save the horseshoe crab populations. A concerted effort by governments, non-profits, and industry will be needed to encourage adoption of this animalfree alternative to endotoxin testing, a move that would ease pressures on the horseshoe crab. However, even if we move all endotoxin testing to synthetic methods and reduce our reliance on the horseshoe crab, will we care about saving the horseshoe crab any more? if we move all endotoxin testing to synthetic methods and reduce our reliance on the horseshoe crab, will we care about saving the horseshoe crab any more?

Photo by Natalie Carroll

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HUMAN RIGHTS

Fall 2018

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Xinjiang’s Journey to a Surveillance State

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The Right to Inclusion: Finding a Place for Women in the Syrian Peace Process

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Linguistic Repression: Forgotten Examples of the Past to Inform the Future

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Dear Megumi: The Abductions That Affect Japanese Diplomacy

Photo by Brenda Lopez

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Xinjiang’s Journey to a Surveillance State Kaylin Ikeda The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, one of the main administrative provinces in Northwest China, shares borders and tensions with Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.

The Qing dynasty originally ruled this territory, but it was absorbed into the People’s Republic of China following the Chinese Civil War. Xinjiang’s initial purpose was to defend China against the Soviet Union; however, in 1955, Xinjiang transitioned from a province to an autonomous region. The Xinjiang Territory is home to minority groups that make up over half of its population. Of these minorities, Uyghur Muslims account for approximately forty-six percent, which heightens religious, social, and political tensions between the Han Chinese minority and the Uyghurs.

Uyghur Muslims are a “Turkic ethnic group of some ten million Sunni Muslims” that authorities in the Xinjiang Territory as well as Beijing deem a threat and a “hindrance to the development of a harmonious society”. President Xi Jinping desires an autonomous state, but Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other ethno-religious minorities comprise over half of the population and stand in China’s way. In 2009, various riots took place in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, where Uyghurs protested their treatment by the government and their Han neighbors; approximately two hundred people were killed and hundreds more were injured.

The Chinese government saw

this as a pivotal opportunity for a nationwide propaganda campaign against “violent separatist groups” in order to achieve ethnic unity and suppress Islamist threats. This particular manipulative tactic continues to oppress Uyghurs and other minorities in present day.

The Xinjiang government utilizes strict regulations to enforce invasive laws that attempt to restrict the Uyghurs’ unsupervised actions.

Its strict population monitoring paves the way for a surveillance state unlike any other, and this mass suppression effort parallels totalitarianism. A surveillance state is a state that legally analyzes and conducts extensive data collection for its citizens and their actions. The Xinjiang state uses a plethora of tactics in their attempt to expel the Uyghur presence, such as numerous surveillance cameras installed under President Xi Jinping. Potentially, outside homes, there are more than “40,000 facial-recognition cameras” in order to monitor and track Uyghurs. It is interesting to note the role technology plays in this type of surveillance.

Another primary method Xinjiang government officials employ are substantial police forces in order to monitor citizens. Adrian Zenz, an expert on Xinjiang, noted that Beijing has “tightened its grip and turned Xinjiang into a security state” in which there are “over 90,000 police officers” recruited within just the last two years. According to Zenz, there are approximately “500 police officers for every 100,000 inhabitants.”

The police force includes, but is

not limited to, regular police as well as secret police, and the increased police presence has created a hostile atmosphere for Uyghur Muslims.

Xinjiang authorities also created the fanghuiju initiative, which means “Visit the People, Benefit the People, and Get Together the Hearts of the People,” in an attempt to create ethnic unification and harmony. This particular campaign began in 2014 where officials “sent 200,000 cadres [...] to regularly visit and surveil people,” only adding to the pervasive controls in everyday life. Two years later in 2016, authorities initiated the Becoming Family campaign in which “110,000 officials visit Turkic Muslim population every two months” and merely one year later, more than one million cadres were ordered to spend one week living in Uyghur homes. These homestay programs continue to get more and more intrusive; currently, cadres spend a minimum of “five days every two months in families’ homes” where the officers collect and update the host family’s information and beliefs. Officers impose on these family homes to instill political indoctrination and promote various Communist traditions in the Xinjiang society.

For example, cadres teach Uyghur families Mandarin Chinese, make them sing Chinese Communist party songs and anthems, and ensure family participation in various games and traditional festivities such as Han Chinese New Year. After each homestay, officers log photos and videos pertaining to their “host” family in order to

Fall 2018 maintain updated intelligence on the Uyghur minority as a form of population control. Xinjiang officers use fanghuiju as a justification for spying on citizens and monitoring the Uyghur population.

Xinjiang’s authoritative forces schemes do not stop at surveillance or homestay programs: it also extends to biometric data collection. Biometric data is an alternative method of executing intrusive policies directed at minorities. To be more specific, the government collects DNA samples, fingerprints, and blood types through annual physical exam programs called Physicals for All in order to nonchalantly collect biostatistics on minorities. In addition to these forms of samples, authorities archive voice samples which are collected when “people apply for passports or ID cards, or during police interrogations.” A woman who left Xinjiang gave an account where police officials forced people to “walk back and forth at police stations” in order to record gait.

All of this biometric information is collected for government monitoring purposes, and is also connected to each citizen’s identification cards.

Identification cards go toward citizen ratings which not only categorizes and classifies Uyghurs from a government perspective, but it also affects interpersonal social constructs. During an interview with an activist under the pseudonym Azat Erkin, the activist reported an encounter in Kazakhstan with a Han resident from Xinjiang who explained, “citizen IDs are divided into three kinds now in Xinjiang- white, yellow and red.”

Each color determines the amount of freedom and social standing for each citizen. For example, white

15 signifies the most freedom while yellow comes with certain mobility restrictions requiring commun authority approval, and red IDs mean that a particular citizen is limited to one village with no permission to leave. There are also accounts that identification cards label citizens as “safe, normal, and unsafe” based on data like “faith, age, religious practice, foreign contacts, and experience abroad.”

Identification cards are important because not only are they swiped at numerous checkpoints, stores, and intersections, but they have immediate electronic access to vital information. This can similarly affect social circles because one’s citizen ranking is also determined, in part, by who they associate themselves with. Therefore, within this oppressed society, minorities might subconsciously create social stratification within their own populations.

Government officials in the Xinjiang Territory also restrict all religious practices besides those of Han Chinese residents. Xinjiang increased surveillance as part of their “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism” in order to promote Chinese ethnic unity.

Such “de-extremification” measures go as far as “banning certain Muslim names for babies” as well as outlawing “long beards and veils.”

Further, Xinjiang government made it illegal to watch non-state television and to send children to nongovernment schools. Administrators even attempted to “promote drinking and smoking” since people who do not participate in drinking and smoking, “such as devout Muslims were deemed suspicious.”

This encroaches on Uyghur Muslims’ freedom to make their

own decisions and even prevents them from escaping Xinjiang, since travel is by permission only.

According to the Human Rights Watch, the most recent suppression tactic is the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, also known as IJOP, which is QR code installation on Uyghur Muslim homes. This tool “aggregates data about people, often without their knowledge, and detects deviations from what authorities deem ‘normal,’” which allows officials to instantly access inhabitant details and records. Cadres come every day or every two days to scan codes on Uyghur homes to ensure the population is kept in line and enforce security crackdowns. Xinjiang authorities claim QR codes “ensures proper delivery services and aid in population control”; however, this does not explain why officials force shopkeepers to engrave potentially threatening items such as knives with customers’ ID card number and QR codes. In a particular account, a knife shop owner spent thousands of dollars on a machine that lasers QR codes onto kitchen knives Uyghurs purchase in order to “trace a knife back to its owner in the event it is used to commit acts of violence.” QR codes on household items such as kitchen knives are not used to ensure proper delivery service, despite government claims.

On the contrary, it is evident that the Xinjiang administration uses QR codes to track Uyghur Muslims’ every action and record information for the citizen identification cards.

Advanced technology, specifically artificial intelligence, coupled with distrust and push for ethnic unification, create authoritarian policies which lead to human rights violations. As

Photo by Raina Kadavil

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16 previously stated above, police officials utilize digital methods like surveillance cameras and QR codes to document biometric data.

The IJOP uses predictive policing programs in order to generate lists of citizens “considered threatening to authorities” in which the police then arrest, interrogate and often detain them. Those who are detained are often “isolated, beaten, tortured, and unable to go home.” News surrounding possible internment camps and reeducation programs emerge and this problem exponentially gets worse.

Torture and reeducation camps are among the most inhumane scare tactics against minorities within the Xinjiang state.

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination believes “up to one million Uyghurs may be held involuntarily” in the Xinjiang Province. Gay McDougall, member of the U.N. committee, particularly notes how China’s Xinjiang region “resembles a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy” which garnered opposition from Hu Lianhe, senior official with Chinese government agency. Lianhe replied to the UN panel that “there is no arbitrary detention”, and that “no such things as reeducation centers” exist in China. China continues to deny allegations that these camps exist; however, there are numerous personal accounts that speak otherwise.

Numerous “leaked documents and

firsthand accounts” from those detained in camps portray an alarming picture of what appear to be “modern-day concentration camps.” Human Rights Watch interviewed fifty-eight people. One account from Kayrat Samarkand, who was detained in a camp for three months, spoke to The Washington Post and explained that he lived in a “dormitory with 14 other men” where they were forced to begin their days by studying political dogma and China’s policies. Samarkand recounts that those who refused were tortured by means of “handcuffs and ankle cuffs for up to 12 hours.” Jessica Batke, former research analyst at the State Department, agreed with the torture accusations and further explained, “detainees are subject to waterboarding, being kept in isolation without food and water, and being prevented from sleeping” which reveals Xinjiang’s tortuous practices. Historian Rian Thum, a historian at Loyola University, warns of history repeating itself and says the sad reality is that society cannot “rule out the possibility of mass murder.” This international crisis demands attention and intervention.

Xinjiang is one of the most intrusive police states and is an example of human rights abuse.

The Xinjiang region was along the Silk Road trade route and is an important asset to China since it is “oil- and resource-rich”, which possibly explains why Beijing is doing little to limit the Xinjiang

state’s actions. Also, Xinjiang is “a major logistics hub of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative”, which is a “trillion-dollar infrastructure project along the Silk Road meant to boost China’s economic and political influence” worldwide. Beijing’s vested interests in the Xinjiang territory reveals that Xinjiang plays a crucial role in China’s future aspirations. Politics come into play here as Beijing appears to turn a blind eye toward President Xi Jinping’s ethnic suppression toward Uyghur Muslims.

As of now, there are an abundance of criticisms circulating, yet there is no equal action to go with the critiques. While the United Nations has called on China “for the immediate release of those detained on the “pretext of countering terrorism”, it is uncertain whether or not China has released those in captivity. China’s Belt and Road Initiative plan reveals influxes of “cash and infrastructure in up to 70 countries”, which might be a reason international organizations stand by and do not intervene.

This is worrisome because nations affiliated with the United Nations might be silenced by means of Chinese investment.

US lawmakers wrote a bipartisan letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as well as the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, putting on pressure and demanding that the White House take action in response to these horrendous events.

This instance is a key test of whether

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or not the United Nations or other concerned governments “will sanction an increasingly powerful China to end this abuse.” Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Christopher Smith “called on the US government to sanction” anyone complicit in Uyghur minority detention and surveillance. The letter was based on the premise of people who violated human rights under the Global Magnitsky Act, which imposes sanctions and freezes of US assets on people responsible for human rights violations.

However, as of now no definitive action has been taken.

This problem is bigger than merely the Xinjiang state, as human rights violations against Uyghur Muslims are relevant to both the Chinese nation and international organizations. Technology plays an interesting and imperative role for the Xinjiang government, as it is the means by which officials heavily monitor Uyghur populations. While innovation is beneficial in many ways, this is a taste of how technology’s impact can have adverse effects if used poorly. China is not acting due to economic and political interests which leaves the responsibility to other international entities; and while different officials are calling attention to this particular atrocity, not much is being done to combat this oppression. Ultimately, Uyghur Muslim brutality is a clear example of human rights abuse and calls not just for worldwide attention, but worldwide intervention as well.

Photo by Raina Kadavil

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The Right to Inclusion:

Finding a Place for Women in the Syrian Peace Process Briana Lopez In an effort to boost the participation of women in the ongoing peace process in Syria, a variety of conferences, coalitions, and advisory boards have been established; yet, the actual influence of women in the negotiations has been minimal.

Women’s involvement has been cited as an important component of the Syrian Peace Process because full participation of women will improve the final deal. In other words, organized and total inclusion of women in peace negotiations is known to positively contribute to the efficacy of peace in more ways than one. As just one example, a comprehensive study done by UN Women found that agreements of this nature are more likely to include gender-sensitive text and can better address issues relating to gender and civil society.

In addition, the sustainability of agreements may increase when they address the needs of women. Thus, women’s participation in the Syrian Peace Process can be seen as a crucial element to include because it will likely strengthen a future peace deal.

The contributions that women can add to the space of a negotiation occur because women experience war through a different lens than men do. Responsibilities of women in the Syrian war have been focused on releasing detainees, leading local ceasefires, and combating ISIS militarily.

In 2012, ceasefire talks between local opposition and government forces in Zabadani, a small

suburb near Damascus, succeeded because women pressured the local military council to accept the 20-day ceasefire. These local ceasefires do not produce largescale transformations, but they are beneficial because they can increase humanitarian access in areas of conflict. Meanwhile, women have also contributed directly by becoming soldiers, most notably in the battle to retake Raqqa in 2017. The role of women in the Syrian conflict has also been a risky challenge because women are at a higher risk of gender-based violence during war. Of those that do experience gender-based violence during the war, many of them (1.7 million) do not have access to reproductive health or mental health services. Overall, past instances of women’s participation in the Syrian war demonstrate that their actions can create a sense of community and grassroots networks. Translating the experience of Syrian women in the war into the bigger field of peace negotiations will produce a more comprehensive outcome in the peace process.

