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The referendum took place, not because the Executive wanted to listen to ‘the people’, but because David Cameron saw it as a way of resolving a continuing problem in the Conservative Party over Europe; and of course, he expected a Remain vote. Cameron’s commitment to the British Political Tradition was clearly evident in the referendum campaign. The Remain side didn’t take account of what citizens thought; rather, they relied on a series of ‘experts’, telling citizens how they should vote. Unsurprisingly, this was counter-productive because a feature of contemporary politics has been a significant increase in distrust of ‘experts’ of all sorts.

Boris Johnson, at one and the same time, appeals to the need to fulfil the will of the people, while attempting to curtail Parliament’s role, to the extent of a prorogation of Parliament for five weeks. It is hard not to conclude that his main aim is to force a general election where he will pose as the champion of the will of the people against both Parliament, as unwilling to support Brexit, and the EU, as obdurate and unwilling to compromise. In essence, he is using arguments about democracy to preserve Executive power

we may be seeing an increasingly destabilized British Political Tradition. However, the ideas of this tradition, inscribed as they have been in the institutions, processes and practices of British politics remain powerful. Government has tried to assert its authority over Parliament, to hold to the idea of strong government so crucial to the British Political Tradition

In this context, we need a system based upon two different, but related, balanced interactions: one between the legislature and the executive; and the other between representative and participatory democracy. To achieve the first balance, we need to return to the issue of constitutional reform, including changing the electoral system, to make it more representative, and to strengthen freedom of information, to make it easier to hold government accountable. To achieve the second balance, we need, not referenda, but, rather, increased co-production of policy and implementation. In addition, we would suggest that we need to take the issue of subsidiarity more seriously.

The growth of the GDP is primarily driven by government spending on mega infrastructure projects (spearheaded by the military), leading to a boom in the construction sector. Government spending is financed by a bloated public debt, the burden of which is disproportionality shouldered by the lower segments of society.

the regime did not invest in the development of the manufacturing sector, and it did not lay down the foundation for sustainable, long-term economic growth

The decline in the level of consumption was not counteracted by an increase in the level of exports in goods and services. This is reflected in the value of Egyptian exports, which reached 47.45 billion USD in 2018, a decrease of 1.66 billion USD compared to 2013. Other indicators also reflect a worsening international competitive position. For example, the trade deficit ballooned from -6.34% of the GDP in 2013 to -10.45% of the GDP in 2018

the military directly employs 19.2% of the labour force. This makes the military the second largest employer in the country, after the public sector that employs 5.6 million.

projects include much-publicised mega infrastructure projects, with dubious economic benefit, the most notable of which is the new administrative capital. The construction sector, which is closely connected to the military led projects, played an important role in generating economic growth. In 2018, it is estimated to have grown by 8.9%, making it the number one contributor to the GDP growth

growth of the GDP is not driven by a dynamic private sector, but mainly by a massive military led construction spree, and mega-infrastructure projects that have little positive impact on increasing the competitiveness of the Egyptian economy

the unemployment rate, which reached 8.1% by the first quarter of 2019, the lowest in 10 years. This drop in the level of unemployment, however, requires some additional qualification. The rate of utilization, which measures the number of workers employed for at least one hour per week as a percentage of the population, has dropped from 44.5% to 39%. This is also accompanied by a reduction in the level of workforce participation from 46.4% to 41.6%, indicating a reduction in the level of those seeking work, rather than an increase in the number of available jobs. Loss of hope should be credited with the drop in the level of unemployment, not improved economic conditions.

profits generated from business owned by the armed forces are exempt from taxation, under law 96 (2015). This means that the government is shifting the burden on the shoulders of the poor, as they finance the military construction spree, which in-turn is used to enrich the military elites and other regime insiders

as debt continues to pile up, the pressure on the poor will continue to rise, as the government continues to cut social spending. This will reduce the level of effective local demand, leading to greater pressure on the private sector. In addition, if the construction spree continues, the possibility of overcapacity and over-accumulation of capital in the construction sector becomes more prominent. In essence, a bubble that is bound to burst.

