Lighthouse MT 17

The Lighthouse Journal..

“DISSENT”

Michaelmas 2017..

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A Note From the Editors...

Challenging writers to consider ‘Dissent’ in a global context, we were overwhelmed by the quality and quantity of submissions we received. Inside you will find thirteen articles tied together by a common theme but tackling a wide array of issues: from nonproliferation to gene editing, an in-depth study of issues facing an indigenous community in Peru to a reflection on global protest movements in the modern world. We hope that our readers will enjoy reading them as much as we have.

We would like to start this edition, however, with an acknowledgement of our deep gratitude to all those who have helped us put this issue together. In particular we are indebted to Alice Wilcock who, as our editor-in-chief, has kept a watchful eye on our finances and helped us in the selection process. Our team of sub-editors, Antonia, Tom, Joel and Elena have supported the writers to ensure that each article is succinct, precise, and elegant. Many thanks go out to Robert Harrison, who once again has outdone himself as our Graphic Designer. And also to Tom Stevens, IRSoc’s President, and the Events Officers (in particular Kean Murphy for liaising with them for us) for helping to promote the Journal at events, in colleges, and at the Freshers Fair. Without the collaboration of all these people this term’s Lighthouse, the most widely distributed ever, could never have come close to being published.

Special thanks must also go out to the Junior Common Rooms at Wadham, Exeter, and Queens. Earlier this term we were seriously worried that we would face a funding shortage, but the generous donations of these JCRs allowed us to continue, and for that we are grateful. Above all we want to thank the writers for their excellent work, and we encourage the readers to follow our blog, where we will be uploading even more.

Margo Munro Kerr & Thomas Wells

Co-Editors of Lighthouse

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Dissent Re-evaluating the ideological misrepresentation of history in the era of ‘fake news’ A. Craven 5 Denied an Education, Denied a Voice S. Septembre 8 Is civil disobedience justified in a modern democratic state?

E. Casale 11 Let’s Talk: A ‘Third Track’ in the Catalan-Spanish Conundrum?

M Rodriguez Dehli 13 Solidarity Remembered: Lessons on Dissent and Social Mobilsation in Poland K Kruk 17 A Return to an ‘Ethical Dimension’ or a ‘Revolution of Values’?

M Rush 20 Is Intervention by Foreign Actors Beneficial to Dissent Movements?

Debate: T Hunt and E Colebatch 23 Pyongyan Spring? The Dynamics of Dissent in North Korea A Philipps 30 Xi Jingping Though and China Heard J Lovell-McNamee 33 Dissent in the Age of Genetic Control J Silverstein 36 Marginalising the Mainstream: ‘Nuke Ban’ and Dissent in the International Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime L Matchet 39 Practical Reflections of Protest in the 21st Century M Scalos 42

RE-EVALUATING THE IDEOLOGICAL MISREPRESENTATION OF HISTORY IN THE ERA OF ‘FAKE NEWS’ Antonia Craven

The attitude towards the past is the central element of any ideology, both mainstream and extreme. So although many see it as a dry subject with little relevance to the fast-paced modern and technological world, History is a social pillar that is significant in shaping national identity, culture, and public memory. Consequently, history can be used as a powerful weapon in the hands of those who wish to influence both moderate and more extreme public opinion.

history of our present day by offering alternative interpretations of current affairs.

Hence the popularity of the buzzword ‘fake news’ - arguing that accepted interpretations of history are not legitimate is a very effective way to encourage dissent.

‘Historical negationism,’ also labelled as ‘historical denialism,’ is the term for the illegitimate distortion of the historical record. This practice often involves invalid historiographic methods, such as presenting forged or edited documents as genuine and untouched, inventing reasons for dismissing genuine documents, and attributing conclusions to books and sources that report the opposite. Adolf Hitler’s manipulation of the idealistic concept of the ‘Übermensch’ - the supposition that mankind is evolving, through natural selection, towards a ‘super-human’ - is an example of the last of these, and was very popular and attractive not only to devoted Nazis or those sharing rightwing views, but to all Germans and other Europeans who felt national pride.

The historian E. J. Hobsbawm wrote, “historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to the heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.” A similar sentiment reverberates today, as the relationship between history and its relevance to the present day is subtly distorted and utilised for nationalistic aims. Dissenting political parties are guilty of this practice, rejecting accepted and verified history and attempting to write what will become the

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Hitler disseminated the Nietzschean ideal of the Übermensch to bolster his constructed argument of the biological superiority of the ‘Aryan’ race. This modified form of Nietzsche’s principle of the ‘Übermensch’ became a philosophical foundation for National Socialist ideology in Germany. Recently, it has resurfaced closer to home through far-right groups such as Vanguard Brittania and the proscribed group National Action, banned in 2016, the first far-right group to be banned in Britain since WWII. However, in reality, Nietzsche himself was explicitly critical of both anti-Semitism and German nationalism, and in fact it was his sister Elisabeth who, upon his death, curated and edited her brother’s manuscripts, reworking his unpublished writings to fit her own German nationalist ideology, often contradicting or obfuscating his stated opinions.

government appointed an outspoken apologist for the country’s World War II-era fascist regime as its culture minister - Zlatko Hasanbegovic, a historian. His academic work has focused on downplaying the crimes of the Ustashe - the Croatian Nazi movement, who went about persecutions so cruelly that he prompted objections even from the German SS - as well as cautiously rehabilitating its ideas.

Hasanbegovic did nothing to blunt his radicalism upon gaining his public position, cutting funds for independent Croatian media and endorsing a revisionist documentary film that denies the scale of the crimes committed by Croatia during its alliance with Nazi Germany in the 1940s.

One group which rose from right-wing obscurity to the mainstream through voters’ personal attachment to their perceived national history was the Republican group supporting Trump’s presidential candidacy. Trumpism gained popularity remarkably quickly among a large part of the Republican party and traditional rust-belt Democrats, as an ideology built on a grandiose slogan “Make America Great Again.” Before his departure from the White House, chief strategist Steve Bannon sought to develop the objective of the Trump campaign into the return to the popular historical concept of the “good old days,” weaving its policy and manifesto around a core of a falsified, homogenous past. So far, President Trump’s track record of failing to turn these words into actions has proven the emptiness of such misrepresentative ideological rhetoric.

Another example of an attempt to re-work powerful and complex historical paradigms for political or nationalistic gain occurred recently in a more public arena: Twitter. When the influential and outspoken UKIP donor Arron Banks attempted to assert a correlation between the (multi-faceted, still debated and still inconclusive) paradigm of the fall of the Roman Empire and the current problems the EU is facing with immigration, his underlying purpose was to voice his opposition to EU policies on immigration.

Following the contradiction offered of his views by Mary Beard - Britain’s most famous classicist - and citing only his schoolboy studies and the Russell Crowe Hollywood epic Gladiator as his ‘expert’ sources he told her “you don’t have a monopoly on history!”

Such dissenting voices in the field of public discourse concerning nations and their histories can be heard all over Europe.

For instance, in January 2016, the Croatian

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‘alternative’ parties and ideologies.

Such a (mis)treatment of history was a key concern of celebrated philosopher Karl Popper, who first brought into common usage the modern concept of a rational, empirical and critically-minded ‘open society’. The values presented by extreme dissenting groups, and their denialist attitudes, rely on attractively presenting a prophetic history as a reaction against change. This adds up to an attempt to revive what Popper called a tribalistic and ‘closed’ society - a misguided effort to recover lost sureties. The worst thing that moderates of all political leanings, whether left or right, could do in reaction to such dissent would be to ignore the principles and insecurities behind the surge in popularity of parties such as the French National Front, German AfD and the increasingly extreme-right mainstream governments of Eastern Europe. Popper offered the rationalist solution of “challenging theories and myths and critically discussing them.”

Mary Beard Foreign policy analyst Joshua Keating argues that such an astronomical rise from obscure dissent to ‘big government’ is helped by parliamentary systems that encourage single-issue right-wing parties as well as rendering centre-left and centreright parties increasingly indistinguishable.

A sentiment shared by most modern far-right groups is an aggressive assertion and defence of national culture and history in the face of a world whose recent history has revolved around globalization and the breaking down of national barriers.

The belief that modern forces threaten local and national identities unifies many people around the globe and has successfully brought previously moderate voters to support the charismatic dissent offered by

In other words, critical engagement should involve recognising why a liberal, internationalist worldview is not flawless and why it may have caused such dissent, rather than steadfastly insisting that the western liberal status quo is the only ‘correct’ ideology. Such lack of flexibility over ideology has resulted in people who seek alternatives being pushed further towards the extreme margins, as they search for an alternative to seemingly unstoppable forces of globalisation, which has left parts of society disaffected. Only by engaging with the history of a country and its impact on the population’s view of its present society can we seek an interpretation to channel potentially productive patriotism as a positive force, rather than one which is manipulated and fed distorted information for political gain.

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DENIED AN EDUCATION, DENIED A VOICE’ Stephanie Septembre While working among an indigenous Quechua community in the Peruvian highlands, I researched the role education played in their lives: how much education they had received, how accessible education was, and what effect it had. Only two of twenty-two participants, both men, had completed secondary school. Two had never received any education, and the rest had attended primary school for at least a year. When asked what effect education had on their lives, the response was almost unanimous: their lack of education made them feel helpless.

Unsurprisingly, those with relatively low levels of education wanted their children to continue on to higher education and become professionals.

The official language of Peru is Spanish, but many indigenous Peruvians are illiterate with very little or no knowledge of Spanish. Indigenous workers’ incomes are less than half the income of their non-indigenous counterparts, and 78 percent of indigenous children live below the

poverty line. Dropout rates in rural, indigenous areas of Peru have been notoriously high, and those who remain within the education system often commute hours each way to school and are dependent on teachers who sometimes show up drunk or don’t show up at all. These disparities can be better understood if one looks back several centuries to when the encomienda system was established during the era of Spanish colonialism. Indigenous peoples were considered vassals of the Spanish Crown, and the Crown would grant Spanish conquistadores and settlers a specified number of locals to provide them with labour and pay them tribute. During this time, education was reserved for the elite.