While supporting evidence about the importance of inclusivity in peace processes is relatively new, the international community is aware of this information and has made efforts to expand opportunities for women to be part of the peacemaking system. In 2000, the United Nations (UN) signed Resolution 1325 (S/RES/1325) on women, peace and security.

This resolution was the first formal

document to acknowledge the lack of women in peace processes, and it orders that these processes become more inclusive for women. Now, UN conflict-mediation efforts are required to use this resolution as a guide to increase participation of women in all roles of peacemaking and peacebuilding. Countries which have successfully resolved conflicts and completed peace deals with significant roles for women include South Sudan with its 2015 peace agreement and the Philippines with its 2014 ceasefire. In the case of both of these peace agreements, women’s participation did not occur with the assistance of the UN. Despite these individual successful cases, there has been a strikingly low number of women in formal peace negotiations since the acceptance of Resolution 1325 in 2000. The cause of this subpar contribution is spotty implementation of Resolution 1325 as a whole.

After the failure of several approaches to make peace in Syria, 15 countries signed Resolution 2254 (S/RES/2254) in 2015, which addressed the necessity for Syrian peace talks and endorsed the creation of a strategy timeline for talks.

The resolution provided the UN with the opportunity to implement Resolution 1325 with respect to Syria. The actual execution of Resolution 1325 for the Syrian civil war came in the form of an advisory board. Created and led by UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura, the Syrian Women’s Advisory Board (henceforth referred

Fall 2018 to as the Advisory Board) consists of 12 Syrian women who represent the interest of Syrian women. Of these 12, notable women include civil society leader Monira Hwaijah and women’s rights activist Insaff Hamad. These women work directly with Mr. Mistura to address concerns that Syrian women have for the peace process. The board also communicates with key Syrian activists and women within the Syrian state. With its large network, the advisory board’s key demands include the release of peaceful activists, the distribution of information on missing persons, and the lifting of Western-imposed sanctions on Syria.

Although the advisory board is an important mechanism for increasing opportunities for women to contribute to formal peace negotiations, it does face important limitations. Some Syrian activists and critics have spoken out against the board: in particular, critics have been weary of the lack of transparency during the selection process because of many notable women activists being left out. In fact, some of the board’s members have been alleged to be linked to government-sponsored violence and have engaged in corrupt practices (Syria Accountability, 2016). Aside from these allegations, critics are right to point out that this advisory board, while a novel idea and a move in the right direction, may not wield the influence needed to produce substantive changes in the peace talks. The advisory board is strictly meant as a channel of communication between the demands of women and Mr. Mistura, which means that there is only one general representative advocating for the rights of these

19 women. Thus, it is hard to conclude whether the board can produce the amount of influence needed to directly affect the peace process.

Meanwhile, the popularity of efforts to increase women’s participation in the Syrian peace process has mobilized external women’s groups to advocate for this issue. Since 2013, there have been several conferences and civil society groups pushing for a greater inclusion for women in the peace process. Most recently, the Syrian Women Political Movement (SWPM), a coalition of Syrian activists, allies and members of the

“In past efforts, women have struggled to make significant strides in becoming negotiators, mediators, and delegates during peace talks.”

Syrian diaspora, has gained traction and has desired to create a viable framework that will make inclusion of women in peacemaking more of a reality. Their overarching theme is to “lay a diverse and inclusive foundation to protect the rights of women and minorities in the peace process”. What started off with a movement of 23 women in 2017 has grown rapidly in 2018.

In July 2018, 200 members of this movement congregated in Beirut, Lebanon to successfully reform their initial framework. One of their key demands, which resonates with many other external civil society women’s groups, is the establishment of a 30 percent quota under the new Syrian constitution that is meant to

begin the drafting process once a peace deal is established.

Although there have been pushes for reform from inside Syria, and Syrian civil society has worked to increase or open up opportunities for women to sit in the negotiation room and become actual representatives in peace negotiations, few seats are actually offered to women today. Measurement of women’s participation is done by counting the number of women included in peace talks that have roles as mediators and negotiators. In addition, women can also be delegates or signers of these negotiations, in which they are present at the time of talks, but do not have direct influence on the agreement and are only signing to signal their agreement.

In past efforts, women have struggled to make significant strides in becoming negotiators, mediators, and delegates during peace talks.

During the Geneva Conference rounds between 2012-2016, women, aside from observers that were third party candidates, were absent from the talks. At the conclusion of the Geneva talks, Astana, Kazakhstan became the next meeting ground for peace talks. These Russian-led talks are known as the Astana Talks.

While the Astana Talks focused more on the de-escalation of hostilities in Syria, a similar trend occurred where women were again absent from the deliberations. Women’s involvement did not increase until the meetings in late 2017, where 16 percent of negotiators were women, particularly due to the push by the U.N Special Envoy. It is unclear whether these women were fully able to participate, considering social limitations.

Recent developments in the Syrian Civil War mark a

Photo by Natalie Carroll

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20 crucial paradigm shift for the supplementary peace process, and as questions arise concerning the future direction of peace talks, the fight to include women within the peace process framework continues, perhaps becoming more crucial.

The Syrian civil war has moved into a new phase in which most of the territory has been retaken by government forces under President Bashar Al-Assad. Now, the remaining territories that have been held by the opposition forces are in the process of establishing a demilitarized zone in Idlib with the help of Russian and Turkish forces.

Photo by

The main question that has taken up the time of many negotiators does not refer to the inclusion of women in these talks, rather to the setting of these negotiations. As stated by Mr. Mistura in a transcript from April of 2018, “So we need to revitalize all three: Make Astana more consistent in de-escalation, make Sochi with its promise to become a reality and Geneva to use it�.

Because the Syrian peace process has been used as a mechanism for other countries to advance their own national interest, it is uncertain whether women will have the chance

to fully participate in the peace process, either as negotiators or mediators. Whatever the case may be, women continue to advocate for their right to be included because their involvement could positively change the outcomes of peace deals, constitutions and the future of Syria.

Photo by Natalie Carroll

Fall 2018

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Linguistic Repression:

Forgotten Examples of the Past to Inform the Future Michelle Ramiz

Language is one of the most integral parts of modern civilization and, as such, a defining factor of a people and of their sovereignty.

Language is simultaneously one of the easiest and hardest things to take away from someone and force cultural assimilation in one of the most fundamental aspects of their identity. Throughout history there have been countless instances of this occurring, many of which are ongoing as discussed in this article.

Although each situation is unique, there are similarities and patterns one can learn from. This article will focus on several languages including Tamazight in Morocco and Macedonian Slavic in Greece.

Ukraine’s complex situation, which involves all of its minority languages but is aimed at its Russian speakers, will also be analyzed. Tamazight and Macedonian Slavic are in similar stages of resolution in their respective countries in terms of efforts being undertaken to rectify the systematic oppression their speakers have endured. Said efforts however, are of dubious efficacy.

The Macedonian Slavic example is particularly indicative of the probable development in Ukraine of its oppression of minority language speakers due to a similar ethnic conflict in both cases.

In Morocco, Tamazight is the language of the Amazigh, also known as Berber, people.

This language has many dialects due to the geographic dispersal of its people, with the three main ones being Tarifit, Tamazight, and Tashelhit. In Morocco, most people consider themselves to be

of mixed Arab-Amazigh heritage, although there are pockets of the population that are only Amazigh.

The exact number of speakers of Berberophone languages is unknown but estimates indicate that about 7.5 million people, or 28% of the Moroccan population, speak Tamazight or a dialect of it.

Another source states that about 40% of the Moroccan population speaks a Berberophone tongue, so estimates do vary and are not precise. Nevertheless, it took the Moroccan government until 2011 to grant the language an official status. The government’s ignorance of the prominent presence of these languages and associated ethnic groups is a result of the postcolonial Arabization policy that follows the French colonial “divide and conquer” methodology.

This policy was designed by the colonizers to favor Amazighs over Arabs because they were seen as less Muslim, more Aryan, and generally closer to Europeans ethnically and spiritually. A non-linguistic example of this would be how Amazigh tribal law was officially recognized in the French colonial state, whereas Arab and Muslim law were not. After Morocco’s independence in 1956, Classical Arabic, also known as Modern Standard Arabic, became the country’s official language. Modern Standard Arabic is used only in mass media and literature, while in day-to-day life people commonly use Moroccan Arabic, or Darija Meanwhile, French is still popular in Moroccan society, the remaining language

of many news sources, education, science and commerce.

The French protectorate did not carry the burden of an ethnic conflict, which the Arabization policies of postindependent Morocco do in terms of their relations between Arabs and Amazighs. The Moroccan government is dominated by people of Arab descent, although the military has been heavily dominated

by Amazighs. Nonetheless, all of the kings, up until current monarch Mohammed VI, have traditionally married an Amazigh woman to signify the friendship between the ethnic groups. The king is a Sherif, or descendant of Prophet Muhammed, which automatically makes him Arab. This, combined with the fact that mixed ArabAmazigh populations tend to consider themselves Arab, means that the King’s Amazigh origins end up overshadowed as well as those of the general Moroccan population. A “respected Morocco professor of Amazight [sic] origin” cited in “Amazight Identity in the Post Colonial Moroccan State: A Case Study in Identity” by Morag E. Boyd states that Amazigh identity is largely reduced to the use of Amazigh language. Although there are of course exceptions, this seems to be the hard and fast rule even in my own experience in Morocco this fall. There aren’t many ways to determine someone’s ethnic origins outside of language, female facial tattoos - an Amazigh tradition that is dying out - and some clothing or jewelry choices.

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22 Up until its designation as an official language in Morocco, Tamazight was prohibited in schools, presenting a huge problem for rural areas whose first language when starting school was Tamazight. Students were physically punished for speaking Tamazight in school and were forced to learn French or Arabic; through my conversations with Moroccan locals, I even discovered that speaking a Berberophone language in the street until recently could often result in physical altercations with Arabic speakers and, furthermore, that Amazigh names were prohibited before modern times. As recently as 1994, the Ilmas Cultural Association was “prevented from holding a conference on Amazigh language and writing,” while in the same year the Moroccan Association for Research and Cultural Exchange was “refused permission to organize a special day for Berber [Amazigh] theater in the city of Rabat.”

The legalization of Tamazight in 2011 was a huge step for Moroccan society in terms

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of overcoming the French colonial “divide and conquer” mentality but the results have been dubious. On a positive note, all government-related or funded buildings carry signs in Arabic, French, and Tamazight, so the alphabet is a common sight in the streets of Rabat and other large cities. Hearing various dialects outside of Amazigh hubs such as Agadir or the Atlas or Rif mountains is also not a huge rarity anymore.

However, as of 2015, Tamazight was taught only to 12% of Moroccan students, and the quality of that education is the subject of much controversy. According to the Moroccan Royal Institute, French, English, Spanish, and Modern Standard Arabic take precedence over the less-practical Tamazight language, resulting in students themselves placing less importance on Tamazight unless it is one of their native languages. One suggestion presented as an alternative to compulsory Tamazight education is the option for students to study Tamazight once they are older, with bilingual education in Tamazight

and beginners Arabic available to monolingual Berberophone children. This system would be similar to how many American public schools offer Spanish or French education. The symbolic value of Berberophone education is immense but the functionality of it is questionable and has many kinks that have yet to be worked out, as does the Moroccan educational system in general. This situation is similar to that of Macedonian Slavic, which is also technically no longer repressed, but unlike the considerable Amazigh population which kept their language alive through hardship, Macedonian Slavic is in dire straits with few carriers and no concrete steps being put in place to revive the language.

Unlike Tamazight, Greece is facing an issue with the study of Macedonian Slavic, which was systematically repressed for decades; unlike Tamazight, which continues to have an impressive number of speakers in Morocco, Macedonian Slavic is becoming increasingly rare, as speakers of the language

Fall 2018 have either died or been silenced over time. After the Balkan War, Greece acquired a lot of new land, including about 260 000 speakers of Macedonian Slavic. There was an ethnic component to this war and to the linguistic oppression that ensued; to this day there is controversy as to who the ancient Macedonian were - Greek or Slavs.

If they were Greek, then the Greeks have the right to call themselves Macedonians and, as such, take credit for Macedonian king, Alexander the Great’s achievements.

Supporters of this idea claim that the Slavs currently living in Macedonia settled there and even called themselves “Bulgarian” until 1944. Although Macedonian Slavic is indeed very close to Bulgarian, it is important to acknowledge the other side of the argument, which is that modern Greeks and ancient Macedonians are two separate ethnic groups and Greeks have no right to claim Alexander the Great.

Even though Macedonian Slavic was acknowledged as a language on Greece’s 1920 census, there

23 was a “conscious effort to conceal the number of people who spoke it” similar to the Moroccan occlusion of the number of Berberophone speakers.

In 1936, the use of Macedonian Slavic was banned in public and in private, with consequences for speaking the language including fines, beatings and torture by police, and penalization of children in school regardless of whether or not they knew Greek. There are existing databases of various settlements whose names were made more Greek as recently as in 1981 with the case of Kapeli, which was formerly known as Agiovlasitika. Petros Karatsareas, author of “Greece’s Macedonian Slavic Heritage Was Wiped Out

by Linguistic Oppression- Here’s How,” reports that surnames were also changed, with his own paternal grandfather becoming Karatsareas from Karachorov and maternal grandfather going from Kanzurov to Kantzouris. After August 1931, greetings in “Bulgarian,” one of the names in Greece for Macedonian

Slavic due to the underlying ethnic conflict, and songs in languages other than Greek were banned in public. The first Slavic lyrics were published again only in 2002.