As sources of information proliferated, long-standing sources of authority (monarchy, aristocracy, and the established Church) feared losing power and turned reactionary. At the same time, the longer-term transformations on which these social and cultural innovations were built—the growth of European overseas empires and the emergence of settler colonialism, massive silver exports from South and Central America, the trans-Atlantic slave trade—continued, and in ever more brutal forms. More than 6 million Africans were sold into slavery in the 18th century—a time that some still call the “Age of Enlightenment.”

Today, as in the 1790s, an old order is ending in convulsions. Even before the coronavirus prompted flight cancellations and entry bans, climate activists were rightly telling us to change our modes and patterns of travel. Even before nonessential businesses were shut by government orders, online shopping and same-day deliveries were rapidly remaking retail commerce, while environmental concerns and anti-consumerism were revolutionizing the fashion industry.

real revolutions are the ones that nobody sees coming

The men and women who made the French Revolution—a revolution which, in a few short and hectic years, decriminalized heresy, blasphemy, and witchcraft; replaced one of the oldest European monarchies with a republic based on universal male suffrage; introduced no-fault divorce and easy adoption; embraced the ideal of formal equality before the law; and, for a short time at least, defined employment, education, and subsistence as basic human rights—had no model to follow, no plans, no platform agreed upon in advance. As the UCLA historian Lynn A. Hunt has argued, they made it up as they went along. Yet for more than two centuries, elements of their improvised politics have been revolution’s signature features: a declared sovereignty, devised symbols, an anthem, war. At the junction Americans face today, however, we need to imitate not the outcome of the French revolution but the energy, creativity, and optimism of the French revolutionaries.

In hindsight a revolution may look like a single event, but they are never experienced that way. Instead they are extended periods in which the routines of normal life are dislocated and existing rituals lose their meaning. They are deeply unsettling, but they are also periods of great creativity.

the claim that Chernobyl caused a legitimacy crisis for the Soviet Union rests on sweeping causal claims that underestimate authoritarian resilience and oversimplify how complex societies really work

More than two decades after the end of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, it should be clear that authoritarian regimes can endure chronic and acute crises that rival, if not exceed, the severity of Chernobyl. After all, the Soviet Union itself had done so many times, from the famines of 1921 to 1922, 1932 to 1933, and 1946 to 1947.

Many systems endure a long time even as they produce a plenitude of lies.

If Soviet collapse was not inevitable or if we can attribute it to factors other than legitimacy or calamity, then the political importance of Chernobyl recedes. What becomes more important, then, is not the roots of instability in authoritarian countries per se but how political systems of any stripe grow brittle or susceptible to collapse—a lesson one would think Americans have learned from the past several years. Indeed, as nonprofit organization Freedom House notes, at the moment, it is contemporary democracies, not autocracies, that seem to be on the waning side as the world enters the 15th consecutive year of democratic recession.

The National Endowment for Democracy’s blog pivoted effortlessly from calling the January 2020 shootdown of a Ukrainian airliner “Iran’s ‘Chernobyl’ moment” to labeling the COVID-19 infection as “China’s biological ‘Chernobyl.’” The Atlantic Council mused (as did others) whether the coronavirus could be a “Chernobyl moment” for Russian President Vladimir Putin. An independent review panel suggested the coronavirus could be a “Chernobyl moment” for the World Health Organization—the clearest evidence the Chernobyl metaphor has become untethered from any evidence-based moorings.

Where the logic of the fable emphasizes how closed authoritarian systems promote untruths and thus engender disaster, the relatively open societies of the United States, Canada, Europe, Brazil, and now India have proved vulnerable to COVID-19, a failing that crossed ideological complexions of ruling parties and varieties of democracy alike.

the appeal of the fable is it reassures Western audiences that democratic institutions possess some natural immunity to the lies and bureaucratic dysfunction that poisoned the Pripyat marshes with radiation.