Even in the early twentieth century, the Peruvian government blacklisted missionaries who taught the indigenous population to read and write. An educated indigenous population was dangerous to those in power. An educated person knows his or her rights, and perhaps most threatening of all, can recognise the absence of their rights and can decide to do something about it.

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That is why Spain denied education to the indigenous, why the slave-owning American feared the educated slave, and why the Taliban prohibited women’s education.

To a certain degree, dissent is a privilege.

Protests which have caught international attention, such as the independence movement in Catalonia or the American NFL kneeling controversy, are perpetuated by those with access to a global audience.

The hashtag, #MeToo, which has appeared in over 1.7 million tweets in 85 countries, has become a global rallying cry against sexual harassment—but it only provides an outlet to vent grievances for those who have access to social media. Many with cause to dissent are consistently denied the opportunity.

When one is denied education, one is denied a voice; when education is denied, it becomes much easier to perpetuate abuses of power and human rights violations without repercussions. In 1995, Peru’s president, Albert Fujimori, modified the General Population Law, permitting ‘voluntary’ sterilisation as a viable contraceptive method. Between 1996 and 2000, approximately 300,000 individuals, mostly indigenous women, were sterilized against their will. Women were threatened, saying they would not receive food if they did not undergo sterilization; some were pregnant at the time of sterilization and lost their babies; women were imprisoned in hospitals; women died due to complications; and decades later, survivors still suffer physically and emotionally. Despite the testimonies of 2000 sterilized women and at least one doctor claiming to have received daily quotas from state officials, the Peruvian government has repeatedly shelved investigations for lack of evidence.

The Wayuu are an example of this. They inhabit La Guajira Peninsula, straddling the Colombian-Venezuela border, and constitute the largest indigenous group in both countries. Although the Wayuu retain a certain level of autonomy, they face discrimination from local and national governments.

Like the indigenous peoples of Peru, many Wayuu receive limited education and do not speak Spanish. In the late 1970s, the government of Colombia partnered with mining companies to create Cerrejón, the largest coal mine in Latin America; built on land overlapping with Wayuu territory.

Cerrejón has also been given rights to the area’s water sources, meaning water supply has become limited for the Wayuu population. The Rancheria River, once the Wayuu’s main water source, was dammed in 2011, leaving one person with an average of 0.7 liters to live on per day. Cerrejón, by contrast, uses 17 million litres. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an autonomous body of the Organization of American States (OAS) promoting the observance and defence of human rights in the Americas, ordered Colombia to provide clean water and basic health services to the Wayuu after indigenous leaders filed a lawsuit against the government for neglect. However, a year later little had been done to improve the Wayuu’s standard of living. At least 5000

Yet, if 300,000 literate, internet-savvy women had been sterilized against their will, the world would have heard about it.

The media would be in uproar. The very idea of sterilizing 300,000 educated women sounds preposterous; women who know their rights, have access to global networks, and are not afraid to report their grievances with law enforcement, would hardly be ideal targets for those wishing to evade retribution. Indigenous women were specifically targeted because many did not know their rights or even speak Spanish. It was possible to keep them silent, and even if they did speak, it was easy to ignore them.

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Wayuu children have died since the dam’s construction due to malnutrition and lack of access to drinking water. Another 15,000 children continue to suffer chronic malnutrition. Despite this appalling violation of human rights, very few outside of Colombia and Venezuela even know that the Wayuu exist.

Indigenous Peruvians and the Wayuu represent examples specific to Latin America, but the relationship between education and one’s ability to instigate change through dissent are evident across the globe. An education that produces literacy, computer skills, knowledge of one’s rights, and knowledge of where to find judicial recourse to protect those rights is incredibly empowering.

Those at the margins of society are kept there by denying them access to education. That is not to say the uneducated are incapable of speaking out against injustice, but they are less likely to be heard. Their causes are unlikely to ever be breaking news or trending on Twitter.

It requires additional effort to identify dissent which may occur through less conventional means.

The Quipu Project, for instance, is an online archive of Peruvian women’s accounts of sterilization. Women call a hotline to share their experiences, which are translated and made available to anyone across the globe on the project’s website. While it does not guarantee justice for these women, it provides an outlet for them to voice their dissent and encouragement in doing so. Many of these women have been silent for almost two decades, but just because they did not speak out until now does not mean they had nothing to say. More opportunities such as The Quipu Project should be provided for the uneducated to voice their dissent, but the optimum long-term solution is to provide quality education for the most vulnerable groups in society. As one Peruvian woman told me, “I want my children to study because I don’t want them to suffer like me.”

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IS CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE JUSTIFIED IN A MODERN DEMOCRATIC STATE? Elena Casale

Today, Spain finds itself in a tense balancing act between central authority and the centrifugal pull of its regions.

Catalonia, of course, pulls the hardest, and in doing so raises a set of issues beyond questions exclusively to do with Catalonian independence. Namely, what makes a breach of law an act of civil disobedience? When is civil disobedience morally justified? And how should the law respond to people who engage in civil disobedience?

Surprisingly, very few commentators have framed the decision by the Catalonian government to proceed with an illegal referendum as an act of civil disobedience.

The response of the Spanish government to try and prevent the referendum has been markedly aggressive; separatist leaders have been arrested, referendum material confiscated, sites where ballots are being prepared have been closed down, and polling stations have been sealed. Such reactive measures have been characterised

by Noam Chomsky, among others, as acts of ‘political repression’.

When we speak of political legitimacy, however, we must look beyond the technical content of an individual law and ask questions about the moral notions that underpin it. In the case of Catalonia, since the referendum was judged to be constitutionally illegitimate, there may be a case for treating the actions of the Catalonian government and of the Catalonians themselves who came out to vote as acts of civil disobedience.

The most widely accepted definition of civil disobedience, famously defended by John Rawls in ‘A Theory of Justice’ (1971), is that it is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies. Importantly, those who engage in civil disobedience are publicly willing to accept the legal ramifications of their actions.

The history of civil disobedience substantiates this fact. When Mahatma Ghandi employed civil disobedience in 1906 as part of his campaign in defence of the civil

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rights of disenfranchised Indian immigrants, he called his practice ‘satyagraha’ - a Gujarati word meaning ‘firmness in adhering to truth’. Ghandi’s defiance of British colonial laws illustrates the way in which civil disobedience has been used to draw attention to a putatively unjust law whilst ‘adhering’ to the others. Such moments in history represent civil disobedience as a necessary method to promote moral standards and justice.

citizen,” wrote Aristotle. Rawls himself saw civil disobedience as a self-correcting mechanism that could help democratic societies achieve more just outcomes.

In the Catalan case, this would not necessarily mean an outcome that would secure independence. It should instead lead to a re-evaluation of the clause in the Spanish constitution which prohibits Catalonia from holding a legal referendum. In fact, there is every chance that such a referendum would be lost by the separatists, but that’s not the point. Removing the grounds of their grievance, namely the fact that they cannot have a legal referendum in the first place, should go a long way towards solving the crisis. A justification for civil disobedience may simply be that there is no practical alternative to expressing discontent.

Another major figure that contributed greatly to the development of the practice of civil disobedience was Martin Luther King Jr., who promoted immediate, direct, nonviolent action as a duty incumbent upon every American who wished to rid the nation of segregationist legislation, and in so doing made civil disobedience a respected tradition of American politics.

Indeed, in his book ‘Morals and Ethics,’ Carl Wellman establishes basic situations in which civil disobedience would be justified; among his justifications is the need to preserve moral integrity, combat immorality, and promote positive social reform. Is this the case for Catalans fighting for self-determination?

At the very least, we should acknowledge the fact that some Catalans are willing to accept punishment for their actions; putting their conscience above the law in order to reflect unresolved grievances at the heart of Spanish society. For Mr Puigdemont himself said he surrendered to the police to show “his willingness not to flee from the judicial process but to defend himself in a fair and impartial process, which is possible in Belgium, and highly doubtful in Spain.” In fact, it is exactly because Catalans are prepared to put their beliefs above the law that an outbreak of civil disobedience is not necessarily something to fear – “It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good

The violence is almost always on the part of the (perceived) oppressor, and Spain is no exception. The use of violence by the State against its own citizens is one of the most harrowing sights one can envisage in a modern democracy, and a clear signal that the state has compromised its legitimacy. Ultimately, civil disobedience must be seen as an avenue that allows communities to express deep-felt grievances without the need to resort to violence. It provides governments with the opportunity to self-correct, and, by changing unjust laws, to bring their societies more closely in harmony with the justice that arises from democratic decision-making. The Spanish government would do well to heed the words of the Catalan poet, Salvador Espriu, and: ‘Keep the bridge of dialogue secured And try to understand and love The different minds and tongues of all your children.’

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LET’S TALK: A ‘THIRD TRACK’ IN THE CATALANSPANISH CONUNDRUM? Magdalena Rodríguez Dehli “Pa amb tomàquet / is so delicious! / Pa amb tomàquet / is so delicious!”

Although arguably true (pa amb tomàquet is a Catalan specialty popular across Spain), this was quite an unusual soundtrack for a Saturday morning in Madrid. Thousands of people in white shirts took to the streets throughout the country on October 7th. One week after the independence referendum in Catalonia, and tired of waiting for politicians to sit at the negotiating table, many citizens were demanding dialogue and trying to reverse the discourse of confrontation between Catalonia and Spain. The Let’s talk movement was making its statement.

ment. The turmoil in Catalonia has largely been presented as a binary conflict of “us versus them,” something the Catalan and the Spanish governments have been keen to reproduce. Yet the tensions being played out are far less simplistic, and they involve multiple actors, interests and rationales that go beyond any simple binary narrative.

The Crisis of a Political Paradigm What has happened in Catalonia during the past five years must be understood as part of a larger socio-political crisis.

The Spanish Transition from the Franco dictatorship to democracy set in place a framework of institutions, consensuses and narratives, labelled by some authors as “the 78 regime,” which are showing signs of exhaustion. The 2008 economic crisis evidenced the estrangement of the political and economic elites and the breach of the social contract that had regulated social life for decades.