In 1994, Human Rights Watch called for Greece to end the harassment of Macedonian Slavic speakers but it was too little too late. In 1998, the European Court of Human Rights had ruled that Greece violated the rights of its Macedonian Slav citizens. In 2009, the Educational and Cultural Movement of Edessa started Macedonian language courses and taught the Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet, and in 2010 Macedonian language classes were being held in secret in Thessaloniki. Macedonia and Greece are currently in the process of dealing with a referendum for the formal name of the Republic of North Macedonia, formerly known as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

The aforementioned ethnic conflict played a big role in Greek opposition to the ethnically Slavic population of FYR Macedonia claiming them

Photo by Natalie Carroll

24 as simply North Macedonia. The current state of the Macedonian Slavic language is quite dire due to its dearth of carriers in Greece and the lack of overall interest in preserving the language.

The suppression of Tamazight as a result of Arabization in Morocco and the controversy regarding ethnic legitimization of historical claims in Greece and Macedonia both resemble certain aspects of the situation currently unfolding in Ukraine, which is also ethnic in nature and connected to animosity surrounding its Soviet past.

The parallel between the Greek/ Macedonian battles for patrimony is fascinating seeing as in Ukraine the battle is the same for the history of Ancient Rus’, the capital of which was in Kiev. The pre-1991 narrative of Slavic brotherhood is gone and the Ukrainian, language that used to be a dialect of Russian, now has a lot of Polish influence to make it a more distinct language. Modern Ukrainian history textbooks claim that the ancient Rus’, which is the root of the word Russian - for the ethnic categorization русский, not the nationality which is россиянин, or “of to the Russian state” - was actually a Ukrainian state claimed

by Russians in a violent way, whereas the previous narrative made no distinction ethnically between Russians and Ukrainians.

After all, the word “Ukraine” in Russian means “on the side,” as of the country, and the state itself was created by Lenin in the beginning of the 20th century. However, in the current political climate of the country, ethnic tensions are on the rise between Ukrainians and everyone else. As of 2011, research shows that 47% of Ukrainians speak Russian at home while 53% speak Ukrainian. The 2001 census shows

that 77.8% of Ukrainian citizens consider themselves ethnically Ukrainian, 17.3% Russian, and the remainder classify themselves as other minorities including: Slavic, European, Roma, and Tatar.

A new Ukrainian 2017 law bans schools higher than the elementary school level from teaching in any language other than Ukrainian and mandates full reforms by the year 2020. According to Reuters, “as of 2015, Ukraine had 621 schools that taught in Russian, 78 in Romanian, 68 in Hungarian and five in Polish.” Furthermore, there was a provision that allowed for further instruction of some subjects in official EU languages, such as Hungarian, Romanian, and Polish, which “appeared to discriminate against speakers of Russian, the most widely used non-state language.” The Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said that the “issue had driven relations [between Hungary and Ukraine] to their lowest” since 1991. Another new October 2017 law declares that 75% and 60% of the content on national and local television respectively, must be in Ukrainian from 7:00 until 22:00, including channels that air in native languages, which includes those of the Moldovans, Belarusians, Russians, etc., that live in Ukraine, as well as the Gutsuls, Rusins, etc. There are countless anecdotes of Russian speakers who, prior to the new laws and current government, were fine getting by with only Russian but now get into physical altercations with Ukrainian speakers. This is very similar to the dynamic between Berberophones and Macedonian Slavic speakers in their respective countries. In Macedonia, the situation has gone too far for there to be a linguistic revival. Morocco faces a similar

The International Relations Review issue related to the standardization of Tamazight education.

The situation currently developing in Ukraine is dangerously similar to the post Balkan War situation in Greece; seeing as there are similar ethnic divides underlying the problem. Only time will tell if the situation become as dire as the one Macedonian Slavic speakers must contend with in Greece. The prognosis for Ukrainian minorities looks bleak as the civil war drags on with no hope of resolution any time soon, as does the prognosis for speakers of Macedonian Slavic whose language has been repressed to the point of no return. Perhaps Ukraine will take the Moroccan route and, after a period of “Ukrainization” return to a state of valuing its minorities. Although the Amazigh people are finally regaining the right to speak their language and relative linguistic equality to Arabic, the issues surrounding education in Tamazight and of Amazigh students most likely won’t be resolved any time soon. These are a few examples of what can only be called cultural genocide, a phenomenon that is ever present globally. In the United States and Latin America, this practice is most significantly embodied in the systematic erasure of Native American languages, in China with the repression of the Uyghur language and in Australia with the attempted elimination of the Aboriginal languages. This type of cultural erosion is inevitable as humans evolve; yet it seems that perhaps our evolution as a species after a certain point should include more conservation rather than destruction, especially of something as both basic and complex as the languages we use to communicate with ourselves, each other and the outside world.

Photo by Natalie Carroll

Fall 2018

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Dear Megumi:

The Abductions That Affect Japanese Diplomacy Kaitlyn Cyprian

In 1977, 13 year old Megumi Yokota of Japan was kidnapped on her way home from school. It would be 25 years before Megumi’s family officially discovered she and many others were in North Korea, all abducted under mysterious circumstances in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2002, when Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il of North Korea admitted to the abductions, the government of Japan declared that “there will be no normalisation of relations with North Korea unless the abduction issue is resolved.”

This declaration still holds today, but other countries have not made such promises. Recent developments and negotiations have begun between North Korea and South Korea, as well as between North Korea and the United States. In order for Japan to stay relevant in these ongoing negotiations and someday form their own stable relations with the country, they must resolve the issue of the abductions with the North Korean government, despite insistence that the case is closed according to high ranking North Korean officials. While the government of Japan recently has not been successful in solving these cases, activism from independent groups in Japan and around the world have made the issue hard for the government to ignore, and keep the memories of Megumi and others alive even today.

When the abductions first occurred, there was no apparent link to North Korea in these disappearances, nor was there any apparent connections between the

Photo by Natalie Carroll victims. Official confirmation that 17 victims were in North Korea came in September of 2002 from Kim Jongil, and in October of that year 5 of the 17 confirmed victims returned to Japan. After this group returned home, the governments of Japan and North Korea had intermittent discussions and negotiations investigating the whereabouts of the other 12 confirmed victims, looking into other victims who are unconfirmed but suspected to be in North Korea, and finding those responsible for the abductions.

Progress was made in 2004 when the families of the 5 victims were also allowed to return to Japan from North Korea. Later that year during the Japan-North Korea WorkingLevel Consultations, North Korea claimed that the remaining victims had either died or never entered their country, providing evidence such as the alleged remains of Megumi Yokota. However, after DNA analysis it was determined that these remains - and others provided by the North Korean government - did not belong to the Japanese abductees. This caused the Japanese public to become skeptical about North Korea’s claims regarding the remaining 12 victims, and led them to the belief that the case was in no way over. However after turning over this report the North Korean government declared the abduction issue resolved, but the inconsistencies in their investigation and evidence led the Japanese government to continue to pursue the issue with little success for several years. In hopes of reopening the case, the

Japanese government offered to partially lift sanctions on the country in 2008, and North Korea agreed to reopen the investigation under these conditions. Unfortunately, even with this incentive very little progress was made in discovering the whereabouts of the remaining victims. In 2014, Japan agreed to lift more sanctions as a way to reward North Korea for forming the Special Investigation Committee in order to complete their investigations. However this committee was disbanded in 2016, and since then virtually no progress has been made on finding the remaining victims.

While it was not officially confirmed that these victims were in North Korea until 2002, North Korean defectors had provided information that led the government and families to suspect this was the case as early as 1997. The most prominent of these victims is then 13 year old Megumi Yokota, due to her parent’s ceaseless letter series called “Dear Megumi” - a public collection of letters wishing for her safe return and detailing the efforts of the Japanese government, and the ongoing work her family and other families are doing to ensure the matter is not forgotten by the government or society. These letters reflect the true feelings of the Japanese on the issue - to them, their government is not doing enough to bring the remaining victims home.

In one letter, Megumi’s parents ask, “knowing that our beloved children have been waiting for decades, why has our country not fulfilled its basic duty of rescuing its citizens?”

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Photo by Natalie Carroll

Thanks to the efforts of the Yokota family and others, foreign governments have also taken notice of the issue and voiced their concerns on behalf of the victims. In 2006, George W. Bush met with Japanese abductees as well as North Korean defectors, and stated that “If North Korea expects to be respected in the world, that county must respect human rights and human dignity and must allow this mother to hug her child again.” The families have also met with Barack Obama during his tenure as president. Most recently, Donald Trump spoke of Megumi and other victims at the United Nations Conference, and met with the families to hear their concerns. He called for a resolution to the abduction issue, something Japan has not brought up as publicly since recent negotiations began this year between North Korea, South Korea and the United States.

Even though the Japanese government has had no success in negotiations with North Korea since 2016, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has repeatedly stated that the abduction issue is his top priority when dealing with North Korea.

He has pledged that Japan will not “normalise ties with and provide economic support to North Korea” until there is a “comprehensive resolution of the nuclear, missile and abduction issues”. On the other hand, North Korea will not engage Japan on these issues until they have lifted their economic sanctions on the country and provide promised aid. At a standstill, it seems that at this time neither side is willing to budge on their terms.

Prime Minister Abe has urged other countries not to provide aid nor lift sanctions until the abduction issue has been resolved, but tensions are rising between him and some of his closest allies as tariffs and economic restrictions are placed on Japan and other countries. While Trump appears invested in the abduction issue and has publicly called for its resolution, his deteriorating relationship with Abe may affect his prioritization of the issue, in addition to other foreign and domestic issues. China and Japan have an improving relationship, but China is the main supporter of the North Korean economy and has no intentions

to stop anytime soon. In addition, South Korea and North Korea have been conducting ongoing negotiations without input from the Japanese government, partially due to the complicated history between the two countries and currently tepid relationship. It feels as if the rest of the important Asian powers are moving to normalize relations with North Korea while Japan still waits for its resolution.

The open talks and new prospect of peace in the region actually do not work out in Japan’s favor. Shigeo Iizuka, brother to one of the victims, said that he was hopeful the abduction issue would be brought to Trump and Moon Jae-In as they increased pressure and sanctions on the country. But now that this pressure has been replaced with peace talks, and new friendly relations, he believes there is no reason for either leader to press the issue, and talks would most likely focus on the nuclear problem.

North Korea recently released three American hostages, and even promised to return the remains of US soldiers from the Korean War. This reflects well in

Fall 2018

the eyes of the United States, but in this instance there is a clear motive and desire to normalize relations with the current administration.

North Korea does not have that same desire when it comes to Japan, a country that has historically colonized and at times abused its power in the Korean Peninsula.

Moving forward, it is not clear if change will happen. Despite some citizens’ discontent with the lack of action the government is taking, the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan still holds a majority, and Abe is poised to stay in office for at least another year if not longer.

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Japanese voters have many other issues to worry about within the country, and for many the abduction issue is not their top priority. While Abe and other Prime Ministers have been supportive of resolving this issue, at this point there is very little Japan can do on its own to push Pyeongchang. It will have to wait for North Korea to re-open the case, the tangible support of the United States, or will need for relations in the region to revert to as they were, in order to give Japan another chance at pressuring results out of the North Korean government.

As for whether or not

resolve will come is also uncertain.

It has been over 40 years since the abductions took place, and the family members of the victims are growing old and passing on.

Megumi’s mother states in one letter that Megumi’s father, 85, “is weak and cannot speak like he used to…” and that she herself has lost her voice at 81 years old. Megumi herself would be 53 years old, if she is still alive. It will fall on the next generation’s shoulders to remember the abductees and keep their stories alive as their government struggles to stay true to its promises and stay relevant in the Asian Pacific region.

Photo by Natalie Carroll

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Germany, Cyber Espionage & The Future:

A Conversation with Joseph Wippl, Former CIA Director of Congressional Affairs Kavya Verma How many years did you work in Europe and how many years did you work specifically in Germany?

I worked in Germany for seven years from 1974 to 1981, and from 2001 to 2003. I also in Austria for three years in the 90’s, and for two years in Luxembourg for 2 years in the mid-1980’s. I was close to and certainly following events in Germany, I was in Spain when unification happened.

How does the German state react to foreign actors interfering in their elections?

Well I think there are two ways that the Russians and the Chinese are completely different, but they’re comparable to our experience.

I’d say the number one target for Chinese industrial espionage is the United States, but the number two target is Germany. They engaged in big time industrial espionage against the German economy. We are in the high tech area but the German economy is in manufacturing, making them the number two target of industrial espionage.

The Russians too very much engaged in Germany - as well as the rest of western Europe - in pushing populist parties that tend to be more favorably inclined to Russia and less favorably inclined to the European Union, which is in Russian interests to weaken. The irony of all that is that thirty years ago

Photo by Neo Hick

the Soviet Union was pushing and in some ways subsidizing communist parties worldwide, and thirty years laters they’re subsidizing rightist, populist parties - the complete opposite of what they were doing thirty years ago. Interestingly enough though, they are being more effective now than they were during the Soviet period where it may have been more conspiratorial.

proving this claim untrue.

The average German voter appears more driven to disprove false political claims: did you notice this trend when you worked in Germany?

No, I think what happened was that they learned something from the Russian campaign in the United States, so their government did everything they could to counter those type of things coming out of Russia. Because of this, I think they were better prepared to When it was falsely tweeted er the misinforthat a rise in crime in Germa- countmation campaigns. ny can be attributed increased also have in that levels of migration, there was They sense a less diffused large-scale backlash from the popuaverage German voter, with many tweeting statistics

Fall 2018 lation, probably their biggest issue with their population is in the former East Germany, where they’re not up to the sophistication of the West. But in the US, somewhere in central Nebraska is just a lot different from Boston. You can get the message out that someone is interfering in our election process more quickly and more thoroughly than you can in the US. Do you believe Germany’s overall passiveness can be attributed to its history?

There are 400,000 video cameras in London, and to do this [kind of surveillance] even in Germany is just very hard, people think of it as a challenge to our rights, its from the Gestapo past and the Stassi past. Part of it I like especially vis a vis the private sector, you’re data is really much safer there than in the US. Ultimately we’re going to have societ-

29 ies where more of those video cameras are going to be there to protect the citizens from all kinds of things, terrorism, crime, and so on.

