Group items tagged

In any human community larger than about 120 to 150 – Dunbar’s number – it becomes increasingly difficult to govern on the basis of sheer personality alone. And so instead of face-to-face encounters of dominance and appeasement you have rules and commands: things that bind you – oral or in writing – because of the legitimate nature of the rule or command. In modern societies these rules and commands are divided between the normative and the positive, and the usual word for the latter is ‘law’.

in a modern society a government is creature of law, and so without law it is ultimately nothing

If the government complies with the law then it is more credible for the government to insist on the governed to comply with the law as well.

the predicament facing cocaine smugglers, as the global pandemic has increased scrutiny on them and disrupted their smuggling and distribution networks. But it also highlights their flexible approach to their trade, which has kept business booming even as many of the world’s legal sectors have ground to a halt.

OCCRP reporters have found that the world’s cocaine industry — which produces close to 2,000 metric tons a year and makes tens of billions of dollars — has adapted better than many other legitimate businesses. The industry has benefited from huge stores of drugs warehoused before the pandemic and its wide variety of smuggling methods. Street prices around Europe have risen by up to 30 percent, but it is not clear how much of this is due to distribution problems, and how much to drug gangs taking advantage of homebound customers.

cocaine continues to flow from South America to Europe and North America. Closed trafficking routes have been replaced with new ones, and street deals have been substituted with door-to-door deliveries.

The Indian government is building mass detention camps after almost two million people were told they could be effectively stripped of citizenship. Around 1.9m people in the north-eastern state of Assam were excluded when India published the state’s final National Register of Citizens (NRC) list in August.

The Indian government claims that the migrants have arrived from neighbouring Muslim-majority Bangladesh. Critics say that the register has upended the lives of Muslims who have lived legally in the state for decades.

Record keeping in parts of rural India is poor and many, including those building the camps, have been caught out by the NRC’s stringent requirements. “We don’t have birth certificates,” Malati Hajong, one of the labourers working at a site near the village of Goalpara, told the Reuters news agency.

My family and I live in Lagos, Nigeria, a tightly packed city with a land mass of only 1,171 sq kilometre and a population anywhere between 15 and 22 million, depending on who you ask. If New York never sleeps because the lights are always on and there’s always somewhere to be, Lagos never sleeps because there’s no power, it’s much too hot indoors and you might as well have a good time while you’re out trying to catch a breeze. Going by the dictionary definition of the word "slum" - "a squalid and overcrowded urban street or district inhabited by very poor people" - my home city is the largest one in the world. And across my continent, more than 200 million people live in one.

Sourcing water is arduous and expensive, so people are unlikely to prioritise frequent hand-washing. Public transportation consists mostly of privately owned vehicles in which intense proximity is inevitable.

In Lagos, about six million people live on incomes earned largely on a daily basis

openDemocracy has counted at least 13 countries – in every world region, and with a combined population of more than 500 million people – that have fully or partially adjourned their parliaments since early March. Only a few of these have returned.Another 1.7 billion people live in at least 18 countries where parliamentary meetings have been postponed or reduced – or where debates have been restricted to the immediate coronavirus response, with discussions on all other topics delayed.

some parliaments appear to have been shut or limited indefinitely – and the scale of these moves globally is unprecedented

“Unaccountable governments are less effective at promoting public health”, added Kenneth Roth executive director of Human Rights Watch.“There are clearly legitimate reasons” for movement restrictions, Roth said, but parliaments should remain open and active. “It’s especially in these times of crisis that it is essential to ensure that governments are serving the people rather than themselves.”

Many political scientists like political behavior to fall into neat boxes, whether those be typologies cleanly defining terms or spreadsheets in which every row contains a discrete observation. They recognize that there’s always phenomena that won’t fit, cleanly, but those can be the basis of future research—or relegated to the “error term,” the leftover bin for the facts that theory doesn’t explain.

When the implicit definition of democracy is democracy with American characteristics, the exceptions don’t even register as exceptions—until some event so far out of the comfort zone of mostly white, upper middle-class academics forces us to confront them as if they were brand new.

A federal union with authoritarian states cannot but be at least partly authoritarian itself

Aristotle (384–322BC) was not only a philosopher but also a pioneering giant of political science. He observed and classified how city states of his time did their politics, identifying six regimes in all. The three “ideal” ones – where rulers would rule for the benefit of all citizens – were monarchy, aristocracy, and polity. Respectively, that meant rule by the one, the few, or the many. He called their real-life equivalents – where rulers ruled for their own benefit – tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.For Aristotle, whether states were oligarchic or democratic was deeply ingrained in their ways of working – the politics of structure itself. He believed that cities that chose their office holders, jurors and judges by lottery were democratic and that those using elections were oligarchic – that’s Greek for government of, by, and for the few.