Let’s talk is a hashtag created to challenge the oppositional politics in the Catalan crisis. It appeared before the Catalan referendum simultaneously in several places over social media. The overlapping initiatives collaborated, organising both the virtual civil society and the physical demonstrations of October 7th, with the aim of promoting political and social rapproche-

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The idea of a shrinking welfare state and narrowing middle classes is not an unfamiliar one in the contemporary global

context. The Spanish version of the neoliberal turn, however, stirred up a particular process of disenchantment. Austerity measures, large corruption cases, and lack of institutional protection before banks and labour deregulations led to an intense disaffection for the institutions that had allegedly constituted the sacred core of the Spanish democracy: traditional political parties, unions and even the monarchy.

The post-Franco promises of meritocracy and open, equal opportunities for all were replaced with precariousness, unemployment and work insecurity. At the same time, many of the political matters that ended unchallenged in the democratic transition are increasingly brought back into the spotlight, such as the form of State and the models of territorial configuration.

despite the prohibition of political manifestations on the eve of the local elections that took place on May 22 and the police repression.

The Indignados movement developed a remarkable ability to build and subvert social practices and collective imaginations.

On the one hand, the protesters organised themselves in a completely horizontal manner, and explored new ways of making politics based on dialogue and participative democracy. Occupied squares held assemblies to discuss, share and vote on both general and internal issues. Public squares were transformed into deeply social places, where politics was taken beyond the realm of debating and voting and into festive activities such as dancing, singing, and theatre performance. Art played a key role in expressing discontent, combined with a sharp sense of humour to compose very creative slogans, signs and chants. New forms of solidarity emerged, both inside the square, on the Internet and between protesting spots across the country.

15M or the Indignados movement: a shift in political culture 2011 was a key year that shaped the culture of nonviolent protest across the world. The Arab Spring and the Occupy! movements, despite their different contexts, shared a new way of understanding and using public space and social media, and new forms of internal organisation. In Spain, the Indignados movement - also known as 15M, after its launch date, May 15th - heralded a decisive shift in Spanish political culture, at both micro and macro levels.

15M’s impact on how people understand politics has been significant in the past years. The movements (called ‘tides’) opposing austerity measures in education, health, and public administration shared the same spirit and were inspired by the new practices of protest and forms of organisation of the Indignados movement. Podemos, the left-wing party that emerged in 2014, draws largely from the ideas and claims of 15M, and so do the electoral formations that won over the town halls of Madrid and Barcelona in 2015. Most importantly, 15M reversed the neoliberal narratives of the crisis and showed that there were other possibilities for action. A whole generation had awoken to politics and had developed a new vision of community engagement.

15M brought together people in the squares of all main cities across the country, who gathered to protest against corruption, elite estrangement, and what was perceived as a ‘failing system.’ The discontent with the system crystallised spontaneously after a demonstration in Madrid, when protesters decided to camp for the night in the Plaza del Sol. Thousands demonstrated for several days, and it was immediately replicated in other cities,

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In many senses, the left sphere of the Catalan pro-independence movement is also inheriting the Indignados movement.

They draw from the same sources of discontentment and practices of community building; but the pro-independence left frames the response in terms of identity politics, and it demands a disconnection from the Spanish State, instead of challenging it from within. The claims for a real democracy spilled over the State container, leading to a new arena which has territoriality and national identities at the core of the conflict.

form of ludic, festive designs. Slogans in Catalan and Spanish - and, in certain platforms, Basque and Galician - promoted dialogue and conveyed a message of empathy and appreciation for the other, sometimes in a humoristic way. These messages use references to Catalan and Spanish identities and local cultural manifestations, as well as elements of popular culture and politics, to subvert exclusionary narratives and create a kinder atmosphere.

When the question of suspending the competencies of the Catalan government through the article 155 of the Spanish Constitution was dominating the agenda, the Let’s Talk universe featured a series of illustrated articles of the Constitution related to welfare, rights and freedoms.

Many examples of these designs can be found in the Let’s Talk nodes on social media, such as the Twitter accounts @hablemosparlem, @hablamos7O, or @HablamosenlaUni.

The Let’s Talk! Movement The ‘15M spirit’ is also animating the October 7th mobilisations and the Let’s Talk movement behind them. As explained above, Let’s Talk is a group of initiatives that started spontaneously on social media. Some regularly post pieces of graphic art calling for dialogue among the Spanish and the Catalan governments, while another one called for the October 7th demonstration. While maintaining their distinctiveness they coordinate and support each other’s actions; all share the conviction that “Spain is better than its leaders” and reject the hostility escalation among the parties at conflict.

The colour white became the distinctive of the movement, as indicated by the media, who dubbed the protest on October 7 as the ‘march of the penguins’. Countering the flood of Spanish and Catalan flags on the streets, many citizens started hanging white clothes on their balconies, in a call for peace and dialogue, and for a de-escalation of polarising uses of public space.

Let’s Talk, like 15M, places social networks and technology at the centre of their attempt to create horizontal collective structures that challenge Spain’s dichotomous political landscape. Many of the actors and networks that had been part of the 15M mobilisations also joined the marches on October 7th.

Aesthetically, Let’s Talk is strongly related with 15M practices. As it happened during the 2015 electoral campaign of the current mayor of Madrid, Let’s Talk received and shared anonymous contributions in the

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It is difficult to assess which will be the future implications of the Let’s Talk initiatives. Despite their efforts to counter the existing tensions, the Spanish government moved on to suspend the Catalan government, which in turn proclaimed the independence, and the incarceration of several members of the Catalan executive has only exacerbated the antagonisms.

The second ‘penguin march’ was called off in the light of the political developments, and nationalist symbols dominate the urban landscapes.

However, there is another lesson from the 15M that we can apply to the Let’s Talk movement. The real gain is also in the practice; people learn and create by expressing themselves and sharing with others. The thousands of white flags and calls for empathy will have a social impact, if not in the short, at least in the medium-long term. The culture of dialogue that emerges from realising how much it is needed and exploring new forms of listening and exchanging will, in any case, leave a ‘utopian surplus’, to use Ernst Bloch’s term, that may help us build a future better society.

SOLIDARITY REMEMBERED: LESSONS ON DISSENT AND SOCIAL MOBILISATION IN POLAND Krzystof Kruk

If you were to reach for Leszek Kołakowski’s now partially forgotten Theses on Hope and Hopelessness, you would be looking at a document whose publication continues to impact and influence Poland to this day. Kołakowski, a Polish exile and fellow of All Souls College, insisted that authoritarian states can be reformed from within by the activity of self-organised groups. This would push the boundaries of the civil society, challenging the hegemonic grip of the Polish United Workers’ Party, whose proprietorial approach to the state apparatus allowed Party-nominated bureaucrats to distribute resources and opportunities nearly at their own will.

Organising action through its various strike committees it put the “strike pistol” to the government’s head, and forced it to make a number of concessions - including allowing for the creation of an independent trade union. The upsurge of Solidarity was famously dubbed a “self-limiting revolution”, which attempted to impact policy making rather than overthrow the regime, which at the birth of the movement was, by and large, unimaginable. Working within this legal formula (though it was banned in 1981, only to be later re-legalised) Solidarity grew to become a potent force, and helped precipitate the Round Table Talks of 1989 that were to be the ultimate demise of the single party state.

Founded in 1980 as a trade union on the back of nationwide strikes initiated in the Gdańsk Shipyard, Solidarity was the real-world expression of Kołakowski’s ideas. Relying solely on peaceful means of expressing opposition, it managed to win unprecedented domestic and international support, and channelled social dissatisfaction to the detriment of the regime.

The legacy of this peaceful revolution remains alive and well in Poland’s collective memory. Born in the aftermath of the 2015 constitutional crisis, the Democracy’s Defence Committee (KOD) - an allusion to the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) of the 1970s, Solidarity’s precursor - emerged as a major social movement online. But the symbolism of solidarity has also been

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incorporated into the rhetoric of the ruling party (PiS - or in English, the Law and Justice Party), whose leaders, referring critically to the capitalist transformation, have drawn distinctions between political projects called “liberal Poland” and “solidarity Poland”. Indeed, one of the factions in the ruling coalition is called – nomen omen – Solidarity Poland.

capitalised is being subverted.

Amongst the Democracy’s Defence Committee’s most burning problems is its lack of representativeness. According to official statistics, the average age of a KOD member approached 58 and the organisation only has a membership that fluctuates around 9,000. The number of non-member supporters, as measured by surveys and activity in the social media, do not even come close to over 40% approval expressed for the ruling party. For many, PiS presents itself as a promise to voice the needs of the previously unheard. And its revolution – in the official narrative – limits itself to the boundaries delineated by the narrow parliamentary margin.

The modern Committee began its existence as a Facebook group catering to the critics of government policies, which they argue undermine the rule of law, but quickly turned into a registered NGO. It tapped into anxiety surrounding the politicisation of the Constitutional Tribunal, a body that was responsible for providing judicial review of legislation, whose ability to act PiS wanted to restrict by filling it with its own and requiring a two thirds majority vote, that is, at least 13 of its 15 judges. Later protests from KOD focused on PiS control of state media, the nomination of partisan apparatchiks to chief positions in stateowned companies, government sanctioned deforestation, and cooling Polish-European relations.

Alongside KOD, a number of minor organisations emerged. Citizens of RP call for acts of civil disobedience. Girls for Girls advocate women’s rights, endangered by the governmental radical anti-abortion proposals. Interestingly, most of these bottom-up initiatives took root online. Yet despite the tools provided by the internet, the emotions channelled in online forums were not translated onto the streets on a scale that could threaten the government. Neither the Committee nor any of the other organisations appear to be able to sustain themselves, let alone challenge the regime. With the state propaganda writing the transformation story anew, the decades-old body of myth and symbolism on which the democratic opposition once

The story cannot be understood without a throwback to the breakdown of communism, when successful democratic consolidation was paralleled by the exposure of vulnerable citizens to the perils of capitalism. In the transition period of the 1990s, state weakness and instability led to an uneven distribution of advantages from the transformation. Shock therapy pushed many rural regions into lasting poverty, organised crime skyrocketed, and economic disparities grew rampantly. Many were left with a sense of injustice and disappointment. In this setting, the discontent again turned against the elites.