It may be true (indeed, it’s probably likely) that open systems prove more self-correcting in the long run than closed ones. Yet societies that pride themselves on being democratic are apt to overrate their own virtues—and their preparedness for disaster.

COVID-19 failures are already creating a fable in China that democracies won’t take the tough measures needed to halt disasters despite the counterexamples of Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand.

Authoritarian systems are not fated to crumble because of one or another catastrophe, and democratic ones will not avert disaster out of their own innate virtues.

Lottery selection has come back in political fashion in recent years, using techniques to promote informed debates among those chosen. This system is being used to address real political issues and recommend policies to governments.

Citizens’ assemblies are happening everywhere from Australia to Canada, Bolivia to France, and plenty of places elsewhere

Belgium’s Parliament of the German-speaking Community has just begun the most startling version to date, creating a lottery-selected second chamber

One of the demands made by Extinction Rebellion

In June 2019, Britain’s parliament announced plans for something like that

While it is true that Athenian women, slaves and foreigners took no part as citizens, those same exclusions prevailed for original versions of today’s electoral governments. At the time of the first presidential elections in the United States in 1789, only 6% of the population – white men with property – were eligible to choose the first US president

Like all ideas that challenge incumbent power, the mechanisms of original Athenian democracy face dangers of institutional capture – not least the look-a-like versions that cloak business-as-usual powers in the shiny new clothes of original democracy. 

After decades of political apathy and the erosion of trust in elected representatives, citizens need faith in their own capacity to shape policy. And that of their peers. Knowing what examples of self-governance have worked, and how, certainly helps.

a phenomenal and impressive movement in Algeria, nothing less than a revolution. And it is one which has taken over every city, every institution, every family and every individual man, woman and child across the country.

Bouteflika stood down in April 2019. Many high-ranking politicians have been tried on corruption charges and imprisoned. Businessmen connected to the elite have been tried. With each demonstration, the Hirak has won concessions from the regime – and they are not giving in until as the rallying cry calls for - Yetnahaw Gaa – all those associated with the regime Must Get Out.

The Hirak seems to have no leaders. It has developed slogans, songs, many taken from the football stadiums where an intelligent and astute political narrative has developed in recent years. It continues in multiple forms from cultural activities in main squares, dialogue and debates on the steps of the national theatre, to collective cleaning up of public spaces. The creative energy, ideas of the young people, women, students, workers – all sectors of society - is its lifeblood.

this week has seen a massive escalation of the protests in response to what is seen as now an illegitimate government trying to pass new bills in Algeria. Combined with cases of violence against students – the reasons for maintaining the protests are profound ones and Algerians will continue to demonstrate.

Most importantly, however, is the question of reconciliation between Algerians, with all sections of society marching and protesting together. These are the beautiful moments of the Hirak – when thousands of people have been vocally challenging detentions, using the “mahraz”, in solidarity with detainees. Or when the Algerian Youth Orchestra took over public space in Jijel and performed to local people. When in Blida, artists have claimed back the square through the cultural Hirak.

Can a proposed 12 December election take place if not all members of the Issaba – the bandits as the regime has been renamed – are gone?

Who can stand in these presidential elections, who is completely untied to a regime which infiltrated so much of Algerian life?

First, Algeria has a highly educated population – the number of universities and the number of students has increased dramatically in the last decades – and these are the heart of debates about reform and development of the country. Second, the Arab Spring in Algeria happened in 1988. Algeria’s democratisation process in 1990 – despite its tragic consequences of the cancelled elections in 1991 and the violence that ensued - left a Constitution which allowed associations and political parties to form. Despite the violence, Algerians have mobilised and organised in their thousands since 1990 in the most difficult of conditions.

one of the most powerful and promising revolutions in Africa.

Politicians give whatever work there is to their henchmen, not to us

Many of the politicians in Lebanon and Iraq are the direct material beneficiaries of sectarian systems instituted after conflicts in both countries.

Wealth and national resources were carved up along sectarian lines, with no party having an interest in upsetting the status quo.