He argued that lotteries extinguish the electoral campaigning advantages of wealthier, more expensively educated candidates over poorer adversaries. He reasoned that a handful of people, grown used to generations in office, are easier to corrupt than the many.

Citizens were ever ready for lottery selection as judges, jury or political office holders – active decision makers in the affairs of their city. That they were chosen by lot – not election – was the critical issue for Aristotle.

The global system is built around sovereign states, and it shows. This is an enormous problem for groups that define themselves, or are defined by others, as distinct from the country within whose borders they happen to reside, and it’s also terrible as a framework for navigating the global politics of a rapidly changing world.

Sovereignty is usually traced back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which was pivotal in shifting conceptions of government toward a secular state with entire authority inside inviolable territorial borders. Designed as a diplomatic solution to catastrophic religious wars among feudal, monarchical territories, its tenets have persisted into the modern world largely due to the entrenched power of those states, jealously guarding their unfettered rule over their slice of geography.

as the power of monarchy eroded and European countries needed something else to inspire loyalty among their citizens, the ideal of the nation-state—that the people within those arbitrary borders would feel some sort of collective identity—became popular. This led to more wars as European states expelled or converted anyone who didn’t fit their concept of nation: not French enough, not German enough, not Italian enough. They also spread this idea to their colonies, exporting successive waves of destructive conflicts.

If the unofficial reports of dead and wounded are anywhere near accurate, this might be the most deadly uprising since the 1979 revolution.

Iran’s turmoil is not driven by U.S. policies, nor is it merely some circumstantial spasm. The protests are the latest salvo in the Iranian struggle for accountable government that stretches back more than a century. And the fury and desperation of the Iranians on the streets this week strikes at the heart of the legitimacy of the revolutionary system.

After the monarchy was ousted, collective action — both spontaneous and opportunistic — was a primary mechanism for gaining advantage in the chaotic struggle for power.

In recent years, the impressive economic performances of Ethiopia and Rwanda have meant that international donors have become increasingly willing to fund authoritarian regimes in Africa on the basis that they deliver on development. Beyond the obvious concern that donors become complicit in human rights violations, the main question facing authoritarian development in Africa has always been whether the economic gains achieved under repressive rule are sustainable.

if Ethiopia is no longer seen as a success story, then the case for authoritarian development in Africa falls apart. Already, the EU has suspended nearly €90 million ($110 million) in budgetary aid to the country because of concerns over the government’s handling of the conflict in Tigray. Growing evidence that authoritarian politics can have devastating developmental consequences will also give a shot in the arm to organizations like the Westminster Foundation for Democracy that argue that the international community should be doing development democratically.

it has become more common for international donors and aid practitioners to question the value of democracy for development—and to suggest that authoritarian governments that can force through necessary reforms might be more effective in some cases.

local reporters suggest that use of force by law enforcement is primarily responsible for things turning violent — and that federal troops have been particularly, dangerously heavy-handed. “I have been in the streets of Portland documenting this movement since the very first riot,” reporter Robert Evans writes in Bellingcat. What’s happening now is “the end result of more than six weeks of escalating state violence against largely nonviolent demonstrators.”

This kind of violent federal deployment over the objections of state and local officials has no real precedent in American history. The closest parallels are Reconstruction, when Union troops occupied the states of the defeated former Confederacy, and military deployments to the South during the civil rights era to enforce desegregation orders.

it was uniformed soldiers that were sent, not unidentified state security forces from an alphabet soup of obscure DHS agencies. More fundamentally, these troops were being used to protect moves toward racial progress — not suppress protesters who were there to demand it.

international activists, groups and institutions are increasingly focusing on the United States as a villain, not a hero, on the subject of human rights. While the U.S. has never fully escaped such scrutiny — consider the post-9/11 fury over torture, Guantanamo Bay and drone strikes — former officials and activists say that, under President Donald Trump, American domestic strife is raising an unusual level of alarm alongside U.S. actions on the global stage. Some groups also flag what they say is an erosion of democracy in a country that has long styled itself as a beacon of freedom.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has created a commission tasked with rethinking the U.S. approach to human rights. Pompeo argues there’s been a questionable proliferation of what counts as human rights. Critics fear the commission, whose report is due this summer, will undercut the rights of women, LGBTQ people and others

“The Trump factor is huge, if not the determinative factor” in the battered U.S. reputation, said David Kramer, a former assistant secretary of State for human rights in the George W. Bush administration. “People advocating and fighting for democracy, human rights and freedom around the world are disillusioned by the U.S. government and don’t view the current administration as a true partner.”