PiS does very well in playing on the anti-elitist sentiments that have outlived authoritarianism into the democratic era.

Solidarity was, obviously, an anti-establishment movement, whose target was the Party’s authority. Even though PiS is now at the helm, it promotes its image as a punishing hand reaching for the rotten elites and as the force which finally delivers Solidarity’s anti-elite revolution.

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The problem faced by today’s opposition is not simply limited to this context,

however. Rather its issues are institutional.

Lech Wałęsa, Solidarity’s founder, personalised the hopes of the oppressed people and his arrest in 1981 provoked outrage; his 1982 release and 1983 Nobel Peace Prize were met with cheering crowds.

Furthermore, Solidarity integrated the representatives of various political orientations into an umbrella coalition, whose members were determined to unite around core shared values.

There is little hope for KOD and like initiatives, if they continue neglecting the lessons taught by recent history. PiS is an attentive disciple and utilises the legacy of Solidarity to pursue its controversial political agenda. Both it and the opposition draw extensively from the symbolism of Solidarity, but whilst the former confidently strides forwards, the latter is torn apart by internal squabbles - failing to create itself as a broadly representative movement, it cannot appeal to those who feel disenfranchised following the systemic transition of the 1989. The contemporary Polish opposition has to find a way to reach the transformation’s losers. But it also has to fundamentally change from within, by finding charismatic leaders and putting its democratic values above the conflicts dividing its members.

By contrast, the dissident movements of today lack decisive and legitimate leadership. The words of protest are uttered by disrespected and distrusted party leaders.

KOD’s founder, compromised by a scandal involving mismanaging the Committee’s finances, lost the internal elections and eventually gave up his membership, undermining the organisation’s credibility.

The effectiveness achieved by Solidarity in recruiting members and mobilising supporters was incredible. Its membership, reaching 10 million during the peak of popularity around its legalisation, outnumbered that of the Party by some seven million. Its programme was clear, concise, and universally communicable. It called the bluff of the communist party.

The scale of social passivity today, however, is as stunning as the scale of social mobilisation in the 1980s. Although consecutive reforms target specific professional groups, these do not manage to pursue collective action in defence of their interests. Education reforms which made thousands of teachers jobless sparked off a modest reaction, but few members of other professional groups joined teachers in their strikes. Following the planned seizure of judicial appointments by the executive, representatives of the judiciary failed to hold a nation-wide strike, let alone convince others to protest.

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A RETURN TO AN ‘ETHICAL DIMENSION’ OR A ‘REVOLTION OF VALUES’?

Martyn Rush

“... Continuity and dissent in Labour’s foreign policy”

The Ethical Dimension – 1997-1998 As well as putting new emphasis on using development aid to tackle poverty and curb climate change to protect the environment, the pledge of the 1997 ‘ethical dimension’ was to enshrine human rights as the ‘centre’ of diplomacy. A flagship policy was the regulation of arms sales, and a commitment to ending their supply to oppressive regimes. This was rounded off by a commitment to working with international institutions and the promotion of democracy and good governance. Britain was, ‘once again’, to be a ‘force for good in the world’.

In a recent interview with The Times, Conservative peer Lord Finkelstein lamented that both capitalism and pro-US orientation coined as ‘Atlanticism’, the twin pillars of post-Thatcher consensus, were under threat from a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government. Yet the actual extent of this prospective rupture from longstanding political consensus remains highly contested, and the Labour Party has been here before. The last time Labour won a victory thanks to the promise of transformation of the status quo was in 1997, when Foreign Secretary Robin Cook announced an ‘ethical dimension’ to foreign policy in the first ‘Mission Statement’ of the Foreign Office’s long history. In order to question the relative extent of continuity and rupture in a prospective Corbyn-led Labour foreign policy, the ‘ethical dimension’ merits a review.

The policy met with initial success. The Department for International Development (DFID) was set up, land mines were banned, and foreign aid was largely increased, to wide acclaim. However, the ethical turn did not survive contact with the first arms contract. After all, BAE systems had embedded itself into the structure of government, its CEO visiting Number 10 regularly to form part of Tony

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Blair’s ‘huddle’. Indonesia was to be the rock on which the policy was dashed. As its government repressed East Timor, in view of the world, British arms sales to Indonesia increased. The first year saw 64 export licences, followed by a twenty-fold increase in weapons sales after 2000. By 1998, Cook himself was distancing himself from the ‘ethical’ policy, and had declared he was, instead, a ‘realist with principles’.

In many ways, in her keynote speech of September 2017, Thornberry promised a reprise of the ‘ethical dimension’ with foreign policy resting on human rights and the rule of law. She promised reviews of arms sales following the same principles.

There was a commitment to NATO, and to maintaining robust defence spending.

The tripartite strategy of ‘defence, development, diplomacy’ that Thornberry expounded would have been instantly recognisable to Cook.

The ethical turn, of course, had contained myriad contradictions from the start.

Efforts to curb arms sales meant cutting against the Trade Ministry’s own objectives, and even Tony Blair’s own priorities to boost the defence industry. Its failure helped feed a narrative that ethics had no place in foreign affairs, and that the advantage was always to the crude realist.

It had at least introduced the possibility of standards by which foreign policy could be judged. However, as Labour pursued a more aggressively interventionist strategy abroad and soared above the Conservatives in the opinion polling on national security for the first time in decades, the announcement of the ethical foreign policy had much more to do with shoring up the left flank of the party than signalling a paradigm shift in British statecraft.

Yet, in the same speech, Thornberry put forward a case for going ‘much further’ than Cook had initially offered to go in 1997.

Instead she promised a ‘genuine, radical revolution of values’, paraphrasing Martin Luther King’s anti-Vietnam speeches of 1967. This would, presumably, include some of Jeremy Corbyn’s own policy proposals, such as the establishing of a Ministry of Peace, nuclear disarmament, recognition of Palestine and a renunciation of unilateralism in war. However, the proposals put forward by the Labour Party have yet to explore the potential in Thornberry’s call for a ‘revolution in values’.

Radical Ruptures Certainly, radical possibilities exist within Labour. In October 2017 its youth wing passed motions denouncing American imperialism and advocating withdrawal from NATO. The significance of the resolutions they put forward was that they signified the line of thinking amongst a bloc of the party which is able, as the party democratises with the upcoming party review, to increasingly shape its policy direction. As more young voters look set to become active in UK electoral politics after 2017 an increasing constituency of the Labour vote will demand a break from the foreign policy of the recent decades.

The Corbyn Doctrine It is important to note, given the fate of the original ethical turn, that the scale of the British weapons industry has surged, with £5bn worth of arms being shipped abroad since 2015. The extent and severity of climate change is beyond anything imagined in 1997. In the Middle East, Britain has been supplying weapons to the region’s bastions of reaction such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt, whilst assisting in the destruction of Syria, Libya, Palestine and Yemen. The need for an ethical turn could not be more urgent.

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Conclusion

There is potential, as the legacies of Empire stalk the world, for a decolonial turn in Labour politics. It would involve decolonising foreign policy – its institutions and its power relations. Professor Walter Johnson of Harvard suggested that this would include the recognition of racial exploitation at the heart of the world system, a break which would require restorative justice and reparations. The Caribbean Community has unanimously approved a ten-point action plan for colonial reparations, based on redistribution of economic and cultural power, as well as formal apology. A radical ‘revolution in values’ would involve an engagement with such demands for redress.

The question facing the next Labour government is therefore between continuity and rupture. The ‘ethical dimension’ of 1997 barely lasted a year. Emily Thornberry was right to recognise its limitations and seek to go beyond it, while the Corbyn doctrine stakes out more leftist positions.

The larger question is whether the new, dynamic Labour movement will press the party to assimilate decolonial and feminist ways of thinking which may mark more extensive dissent from not only Britain’s foreign policy establishment, but even its baseline assumptions. Finkelstein may well be worried, but he is wrong to suggest there will be no debate, as the Labour party is set to have the most vibrant discussion of foreign policy Britain has seen in generations.

It may begin with reform of the Foreign Office, a long threatened, but never implemented, Labour policy. Past concerns have involved ensuring the Foreign Office has sufficient class diversity, however this may well need to include racial and cultural diversity as a priority. A decolonising of an institution whose main exhibition space is still named ‘Durbar Court’, after the imperial coronation ceremony in the Indian ‘Raj’, is long overdue.

There are already parts of the Labour movement incubating new practices of foreign policy. The Intersectional Feminist Foreign Policy network, which moves between Chatham House and the Fabian Society, has practiced a policy of putting the safety of women first in the consideration of foreign affairs. It brings marginalised voices forward into policy-making spaces.

This is a foreign policy guided by discourse ethics, of judging decisions based on the approval of ‘all of those who would be affected by them’, moving beyond utilitarianism to inclusionary and democratic forms of justice. It would be a long way, and a huge amount of progress, from Cook’s doomed ‘mission statement’.

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DEBATE: IS INTERVENTION

BY FOREIGN ACTORS BENEFICIAL TO DISSENT MOVEMENTS?

Yes. Yes. 2nd November 2003 was election

dissent movements that have made an impact. During Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’, a key component of the country’s independent media, Pravda Ukraine, was reliant on Western funding. A 2011 report in the New York Times found that prominent activists and dissent organisations participating in the anti-government protests of the Arab Spring had received American-funded training on the use of social media to organise protests.

day in Georgia. Official results showed the party of the incumbent president, Eduard Shevardnadze, winning a majority in parliament. However, discrepancies soon emerged between the government’s tally and the exit poll, which showed a victory for opposition parties. With foreign observers reporting cases of malpractice by the electoral authorities, demonstrations began in the capital Tbilisi calling for Shevardnadze’s resignation. In what has since been dubbed the ‘Rose Revolution’ after the roses carried by the protestors, Shevardnadze bowed to public pressure and resigned, opening the way for fresh elections and an opposition government.

A dissent movement had been successful.