After the 2003 U.S. invasion, Iraq borrowed from Lebanon to build its own muhasasa taifa, or balanced sectarianism. Power is likewise shared between the ruling elite of Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. As a result, while elections can shift the balance of power, they do little to change the faces of those who wield it, from whichever sect or faction

many Lebanese feel that Hezbollah can no longer claim the moral ground it once claimed for itself as a political outsider, now that it’s clearly a part of the faulty system

one side of the protests is that they are against any political parties that are religious or ideologically charged

At least two generations of Iraqis have been scarred by sectarianism, beginning with Saddam Hussein’s killings of Shiites in Iraq, the subsequent revenge by the Shiite militias on Sunnis, and then the formation of the Islamic State. They are not just exhausted from the chaos unleashed by sectarian rivalries, but also disdainful of them. The most recent Iraqi protests were held mainly in Shiite cities and against a Shiite-dominated government.

In Lebanon, meanwhile, the protests comprise different sects, ages, sexes, and ideologies. However, perhaps most notable were the protests by Shiites in the south of the country against the Amal Movement, historically the dominant Shiite political party. The streets of Tyre resonated with curses aimed at Nabih Berri—Amal’s leader, the Shiite speaker of the parliament, and a Hezbollah ally.

In both countries, Shiite militias backed by Iran have come to play a dominant role in government in recent years: Hezbollah in Lebanon, and groups that belong to the Popular Mobilization Forces, the irregular army raised to fight the Islamic State, in Iraq

such division of power has reduced sectarian conflict but failed at making government efficient or transparent

In last year’s elections, a new movement of independent, nonsectarian “civil society” candidates stepped up, and though only one succeeded in winning a seat, amid claims they are too disparate and divided to succeed, they are still determined to try again

For now, however, the very act of protest offers a sense of possibility. “It’s very beautiful,” said Azab, “when you feel that you managed to defeat all your fears and say what you want out loud.”

The third sector — the new rising stars of the defense industry — are led by the president's men. They and their companies are tied to Erdogan: Baykar Makina, owned by the family of Erdogan’s son-in-law, Selcuk Bayraktar; BMC, owned by the Ozturk family and Ethem Sancak, a member of Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its Executive Council; and the Tumosan unit of Albayrak Group.

BMC is the leading producer of buses, trucks, rail systems, Kirpi armored vehicles and Amazon mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles. The ambitious joint venture aspires to become Turkey’s monopoly over diesel engine production for land vehicles and jet engines. Sancak holds 25% of the venture's shares, the Ozturks hold 25.1%, and the remaining 49.9% is owned by the Qatar Armed Forces Industry Committee.

In 2018, BMC became Turkey's first private defense industry company to reach the Defense News “Top 100 List,” ranking No. 85, with $554.18 million in defense revenues.

In early 2019, Erdogan offered generous incentives to BMC, such as the opportunity to lease Turkey’s largest tank maintenance factory to produce the indigenous Altay main battle tank under a 25-year contract for only $50 million. This transfer of a tank factory in Sakarya province to BMC is still highly controversial in Turkey, with the main opposition party criticizing it at nationwide rallies because of transparency and accountability issues. Also, factory workers organized several protests against the decision.

a big cooperative deal in the defense industry helps strengthen Qatar’s ties with Turkey, guarantees Turkey's continued military-political shield against the Saudi-led bloc and blockade, and helps Doha diversify its defense sources.

BMC wants to penetrate jet engine production as well. After securing Erdogan's political backing, BMC’s TRMotor went to a joint venture with TAI to develop the jet engine for Turkey’s indigenous TFX aircraft project with the help of the UK’s Rolls-Royce. In March, however, Rolls-Royce​ announced it was withdrawing from TRMotor because of an irreconcilable difference over intellectual property caused by Qatar’s involvement with BMC.

BMC is trying to establish a monopoly in military diesel and jet engines, and also seeks to monopolize the raw material production field of boron mining it recently entered. 

Joint ventures are having a rough time. TSKGV, now under the jurisdiction of the presidential palace, is struggling to evade Erdogan’s attempts to take full charge. Meanwhile, Erdogan's favorites are rising quickly to the top.