Do you believe this kind of occurence will allow for Germany to go from being an overall passive country to taking a stronger role both in Europe and globally? Would this kind of warming up on the part of the German public to increased defense capabilities also translate into the Bundeswehr also having more power?

It’s going to take a long time. It might happen but it’s not going to happen soon: they would again need to feel a threat. There is Russia there but how far is Russia really going to go? They have done opinion polls on if Russia invaded the Baltic States would [German citizens] want Germany to protect them? The majority say no, they’re thinking “well it was part of Russia before 1918, and then again after 1945,” if something like that did happen they might

not go to war over it but it would all of a sudden be different. Everyone would say “we do have to defend ourselves, we do have to do something different.” They’re increasing their [defense] budget but it should be higher and they should have a really effective defense. The problem with the Europeans is that they don’t have any capability, in the sense that we have military capability. For instance, on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, they don’t have any capability of stopping people from crossing the Mediterranean and getting themselves killed. The Europeans also have to work together on this, if you put all their budgets together it’s pretty substantial, regrettably they’re not splitting the work up.

Do you Nord

believe

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30 Stream 2 is a genuine threat to German security interests?

That’s a question that goes back a long way to the Reagan administration, when the first pipelines were being laid between the Soviet Union and western Europe for natural gas. The Reagan administration opposed it based on the fact that this would give the Russians influence over these countries, essentially by turning off the gas. Nord Stream is interesting because it’s a Russian-German thing, they’re going to go under the Baltic Sea, it’s not going through Poland or any other country, in other words, countries that would like to get fees for the transport of this natural gas. So just about all the other EU countries don’t like it, and so on.

It’s always one of those matters that the Russians have a certain amount of influence, but if they turn off the gas they’re not going

to be paid for the gas. It becomes a mutual dependence, and as the Germans go more into alternate energy, [it] will probably have less influence than we think.

Do you think there needs to be anything done on the BfD’s part and generally in the global intelligence community to counter cyber espionage?

That is such a huge field you’re getting into. I would recommend David Sanger’s book, called The Perfect Weapon, it’s a very, very good book on cyber. There’s no doctrine on cyber, on what we’re gonna do, we have all kinds of offensive capabilities in cyber but are reticent about using them because if you use them, others can use them against you. When does that tipping point come when you no longer can just ignore a cyber attack? How much defense do you

really need to play before you go on the offense? You’re getting into an area that is a big area in the future and so on. If you take the 556 course I have Admiral Glenn come in, who is I think the cyber tsar for a while, he gives a terrific lecture on this. So especially in the industrial espionage world, Silicon Valley in the US, all the pharmaceutical firms we have here in Boston, the German industrial infrastructure, these are the perfect targets for cyber industrial espionage, and using cyber to attack their systems.

Right now everybody is playing defense, so knock on wood on that one. Coming up with a strategic doctrine, is somebody really thinking about this? We have cyber command and NSA, but right now everything is quieter than I’d like to see it.

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WORLDWIDE AND WORLDCLASS WHERE IN THE WORLD WILL YOU STUDY?

SPAIN MADRID

Boston University Global Programs Study Abroad

BU.EDU/ABROAD

ABROAD@BU.EDU

@BUABROAD

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ECONOMICS

Fall 2018

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China in the Middle: Hukou Reform Under Threat of Economic Downturn

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Currency Collapse in Turkey: What NATO Means for the Lira

Photo by Natalie Carroll

The International Relations Review

34

China in the Middle:

Hukou Reform Under Threat Of Economic Downturn Tal Dickstein

Countries around the world are not content staying stagnant.They do what they can through policy and diplomacy to catalyse growth in their economies.

In general, growth is influenced by four main factors: land, labor, and capital allocation accompanied by technological innovation. The first three factors are finite, and are by the stage of technological progress within a given country.

As innovation flourishes, so too does an economy. Popular belief dictates that innovation will occur throughout different countries as time goes on until the global economies converge and equalize.

On a historical basis, however, this is untrue.

There is a stark difference between popular opinion and the focus of economic literature on growth and economic development. Harvard Professor and Development Economist Lant Pritchett discovered that there has been a global divergence in per capita income since at least the 1870s that has persisted and even worsened over time. He further notes that “some aspects of modern historical growth apply principally, if not exclusively, to the “advanced capitalist” countries.” In sum, there is a small group of high-income countries rising continuously while other countries struggle to move ahead and expand their economies.

One possible explanation for this is the Middle-Income Trap (MIT): a concept that argues that the transitionary phase between the Middle and High-Income categories is incredibly difficult to breach and ‘traps’ most countries that attempt to do so. There exists some controversy regarding its existence, but most arguments merely disagree with the semantics of the word ‘trap’ rather than disagreeing with the entire theory itself. the research done so far on the MIT, including research by those who argue against it, highlights the importance of changing growth strategies during this period to escape the Comparative Advantage Vacuum (CAV). This vacuum appears as a U-shaped curve as MiddleIncome countries lose their comparative advantage in lowskilled labor to Lower Income countries while having yet to attain the comparative advantage in high-skilled labor that a highincome country has. Felipe et al compared the exports of countries in the trap to those that passed it using disaggregated trade data and found that high-income countries had more “diversified, sophisticated, and non-standard exports basket[s]” than countries stuck in the UMIT in 2010. Jan Eeckhout and Boyan Jovanovic also reached incredibly similar conclusions when looking at the

differences in occupation choices across levels of development.

The most substantial support for this idea comes from an observed growth slowdown around a per capita income of $7000. Most estimates for the severity of this slowdown are between 2.4% and 2.8%.

The World Bank’s China 2030 report described the issue arising from the transition as “the factors and advantages that propelled high growth in these countries during their rapid development phases—lowcost labor and easy technology adoption—disappeared when they reached middle- and uppermiddle-income levels, forcing them to find new sources of growth.” In other words, countries must continuously innovate and build themselves up domestically through restructuring once they reach the CAV—not just cherrypicking one or the other. Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps echoed this sentiment when he was asked about the chances of China entering the Middle-Income Trap, asserting that “China cannot overcome the trap by simply relying on structural reforms and expanding domestic consumption, rather, China needs to develop and promote its own approach to technological innovation.”

China is continuously hailed as a rising or emerging

Fall 2018

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Photo by Laura Stanton

superpower by academics and countries alike. A PEW survey found that from 2008 to 2014, there was a 22% jump in the number of countries that believe China will replace the US as the global superpower China’s rapid growth begs one question: will it breach the transition to become a High-Income country, or rather will it fall into the Middle-Income Trap?

The Middle-Income Trap can be split into two ranges: the Lower-Middle Income Trap (LMIT) and the Upper-Middle Income Trap (UMIT). To qualify for the LMIT, a country must satisfy three benchmarks: (i) per capita income must be at least $2000 USD but no greater than $7250, (ii) the country must have been between these two bounds for at least 28 years, and (iii) the average per capita income growth rate must be at least 4.7% per annum. The benchmarks are similar for the UMIT: (i) per capita income must be at least $7,250 and $11,500, (ii)the country must have between these two bounds for at least 14 years, and (iii) the average per capita income growth rate must be at least 3.5% per annum.

In 2007, former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2007 remarked that China’s growth trajectory was “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and

unsustainable.” This shift from the usual optimism regarding China’s development follows recent speculation regarding its rising capital-output ratio and slowing GDP growth. The Economist and Forbes have coined this change as “The End of Cheap China” and cite China’s high rates of intra-Asian investment (both independently and through the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank) as policies aimed at combating this decline.

“...from 2008 to 2014, there was a 22% jump in the number of countries that believe China will replace the US as the global superpower.”

“The End of Cheap China” is another way of framing the effect of the Comparative Advantage Vacuum that MiddleIncome countries face during their transition. Even Chinese Government Officials were convinced-- Lou Jiwei, the former finance minister and the current chair of the National Council for Social Security Fund, said that China had a more-than-50% chance of slipping towards the MIT if no policy reforms were carried out. He focused on four

main changes: (i) encouragement of agricultural imports, (ii) Hukou reform, (iii) land reform, and (iv) minimization of social security issues. The first three reforms are most integral to avoiding the MIT. It is evident that Lou Jiwei wanted to work on decreasing the dramatic rural-urban income divide that has plagued the country for decades while forcing a shift away from the agricultural sector towards the industrial and service sectors. An increase in agricultural imports would decrease the need for laborers in the sector while the Hukou reform would increase laborer mobility across all provinces allowing for increased rates of urbanization.

This would, theoretically, spur the innovation and growth the former finance minister sees ripe for the taking.

It is important to note that, all the reforms Lou seeks come from the China 2030 report coauthored by the World Bank and the Chinese Government. One of the report’s most integral stances is that the past interventions of the Chinese government have negatively affected growth by creating factor market distortions and that the government needs to relax its grip on the private sector so it can develop. Previous government decisions worsened the rural-urban income divide via the

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36 failed Great Western Development strategy and artificially forcing the private sector to step aside in favor of government subsidized StateOwned-Enterprises, also known as SOEs.

According to Lou Jiwei, things are now different. Days before the 19th Communist Party Congress in October 2017, he confidently announced that China will have no problem avoiding the Middle-Income Trap thanks to the reforms of the last two and a half years. However, it serves to pause and ask: is he right? The World Bank supports this belief, estimating China’s growth rate averaging about

6% to 7% over the next twenty years after the recommended reforms have run their course. Averaging even the lower bound of 6% placed China above Felipe et al’s 3.5% maximum growth rate for Upper Middle-Income countries to be stuck in the MIT.

Of the four reforms, Hukou reform is perhaps one of the most interesting. While much of this paper focuses on the inequality that exists between nations, the hukou system brings up the equally important issue of inequality within nations.

The Hukou system is a family registration program that allows the

government to regulate immigration from rural to urban areas. It was initially implemented in 1958 in order to prevent the creation of slums as a result of massive, sudden urbanization in cities as well as to allow for several industrialization schemes under Maoist rule. The system made it incredibly difficult to move around the country and restricted access to employment and housing opportunities. At its most basic function, the Hukou system registers a citizen as living in a rural or urban area based on their place of birth. Thus, all of a citizen’s social benefits are tied to their registered local government. Moving to a new

Photo by Raina Kadavil

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Photo by Kexin Yang city without government permission would mean losing necessities such as healthcare, education, and working rights. A rural citizen who goes to work in an urban area in hopes of higher wages does not have the same rights as a counterpart born in the city. Such migrants are treated the same as an illegal immigrant looking for work in the US. As a result, these restrictions on movement have created a secondary, shadow labor market in urban areas; an estimated 230 million workers currently exist in this labor market. Furthermore, cities tend to have wealthier local governments relative to rural areas.

This disparity in the resources available for citizens in each region effectively creates an informal caste system within China.

The effects of the Hukou system are also not purely limited to urban and rural areas. The

government has attempted to coral rural workers into less developed urban areas by reducing regulations to move into designated cities. This was done in the hopes of spurring economic development in them, but has failed to properly incentivize potential migrants. This expands the issue into the long-running narrative of regional inequality in China. The Financial Times puts it best, “Of all the regions with a population at least 1 per cent of the total, the poorest — Guizhou — has an average income per capita only 25 per cent of the richest — Tianjin.

That compares with equivalent figures of about 35 per cent in the eurozone, 42 per cent in the UK, 46 per cent in Japan and 57 per cent in the US.” Thus, the big question is introduced: What are the benefits of hukou reform?

Labor mobility is one of

the largest benefits that could result from further Hukou reform, if not the most important. The system has been reformed several times, but it is still biased towards already welloff urban citizens, especially with the current points system.

According to China Daily, a total reform might contribute two percentage points towards economic growth by expanding the labor market. While seemingly minimal, the addition of those two percentage points could mean the difference between falling into the MIT and overcoming it. The reform plan as of 2014 is to grant about 100 million rural hukou registrants (with priority given to migrant workers with steady jobs in urban areas) urban designations by 2020. The “Opinions on Further Promoting the Reform of the hukou System” followed shortly after and

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discusses the potential of opening the hukou restrictions for towns and small cities while orderly opening the restrictions for medium-sized cities and reasonably determining conditions for large cities. These plans have the potential to increase demand via increases to worker incomes, and would help spur the economy further.

Despite the potential for growth, not all feel encouraged by these proposals. Some urban residents perceive rural migrants as incomers trying to steal their labor. This perspective comes from the aforementioned urban-rural divide. Urban residents have more resources, such as access to better education, and they see themselves as more privileged than their rural counterparts. This worries local officials who fear that urbanites may become angry or create management issues, which further increases urban resistance to reform.

Photo by Raina Kadavil

Fall 2018

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Currency Collapse in Turkey: What NATO means for the Lira Samira Jafar

Photo by Peter Evans

This past summer has been turbulent for Turkey as well as for its currency, the lira. In late July and early August, the lira hit a record-low 24 percent drop after the United States imposed sanctions on the country. The sanctions are the results of an array of tensions between Turkey and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Though Turkey is a NATO member state, several incidents have tarnished the relationship between the other allies and Turkey, including the detention of an American pastor in Turkey and disagreements about who to support during the Syrian conflict. Currently, Turkey is moving dangerously faraway from NATO, and at the same time, closer into the

arms of its rival, Russia. Coupled with Turkey’s already shaky current account and currency dips, the future of Turkey’s economy could very well be hinging upon its ability to stay in the good graces of NATO. The United States clearly expressed the reason behind the sanctions that were initially imposed on two Turkish government officials, Abdulhamit Gul and Suleyman Soylu. These were the result of an American pastor, Andrew Brunson, being held on espionage charges relating to the 2016 attempted coup against the current Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The tensions that caused Erdogan to take these steps also stemmed from the coup, as he had been upset at

the U.S.’s failure to extradite a cleric who was suspected of having plan it.

U.S. President Donald Trump was upset at Turkey’s failure to release Brunson, as they had struck a deal with Erdogan that a Turkish woman being held in an Israeli prison would be released if he would do the same for Brunson. In addition to these sanctions, Trump also cracked down on the lira by doubling tariffs on steel and aluminum. In imposing the sanctions and more on the two officials, the U.S. ultimately set in motion the economic shockwaves that would cause the lira to plummet.