Interventions like this are not the sole preserve of nation states: the United Nations Democracy Fund, established in 2005 by the Secretary-General at the time, Kofi Annan, disperses money to support projects that aim to strengthen civil society across the world. These projects tend to operate on a small scale, and focus on training and skills. For example, current projects include training Afghan female journalists in investigative reporting; training members of the Bolivian LGBT community in “leadership and advocacy skills” and training young people in Lebanon and Jordan in community activism. By focusing on skills, projects like these assist members of dissent movements to teach themselves to work more effectively. Such projects also amount to a subtle form of intervention, which can be broadly defined as interference by foreign organisations in

The Rose Revolution is not only an example of a successful dissent movement; it is also an example of the benefits of intervention by foreign actors to dissent movements. American aid money had funded the creation of the independent Georgian TV station Rustavi-2, which drew attention to irregularities in the vote counting process. Foreign election observers added to credibility to these reports. Even the symbol of the dissent movement, the rose, was an idea from the American National Democratic Institute.

A similar pattern can be traced to other

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a country’s domestic affairs without the permission or support of the government.

Tellingly, such interventions have often been met with resistance by authoritarian states, who presumably identify these interventions as threats to their power.

Leaked State Department diplomatic cables report that Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian President until 2011, was “deeply sceptical” of American intervention; which in the case of Egypt extended to direct American funding for Egyptian pro-democracy non-governmental organisations.

Unlike military intervention, training and financial aid may not produce dramatic television footage or opportunities for world leaders to grandstand, but there is still evidence to suggest it benefits dissent movements, as the examples above testify.

Generally speaking, dissent movements aim to challenge the existing hierarchy and its ideology. As a result, even with popular backing, the dynamics of domestic politics will often disadvantage dissent movements. Support from foreign actors is therefore beneficial: it can strengthen the dissent movement (for example, through training or funding) and weaken the forces opposing it (for example, through military intervention and sanctions directed at the government). Intervention is often not in aid of (mostly) peaceful protest movements. The CIA sponsored the 1953 Iranian coup that saw the overthrowing of the fledgeling democratic government, which had recently nationalised the country’s hitherto British-owned oil industry, and the replacement of the autocratic Shah, who would co-operate with the US and its allies. More recently, Western powers intervened militarily in Libya on the side of anti-regime forces. The UN Security Council Resolution that authorised the 2011 intervention stands opposed to the UN Democracy Fund in its demar-

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cation of the two extremes of intervention by foreign actors in international politics.

While the UN’s Democracy Fund supports projects aiming to strengthen civil society through financial aid and training, the 2011 Security Council resolution authorised member states to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya; using military force if necessary.

This was used to justify extensive military intervention by states, including providing intelligence to rebel groups and close air support. Rebel groups also received shipments of arms from Egypt and Qatar.

This led to the final collapse of Gaddafi’s regime in late 2011.

Such intervention was clearly beneficial in the short term to the country’s anti-regime dissent movement, protecting it from harsh government repression and allowing rebel forces to overwhelm the regime.

However, today Libya is mired in civil war and is a haven for human traffickers. In the words of Jean-Marie Guéhenno, UN

Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations from 2000 to 2008, the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime “unleashed a chain of violence”. Similarly, one of the aims of the 2003 Iraq war was to create a Western-style liberal democracy in Iraq. As in Libya, this clearly has not transpired. In addition, any form of foreign intervention carries risks for dissent movements: organisations in receipt of foreign funding and advice can be painted as puppets of foreign governments by the regimes against which they are dissenting. Such accusations are given added potency by the history of foreign powers, such as the United States, intervening across the world to secure their own narrow geopolitical interests. Therefore, foreign intervention is not without its risks for dissent movements. On the other hand, rejecting intervention carries risks for dissent movements too. For example, rejecting foreign military support can leave dissent movements vulnerable to state repression.

Last, when deciding whether foreign intervention is beneficial, we should be realistic about what it can achieve. Intervention by foreign actors cannot control the development of a society. Instead, control over the future development of a society ultimately resides with the agents that make up the society. The intervention by UN member states in Libya in 2011 could not change the fact that the country had endured 41 years of Gaddafi-led dictatorship during which the regime had hollowed out civil society. As such, any Libyan dissent movement would have struggled to transform the country into a functioning democracy overnight. However, by attacking the regime they could drastically increase the dissent movement’s chance of military success. Similarly, foreign-backed training will not guarantee the success of dissent movements, but it can improve their chances, as shown by Georgia and Ukraine, where foreign intervention was used to support dissenting media outlets. If the UN sponsors training for Afghan women in investigative journalism, it will neither transform Afghanistan’s society nor eliminate gender discrimination or corrupt government officials. What it can do is assist Afghan women in making progress towards achieving these goals.

Intervention is therefore beneficial or harmful according to a counterfactual question: would dissent movements have been more or less likely to achieve success without intervention? The available evidence, from UN-funded training projects to the long history of Western interference in the Middle East, suggests that intervention makes it more likely, not less, that dissent movements will succeed. By this narrow criterion, intervention by foreign actors is beneficial to dissent movements; although it is no guarantee of their success.

- Tom Hunt

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No. No. Interventionism has long been a

awareness. This has particularly been the case with issue-specific social movements such as the work that the Daughters of Eve has done to spread an understanding of the dangers of female genital mutilation. However, whilst this form of dissent is important, it should not serve as the focus of a question on interventionism. More potent than social movements, political dissent has a much wider scope for disintegration into chaos following intervention, partly due to the broader field available for intervention that might not be so present for more issue-specific movements. So where can foreign actors contribute beneficial results for more narrowly-focused political dissent movements?

byword for questionable Western morality and botched military operations. More recent calls for International Court of Justice war crimes investigations into Tony Blair and George Bush over their intervention in Iraq have highlighted a growing awareness of the devastation that Western saviourism can cause.

The question of whether intervention by foreign actors is beneficial for dissent movements is one that, ultimately, is loaded in a number of ways.

At a simply linguistic level, an answer is entirely dependent on the definition of the question. It is important to draw a distinction between verbal and actual intervention, between money and guns, public endorsement and boots on the ground, and to understand ‘dissent movements’ as movements attempting to engender political or social change, which can be ‘benefitted’ by being furthered in the aim they have set about to achieve. It must also be noted that ‘foreign actors’ constitutes a wide category, including non-political actors; for example, NGOs that collect and disseminate information. By raising the profile of a dissent movement and the issue that they are protesting, NGOs can help improve accountability and

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It is important to recognise that not all political involvement by foreign actors need be highly detrimental to the progress of dissent movements. In fact, studies on revolutionary success show that non-violent revolutionary groups are forty-six times more likely to usher in regime change if the military and police defect. The study cites international backing as a key factor in determining the likelihood of this outcome.

This is clear if we consider the disparity in results between the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and the Bah’rainian uprising during the same period. In reaction to the former, the Western world responded with resounding

calls for Mubarak to step down, encouraging military defection and the efforts towards regime change. By contrast, Bah’rainian protests, which the West ignored and Saudi Arabia made moves to quash, were quickly supressed and did not incite even small-scale defection by security services. It thereby becomes clear that foreign endorsement of dissent groups can be instrumental in changing the status quo. Indeed, if we look at situations in which intervention in the form of affirmation has failed to take place, there have been brutal consequences. In particular, the civil war over Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, seemingly ignored by much of the Western world, resulted in the deaths of thousands and the perpetration of horrific war crimes. These results, in conjunction with the lack of Western response, could be used to highlight the importance of foreign affirmation in the success of dissent groups by forcing regimes to deal with discord in a more democratic and humane manner.

However, the atrocities in Bougainville, as much as they were ‘permitted’ by the lack of threat of substantive foreign intervention, were not devoid of active Western encouragement. In particular, Australian involvement in arming, training and transporting Papua militia against Francis Ona’s Bougainville Revolutionary Army was a highly instrumental factor in the tragedy that followed, and a transgression for which the state has only recently recognised some responsibility.

This shows a dark side of interventionism that treats struggles between regimes and dissent movements as available for co-option and conduct in line with foreign (often economic) incentives. In the case of Australian involvement in the Bougainville crisis, this ulterior motive was national and corporate ties to the Panguna copper mine on the island.

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Furthermore, it must be noted that even when foreign co-option broadly follows the direction and aims of a dissent movement, huge problems can be created for groups that are trying to provide organic and authentic political change. This has been most obvious in areas of US intervention during the twentieth century, particularly in Iran and in multiple states in Latin America where CIA-backed coups have discouraged local political support for change. The ability of governing regimes to point to change as a ‘secret plan’ of the West has prevented political dissent from gaining popular support among citizens who see unjust regimes as the lesser of two evils by comparison to insidious neo-colonialism.

This problem is not something confined to history, and even as recently as 2011, during Iran’s Green Revolution, Western support has been received as problematic. More conservative elements of Iranian society have even pointed to foreign approval of liberalising adjustments as indicative of the fact that movements for social change are destroying the moral and cohesive fabric of society. Nor is this attempt to delegitimise dissent confined to political movements; the progress of feminist endeavours in the Middle East has been severely enfeebled by historical associations with the colonial period. The hotly debated politicisation of veiling practices can be seen as directly contributing towards, or even instigated by, colonial co-option of the feminist cause as a mechanism of control. This co-option has been sustained in the modern era, with much of the US rhetoric surrounding the intervention in Afghanistan focusing on Taliban veiling practices rather than other far less altruistic US incentives to invade.

actors can have detrimental effects on dissent groups - and the ends they are trying to further both in the short and long term.

Whilst affirmation of groups demanding political change can be very important in raising the likelihood of accountability and progress, even affirmation must be carefully handed out, especially in regions that have painful memories of colonial involvement and economic neo-imperialism. As for intervention that involves more ‘boots on the ground’ and monetary or weapons-based sponsorship, it is hard to think of an example in which foreign states have not in some way co-opted the dissent movement and harmed its long-term viability as an alternative to the status quo.

The problem with such substantive intervention is not only that it aims at the wrong ends. The far more fundamental problem is, in fact, that substantive intervention as an institution is profoundly flawed, and that however noble the end, it can never have just underpinnings or beneficial effects on dissent movements.