Russia seemed like an appropriate choice due to its close relations with Egypt, as well as the longstanding admiration among many senior Egyptian officials for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s style of governance

Among the primary reasons for sending Mahmoud al-Sisi to Moscow was his failure to properly handle most of the responsibilities assigned to him, according to the GIS sources. Chief among them was the media, over which he has exercised direct control for more than a year. In 2017, the GIS began to exert direct control over the media through acquisition, purchasing a controlling stake in the Egyptian Media Group, the biggest media conglomerate in Egypt. The corporation has several influential newspapers and television outlets under its control, including ONtv and the Youm7 newspaper. GIS also owns the DMC television network. Yet during Mahmoud al-Sisi’s tenure, the president has been unsatisfied with the media’s performance to the extent that he publicly criticized local media coverage on several occasions, one GIS official said.

A number of informed sources told Mada Masr at the time that, on the president’s orders, Mahmoud al-Sisi oversaw the fierce crackdown that followed the protests, with over 4,000 people arrested, including prominent activists, lawyers, university professors, and political opposition figures. At the time, the president was in New York to take part in the UN General Assembly on the advice of his closest aides, particularly Abbas, a longtime confidant of the president and current head of GIS.

Sending Mahmoud al-Sisi to Moscow will also help alleviate growing tensions within GIS about the role of the president’s son in the removal of senior officials from their posts in the intelligence apparatus since the president formally came to power in 2014

The process of removing senior members of the GIS came under the pretext that they were “Omar Suleiman’s men” (the late intelligence chief under Mubarak) who had no loyalty to the “new state.”

“I think that President Sisi knows very well that there is a general state of dissatisfaction within governmental institutions. There are considerable worries inside the state apparatus that cannot be underestimated,” the source close to Abu Dhabi’s decision-making circles said. “I think he understands that his popularity on the streets has declined for various reasons, some of which are economic, while others are rooted in social and political grievances. Besides, the wound inflicted by his handover of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia three years ago has not healed. Sisi will certainly not ignore the growing signs of anger altogether.”

The new Russia post may instead be an attempt to hone his skills by becoming a military envoy in a country of great strategic importance to Egypt, including in its role in constructing a nuclear power plant in Dabaa.

His two siblings include Mustafa, who works in the Administrative Control Authority, and Hassan, who moved from the oil sector to a GIS position nearly three years ago.

“The advice was that the son should not cast a shadow over the president’s position, so that the situation of Hosni and Gamal Mubarak is not repeated.”

The Lagos-based Punch newspaper declared on Dec. 11 it will no longer address Buhari as president, but by his military rank of major-general in recognition of the martial tendencies of his government.

Omoyele Sowore, a prominent critic of Buhari, was detained by intelligence agents, 24 hours after the secret police belatedly submitted to a court order to release him on bail. The publisher and former presidential candidate was first arrested in August, after calling for revolution, and charged with various crimes including treason.

at least 61 cases of attacks or harassment of journalists in Nigeria this year, more than any year since 1985, according to a report published by the Lagos-based Premium Times newspaper last month

The detention of Sowore, despite a bail order, “doesn’t send a favorable signal to investors concerned about contract risk,” said Adedayo Ademuwagun, an analyst at Lagos-based Songhai Advisory LLP. “The more the government demonstrates that it doesn’t respect its own laws and legal institutions, the less faith investors will have in the system.”

Two bills -- one designed to regulate “internet falsehoods,” the other to rein in “hate speech” -- are being scrutinized by the Senate. Under the former, individuals found guilty of creating or transmitting “false” information online face fines of up to 300,000 naira ($824) or three years in prison. An early version of the latter sought life imprisonment for anyone convicted of stirring up ethnic hatred and the death penalty if the offense causes loss of life.“If these bills become law, we will see the political class and the security services move rapidly to use them to stifle dissent,” said Cheta Nwanze, head of research at Lagos-based SBM Intelligence. Legislation already on the statute books has been used to justify a recent raid on a leading newspaper as well as the imprisonment of journalists.