Prior to the sanctions, the Turkish lira was already on questionable ground. Turkey’s initial economic transition from “the import-

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40 substitution model to neoliberal reforms” resulted in a failure to achieve macroeconomic stability to match its economic growth. This resulted in a severe financial crisis between 2000 and 2001. Turkey has struggled to ease its fiscal imbalances even prior to 2001, having boasted high public sector deficits at almost nine percent of Gross National Product (GNP) and inefficient tax systems in the 1980s and 1990s. Even today, President Erdogan is doing little to maintain macroeconomic prosperity. Erdogan has always taken a strong stance against higher interest rates that differed from the proposals issued by his economic advisors. This meant that coupled with the sanctions imposed, the lira fell to a fifth of its former value - a forty percent drop against the dollar - and Turkey was faced with eighteen percent inflation. Additionally, Erdogan was accused of promoting high levels of borrowing and investing too heavily in public works projects without the sufficient funds, such as plans for the “world’s biggest airport.”

Currently, the government’s budget deficit is about two percent of GDP, and public debt is about 30 percent.

This is a key example of Erdogan’s heavy management of the economy leading to macroeconomic instability that matches that of Turkey’s troubled economic past.

In addition to this, Turkey’s political instability and issues with NATO

are contributing to its economic troubles. In the past, Turkey always seemed to be one of NATO’s major Middle Eastern members, and Turkey even looked eager to become a new member of the EU with its European counterparts. However, their relationship has slowly begun to deteriorate over time.

NATO members have consistently been disapproving of Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies and have been critical of his harsh reaction to the 2016 attempted coup against him. This is especially prominent when the conspiracy theories touted

by Erdogan are examined. In accusing the U.S. of having helped plan the coup, he pushed Turkey’s

“...coupled with the sanctions imposed, the lira fell to a fifth of its former value - a forty percent drop against the dollar - and Turkey was faced with eighteen percent inflation.” ally farther away and ushered the momentum against his arrests of suspected citizens. Furthermore, on the other side of the tensions, it can be argued that Trump has promoted a sense of distrust and political instability that is pushing Turkey further away from its ally and one

of the most important members of NATO.

The war in Syria is also a strong point of tension between Turkey and NATO. To begin with, Turkey was initially upset at the lack of support given to them by NATO for their military intervention in the Syrian conflict and attacks against the Islamic State (ISIS). To begin with, Turkey has made it clear that they are disapproving of the U.S.’s relial on Kurdish forces to fight in Syria. Efforts for reconstruction between the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish government have resulted in continuous tensions between the two groups, and the U.S.’s assistance by the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) has angered Erdogan. Even though the U.S. has lacked in its assistance to the Kurds when it comes to their basic protection, their aid in the fight against ISIS has added enough fuel to the fire. Additionally, Turkey fears that the inflow of refugees, which NATO promotes the acceptance of, is in danger of “exacerbating ethnic and religious tensions within Southern Turkey.”

In contrast to the tensions between NATO and Turkey - or perhaps even because of it - the latter is enjoying a close new relationship to NATO’s rival, Russia. Russia’s relationship with Turkey was not always as promising as it now seems to be.

Photo by Yasmin Al Mousa

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Photo by Sophia Culpo

In 2015, the two countries came close to war when Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 that was accused of having violated Turkish airspace during a bombing campaign in Syria. This resulted in strong tensions considering that Russia had also been deploying “helicopter gunships” and “rocket artillery” to assist Syria. However, their relationship seems to be taking on a different tone now that Turkey’s issues with NATO have intensified.

In December of 2017, Turkey finalized a deal to purchase a S-400 air defense system from Russia. Following this deal, in April of 2018, Turkey made plans to begin building a Russian power plant.

Also, whereas the U.S. and Turkey seem to have reached a stalemate in Syria, Turkey’s relationship with Russia is only more prosperous on that front. The two have been working together to create a nine to twelve mile demilitarized zone

in Syria’s Idlib province; Erdogan believes that this is key to preventing a “humanitarian crisis” in the region.

While Turkey and Russia have yet to take formal steps towards a closer alliance, their common political interests are driving Turkey further from NATO and thus further from economic prosperity.

Overall, Turkey’s tensions with NATO and newfound closeness to Putin have various implications for the currency crisis. It is in Turkey’s best interest to maintain its relationship with NATO, particularly the U.S., even though NATO might view it as a troublesome member state. In maintaining a positive relationship with the organization, Turkey is able to enjoy economic stability devoid of major changes implemented by Trump or any other leader. During the Arab Spring, Turkey was able to avoid political and economic collapse by being a part of NATO,

as they teamed up for the regime change in Libya. Additionally, Turkey enjoys more economic stability because they have been able to maintain lending privileges with their European allies. While it is economically sound for Turkey to head in this direction, it makes the most sense for NATO member states as well. Turkey is one of the U.S.’s leading allies for stability in the Middle East, and “the U.S.Turkey trade and investment relationship has traditionally been described as one with great potential that punches below its weight.”

While both sides may be tempted to challenge the other in an attempt to prove their prowess, their political and economic stability is contingent upon stability and unity on both sides.

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DIPLOMACY

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44 45

Unattainable Peace in Kashmir The Future of Somaliland’s Nascent Democracy

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Agni-V: India’s Nuclear Missile Development

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Saudi Arabia’s Move Towards Nuclear Weapons

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The Suidlander Connection: South Africa’s Land and Language Wars

Photo by Rebecca Giovannetti

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International Relations Review

Unattainable Peace in Kashmir Samantha Day

Photo by Madeline Van Heusden

Fall 2018

In April 2017, there were widespread student protests in the Indian State of Kashmir. As many as 50 students were injured by tear gas and pellet guns as they marched in favor of independence, a cause favored by two-thirds of Kashmir’s population. This is a small representation of the near-constant violence that has plagued Kashmir since its creation following the Indian Partition in 1947. There were 18 deaths, 147 injured, and 137 arrests along Kashmir’s “line of control” in January 2018 alone. Major ethnic and religious differences, vague definitions of borders, and competition for economic assets have caused Kashmir to become the world’s most militarized zone, as well as the largest region occupied by security forces. The tangle of shared history between ethnic and religious groups makes this a conflict without a feasible peaceful solution.

Kashmir is a roughly 85,000 square mile territory, located in the northernmost region of the Indian subcontinent. The region is controlled by a complex, multilevel web of power. The territory is divided into three autonomous regions administered by Pakistan, India, and China. The Pakistanadministered portion is divided into two autonomous sections and the Indian-administered portion is composed of two autonomous states. The border between Indian Kashmir and Pakistani Kashmir is divided by the “line of control,” a temporary border created by a 1972 accord. China administers two small, disconnected sections in the northwestern portion of Ladakh, referred to as Aksai Chin. These sections are the two autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet within China.

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Kashmir has a long history of cultural diversity. The Himalayan mountains have long been the subject of literature, mythologies, and religious reflection for people across South Asia. From the 9th12th century CE, the area was a center of Hindu culture. In 1346, it came under Muslim rule, which lasted until 1819. Britain controlled the region from 1858-1947, and then the region was divided into Hindu-majority India and Muslimmajority Pakistan. In the chaos that followed British decolonization, roughly 15 million people were uprooted, 2 million died, and 75,000 women were raped. After hundreds of years of peaceful coexistence, this mass religious migration resulted in a genocide of both sides.

“Conditions in the area are described as ‘partially free’ by Freedom House, an independent human rights watchdog organization.”

Kashmir was given the choice to remain independent, which it maintained for two months. Ultimately, the Kashmir government was forced to sign an accession agreement with India to obtain help in subduing Pakistanisupported Muslim revolutions.

Localized warfare continued in the area until a United Nations-ordered cease-fire went into place in 1949.

Tensions arose again in 1962 after the Chinese incursion in Ladakh.

Another cease-fire was established in 1965, but after continued flares

of violence the “line of control” was established. A treaty has never been signed to officially end the war. Notable major conflicts have occurred in 1977, 1979, 1999, which brought both sides close to a nuclear war, and in 2004.

Kashmir is mostly mountainous and is sparsely populated. This has historically caused difficulties in reaching precise definitions of the region’s borders. However, it is an area rich in natural resources, as the Himalayas provide huge economic opportunities for forestry, tourism, agriculture, hydroelectric power, and irrigation. Kashmir also holds the greatest concentration of minerals in the Himalayan region, including copper and iron ores, borax, sulfur, and bauxite. The Vale of Kashmir is the most fertile plain in the region, located within the Indian state of Jammu. In the Vale of Kashmir, India runs a booming agricultural industry, creating large amounts of food for its growing population, which is projected to become the world’s most largest by 2024.

The Indus River, which flows through all three major regions of Kashmir, is one of the most significant sources of water for the Indian subcontinent. The Indus provides irrigation for the otherwise arid landscape of Punjab province in Pakistan, and both Pakistan and India use it to generate electricity.

Use of the Indus River also plays an important role in the Chinese economy. It is estimated that as much as 80% of groundwater wells in China are heavily polluted from industrial and agricultural use, making the Indus a rare outlet of fresh water which can fuel the agriculture-based economy of

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46 Tibet.

The Indian-administered states make up the largest section of the region. Conditions in the area are described as ‘partially free’ by Freedom House , an independent human rights watchdog organization. While the area largely enjoys autonomy from the Indian government, human rights violations are often reported during times of conflict. Curfews, newspaper bans, internet, and mobile phone blackouts are routine during periods of unrest. India is the third-largest economy in the world and has the second-highest amount of external debt in all of Asia; thus far its debt has not caused an issue, but it could prove problematic if growth rates slow due to political tensions or a serious military conflict. This fact acts as a strong deterrent against Indian action on border disputes in

Kashmir.

The states of Pakistani Kashmir have limited autonomy.

The states lack the same representation and rights as other Pakistani provinces and the federal government maintains control of courts. A message of eventual accession into Pakistan is promoted and any political activity contrary to this is restricted. Recently Pakistan allowed for the creation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, through Gilgit-Baltistan, as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The Pakistani government hopes this project will move the country toward economic maturity and help it deal with its large debts. From its creation in 1947 to 2016, Pakistan had debts amounting to roughly 66.50% of its GDP. Pakistan holds the belief that Kashmir should be under their control, primarily because of its

Muslim demographic. While there was already a Muslim majority in Kashmir before 1947, this became abundantly clear following the partition, which left Pakistan with a thinly populated, inaccessible, and economically underdeveloped region. The largest Muslim group, located in the Vale of Kashmir, held more than half of the population of the region. Pakistan found itself cut off from these people and from their former economic outlets. This has prevented Pakistani recognition of the ‘line of control’ and has stalled serious negotiations.

China occupies two portions of Ladakh, held under the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang. Tibetans have maintained their own distinctive culture, speak Tibetan, and are largely Buddhist.

While technically an autonomous region, Tibetan people are listed as

Photo by Natalie Carroll

Fall 2018 unfree by Freedom House. People across China are denied basic human rights, but repression is especially rigorous in Tibet, as expressions of religion or culture often lead to aggressive prosecutions. Xinjiang is China’s largest province and home to 8 million Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighur persons. As an area rich with natural resources and economic development, Uighurs have seen themselves marginalized by largescale immigration to the province

by Han Chinese. The Kashmir portion of Xinjiang is primarily Buddhist, and this group has called for a further level of autonomy from Xinjiang since 1997.

Chinese involvement in the region continues to be a source of aggravation. China never accepted the British boundaries in northeastern Kashmir. Attempts were made to reopen border negations with India in 1949, but these failed. Once authority was established in Tibet and Xinjiang, Chinese forces moved on Ladakh, and have occupied the area ever since. India’s belated discovery of a Chinese-built road through the region led to border clashes, which have never been negotiated. In 2010, China invested in a port in Gwadar on Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast and created the CPEC to connect it to western China. This trade corridor provides China with more direct access to Middle Eastern oil, as well as the ‘riches’ of Africa. As China faces an economic slowdown and local debts of over three trillion dollars , this initiative and others like it have become a beacon of hope that China can become a developed economy. India has boycotted the CPEC because of China’s choice of location, arguing that China is illegally occupying land in Kashmir.

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Photo by Madeline Van Heusden Sino-Pakistani cooperation in the region makes it less likely that India will gain control of Kashmir, and Chinese presence in the region is now likely permanent.

Underneath these battles for control are the people of Kashmir.

Most of the people of Kashmir are unhappy with their current situation. While most argue in favor of independence, there are also arguments for joining surrounding countries. Residents of the Vale of Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim region, call for a merger with Pakistan. On the other hand, a large Buddhist community in Tibet desires to become a union territory under India. Distinctive ethnic and religious groups remain uprooted and disconnected from their communities. With the memories of the genocide following the partition, it is doubtful people would move again to resolve this.

This is especially true because of the shared history in the region: each group believes the land is rightfully theirs.

It is unlikely that the question of Kashmir will be resolved anytime soon and equally unlikely that the situation will be solved without further violence. As long as Kashmir plays an important role in each of the economies that control it, there will be no peace for those seeking independence. Chinese activity is proving to further escalate tension in the region, and it is likely China will play an increasingly dominant role in the fate of Kashmir. The future of Kashmir remains unclear as violence continues daily and rulers of competing nations have no incentives to relinquish their control.

International Relations Review

48

The Future of Somaliland’s Nascent Democracy Yoni Tobin

Photo by Nikta Khani The international perception of Somalia, reinforced by popular Hollywood blockbusters such as Black Hawk Down and Captain Phillips, tends to be portrayed as a bloody petri dish of crime, corruption, and an anarchy. Such a characterization of Somalia is not unfounded but rather it is incomplete. While the country’s recent history has been marked by internal clashes, most notably the Somali government’s ongoing campaign against militant group AlShabaab, a relative oasis of progress within Somalia’s borders has emerged over the past two decades.