- Emma Colebatch

Though blanket claims (particularly about normative issues) can be unwise, history and politics seem to vindicate the assertion that, in general, intervention by foreign

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PYONGYANG SPRING? THE DYNAMICS OF DISSENT IN NORTH KOREA Archie Philipps

President Eisenhower once hoped, “may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.” For the North Korean government, as for all authoritarian states, they are one and the same. Despite claims by state media that “everybody leads the most dignified and happy life,” and repeated insistence that the liberties theoretically enshrined in its constitution are enacted, the country scored bottom place on the EIU Democracy Index. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is anything but democratic; it is the last bastion of the Stalinist model of dictatorship, it has perfected – over some seventy years – the art of totalitarian terrorisation, propagating a Juche ideology of nationalist autarchy – Korea First – mixed with blatant militarism and racism. It is a state where not just disobedience, but mere apathy towards the party line, can mean death.

For a state and its regime to survive it is essential that it maintains political legitimacy - both in the eyes of the elite and the

people at large. Principally, legitimacy is achieved through economic, bureaucratic, and military means, but in North Korea, these pillars of survival are showing signs of cracking.

The North Korean government has, since the 1990s, consistently failed to provide for many of its people’s most basic needs.

Although mass starvation is no longer the norm, 2 million people perished due to famine in the 1990s – today, over one third of the population remains severely malnourished. Although economic data is scant, the GDP per capita of South Korea (which until the 1970s was the poorer of the two countries) is still estimated to be over 30 times larger than the North’s. In 2009, to combat rampant inflation the DPRK currency was redenominated; 100 won notes were replaced with 1 won notes, yet the state only allowed people to exchange limited numbers of old notes for new ones, wiping out savings and sparking barely hidden mass discontent.

Although still very much a command

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economy, North Korea has introduced some tentative economic reforms: under Kim Jong Un, farmers are able to keep some produce for themselves, transforming them from serfs to sharecroppers. Indeed, economic growth in 2016 reached a 17-year high. Most visible, however, are the grand projects that have been popping up around Pyongyang and the surrounding regions, spawning the rather amusing oxymoron of ‘socialist luxury:’ from ski resorts to water parks and new restaurants. For North Korea’s elite, the words of the great Roman poet Juvenal, who proclaimed that a populace might be satisfied with ‘panem et circenses’ (bread and circuses), to some extent ring true. The trouble is, however, that outside the capital of 2 million, the remaining 22 million citizens have neither.

on 11th August 2017, the DPRK’s recent nuclear tests – which it sees as essential to the regime’s survival – have instead led to increased questioning by the people of their government’s policies. Asking where the money for such expensive projects came from, while their own livelihoods have seen little concrete improvement, many North Koreans are feeling increasingly disillusioned by the Kim Jong Un regime. The government has reportedly sent out teams to promote propaganda in the countryside and punish potential dissent. Kim also recently convened a rare meeting of the judiciary and security services to demand more arrests of rebellious elements.

Satellite images indicate that there has been an extension of the country’s gulag system, while reports have even emerged that Kim Jong Un has resorted to travelling in aides’ cars, at night and avoid rural areas, for fear of assassination attempts. The fact that a totalitarian regime finds ever more need to clamp down on any form of dissent is indicative of the lessening efficacy of its autocratic apparatus and – causally and symptomatically – a burgeoning of civic dissent.

Any major Chinese-style economic reforms would virtually mean an admittance of ideological defeat. Moreover, according to Seoul-based Professor Andrei Lankov, the need, and thus temptation for, radical reform could lead to disaster for one of the most economically backward countries in the world. The transition of Russia from socialism to capitalism in the 1990s, or the incorporation of East Germany into the Federal Republic, gives an idea of potential catastrophe that would befall the Kim regime should such reforms ever be introduced. This, and the ensuing mass migration that would almost certainly take place, is a crisis which neither the North, nor the South, nor indeed China, would want to deal with. But such a situation is unlikely: in December 2013, Kim Jong Un had his uncle Jang Song Thaek, a key proponent of such reform, executed for treason.

Displays of military might are no longer enough to stifle discontent, nor foment national unity against a common enemy.

According to a report in The Telegraph

The backbone of North Korean state, its raison d’être and key source of popular legitimacy is the Kim dynasty. It is built on a cult of personality, an ideology serving purely to preserve the regime. He rules through heavy propaganda enforced by fear. Yet repression, as history shows us, is not a permanent solution to complex political grievance, and a regime cannot forever be sustained on a diet of propaganda alone.

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In his study on totalitarian language, John Wesley Young claimed that to avoid mass discontent “the light of reality must never penetrate the iron curtain drawn down by the dictator.” However, Kim’s control of information flows is facing a bottom-up revolution directed by a digital ‘commons.’

South Korean films and Chinese radios are known to be illegally smuggled into the country and sold on the black market, while mobile phone usage is on the rise, despite the regime’s attempts to move with, and thus control, these developments. Organised religion, notably Christianity and shamanic practices, are said to be on the rise in rural areas as increasingly sceptical and discontented citizens seek a respite from the harsh realities of daily life in the DPRK. Yet none of this means that a popular uprising is likely.

Having watched the execution of Romanian dictator Ceausescu in December 1989, Kim Jong-Il, the then-heir, warned aides that “we must think very carefully about the future of our country.”

– a ‘Pyongyang Spring’ of sorts – nor a highlevel military coup d’état are on the cards at present. Nevertheless, if no resolution is given to North Korea’s consistent lack of real economic progress (accentuated by sanctions) and increased access to information from the outside world, it is not impossible to imagine that simmering disillusionment with the selfish and damaging motivations of the Kim regime could spark serious upheaval and regime change (perhaps with outside interference).

Ultimately, it will be the decisions taken by the North Korean elite that will determine whether the potential for dissent will ever be converted into real political action on the ground, and at the highest levels, of North Korean society.

The death knell for autocrats is usually loss of support from the elite, in particular the army. Until recently, the army supported the Kim regime out of ideological loyalty or, more cynically, because the status of the army is so highly elevated in the People’s Republic. However, for the Party elite, who are the (sole) beneficiaries of Kim’s bread and circuses, such appeasement is proving to be increasingly insufficient, in light of the recent and ongoing purges of the upper echelons of the party apparatus. According to Thae Yong Ho, former deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom who defected in 2016, the North Korean elite are becoming ever more disenchanted with Kim Jong Un in no small part because of his lack of revolutionary credentials, his costly isolationist nuclear policies, and, most importantly for them, the routine and arbitrary nature of his purges of officials. There is systematic fear that under Kim Jong Un, they have comparatively little to gain and potentially everything to lose.

This sentiment not only stifles good governance, but might even come to threaten the position of the nation’s Supreme Leader.

Clearly however, neither a popular uprising by an exhausted and downtrodden populace

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XI JINPING THOUGHT AND CHINA HEARD Joe Lovell-McNamee In the days leading up to China’s 19th Communist Party Congress preparations were made to ensure that the quinquennial gathering of thousands of Communist Party (CCP) delegates in Beijing to elect the party’s leadership for the next five years went off without a hitch. Parcels ordered from Taobao (China’s largest online retailer) were delayed, restaurants and bars temporarily closed, and the streets of the capital lined with keen senior citizens bedecked in official blue volunteer vests.

Despite best efforts however, attempts to shut down industrial production to guarantee the clear skies of summits before were repeated without success.

But beneath the veneer of bureaucratic micro-management, there was a somewhat darker endeavour by capital officials to see everything go according to plan. Hiked up to a level higher than even its usual prevalence was the state surveillance of known dissidents; critics of the one-party state faced questioning, house arrest, or, for those lucky enough (read: too

high a profile) an all-expenses paid holiday to more remote areas of the country.

Such efforts can undoubtedly be situated within a broader trend of a Chinese state increasingly hostile to dissent. Since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 he has instituted an anti-graft campaign to supposedly clean out all such behaviour from a party riddled with corruption.

Outside the party, a concerted effort has been made to silence calls across the nation for a more liberal, free, reform-minded China. Everyone from foreign NGOs and democracy activists to the lawyers who represent them have been targeted. In doing so Xi has consolidated power both within and beyond the CCP, more so than any Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping, who de facto governed China from 1978 until his death in 1997.

For his participation in a 2013 protest outside the offices of Guangzhou-based Southern Weekly demanding greater press freedom after interference by authorities with the paper’s editorials, Guo Feixiong

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was sentenced to six years imprisonment.

Such antagonism is also finding manifestation beyond the mainland. Five employees at Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay Books disappeared in 2015 and were later detained by authorities and compelled to make false confessions that they fled of their own accord. Concerned observers immediately linked the incident to the independent book store’s stocking of titles banned in China, which covered subject matters ranging from politically sensitive histories of the country to personally licentious biographies of the party elite.

The clampdown on not just the nation’s dissidents and activists but now on those non-state actors who have traditionally been given the remit to work on their behalf is cause for even greater concern. New legislation demanding greater government oversight of foreign NGOs has pushed many out the country, underground, or under the auspices of state surveillance, leaving their vital work in a state of limbo. Two years have passed since the so-called ‘709 incident’ a hitherto unprecedented crackdown in which hundreds of human rights lawyers were questioned, detained, and in some cases charged; since that time a large number remain imprisoned. With many of those who would otherwise provide legal representation for China’s dissidents now out of circulation and an even greater number naturally reluctant to do so, activism has only been further pushed out to the fringes.

Unsurprisingly it is China’s already marginalised groups that are feeling the pressure more than ever. The Beijing Zhongze Women’s Legal Counselling and Service Centre, a legal aid centre providing support for those involved in child custody battles and employment disputes amongst others, was forced to close only a year after the arrest in 2015 of five feminists for an attempted protest against public sexual harassment in a case that made international headlines.

Furthermore, in the country’s northwest border region of Xinjiang, home to a large number of the Uyghur ethnic minority group, many of whom are Muslim, restrictions on civil liberties have been far-reaching. Bans on so-called excessively long beards and public sporting of headscarves have been implemented in recent years as the government seeks to address the area’s reputation as a hotspot for domestic terrorism. Even bleaker is the suppression of individuals such as Ilham Tohti, an academic who regularly writes on Han-Uyghur relations in contemporary China. After his rebuke of such policies as draconian and warning they would only lead to further radicalisation, he was charged with separatism and handed down a life-sentence.