It would also aim to bring more transparency to purchases of high-end real estate, which many foreign nationals use to launder money into the U.S. And it would require that the State Department and the Intelligence Community report to Congress every 90 days on whether or not the Kremlin is meddling in U.S. elections. 

Business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, have also raised concerns about the bill

design thinking” has also reached the halls of power. You can find it in the upper reaches of corporations and governments and universities. It organizes and mediates decision-making among executives and elites. At Stanford’s d.school, as cofounder Robert Sutton has said, “design thinking” is often treated “more like a religion than a set of practices for sparking creativity.” So what is it?

Here’s what I say “design thinking” is: using a particular set of design methods to solve problems that traditionally have fallen outside the purview of design. I show my students what designers call the “hexagon diagram,” a ubiquitous image that came out of the d.school in the mid-2000s and purports to represent the five steps of design thinking. It consists of five hexagons that read: “Empathize,” “Define,” “Ideate,” “Prototype,” and “Test.” The idea is that design thinking involves listening to and empathizing with some group of people, then using what you’ve heard to define the problem you want to solve. Then you come up with ideas, prototype those ideas, and test the prototypes to see if they work.

Suddenly everything is a design-thinking problem: postpartum depression, racial injustice in sentencing, unsustainable growth. To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But my students aren’t stupid; they’re smart. They’re picking up on something. In the worlds they inhabit, “Better by design” is a dominant structure of feeling.

Any solution implemented would leave “traces” that couldn’t be undone. “One cannot build a freeway to see how it works, and then easily correct it after unsatisfactory performance,” they wrote. “Large public works are effectively irreversible, and the consequences they generate have long half-lives.” The designer had no “right to be wrong,” because these problems mattered. Human lives, or the quality of human lives, were on the line.

Rittel called them “wicked problems.” They were “wicked” not because they were unethical or evil, but because they were malignant and incorrigible and hard. There did exist simple problems that didn’t rise to this level. But “now that [the] relatively easy problems have been dealt with,” the problems worth designers’ time were the wickedest ones. The hardest problems of heterogeneous social life called for designers’ exclusive focus and concentration.

Design was a multiplicity of critical voices batting a problem around unknown terrain until it formed itself, or not, into some kind of resolution.

IDEO is just another multinational corporation. But it’s a multinational corporation whose niche branding and marketing, funded by the success of “design thinking,” have been so phenomenally successful as to seem like straight sorcery.

In 1987, Peter Rowe published an ethnographic study of designers called Design Thinking (this may be the first printed instance of the phrase). But Rowe’s study of observed evidence concluded, just as Rittel and Papanek had argued, that in fact there was no one “design thinking.” “Rather,” Rowe wrote, “there are many different styles of decision making, each with individual quirks as well as manifestations of common characteristics.” It had become a commonplace that there was no one way to make design. The more interesting question was how to observe and negotiate the proliferation of differences.

“It is not easy to live with epistemic freedom,” he wrote, and so designers often sought out sachzwang — practical constraint, inherent necessity, “a device to ‘derive ought from fact.’” But they shouldn’t. Without methodological constraint, design had room for heterogeneity. It had the capacity to surprise. “Nothing has to be or to remain as it is,” Rittel wrote, “or as it appears to be.”

even as “design thinking” rendered “design” yet more capacious ,  it also jettisoned the self-conscious suspicion of “methodology” at which designers, following Horst Rittel, had arrived in the ’60s. Design thinking was unambiguously a recipe, a formula, a five-step program

It was design for a service economy: memorable, saleable, repeatable, apparently universal, and slightly vague in the details. Horst Rittel had convincingly described the folly of trying to define or rationalize design’s “how”; IDEO’s template for design thinking brought back the “how” with a vengeance.