In Somalia’s arid northwest province lies Somaliland, a 68 thousand square-mile autonomous region which has declared itself its own state. Somaliland, characterized by the Freedom House as “partly

free,” has remained relatively stable since its inception in 1991. Due to a concerted effort to garner international recognition and assistance, Somaliland has over the past decade received some support from Western nations such as the U.S., U.K., and France, as well as continental unions such as the African Union and the European Union. However, Somaliland’s attempts at gaining legitimacy have fallen short and have forced it to turn to more unconventional allies. Somaliland’s efforts to become a somewhat free and democratic-breakaway state can serve as an interesting case study for independence movements across the globe and demonstrate a relatively optimistic future for the region.

Somaliland’s brief history dates back to June 27, 1960, when

the State of Somaliland was granted independence by the British. The British granted it independence under the assumption that Somaliland, comprising present-day Somalia’s northwest region, would unite with the Trust Territory of Somaliland, a previously Italiancontrolled territory encompassing present-day Somalia’s northeast, central and southern regions. For five days, the State of Somaliland existed as a sovereign state, during which time it was recognized by 35 countries, until it formally merged with the Trust Territory of Somaliland to form Somalia on July 1, 1960. Following the unification, the transient Somaliland became a mere afterthought for nearly 30 years.

In the late 1980s, however, the discussion of Somalia’s

Fall 2018 northwest region becoming autonomous again began to surface in the wake of atrocities committed against the Isaaq tribal clan Marxist dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, Somalia’s president. The Isaaq tribal clan that makes up the vast majority of present-day Somaliland was the victim of vicious attacks

by Siad Barre, who had outlawed “tribalism” and banned any public references to clans or family lineage.

The oppression of the Isaaq and their political body, the Somali National Movement (SNM), culminated in a mass slaughter of the Isaaq between 1988 and 1990, claiming over 50,000 lives.

Siad Barre’s military dictatorship was ultimately overthrown in 1991 which resulted in Somalia falling into disarray as competing factions fought to fill the power vacuum.

Members of the SNM seized on the opportunity and officially declared independence on May 17, 1991, claiming that Somaliland was simply restoring its short-lived 1960 status as an autonomous nation.

Somaliland’s justification for independence is predicated on its historical origins, as its leaders assert that they are trying to revert to its original, albeit short-lived, premerger status in 1960. The African Union and other critics have rejected Somaliland’s independence and say that granting Somaliland independence would set a dangerous precedent - analogous with opening “Pandora’s Box” Independence would lead to any breakaway state or independence movement redrawing the borders of Africa according to their whim. Despite its lack of formal recognition and independence, Somaliland has shown many promising signs of

49 liberalization.

In the years since 1991, Somaliland has largely embraced democracy and structure, in sharp contrast to the continued dysfunction of the rest of Somalia. In 2017, an international delegation that included observers from the France, Germany, U.K., and U.S., and other Western countries, travelled to Somaliland to monitor Somaliland’s

“The lack of broadbased international material support for Somaliland appears to have jeopardized many of its most promising attributes.”

November 13 presidential elections.

The observers “praised the smooth and peaceful conduct of voting,” according to a joint statement.

Freedom House’s 2017 report concurred, noting that “elections in Somaliland have been generally free and fair” and rated Somaliland as a whole as “partly free.”

Various explanations have been offered as to why Somaliland has been able to achieve democratic advancement.

One particular theory centers around endogenous factors. According to this theory, Somaliland’s internal political structure, a blend of Western liberal thought and tribal-based tradition, allows for the governing body to maintain legitimacy and support from reformers and traditional clan elders alike. Another theory focuses on exogenous factors, namely the incessant warring and corruption in the rest of Somalia. Looking at the violence and chaos in the rest

of Somalia, the theory states, the people of Somaliland collectively decided to endure the growing pains of a emergent democracy rather than to risk suffering the same fate.

Whatever the reason for its level of progress, Somaliland has its own political institutions, laws, and constitution, all of which grew out of a bottom-up model that emerged primarily without international support.

By and large, international support for Somaliland has been largely expressed through rhetoric rather than action. Both the African Union and the European Union sent foreign ministers in January 2007 to discuss Somaliland’s future, but no meaningful cooperation seems to have developed in the nearly 12 years since. In September 2010, United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson paid lip service to Somaliland, saying “we will work to engage more actively” with the government of Somaliland; however, he stressed that the United States would continue to refrain from formal recognition. Some programs intended to improve the freeness of Somaliland’s elections have been partially financed by the United States. However, aside from those measures, no Western nations or bodies have undertaken initiatives to catalyze the state’s middling economy or help propel it towards international recognition.

Perhaps as a result of its limited support from Western countries, Somaliland has begun looking elsewhere for help to stimulate its economy. Due to Somaliland’s strategic location, with its capital city Berbera located along the southern coast of the Gulf of Aden (a major trade route

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50 used primarily for oil exports), others in the region have recently looked to expand their influence into Somaliland. All ports on the northern side of the Gulf of Aden are located in Yemen, which has been embroiled in a bloody civil war for over three years, ultimately making investment in the fairly stable Somaliland far more appetizing for foreign firms and governments.

One country that has thrown its lot in with Somaliland is the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

On September 5, 2016, DP World, a global shipping firm based in Dubai, the UAE’s capital, signed a contract with Somaliland to invest $442 million USD to build a port in Berbera and manage it for the next 30 years. UAE’s government followed suit in February 2017, when it reached a deal overwhelmingly approved by Somaliland’s

parliament to build a military base in Berbera, and control it for a minimum of 25 years. The base is expected to be used by the UAE to help it continue its military support of Saudi Arabia’s intervention in the Yemeni Civil War against Iranian-backed Houthis. Exact details of the deal remain unclear.

However, Somaliland President Muse Bihi Abdi said on April 3 that Somaliland is “allied to the United Arab Emirates and to Saudi Arabia,” adding that “our business and main assets are in Dubai. All our imports depend on United Arab Emirates and their ports. We have relations of business and economic ties with them, so we are allies with them.” The relationship between Somaliland and the UAE seems very likely to flourish for the next few decades. Somaliland will continue to leverage the good fortune of its

Photo by Matt Manarchy

geographical position for business and military contracts with the wealthy UAE and perhaps even with other Gulf countries seeking to expand sphere of influence.

The lack of broad-based international material support for Somaliland appears to have jeopardized many of its most promising attributes. Somaliland’s military suffers from a lack of advanced weaponry, offsetting its potential to be a more potent force in anti-piracy and counterterrorism efforts. Its prime real estate, a harbor on one of the world’s most used petroleum trade routes, now effectively belongs to the UAE. Finally, Somaliland’s burgeoning democracy while strong at this moment, may not stand up to the test of time if its people are forced to choose between a strong economy and a democratic future.

Somaliland’s progress in its short history with its newfound loyalty to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, coupled with its failure to obtain international legitimacy may pose a challenge to its tribal-based political structure and perhaps even its democratic character. Current and future developments notwithstanding, Somaliland’s bottom-up model for nation building has already provided the world with a template for similarly situated groups, such as Iraqi Kurds. The ability of a tribalbased traditional power structure to adopt aninstill liberal principles to form a functional democracy is an auspicious beginning for Somaliland, as it continues to be a shining beacon in an otherwise tumultuous corner of the world.

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51

Agni-V:

India Nuclear Missile Development Noah Riley

Nearly five months ago, on June 3, India conducted the potential penultimate test of its newest nuclear capable ballistic missile, the Agni-V. As the name suggests, this intercontinental surface-tosurface missile (ICBM) is the fifth in the Agni series developed by the Indian Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP) of the Defence Research

and Development Organisation (DRDO). The DRDO is an agency under the administrative control of the Ministry of Defence, and consists of a network of 52 laboratories involved in developing an array of defense technologies and is widely considered India’s most diverse research institution.

According to the DRDO, the organization consists of over 5000 scientists as well as 25000 other support personnel. Under the mission of the DRDO, the IGMDP was initiated in 1982, and its full integration into various branches of the Indian military was officially completed in 2008. This Programme was created to specialize in the development of four missilerelated projects each researching various types of deployments and ranges of varying deployments and ranges (e.g. surface-to-surface, surfaceto-air, anti-tank);however, the Agni family was not originally included in these developmental groupings. The Agni missiles were initially designed as a form of reentry vehicle, but they were later upgraded to constitute an entire family of ballistic missile with different ranges.

The Agni family includes medium to intercontinentalrange ballistic missiles with a series of payload capabilities and ranges.

Agni-I, Agni-II, and the Agni-III all underwent

extensive testing on a number of prototypes and were deemed fully operational by 2010. The Agni-IV was the first missile tested post-2010 and is a two-stage nuclear-capable intermediate range missile. It was successfully test-fired as recently as January 2017 and has now been fully integrated into the arsenal of the Indian military. This now leads us to the Agni-V missile, India’s most advanced to date

The first test of Agni-V was conducted on April 19, 2012 and is an intercontinental ballistic missile with an official range of 5,500 to 5,800 km, equivalent to about 3400 to 3600 miles. Some security experts including Du Wenlong—a researcher with China’s People’s Liberation Army—doubt the claims made by the Indian military and suggest the range of the Agni-V is closer to 8000 km (~5000 mi). For some perspective, at a minimum, the Agni-V is capable of traversing the distance from New York City on one side of the Atlantic Ocean to London, on the other. To be regionally specific, the Agni-V can now strike virtually every location in Northern China,and its range hypothetically extends into parts of Africa. This missile, like the AgniIV, is also nuclear capable, with a payload capacity of 1500 kg of material consistent with a highexplosive warhead. The launch weight of the missile is around 50 tons, while the nuclear warhead that can be carried on the missile is roughly one ton. It has a length of 17.5 meters and a diameter of

Photo by Raina Kadavil

International Relations Review

52 roughly 2.2 meters, measurements consistent with some of the most advanced missiles known to be in the arsenals of the United States, China and Russia. The Agni-V consists of a three part propulsion system, using a composite case solid rocket motor for the third stage. Collectively, the three engines propel the missile to a final height of 800km before re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Perhaps one of the most enticing facets of the Agni-V for the Indian military is the complementary development of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV). The MIRV is a ballistic missile payload that is capable of containing several (310) nuclear warheads that can be aimed at different individual targets.

As of 2016 experts speculated that India is progressing in developing this technology, if not already completed, and that the Agni-V would be inducted with such technology.

After the first successful launch in April of 2012, the Agni-V was tested a number of times

between 2013 and 2018 before undergoing its most recent test in July of 2018. It was successfully testlaunched from Wheeler Island in the Indian Ocean. Though the timeline of testing before operational approval has shifted in the past year, it is expected that the Agni-V may undergo one more test before being inducted into the Strategic Forces Command by late 2018-early 2019.

Beyond acknowledgement of the impressive, homegrown technological advancements made

by India in a relatively short time period, the development and impending operational induction of the Agni-V has far reaching geopolitical implications. Upon induction, India will become one of the elite nations that possess ICBMs, joining the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council: United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France (and unofficially Israel).

It is important to note that India does remain a tier below these nations.

According to a New York Times report in 2018, the aforementioned

nations are all capable of striking any location in the world with a missile, at any time.

Additionally, India is a nation in the middle of a number of high-tension relationships with similarly ambitious and quickly developing nations. The most obvious conflict is with Pakistan, as the two have long had a contentious relationship, to put it generously.

The two nations, in their long and documented conflict have had nuclear proliferation as a topic of the utmost importance dating back as early as the 1990s. According to top officials, “the Indian missile programme is head and shoulders above the programme of Pakistan� as the missile technology of Pakistan is limited in comparison.

In response to the most recent test, Pakistani officials did not seem to express worry, though the test was widely broadcasted on Pakistani new networks. They did note that the test occurred, and that the Indian government gave them the requisite notice that such a test was underway.

Photo by Raina Kadavil

Fall 2018

An interesting dynamic has also emerged with China, the nation most would consider the most significant power player in the Asian region. The two nations share a border just over 4000 km long.

Historically, there have been border disputes focused on sovereignty over Aksai Chin and Doklam. Though agreements have been made between the two nations as recently as last year,tensions have escalated significantly. In June of 2017, the Doklam Military Standoff occurred in Doklam, near the Dok La pass.

On June 16th, the Chinese brought heavy road construction equipment to continue excavation for a road it was building in extremely close proximity to where Indian troops were stationed. The period of near confrontation eventually passed, but the status quo had been sufficiently violated in an already contentious period. On top of the physical border conflict remains competition between two nations vying for power and influence in the region.

Though China is more advanced along the developmental timeline, India’s booming population and resource possession profile its advancement by leaps and bounds over the next century. The Agni-V serves as a step forward for India as it seeks to match China’s military might. Beyond its range into most of China, it also acts as a nuclear deterrent for aggressive Chinese actions or the hypothetical launch of their own nuclear weapons.

It is not possible to discuss

53 superpower politics without also mentioning the interests of the United States and Russia.

The Agni-V induction timeline coincides with a $5.43 billion deal between India and Russia for five advanced S-400 Triumf surface-toair squadrons. It is India’s largest defense deal ever and provides strategic defense measures to address threats from neighboring nations (e.g. China and Pakistan). These air defense systems are capable of taking down enemy aircraft from fighter jets to incoming missiles. The S-400 Triumf units provide further deterrence in terms of potential conflict over the Sino-Indian border.

India has officially inked this deal despite potential repercussions from the United States as designated by the Countering Adversaries through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). This act mandates the US administration impose sanctions on nations that engage in significant transactions with Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

Though this is official US policy, it would not be surprising to see a lack of action from the United States.

India and United States concluded the inaugural ‘two-plus-two’ talks this past September. Delegations led by U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Indian Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj, and Indian Minister of Defense Nirmala Sitharaman met and discussed a variety of issues, focusing mainly on energy and security in the region. The two sides

came to a number of agreements on mutual concerns, a particularly important accomplishment for the Trump Administration seeking to mitigate Chinese influence via hard and soft power plays by the global superpower. Agreements between the two countries included reaffirmation of India as a Major Defense Partner of the United States, the signing of the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA), and the opening of communications between US Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) and the Indian Navy. It is certainly within the realm of possibility the two nations discussed the development and induction of the Agni-V into the Indian arsenal.