Unable to work within the system by using the courts to seek redress from institutional abuses, it leaves international pressure as the only avenue available for those seeking change in Xi’s China. But in the era of Trump and Brexit, Beijing is more confident than ever of the supremacy of its political system over that of the seemingly evermore volatile Western-style democracy.

Perhaps the biggest news to emerge from the party congress was a resolution to formally include ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ into the Chinese constitution. A rubber stamp of all Xi’s major policies thus far, the constitutional appropriation of the president’s name is proof that ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the slogan that accompanied market reforms under Deng, is entering into its latest phase. This era, to take at face value the remarks in Xi’s three-hour long opening address to the congress, is to be one of clout.

‘Xi Jinping Thought’ firmly establishes the party’s control over China’s armed forces, the People’s Liberation Army, deepens state

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reach into still more quarters of civil society, and proposes a vision of Chinese pre-eminence on the global stage.

To say, as some Western analysts have, that the move necessarily makes Xi the most powerful figure in Chinese politics since Mao, surpassing even paramount leader Deng (whose own eponymous ideology was only formalised posthumously), may prove to be overblown, or at the very least premature, but it certainly marks Xi’s ascent to power as the beginning of a significant epoch in the People’s Republic of China’s near seven-decade history.

Speculation was rife prior to the congress’ commencement that Xi would keep the 69 year-old Wang Qishan on the Politburo’s seven-member standing committee, in breach of the convention dictating members only seek a further term if they are 67 or younger. This would have signalled Xi’s own intention to stand for an additional five years beyond the expected ten. Such a move would be something unheard of since the post-Maoist decentralisation of power, in which fearing a repeat of the turmoil partially wrought on by Mao’s personality cult in the Cultural Revolution, it was decided that authority should be delegated more widely amongst the party’s highest echelons.

Though this failed to materialise, five new faces instead join Xi and Premier Li Keqiang on the seven-body committee. Regardless, with his name and dogma constitutionally amended as state-officiated ideology, Xi has ensured his position as a hegemonic force in the party for years to come. It is difficult to know for certain what this means going forward for the state of dissent in China, but if this president’s past five years are anything to go by then those working to create a freer and fairer China may be in it for the long haul.

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DISSENT IN THE AGE OF GENETIC CONTROL Joel Silverstein

In a laboratory at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, eastern China, two mice vie for control of a narrow tube, each attempting to shove the other out in a display of social domination. After a short period of time, as is inevitable, one mouse displaces the other and becomes master of its cylindrical precinct. Then the experiment is repeated, but this time a laser is shone at the brains of those mice who previously proved to be submissive to the will of their counterparts. This time ninety percent of the formerly submissive mice successfully take control of the transparent pipe.

So, what is going on? The answer is the genetic manipulation of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain where we make decisions about whether to be assertive or submissive in a given social interaction. Having genetically engineered a target group of neurones in the mice’s brains to make them light-sensitive, Professor Hailan Hu and his team were able to, as he put it, “stimulate this brain region and … make lower ranked mice move up

the social ladder.” With just several seconds of light stimulation (a technique known as optogenetics), previous patterns of social hierarchy could be deliberately refashioned.

Similar neural circuitry exists in humans, and although our social hierarchical patterns are both more complex and flexible, similar synaptic mechanisms are likely to mean that we could be manipulated in a very similar way. It is relatively easy to imagine, therefore, that such technology could be used in an oppressive manner, to create what might be termed ‘designer citizens’.

More recently, the arrival of CRISPR-cas9, a relatively cheap and practical gene editing tool, has raised the prospect that within the next decade genetic editing could dramatically transform our society. Hereditary diseases like Huntington’s chorea or cystic fibrosis could be eradicated, and tendencies towards violent crimes diminished.

Indeed, even small increases in intelligence brought about by gene editing—which would compound with each passing gener-

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ation—could have a significant impact upon a nation’s economic productivity.

in terms of its share of global output.

This event will mark an historic moment in post-war history, not least because it will indicate to the world that the most successful operators of capitalist enterprise are no longer democracies, but ruthlessly well-organised authoritarian regimes.

While many Western scientists have spoken with optimism about the positive role that gene editing could contribute to our society, such hopefulness has been tempered by the potential for such technology to be used more controversially—as a form of futuristic eugenics. These fears have been exacerbated by controversial research conducted by scientists in China, whose genetic modification of (purportedly unviable) human embryos has been heavily criticised by academics in the West. Yet, over the course of the next few decades, two important and interconnected factors might change both where and how this research is conducted, and in what ways it will come to influence our societies in the long run.

Since 2014, when the Russian Federation annexed Crimea and deployed unmarked troops to eastern Ukraine, an increasingly unchecked global authoritarianism has been on the rise. In July 2016, a failed Turkish coup was met with an extensive government crackdown and a subsequent constitutional referendum that handed sweeping executive powers to President Erdogan. Today, North Korea’s increasingly bold weapons tests threaten not only its neighbours in the region, but demonstrate democratic America’s impotency when it comes to dealing with a rogue nuclear state.

Even in the United States itself, the wildly irresponsible rhetoric of the Trump presidency has abetted—and demonstrates itself as a symptom of—a growing authoritarian political culture.

Firstly, whereas bans on germline genetic modification—i.e., modifications that pass along a hereditary line—are on the statute books across Europe, Canada and Australia, such laws are much laxer in countries such as India and China (where often only guidelines exist). In the case of the United States, although gene editing is not restricted by law, in practice studies are significantly inhibited because federal funding for germline research is proscribed. Consequently, its ability to contend with China in this area is rather limited. Thus, as China monopolises this important new field of research, it is quite possible to imagine that the US and its allies might seek to roll back restrictions in order to compete.

Secondly, as China continues to make its rise as a global superpower, its political and ideological influence over the rest of the world is likely to increase. In approximately one year from this article’s publication, the Chinese economy is expected to have surpassed that of the United States

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Addressing the United Nations General Assembly this past September, President Trump’s paradoxical philosophy of non-interventionism, coupled with the threat to destroy a sovereign nation state [North Korea], have garishly illustrated on the world stage not only the inherent weaknesses of democracies, but also the gradual diminution of the United States’ position as chief arbitrator of world politics. The days of American political hegemony, especially as existed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, must now seem well and truly consigned to the past. As the President of the United States makes mockery of democratic norms— whether it be the manner of his firing the FBI Director, or encouraging violence at his political rallies—democratic idealism is being undermined both at home and abroad.

Today, many nations seek to improve relations with—and increasingly model themselves upon—the great power of tomorrow: the People’s Republic of China.

Thus, as China becomes the newest and largest superpower on the international scene, its political and ideological draw factors will be at their height. When combined with its growing monopolisation of research into gene editing, which will allow the Chinese state to define the trajectory along which experimentation in this field is conducted, it is likely that other nations will be obliged to follow suit and relax their legal (and ethical) restrictions in this field. The Chinese government has been clear on its intentions to use bio-genetics as a way to improve the social ‘wellbeing’ of its citizens, but while this may allow for positive outcomes, the human rights record of the people’s republic suggests that such a tool could be used to more nefarious ends.

Consequently, it is now increasingly possible to imagine a dystopian ‘Brave New World’ in which authoritarian states use genetic modification to control their populations, and quash dissent before it even arises. In fact, with an authoritarian culture even filtering into mainstream discourse in the West—and shaping decision-making at the highest levels of government—there is now greater pressure than ever before upon the Western scientific community to remain resilient to the ideological and market pressures that draw it to conform to ‘novel’ ethical standards. As democratic values are eroded globally, the very ability to dissent against one’s government may, with scientific ‘advances’, be undermined in the future.

It will therefore be pertinent, now more than ever, to speedily recognise these dangers, to revitalise tattered social contracts between governments and their citizens, and to safeguard our democratic values.

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MARGINALISING THE MAINSTREAM: ‘NUKE BAN’ AND DISSENT IN THE INTERNATIONAL NUCLEAR NONPROLIFERATION REGIME Joel Silverstein

The announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), split opinion among nuclear policy-makers. While outpourings of support for ICAN were evident, many governments and officials have been less enthusiastic about the role of the organisation in furthering disarmament. These officials, primarily located in nuclear-weapons states, objected to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (the Ban Treaty) as futile or even dangerous.

The Ban Treaty represents an attempt to reframe the nuclear nonproliferation debate in humanitarian terms, and to break the stalemate in disarmament between nuclear-weapons states. With the award of the Nobel Prize, this narrative has been elevated publically, despite concerns and criticism from officials in the United States.

The Nobel Prize did what the Ban Treaty alone had failed to do: it caused ordinary citizens the world over to consider the morality of nuclear weapons, often for the

first time since the end of the Cold War. Negotiations behind the treaty took a significantly different approach than traditional bilateral disarmament talks between world superpowers, focusing on humanitarian norms rather than security concerns.

The treaty begins with the premise that nuclear weapons are “abhorrent to the principles of humanity,” and what follows are arguments that seek to delegitimise such weapons in moral terms. The point of the treaty, according to ICAN, was to delegitimise nuclear weapons in the same way that biological or chemical weapons were by their respective conventions, rather than immediately enshrine effective disarmament procedures.

As several experts have noted, the impetus for the ban grew out of discontent among the non-nuclear weapons states. In recent years, many countries have been frustrated with what they see as the failure of nuclear-weapons states to live up to their disarmament commitments under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation

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Figure 1: Google trends data on Internet searches for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

Treaty. Part of this frustration stems from a slowdown in nuclear disarmament in line with an overall chill in US-Russia diplomatic relations. What is more, almost every nuclear power is currently in the midst of a modernisation and/or expansion of their nuclear capabilities. Since it is necessary to have nuclear weapons to participate in disarmament talks, the non-nuclear weapons states have been traditionally sidelined from participating in such forums.

Growing vexation among these countries at this ‘second-tier’ status within the international system has been instrumental to the building of momentum that secured the new Ban Treaty. Left with no recourse in the traditional disarmament architecture, these states took matters into their own hands, hoping to galvanise further action to disarm among the nine nuclear-armed states.

the actual problems facing disarmament.

Advocates of the Ban Treaty were seen as naïve, deluded, and even counterproductive to the cause they promoted. This did not largely change with the signing and ratification of the treaty. Despite being supported by a majority of the UN, the Ban Treaty has been largely ignored by nuclear-weapons states whose focus has been on other nuclear issues.