So it was that in the United States in the early 2000s, design again became not just a method but a universal method — and a method that seemed a little bit magical. It applied to everything, and anyone could do it. “Contrary to popular opinion,” read a sidebar in Brown’s 2008 Harvard Business Review essay, “you don’t need weird shoes or a black turtleneck to be a design thinker.” You didn’t need, in fact, to be a designer. All you needed was a set of designerly qualities — empathy, “integrative thinking,” optimism, experimentalism, a collaborative nature — and that brightly colored five-step map.

Lyons and IDEO’s design-driven project aimed to solve the alleged problem of insufficient “competitiveness.” That problem, as stated — and the changes Gainesville instituted to address it, including beautiful graphic design, better web resources, and that friendly new office called the Department of Doing — had at best a tenuous relationship to the experiences of many of Gainesville’s poor and Black residents. Although the plans were intended to boost Gainesville’s economy on the whole, they did not create affordable housing, eradicate food deserts, or raise high school graduation rates. They didn’t address those for whom “competitiveness” seemed a distant problem. They seemed to leave much of Gainesville behind.

“Design thinking” can’t solve the wicked problems that organize Gainesville’s inequality: poverty, income disparity, structural racism, environmental injustice, unregulated market capitalism. You face wicked problems by struggling with them, not by solutioning them. You argue, you iterate, you fail, you grieve, you fight.

This is what worries me about design thinking: its colossal and seductive promise. There was an earlier Anglo-American vogue for design — a love affair with industrial design, beginning in the Depression era — but it was relatively benign in its claims and its outcomes. This more recent vogue for design thinking seems more insidious because it promises so much more. It promises a creative and delightful escape from difficulty, a caper through the Post-it Notes to innovative solutions. And it promises this as a service, delivered at what is often great cost — not just to IBM and Intuit and Starbucks, but to villages and nonprofit organizations and cities like Gainesville without enormous resources to spare.

By embracing “design thinking,” we attribute to design a kind of superior epistemology: a way of knowing, of “solving,” that is better than the old and local and blue-collar and municipal and unionized and customary ways.

Americans love design most when we’re afraid.

design isn’t magic. To address a wicked problem is to look for its roots — and there’s no hexagon map for getting there

There is no consensus as to how resources should be distributed, social life arranged, justice done. To design, really design, is to acknowledge those divergences — and then to listen one’s way, and push one’s way, to somewhere new. Such battles from competing positions can be truly wicked, Rittel believed, but it’s better to fight than to obscure irresolution with optimism. He had a point. Design may come in an elegant package, but it doesn’t always make things right.

On January 24, the government opened a control room to deal with the situation, made plans to isolate people, including home quarantine, and looked at the existing provisions of equipment including N95 masks, and PPEs (Personal Protective Equipment). On January 30, India registered its first Coronavirus infection in Kerala; it was a student who’d returned home from China.As of May 4, 462 people have recovered from the infection in Kerala, and there have been just three deaths. Even the oldest patients have recovered—a couple, aged 88 and 93. “When their tests came back positive, they were moved to a medical college because they were very vulnerable,” she shares. “In fact, we had special nurses and the best ICU set aside for them. And so, we brought them back to life,”

Kerala has long been focused on public health, education and social upliftment. Over the last few years, and since Shailaja Teacher got the health portfolio, there’s been renewed attention to the state’s public healthcare institutions. “We had a three-point agenda: government hospitals should be patient-friendly, high-tech, and out-of-pocket expenditure must reduce. Primary healthcare units are very important, especially in rural areas, they now have testing labs and are able to catch early signs of different diseases. Medical college hospitals have new equipment, and good infrastructure. Our focus definitely strengthened the system,”

a daily video conference with different frontline staff of the healthcare community across 14 districts. “Each day’s video conference is dedicated to groups of people doing different kinds of work, from district medical officers, nurses, ASHA workers. It gives us the opportunity to talk to people and hear them out. Keeping in touch with those working at the grassroots level is extremely important, we try to maintain that at all costs. When the minister, or a health secretary directly wants to understand their ground reality, it makes a huge difference, especially to keep morale up.”