Overall, the Agni-V is the latest addition to the already impressive missile arsenal of the Indian military. It adds a new dimension to the capabilities of the Strategic Forces Command and alters a number of power dynamics within the region and beyond. Even having accomplished so much, India is not done yet. They are currently working on the Agni-VI which is anticipated to have even greater range and payload capacity. India has announced itself to the world as a military force to be reckoned with and is here to stay.

Photo by Raina Kadavil

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Saudi Arabia’s Move Towards Nuclear Weapons Julien Dresbach

Photo by Yasmin Younis

Fall 2018 In 2011, Saudi Arabia announced its $80 billion plan to build 16 nuclear power reactors by 2030, and it has recently started to concretely pursue this with the intent to award a contract for the construction of two reactors by the end of 2018. Saudi Arabia is, in practice, the leader of the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the world’s largest oil exporter.

While Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves account for an estimated 22 percent of all known oil reserves, Saudi Arabia has recently announced its intention to diversity its economy away from oil.

Unlike the UAE, the Kingdom has stated that it wants to do its own enrichment of fuel into energy rather than rely on American nuclear technology. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (or NPT) allows signatories to obtain technology to develop nuclear power, even though there is no guarantee what the country will do with the technology.

For instance, nuclear energy facilities use both uranium and plutonium, both of which are vital elements found in nuclear weapons. Nuclear power requires uranium that is enriched up to 5 percent, while the uranium in nuclear bombs has to be enriched to above 90 percent using centrifuges. To obtain plutonium, uranium is irradiated in a nuclear reactor, but a different isotope is created as a by-product in a nuclear reactor than is formed for use in nuclear weapons.

Meetings in early March between U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and the Saudi Energy Minister in London may not have concluded to the satisfaction of the Saudis. The agreement would only allow the Saudi Arabian capital

55 Riyadh to enrich uranium and extract plutonium on the premise that U.S. companies are able to build nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia.

As a result, the Saudis may turn to other countries for the technology, such as Russia (which has already made deals with Egypt and Jordan) China or France.

A deal with Russia or China would also carry political implications for western countries, particularly the U.S. While Saudi Arabia has strong economic ties with the U.S. despite their different political systems, Washington may hesitate to provide such technology to the Saudis given the concern that other countries in the region might then try to obtain the technology as well. Specifically, a technology deal with Saudi Arabia might make it more difficult for the U.S. to impose tighter restrictions on Iran.

On the other hand, a deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, which would likely be a 123 Agreement that provides for peaceful nuclear cooperation under Section 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act, would allow the U.S. to influence the Saudi technology program.

Although it is difficult to judge the extent to which Saudi Arabia’s interest in uranium enrichment and plutonium extraction technology is due to an equal interest in obtaining nuclear weapons, reports over the years suggest that Saudi Arabia would like to have nuclear weapon capacity. A leaked Saudi document in the early 2000s outlines options for a nuclear program and lists the option of acquiring a nuclear deterrent.

Despite not possessing nuclear weapons, the Kingdom does have, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, 36 intermediate-

range ballistic missiles that have the capability of delivering nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia purchased these from China in 2007 without U.S. approval. Also, it is possible that Saudi Arabia has either developed or is in the process of developing components that are necessary and support nuclear weapons. As a result, there is some concern that Saudi Arabia would be albe to amass nuclear armaments in a relatively short period of time.

Saudi Arabia’s current pursuit of obtaining nuclear power technology and its historical interest in nuclear weapons suggest that it is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapon technology and perhaps even nuclear weapons. The question is then what are its motives for acquiring nuclear weapon capability.

Saudi Arabia’s interest in nuclear weapons is closely linked to its concern about its security and power in the Middle East.

Israel possesses nuclear weapons and Iran has a nuclear program.

Saudi Arabia sees that there is no continuous pressure on Israel to give up its nuclear arsenal. Additionally, under the current Iran nuclear deal framework reached in 2015, it is allowed to process uranium at a level that is well below what is required for nuclear weapons. Yet, even with this agreement, Saudi Arabia has, what a senior pundit has termed “significant doubts,” about Iran’s ability to give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

If Iran has nuclear weapons capability, then Saudi Arabia, with its enmity of Iran, will feel that it is at a political and military disadvantage and, as such, will desire nuclear capabilities as a deterrent. Iran and Saudi Arabia have not had

International Relations Review

56 diplomatic relations since the attack on the Saudi Embassy in Tehran in 2016, and Saudi’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman appears willing to take action to counter and confront Iran.

Behind Saudi Arabia’s desire to possess nuclear weapons as a guarantee of its own security against Israel or Iran is a complex web of threat perceptions and historical experiences complemented by its views of the benefits and costs of any actions toward nuclear capability. Alongside these are the internal politics and workings of Saudi Arabia with its religious and political values.

Saudi Arabia has watched as Iran tries to develop its own military industries to decrease its dependence on the external markets, investments, capital, and technology of western countries.

While the U.S. develops its own nuclear weapons, it opposes other countries’ development of nuclear weapons. It does not allow the UAE to carry out uranium enrichment and would likely take the same approach with Saudi Arabia.

As Saudi Arabia pursues increased influence in the Middle East, it confronts a rival, Iran, which has greater nuclear capability.

Iran has gained influence in the Middle East through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, proxy forces that have opposed the interests of Saudi Arabia. The consequence of Iran’s actions can be seen with Saudi Arabia’s decision to become directly involved in bombing in Yemen. As Saudi Arabia has felt increasingly threatened by Iran, it would then give them good reason to explore nuclear defense solutions for its own country. The possibility of such nuclear escalations would

hold both immediate repercussions and longer-term effects in world relations.

The reaction from the international community would be led by the United States and, given the U.S.’s significant trading and political ties with the Kingdom, the U.S. might not adopt a confrontational response. In addition, an editorial in the Saudi publication Al-Riyadh concluded that the western powers opposed North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programs principally for political reasons, being that they were both outside of the West’s orbit. This suggests that Saudi Arabia might be treated differently. Also, Israel has been building ties with Saudi Arabia, in response to an alliance sponsored by the U.S. against Iran, and if these become stronger, then Israel might not express outrage at Saudi Arabia’s actions.

To the extent that Saudi Arabia acquires nuclear technology or weapons in response to Iran having done so, then the reaction of western countries would likely be more muted. As one Saudi academic concluded, , “the United States in the past used to prohibit the Arab countries from developing nuclear technology, but now has become more open to such an option, out of fear that Iranian influence will increase, potentially leading to a sort of hegemony over political developments in the region.” Also, a crisis in the Middle East, such as another war or a military coup, may develop as the international community finds out that Saudi Arabia has become a nuclear State. Any such crisis would divert attention from Saudi Arabia, particularly where its military or logistical support was needed in

response to the crisis, similar to when the international community found out in the 1980s that Pakistan was close to obtaining nuclear weapons, but the country’s support was needed to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of nuclear weapons will have significant effects on other countries in the region. Iran will certainly reinforce its efforts to obtain them and perhaps even withdraw from the 2015 nuclear framework with Iran. Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of nuclear weapons might also trigger proliferation in the region.

Countries such as Turkey, Egypt or Algeria would be likely to follow Saudi Arabia’s actions. Essentially, there could be a ripple effect across the whole region with an increasing desire of countries to obtain nuclear technology and weapons. To the extent that nuclear technology and weapons become more available in the region, there will likely be a corresponding risk that these will be sold to other States in the Middle East and therefore become more widespread. Further, these effects could then undermine efforts to ensure the application of the NPT, which could have ramifications for other regions.

Yet, there is also the possibility that Saudi Arabia’s possession of nuclear weapons would contribute to a greater political balance in the region, similar to the Pakistan–India nuclear standoff and that of the U.S. and Russia, which could contribute to a sort of understanding seen in cases of mutually assured destruction. A key consideration for the stability of nuclear deterrence is a country’s basic political outlook. Saudi Arabia, which has been a Kingdom

Fall 2018 ruled by the sons descended from the first King Ibn Saud since 1932, is less likely to represent a danger to nuclear stability than one where the military plays a central role. Also, Saudi Arabia has generally sought to maintain the status quo within the region rather than pursuing an aggressive expansionist policy or one that seeks to right past injustices with other countries.

The question is then whether it would be possible to prevent Saudi Arabia from obtaining nuclear capability. More specifically, what steps could be taken by the international community to meet Saudi Arabia’s interests in nuclear energy and its security. A complete denial of the technology related to nuclear energy would probably be unacceptable to the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia has publicly announced its plans to move forward in building nuclear reactors and would not be willing to ‘lose face’, either domestically or within the international community by changing its mind. Plus, the Kingdom has started to think about alternatives to oil energy in recognition that oil reserves will become increasingly depleted.

However, Saudi Arabia does not

57 need uranium enrichment to generate electricity nor does it need to separate plutonium. Therefore, in order to meet Saudi Arabia’s nuclear energy needs, careful consideration needs to be given to exactly what technology Saudi Arabia requires.

The more difficult challenge for preventing Saudi Arabia from becoming a nuclear State is its security concerns. De-escalating the key sources of tension in the region is the key. Israel would be unlikely to give up its weapons, but perhaps Iran could be stopped from making any further progress toward developing or obtaining weapons. Saudi Arabia’s distrust of Iran might still lead it to discount any statement by Iran or even the international community’s verification that Iran is not pursuing nuclear proliferation. What is really needed is to build trust between the two powers and construct mutual cooperation between them in regional matters. This is a significant challenge because of their religious and historical differences and the tensions between the two countries, spread across much more than the issue of nuclear proliferation in the region, make cooperation difficult.

Photo by Sabrina Khan

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The Suidlander Connection: South Africa’s Land and Language Wars Desmond Molloy

Photo by Claire Martin

The prospect of massive, uncompensated land seizures from white South African farmers almost became a reality this year. In April 2018, Australian Minister of Home Affairs Peter Dutton called for his government to grant expedited humanitarian visas to white South African farmers, claiming that they needed a “civilized country’s” help in the face of alleged ethnic persecution by the country’s black majority. Four months later, U.S. president Donald Trump fanned the flames by tweeting that he had “asked Secretary of State (Mike Pompeo) to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.”. The South African government reacted angrily, summoning the U.S. ambassador to Pretoria.

Beginning with the 1973 publication of The Camp of the Saints, a novel depicting the fall of a civilized, fatally altruistic Europe to African and Asian hordes, the idea of a Caucasian genocide that began in Africa and spread to Europe and North America is haunting for the far right. The Camp of the Saints was published in an era when white settlers in southern and eastern Africa were losing their political power, and, frequently, their farmland as well.

The last holdout of white power on the continent was South Africa. There, to an extent seen nowhere else on the continent, the black population was confined to nominally independent tribal reservations, while the majority of the land was expropriated and given to white farmers. Outside the reservations known as Bantustans, black South Africans were subject to Jim Crow-style segregation,

Fall 2018 including a ban on interracial relationships. Because the Bantustans were crammed onto the country’s least desirable land (and existed only in the eastern half), millions of residents flooded South Africa’s ‘white zone’, looking for work.

Prohibited from obtaining housing accomodations in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria, or the other cities, they ended up in slums on the outskirts, where most remain well after the end of white rule. To white nationalists, this impoverished and desperate population represents an existential threat, a view shared among American extremists.

Shortly before murdering nine black parishioners in a South Carolinian church, Dylann Roof was photographed with two flags— the orange, white and blue of pre1994 South Africa and the green and white of Rhodesia—on his jacket.

The Rhodesian flag represents a state that was completely dismantled after the end of minority rule, with most Rhodesian farmers losing their lands to the Zimbabwean government’s expropriation laws.

South Africa has taken a more gradual approach to redistribution.

The ruling African National Congress (ANC) has favored a gradual approach of compensated land purchases and redistribution, reducing white land ownership by 15 percentage points. To this day however, 72% of privately held land in the country remains in white hands.

As the national economy slowed towards the end of former President Jacob Zuma’s administration, demands to forcibly expropriate all white-held land grew more vehement. Currently, Zuma’s successor Cyril Ramaphosa, is trying to garner support for legislation to

59 permit such expropriation, which would require an amendment to the South African Constitution.

Opponents of the measure have already begun to push back -- not all of them fall into the shadow of the country’s surviving white nationalist movement. Mixedrace (“coloured” in South African parlance) individuals hold a great deal of farmland in the Northern and Western Cape provinces.

Viewed as more privileged than their black counterparts, they have grown less and less friendly to the ANC. They have joined white farmers to resist the proposal. South Africa’s farmers’ association has warned that uncompensated land expropriations would be illegal, and is prepared to fight it in court.

The greatest resistance by far has has come from the far-right wing of white South African society. To them, expropriation is the latest in a series of concerted attacks on their civil rights intended to drive them out of the country. Since the 1980s, South Africa has been plagued by a string of “farm killings”, in which (mostly black) farm workers or locals kill and rob (mostly white) farmers.

White nationalists fear that this is a precursor to genocide. The media has however tried to assuage fears, with reports indicating that the total number of farm killings has in fact been declining since the end of apartheid in 1994. Despite this, many farmers remain apprehensive and have emigrated, taking their farming skills to Australia, Georgia and other nations with an abundance of land. They fear that the South African government is orchestrating the attacks in an attempt to drive them out. A fraction of the country’s black nationalist right support such tactics. Julius Malema, leader of the

Economic Freedom Fighters, has said that he will not call for killing white South Africans “at least not yet”. But even Malema later had to retract his statement, after facing criminal charges for ethnic incitement. Furthermore, polling in Gauteng, the country’s richest and most populous province, has shown that even black respondents are largely opposed to Malema’s preferred tactic of forcible expropriation, preferring a more vigorous buyback program.