As US Ambassador Robert Wood noted, “We are now facing the greatest nuclear challenge that we have faced for quite some time in North Korea’s nuclear weapons program …And, the ban treaty does nothing and cannot do anything to impact and improve the situation with regard to that challenge[s] that we face.”

Even after the signature and passing of the Ban Treaty, most of the congratulations came from and were confined to those who had supported its negotiation. The award of the Nobel Prize took this issue and turned it on its head, raising the ethical question of nuclear weapons directly to the world’s public for the first time in years.

Unfortunately, the initial effect of the Ban Treaty on the rhetoric or behaviour of nuclear-weapons states was limited.

None of these states took part in the Treaty negotiations, and many exerted pressure on allied countries (such as NATO) to boycott negotiations altogether. The Ban Treaty initiative was generally seen by nuclear-weapons states as tangential to

The weight of public attention and approbation that comes from the award of a Nobel Peace Prize has placed ICAN at the

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centre of the debate on nuclear disarmament. By reframing the debate in normative rather than practical terms, the award of a Nobel places critics of ICAN and the Ban Treaty on the defensive.

the audience beyond governments to the world populace, the award of the Nobel Peace Prize has transplanted ICAN and the humanitarian anti-nuclear movement, into the mainstream of public debate. The negotiations alone were a step in this direction, but it took the moral and independent prestige of the Nobel award to reintroduce this agenda into the public consciousness.

Public opinion, unhindered by the controversy the ban has engendered in the expert community, has shown an enormous spike in interest in the ban treaty in the aftermath of the prize (Figure 1), which did not occur after the treaty was negotiated (March 2017), signed (July 2017), or entered into force (September 2017).

Nevertheless, this prize has only highlighted the fissure at the heart of the global nuclear order. The very public pedestal that was given to ICAN by the Nobel Foundation has transformed the organisation from a dissenting group at the margins of the nuclear debate, to the moral leadership at its core. However, the gap which divides the two groups remains unbridged. It is still unclear whether the nuclear-weapons states are willing to directly dissent, or whether they will continue to ignore the Ban Treaty’s existence. What is clear is that the position of ICAN has shifted, and its next steps are uncertain. Will the movement attempt to continue a role of dissent vis-a-vis the nuclear powers, or will it turn towards taking a more central role in the emergent public debate?

The moral and functional implications of the Ban itself are not the focus of this article. However, the award of the Nobel Prize to ICAN has put the Ban Treaty directly to the global public, and placed an organisation that started at the margins at centre stage.

The simplicity of the Nobel stamp of approval glosses over certain legitimate - albeit often overstated - criticisms that the Ban Treaty lacks verification procedures, and has the potential to undermine the existing Non-Proliferation Treaty.

It also disguises that ICAN and the Ban Treaty negotiations represent ever-clearer evidence of the growing gulf between the ‘have’ and ‘have-nots’ of the global nuclear order. By taking approval directly to the public sphere, the Nobel Prize casts the argument against nuclear weapons in a humanitarian light, which was the original goal of ICAN. Nuclear-weapons states that opposed the treaty find themselves out of step with a widely-understood symbol of international approbation, without a similar public understanding of the potential problems of the ban.

By changing the nature of the public debate on nuclear weapons from a technical/security framework to a moral/ humanitarian framework, and expanding

How ICAN balances these two roles, as a voice of dissent and as a voice of moral leadership, will determine its future impact. Continuing to take a position of pure dissent may preclude any meaningful concessions from nuclear states who continue to see disarmament as a security issue. If disarmament is to move forward substantively, it will take both moral courage and a delicate handling of extant political realities.

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PRACTICAL REFLECTIONS OF PROTEST IN THE 21ST CENTURY Meredith Scalos

Protest is one of the oldest forms of dissent, taking on many different forms throughout history. While dissent can encompass many different forms of action, protest occupies a traditionally more radical space: it involves the aggregate actions of many to make a statement, usually through the form of physical participation in a march, sit-in, picket line, and so on. Enlightenment thinkers believed the right to protest was integral to the fabric of human nature and it was enshrined in many of their writings – writings that have inspired protection of protest in government documents around the globe to this day.

It’s a form of dissent used by groups large and small, on issues of varying types, and transcends national politics, language, and culture. However, if protest is so integral to human society, why is it that so little has seemed to get done?

the original March on Washington led by Martin Luther King, Jr.; or the countless worker’s strikes for fair pay and equal treatment across the globe. However, there are also numerous examples of unsuccessful protests that have amounted to little or no change and, in some cases, to more instability and oppression: the Arab Spring protests; Occupy Wall Street; the Women’s March; and marches for climate change. Is there, then, a recipe for a ‘good and effective’ protest? Or have we simply entered an era where protest’s purpose is limited, or, in fact, almost counterproductive?

Protest’s main function is as a medium for public dissent. Protest calls the status quo into question, and brings together different people concerned with the same thing: to show the establishment that the status quo is failing them. The importance of such a function is indisputable. However, when we rely too heavily on protest, eschewing other types of dissent and activism, are we guilty of only pursuing half-formed movements of dissent? Further, is there

When we imagine protest historically, there are certain outstanding examples that spring to mind: Gandhi’s Salt March;

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something inherent in protest that makes it a less-than-effective form of dissent?

these movements - e.g. gender, LGBTQ+, race, disability awareness - and divides the willing participants into silos that prove less effective on their own.

Unfortunately, when political scientists, commentators, and policy professionals consider protests, they typically only consider the monolithic concept of protest without the interplay of personalities, issues, management, and organization within them. When we lump all forms of protest into a single category for consideration, we risk ignoring the important nuances of global situations and harm, rather than help, a dissident cause.

Finally, and perhaps most crippling, is the internal violence in some protest spaces.

This is not the kind of violence that is often reported in the media - that of violence towards oppressors by the oppressed but rather intra-movement violence that breaks down the integrity of movements themselves and weakens the project. While no protest space may ever be totally free from this issue, more recent protests have arguably become rife with systemic internal violence between protestors - often emerging from the lack of intersectionality within protests.

In particular, there are three distinct issues manifest in recent protest movements that seem to highlight the pertinent problems within protest as a form of dissent today.

The first, and probably the most common, argument is the lack of a ‘what’s next’ call to action. It must be acknowledged that, in some countries, the risks of advancing a protest movement to its next stage might outweigh the advantages that such a movement intends to secure. Viable avenues for ‘next steps’ can be limited, and it is often difficult to bridge a protest ethos with legislative action. Yet, beyond this caveat, several protests that have such flexibility and capability for post-protest action have nonetheless failed to mobilize their base afterwards. This amounts to an incredible mismanagement of resources and political moments.

Violence, in this sense, derives from the Fanonian sense of violence in its many forms: physical, social, epistemic, and psychological. The landscape of protest, as a means of dissent, has devolved into factionalism and division; as coalitions have become fragmented, vicious cycles of inaction have been formed. Dissenters de-legitimize themselves, not by the violence inflicted upon their oppressors (which can be legitimate, and sometimes necessary), but by the violence done between and amongst themselves.

The Women’s March on Washington is a prime example of this kind of internal violence. From the inception of the march, it was very much seen as a ‘white feminist’ protest filled with activists that had very little sense of the struggle of women outside the mainstream of white, exclusive feminism. The movement was born outside of the realm of intersectionality and, from this moment, a certain kind of violence was done to many of the women that the March claimed to represent. Despite continuous attempts to alleviate the problems, and

A second issue is the increasingly common phenomenon of ‘protest fatigue.’

Many protests are delinked from greater or broader campaigns and there is an increasing proliferation of protest action, resulting in countless protests that lack gravity of a single, cohesive protest action.

While this can be a good thing, in that it provides avenues for people to get involved with specific issues they care about, it also ignores the intersectionality of many of

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respond to these criticisms, the march’s organizers and participants have continued to perpetuate forms of violence nearly a year after the movement’s inception. In the case of the Women’s March, the oppressed have, to some extent, become the oppressors.

Protest, as a mechanism of dissent, is a vital element of the human experience.

Protest serves to challenge the status quo, to draw attention to perceived injustices, and to propose solutions. However, when protests are rife with organizational incompetence and violence within themselves, their legitimacy is called into question.

For the international community, we are faced with a growing sense that protest either serves little practical purpose, or that it can even be detrimental to the struggle it has attempted to highlight.

However, within dissent politics, protest and sometimes violent protest - is often the only way in which a group can express its collective voice. As members of a global system, and with the rise of more global protests and their visibility, activists and organizers must become more reflexive, put greater focus on intersectionality, and consider how they may be doing violence to their fellow protesters. Perhaps most importantly, there must be more reflection on how to translate the energy generated by protest into real and lasting change and action.

With the ever-shifting obligations of the international system, the world is smaller than it has ever been. This has brought with it new opportunities for global dissent on behalf of marginalized and oppressed groups, which could have incredible impact and power if designed and carried out in a more reflective and intersectional manner.

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A Note About Oxford IRSoc Lighthouse is the Oxford International Relation Society’s termly journal. In it is published a collection of student-written articles (both postgraduate and undergraduate) by a team of Oxford students.

Each article is the result of a collaborative effort between writer and editor, and is written over the first four weeks of term. This finished journal is the final product of countless hours of work put in by the writers, editors, and the committee of IRSoc. If you are interested in being involved in next term’s edition of Lighthouse, please follow the Lighthouse Journal page on Facebook. Applications for editing positions will be opened in seventh week, and the call out for articles in the print journal will be at the beginning of next term; both will be published on Facebook. Articles are published on the blog on a rolling basis.

Thanks go to this term’s team of editors: Alice Wilcock ... Editor in Chief Margo Munro Kerr & Thomas Wells ... Co-Editors Antonia Craven, Thomas Hunt, Joel Silverstein, & Elena Casale ... Sub-Editors Robert Harrison ... Graphic Designer

November 2017, Issue 16 (Formerly ‘Sir’) editor-in-chief@oxirsoc.org Printed by Anchorprint Group Ltd. The fonts used are Didot (titles) and Seravek (body).