Morale is especially important because there’s little knowing how things will pan out. Shailaja Teacher is cautious: “It will take time to get back to normal life. It is a truth that people must accept now. This virus is not like others. Many people test positive then test negative within a few days, but others take upward of 30 days to test negative. It sometimes takes five or six tests before it comes back negative. So that means this virus remains in the body for a while, and there’s a possibility of a transfer. In Kerala, we have it under control but if we get over-confident then we may have a second wave.”

When I spoke to Shailaja Teacher, she had another 9 or 10 hours of meetings, files, discussions, and even a press conference ahead of her. Her husband, two grown-up sons and their families, check in on her just before midnight via phone calls. 

Early farming embodied what Graeber and Wengrow call “the ecology of freedom”: the freedom to move in and out of farming, to avoid getting trapped by its demands or endangered by the ecological fragility that it entails.

The authors write their chapters on cities against the idea that large populations need layers of bureaucracy to govern them—that scale leads inevitably to political inequality. Many early cities, places with thousands of people, show no sign of centralized administration: no palaces, no communal storage facilities, no evident distinctions of rank or wealth. This is the case with what may be the earliest cities of all, Ukrainian sites like Taljanky, which were discovered only in the 1970s and which date from as early as roughly 4100 B.C., hundreds of years before Uruk, the oldest known city in Mesopotamia. Even in that “land of kings,” urbanism antedated monarchy by centuries. And even after kings arose, “popular councils and citizen assemblies,” Graeber and Wengrow write, “were stable features of government,” with real power and autonomy. Despite what we like to believe, democratic institutions did not begin just once, millennia later, in Athens.

the authors’ most compelling instance of urban egalitarianism is undoubtedly Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that rivaled imperial Rome, its contemporary, for size and magnificence. After sliding toward authoritarianism, its people abruptly changed course, abandoning monument-building and human sacrifice for the construction of high-quality public housing. “Many citizens,” the authors write, “enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own.”

What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package that’s persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics). Some states have displayed just two, some only one—which means the union of all three, as in the modern state, is not inevitable (and may indeed, with the rise of planetary bureaucracies like the World Trade Organization, be already decomposing). More to the point, the state itself may not be inevitable. For most of the past 5,000 years, the authors write, kingdoms and empires were “exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants … systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority.”

does civilization rather mean “mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality [and] simply caring for others”?

The Dawn of Everything is framed by an account of what the authors call the “indigenous critique.” In a remarkable chapter, they describe the encounter between early French arrivals in North America, primarily Jesuit missionaries, and a series of Native intellectuals—individuals who had inherited a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as “generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.”The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom.

making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We’re richer, went the logic, so we’re better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.

“How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”? It’s a pretty good question. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” It isn’t clear to me how many possibilities are left us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.

As the recent efforts of the Republican Party in the United States demonstrate, the right of centre parties introduces these kinds of restrictions because they look democratic while serving to disenfranchise the working class, Black, Asian and other minority voters who don’t tend to vote for them.

In a move that UK representatives would criticize if it happened in Africa or Asia, politicians have been given greater control over how the Commission works. In particular, the Bill hands the government the authority to issue a “Strategy and Policy Statement” setting out its electoral priorities, which the Commission is expected to follow.

Even more shocking for those of us who have studied electoral manipulation is the removal of the Commission’s ability to bring criminal prosecutions when parties fail to respect campaign finance regulations. This is particularly striking because the weakness of the Electoral Commission in this area – and in particular the meagre fines that it can hand out to rule-breakers – has already facilitated delinquent behaviour.

a British government has deliberately weakened the power of the Electoral Commission in precisely the area where it was caught flouting the law

Declining democratic standards in one country further lower the bar that leaders around the world think they need to meet. Corrupt politics makes it easier for authoritarian regimes to buy influence abroad and facilitates transnational criminal networks. And double standards between what the government does back home and what British representatives call for abroad will lead to accusations of hypocrisy, making it easier for the likes of Vladimir Putin to mobilise support in the parts of the world already suspicious of the motives of “Western” governments.

Weakening democracy in one country hurts the fight for freedom everywhere.