Nevertheless, the farm killing story has proven appealing to American white nationalists.

Last year, far right media producer Lauren Southern (a Canadian by birth, but popular in the American alt right movement) created the documentary Farmlands, which focused on the farm killings and Malema’s remarks as purported forerunners of white extermination in South Africa.

South Africa’s white nationalists cashed in on the farm killings story as much as possible.

Simon Roche, the leader of prominent white survivalist group the Suidlanders, went on tour in the United States, soliciting donations from American white nationalist groups including the League of the South and Red Ice TV, an online platform known for hosting Holocaust deniers. Towards the end of his tour, which lasted six months, Roche attended the Unite the Right rally, witnessing an event that ended in widespread publicity for the American far right, and the murder of a counter-protester. His presence went largely unnoticed by an American news media focused on the rise of their own neo-Nazi and white nationalist movements. But almost a year after Roche marched

International Relations Review

60 through Charlottesville, the fruits of his American tour blossomed, as the head of the most powerful state in the world warned that his chief diplomat was keeping an eye on South African land reform.

How large is Roche’s base of support?

It remains almost impossible to tell. A 2018 survey of residents of Gauteng, the country’s wealthiest and most populous province, found that most white South Africans were pessimistic about race relations, and that 40% were opposed to land redistribution and other forms of affirmative action. But these disagreements may not always translate into support for extremists such as the Suidlanders. In the short term, their income advantage (3.22 times that of the national average income) means that few urban whites will take advantage of any potential Australian visa.

Additionally, white South Africans feel increasingly

marginalized in the public sphere. This is not a factor of underrepresentation; some of the country’s biggest cities, including Port Elizabeth on the Indian Ocean coast, have white mayors. The historically white Democratic Alliance has rebuilt itself as a multiethnic, right-ofcenter opposition to the ANC’s socialism, and remains in control of state government in the rich, influential province of the Western Cape (which includes Cape Town).

However, many fear they are literally losing their voice. The country’s third-largest language, Afrikaans, a descendant of white Dutch settlers’ intermingling with the Indigenous people of the Western Cape, has gradually lost ground in the public sphere.

This marginalization is largely a product of Afrikaans’ racist reputation. To an outsider, South Africa can seem like a cultural

offshoot of the United Kingdom; afterall, the Rainbow Nation does share its former colonial power’s spelling, rules of the road, and phraseology. Like their British counterparts, South African university students revise rather than study before an exam, a source of confusion for Americans.

Only recently has English become the lingua franca of the media, politics and daily life in cities like Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. While South Africa has had close ties to the United Kingdom ever since the Royal Navy seized Cape Town from the Netherlands in 1814, Afrikaans was the dominant language until the end of apartheid. Most white South Africans are Afrikaners, who can trace their family tree back to the Dutch settlers who colonized South Africa in the early 1700s. Afrikaans is still the mother tongue of 61% of the country’s white population.

Fall 2018 Historically, Afrikaans-speakers were seen as much more racist than their Anglophone compatriots. Despite Nelson Mandela’s public embrace of, and genuine warm regard for, Afrikaner culture (especially rugby, their quasi-national pastime), his successors in the ANC encouraged Afrikaner-bashing. In 2015, students rioted against the continued use of Afrikaans as a language of instruction at several public universities, torching buildings at North-West University. Ironically, North-West is the only university in the country that uses an Indigenous language, Setswana, as another one of its teaching languages. But none of this has helped Indigenous speakers. As with many ostensibly progressive ANC policies, linguistic “Africanization” focuses on pushing “colonial” elements of society out of the public sphere rather than bringing marginalized elements in. The South African government

61 itself does not make its website available in any language other than English. One notable exception to this trend is the national South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), which operates radio stations in every national language (SABC Radio). Indeed, Afrikaans as a language has adapted surprisingly well to the post-apartheid era. Most speakers are black or mixed-race, a stark contrast to the language’s reputation as a bastion of whiteness, and it remains spoken at home across the western half of the country.

In other words, it has assumed the same position as other nonEnglish languages in South Africa: widely used by native speakers, but secondary in the public sphere.

Will this cultural struggle make an immediate difference in South Africa’s ongoing land expropriation struggle? It seems unlikely. Most white South Africans are city- or suburb-dwellers and are

more worried about the country’s high rate of violent crime and tanking economy than who owns farmland. The Suidlanders appear unlikely to make any real progress on the world stage. Washington and Pretoria have too many common interests to be divided by an issue as esoteric as farm ownership, and the international community would have no interest in siding with the United States were it to pursue measures against South Africa. The probability of paramilitary groups seeking funding from the American far right is higher, but still unlikely in a country hypersensitive to any hint of vigilante justice or separatism. In the end, little will happen unless the South African parliament authorizes land seizure—an unlikely prospect at best.

Photo by Claire Martin

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A Post-Colonial Reality Check Raina Kadavil

Photo by Yasmin Morais

I grew up calling Christopher Columbus a hero.

While Columbus is slowly receiving the vilification he deserves (in addition to recognition of his bravery), he is a mainstream example of the way that education systems are failing their citizens by painting history as black-andwhite, a story of heroes and villains, and failing to capture the crimes in addition to the victories embedded in national histories. The United Kingdom is particularly guilty of this: too often in British as well as American history courses, the British Empire is quelled down to just the leading victor of the two World Wars, a herald of democracy.

The British Empire was with no doubt great, but it was also shockingly terrible – during its height, it produced great technological and artistic advancement, and it also invaded 90% of the world’s countries and subjected them to terror. Yet, you would never know this from history courses in the United Kingdom and the United States. It took graduate level courses for my International Relations major for me to finally learn about the Amritsar Massacre, one of the largest attacks of peaceful protestors – up to 1,000 killed and over 1,000 injured – in history. I learned that it was not the Nazis, but the British, who created the first concentration camps of the 20th century, interning 107,000 Boers in South Africa from 1899-1902, and later detaining and torturing up to 100,000 Kenyans in what was dubbed “Britain’s gulags” during the Mau Mau Uprising of the 1950s.

I learned about the Bengal famine caused by excess British export of grain out of India while four million starved to death in Bengal and up to 29 million Indians starved to death over the course of British rule – to which the heavily lauded Winston Churchill responded, “I hate Indians…The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” I learned that in 1789, the British intentionally spread smallpox in order to clear natives out of the Sydney area of Australia, and performed chemical warfare upon Iraqis demanding independence in the 1920s.

Regarding the legacy of the British Empire’s problematic rule, former Prime Minister David Cameron himself said it best during a 2011 Q&A with students in Pakistan: “As with so many of the problems of the world, we are responsible for their creation in the first place.” Indeed, many current international issues including the fragile relations between India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh that creates one of the world’s most volatile hotspots; the “vehement rejections of Westernization” that inspired Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram; and enduring homosexual laws and practices in 40 of the 53 Commonwealth nations. From tribal tensions, warfare, and genocide in many African nations to the breakdown of the West Indies Federation to the struggle over Pakistan, many structural issues facing the world’s “developing nations” are directly or indirectly a result of the colonial legacy that Great Britain and the other European colonial powers left

Fall 2018 behind during a mercantile quest that took only its own self-interest into consideration. In all fairness, these nations should not be called “developing nations” but “formerly colonized” nations: the “developed” world should be reminded of the price of its success.

Despite all of this, the whitewashed narrative of the British Empire seems to be the only version that British citizens today know: a 2014 YouGov poll showed that 59 percent of British people view the British empire as “something to be proud of,” and that 49 percent believe that the Empire benefitted its former colonies. This may well be in large part a failure of the British education system, which teaches of British conquests and not of British crimes.

To teach history accurately and stop trivializing the struggles of the nations and peoples that it has harmed, the United Kingdom and other former colonial powers should adopt a system of education similar to Germany’s. Its Nazi history may not be something

63 that Germany is proud of, but it is something that is well-known by German citizens, partially because it is well-taught. Many British crimes coincided with or recently preceded the Holocaust, but are far more poorly remembered – of course, in large part because the victors write history, and Germany lost the war. Still, a great deal of credit should be given to the German system, which integrate the events that led to Hitler’s rise to power and its results into its history curriculum. A 1995 study conducted for the New York Times in high schools in Bonn and Berlin indicates that “while many young Germans sense no personal guilt for a past generation’s crimes, they feel responsible to thwart any revival of their history’s racism, anti-Semitism, militarism and nationalism.” German teachers seem to overwhelmingly believe that no student should be able to say, “I didn’t know.”

While Great Britain was arguably one of the worst, the United States, France, Portugal,

Belgium, and others could also benefit from a similar shift in their education policy. Understanding their colonial histories is understanding the privilege that these nations exist with today, and might serve to create greater sympathy among the British public toward foreign aid policies. In recent years, there has been a push toward cutting British foreign aid, despite the great impact that this aid has in conflict-stricken nations like South Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia – all of which, incidentally, are former British colonies. Furthermore, such an education could be a step in the right direction toward erasing the damaging colonial tale that nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America – or the “global south” – that are still struck by conflict, famine, political fragmentation, and other debilitating issues today are “backwards nations” and instead recognize that their current misfortune is often a result of past exploitation.

Photo by Raina Kadavil Photo by Alice Yih

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A Dose of Digtal Dilligence Gowtham Asokan Digital privacy has taken the stage again following high-profile incidents of the Cambridge Analytica debacle faced by Facebook, Net Neutrality, and the most recent The General Data Protection Regulation more commonly known as the GDPR. But many have not heard of this bold and far-reaching set of regulations across the European Union that went into effect on May 25, 2018.

The law oversees the processing of personal data by establishing a data controller and processor, and requires the full consent of the user for data processing. When data is collected, users must be clearly informed about the extent of data collection, the legal basis for processing of personal data, how long data is retained, if data is being transferred to a third-party and/or

outside the EU. Each firm is also required to have a Data protection officer that oversees user requests about their digital data and their right to delete them.

The GDPR is a revolutionary step in enforcing user’s digital ownership of their information; it has blown open the Internet model of collecting data in exchange for ‘free services’. In the most recent high-profile example, a British data company called Cambridge Analytica was able to use Facebook’s advertising feature to collect millions of users’ data and sell it to the Trump campaign for voter targeting. The European Union had been working for decades to expand their previous data regulation to cover the modern Internet giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook,

Twitter and others. Despite these companies being US-based, anyone conducting business with EU citizens had to be compliant with the law so it placed the price of losing the EU’s 508 million citizens and a 2% fine of annual revenue for a failure to comply1.

An interesting geopolitical addition to the equation is Germany and France’s Joint European Disruptive Initiative (JEDI) that frames Europe’s larger catch-up on digital emerging technologies.

An argument could be made that this law also acts as a protectionist measure against the US technology companies looking to dominate the European market. Despite their internationalist exterior and rhetoric, both Macron and Merkel have placed the growth of their

Fall 2018

countries’ nascent technology sectors. Merkel felt an increased sense of urgency following a trip to China where she was able to see the rapid growth spurt. This prompted Merkel to push forward the JEDI, which is essentially a DARPA program adapted for the EU.

The passage of this landmark legislation has upset some of the US’ largest technology companies as they make the argument for lost consumer welfare as a result.

The business argument claims that the subscription-free model provided by Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google rests upon the revenue generated by selling user data or optimizing their respective search algorithms to drive user engagement. As with many debates surrounding the role of the government in regulating the

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private sector, a binary option has been put forth where one cannot be had without the other2. But can users have their cake and eat it too? There are scarce data on the economic effects since it is still in the early stages, however the most

“it has blown open the Internet model of collecing data” likely answer is that said technology companies will most likely have to devise ways for mutual sharing of information otherwise risk losing revenue. To be clear the law requires only user consent, it is not an entire ban on companies leveraging user

data. The real question that EU regulators and business should be asking is “How can we simplify the law for easy compliance?” because at the moment businesses are fumbling to keep up with its many articles and exemptions and most are under legal threat of a fine. What can be said to be true is a loss of shortterm revenue to these Internet giants as a result of adjusting their business models. But if the endresult is both a healthy sharing of user information and continued accessibility to digital media, this will have been a revolutionary piece of legislation in the 21st century.

Photo by Brittany Chang

Photo by Natalie Carroll

Fall 2018

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The IR Review Editorial Board Raina Kadavil Gowtham Asokan

Editor-in-Chief Editor-in-Chief

Jordann Krouse Content Consultant Natalie Carroll Photography Editor Rebecca Giovanetti Layout Coordinator Carly Berke Layout Editor Josee Matela Layout Editor & REACT News Manager Julia Mullert Layout Editor Ting Wei Li Layout Editor Desmond Molloy Staff Writer Samira Jafar Staff Writer Rachel Petherbridge Staff Writer Tal Dickstein Staff Writer Michelle Ramiz Staff Writer Briana Lopez Staff Writer Kaylin Ikeda Staff Writer Adia Armstrong Book Reviews Writer Morgan Cope Senior Editor Christopher Brown Senior Editor Melissa Bui Editor Sonali Paul Editor Samantha Dorning Editor Soo Min Cho Editor Alex Blumenfeld Editor Dariy Esenov Infographic Designer Kavya Verma Blog Writer Sabine Tessono Blog Writer Leah Cerilli Blog Writer Jack Tomsicek REACT News Manager Andy Chen REACT News Tech Specialist Eliot Usherenko REACT News Anchor Elle Garfield REACT News Anchor Maneesha Khalae REACT News Anchor Noah Riley REACT News Anchor

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About the IR Review

The International Relations Review, ISSN 2152-738X, is a subsidiary of the Boston University International Affairs Association. The IR Review is an international relations magazine serving the undergraduate students at Boston University. With a circulation of nearly 1,500 the IR Review is considered Boston University’s premier academic journal.

Since it was founded in 2009, the IR Review has striven to create a forum for students interested in international affairs. The submissions features in the publication cover a myriad of topics and controversies, including but not limited to globalization, international security, human rights, international law and politics and sustainability.

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