edwebbempireseminar

Journalists have rarely done justice to indigenous communities because the language of journalism has rarely done justice to indigenous peoples.

The language that media uses today does not heed silence and self-interpretation. It does not respect the power of conjured stories. It does not favour the collective over the individual. And this does not fit with indigenous perspectives.

Indigenous people know that their representation has failed before they've even begun speaking, because the medium through which they are represented - a hard, sharp language rooted in ideas rather than feeling - has rarely granted them territory.

A U.S. federal appeals court on Tuesday reinstated a lawsuit by a group of former child slaves accusing the U.S. unit of Nestle SA (NESN.S), the world’s largest food maker, and Cargill Co [CARG.UL] of perpetuating child slavery at Ivory Coast cocoa farms

“In sum, the allegations paint a picture of overseas slave labor that defendants perpetuated from headquarters in the United States,” the court wrote.

The plaintiffs, originally from Mali, are contending that the companies aided and abetted human rights violations through their active involvement in purchasing cocoa from Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire)

As Britain looks to make new trade deals, politicians are promoting a Brexit where multinationals rule over elected governments as well as over the people they are meant to represent. International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, Theresa May and co. have been clear in their ambitions for the global south. “The thriving economies of south and east Asia and, increasingly, Africa, are, and will become, ever more important,” said Fox in July as he gave the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington. He spoke of the “golden economic opportunities” presented by “the rise of the collective wealth of developing countries.”

The drive to boost trade links with African countries has been branded “empire 2.0”, reportedly by Whitehall officials themselves. This latest scramble to capitalise on the Commonwealth and other countries in the South is just an extension of what Britain has been doing for generations.

Last month an international tribunal in The Hague ruled in favour of the oil giant Chevron after it sued the Ecuadorian government. Chevron’s subsidiary Texaco have been accused of dumping billions of gallons of toxic wastewater in the Ecuadorean Amazon, polluting rivers and lakes, over the course of nearly 30 years. Campaigners told Latin American broadcaster Telesur that high rates of cancer and other disease were affecting indigenous people in the area, which they attributed to oil pollution of their watercourses. Chevron had previously been ordered to clean up extensive environmental damage, by a court in Ecuador, as well as pay £7.4billion ($9.5billion) compensation to local people. This latest ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration found that Ecuador had violated its obligations under a bilateral investment treaty signed with the US and said that the previous judgment against Chevron had been gained through fraud and corruption. Ecuador must now pay compensation to Chevron.

2. David Treuer [@DavidTreuer], writer and historian, on the simplistic, flawed narratives tied up in popular Native American history. Listen. 3. Frank Usbeck, historian and researcher-curator at the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony, and Evan Torner, German Studies professor at the University of Cincinnati, on the fantasies about indigenous people involved in German politics and culture. Listen.

the reality is we can't afford to look away because these outfits are costumes of white supremacy

yet another dog whistle for the white-supremacist fringe who'd prefer not to see people of color in "their" country, and if they do would rather they be the help

I won't — no, I can't — ignore this Columbus Day weekend choice to promote her "Be Best" campaign wearing khaki-hued ensembles inextricably linked to some of the world's most violent colonizers

Mr. Macron admitted what no French president before him had dared to acknowledge: that torture by French forces was widespread during the Algerian war as a product, in Mr. Macron’s words, of a “legally established system.” French historians described this admission, which goes far beyond the emblematic Audin case, as a turning point for French history. President Macron also promised that archives that might shed light on the disappeared would be opened.

Mr. Macron is the first French president born after the Algerian war. In every African country he visits he makes this point: As a 40-year-old, he does not feel burdened by this part of French history, and he encourages young Africans to look ahead, not back.

Algeria has a special and painful place in French national memory, and vice versa. The Algerian war in the French psyche is often likened to the Vietnam War for Americans — two conscription wars that ended in humiliating defeat. But the Algerian wounds, kept under a lid, are deeper.

Empires ancient and modern are large, hierarchical organizations, structurally founded on deep inequalities of risk and reward. The British Empire in Asia was no exception

Transoceanic empires built by corporations like the British and Dutch East India Companies faced even greater problems because they lacked the sacred aura that surrounded kings and helped maintain nominal loyalties. It took nearly half a year for an inquiry or command to reach a functionary in Asia and it took many more months before a report or an excuse would come back. The military, commercial, or political situation could change dramatically in the interim. Many readers will be aware, for example, that the British and Americans continued to fight for six weeks in 1815 after the peace treaty was signed between the two powers

Corporations growing into empires, such as the Dutch East India Company and English East India Company were keenly aware of what modern organization theorists, such as Oliver Williamson, have termed the “agency problem.” This is simply the difficulty of monitoring subordinates and ensuring that they act mainly in the interest of those (“the principals”) whose “agents” they had been hired to be

“Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it,” Wilde wrote, “so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.”

“For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is — above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners,”

to question the system that allows people to make money in predatory ways and compensate for that through philanthropy. “Instead of asking them to make their firms less monopolistic, greedy or harmful to children, it urged them to create side hustles to ‘change the world,’ ”

For Sykes, the Allies’ victory in World War One and Zionist ambitions were interlinked. His intent was to secure a strategic base for Britain in the Middle East in the aftermath of the war, thus revealing yet another debate as to whether Sykes was pro-Zionist or cynically using Zionism to secure British and his own interests. The author leans towards the latter. However, it is clear that whatever philosophy Sykes harboured, the Palestinians were merely a pawn in the game and forced into subjugation for a simple reason. If the British had consulted Palestinians over the colonisation of their land, a revolt would have been a natural result. Berdine describes such a reaction as “an inconvenient fact” for Sykes, had his plans been revealed to the indigenous population

Edwin Montagu, British Secretary of State for India and an opponent of the Balfour Declaration. Montagu — the only Jew in the Cabinet when the infamous declaration was written — warned against the British government’s willingness to accommodate more than “liberty of settlement and life on an equality with the inhabitants of that country who profess other religious beliefs.”

New Mexico spaceport is only the latest entry in a triumphant time line of military and aerospace innovation in this southwestern state. Our video narrator speeds through Spanish colonialism and westward expansion to highlight the Manhattan Project’s work in Los Alamos, to the north, and Operation Paperclip, a secret program that recruited German scientists to the United States after World War II. Among them was Wernher von Braun, who brought his V-2 rockets to the state.White Sands Missile Range, a 3,200-square-mile military-testing site in South Central New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin, hosted much of this work. It’s home to the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, and von Braun’s rocket testing site, too. Spaceport America is positioned adjacent to the Army property, in a tightly protected airspace. That makes rocket-ship testing a lot easier.

“It feels exciting, it’s like the future is now,”

For now, the spaceport is a futurist tourist attraction, not an operational harbor to the cosmos. The tour buses depart from a former T or C community center twice a day every Saturday. They pass thrift stores, RV parks, and bland but durable-looking structures, defiant underdogs against the mountains. We pass the Elephant Butte Dam, a stunning example of early-20th-century Bureau of Reclamation engineering that made it possible for agriculture to thrive in southern New Mexico; even so, a fellow spaceport tourist notes that the water levels seem far lower than what he recalls from childhood

In 2017, as the media ran out of synonyms for “implosion” in describing Rex Tillerson’s tenure as secretary of state, a quieter trend unfolded in parallel: the exclusion of minorities from top leadership positions in the State Department and embassies abroad.

In the first five months of the Trump administration, the department’s three most senior African-American career officials and the top-ranking Latino career officer were removed or resigned abruptly from their positions, with white successors named in their places

64 percent of Trump‘s ambassadorial nominees so far have been white non-Hispanic males, a 7 percentage point increase from the eight years of the Obama administration. President Trump stands out from his six predecessors in his failure so far to nominate a single African-American female ambassador; African-American women made up 6 percent of all ambassadors under President Barack Obama and 5 percent under President George W. Bush, who had two African-American secretaries of state. Meanwhile, from September 2016 to June 2018, the share of African-Americans in the Senior Foreign Service—the top ranks from which most career ambassadorial nominees are drawn—dropped from 4.6 percent to 3.2 percent

Judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Monday began hearing arguments for an advisory opinion the UN General Assembly requested on the legality of British sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. The largest island, Diego Garcia, has housed a major US airbase for decades.

the process of decolonisation of Mauritius remains incomplete

The case is seen by some as a test of whether colonial-era deals struck by great powers and weaker states are legitimate, given the power imbalance. Britain in 1965 detached the Chagos Islands from Mauritius, a British colony that became independent three years later. It leased Diego Garcia to the US in 1966, clearing the way for the construction of the airbase that required the forced removal of around 1,500 people. The islanders have never been allowed to return home.

when pressed, the head of the officers’ delegation became red-faced with anger. Apparently, laying the groundwork for more open and just politics did not include human rights organizations, good-governance groups, environmentalists, private associations that provide aid to people in need, or other NGOs.

in Egypt, employees of NGOs have become virtual enemies of the state. In keeping with its reputation as the lone Arab Spring “success story,” Tunisia has created a more welcoming environment for these groups, but even there, the ability of NGOs to carry out their work can be constrained given that a state of emergency and other laws place restrictions on the right to assemble

the relentless pressure Middle Eastern governments have long applied to NGOs. Leaders in the region do not do well with ideas like “self-organizing,” “relatively autonomous from the state,” and the creation of associations and “solidarities” — and it is hard, without justifying repression, not to see why. Civil society groups have the potential to help people with common interests overcome the considerable obstacles to collective action that many Middle Eastern governments have put in place and, in the process, give greater voice to people’s grievances.

America learned from its founding to dehumanize and dominate people. But there is a great problem here, which America has never understood, much less reckoned with. Only the dehumanized can dehumanize. Dominance always requires our own subjugation. To be able to treat another person as if they are not a human being, but a mere possession, also costs us our very own empathy, gentleness, mercy, wisdom, courage, defiance, grace, and truth. And in the end, my friends, that ruins a nation

In other rich nations, norms of decency developed — after strife, it’s true, yet develop they did. What do I mean by norms of decency? Simply the idea, if you like, that every person is one. All people deserve dignity, equality, and freedom. Nobody stands alone — especially when they are in need of support, nurturance, and guidance.But Americans developed a perverse, backwards set of norms: I am only good when I punish you, when I’m above you, when I dominate you, when I dehumanize you

norms of dehumanization and dominance had catastrophic political effects. “Why should I invest in schools for those dirty animals?” asked American whites. And so the result of norms of dehumanization and domination were that America never built proper public goods, like healthcare, education, finance, media, transportation, and so on — and yet those are exactly the things that whites needed too, if they were ever to live lives that were genuinely free, healthy, sane, and happy. But now nobody had such things, because such norms make it impossible for people to invest in one another.