Group items tagged

Doing Business is a sort of economic cholesterol check — important, even critical, but not the whole story.

some critics perceive Doing Business as a libertarian argument against the collection of taxes. On the contrary, Doing Business facilitates the participation of companies in the formal economy, including the payment of taxes and respect for the legal framework

The consensus, quite reasonably, calls for more women’s economic empowerment in the developing world. If we want to see empowerment, that generally means women participating in the formal economy, accessing loans from banks, and participating in global supply chains. Any business that seeks bank loans or seeks to participate in supply chains needs to be a formal business. Making it easier for anyone to start a business also has a positive impact on women’s economic empowerment

The Doing Business indicators have been subject to a number of methodological adjustments. These have been relatively minor in impact on most countries’ rankings. In the case of Chile, for a variety of reasons, the rankings swung more wildly, in such a way that the center-left Michelle Bachelet administration accused the World Bank and the rankings of being politically motivated. To make matters worse, Paul Romer, then the chief economist of the World Bank, in response to a question from the Wall Street Journal about the possibility of the the ranking being “tainted by the political motivations of bank staff” seemed to imply that he found the rankings unfair and misleading, and he said he would “recalculate national rankings of business competitiveness.” This caused a furor. Romer retracted his statement within 72 hours, the World Bank board reviewed the indicators, and management formally responded.

In the future, the World Bank’s money will be less and less important. Instead, its analytics, data, and ability to share lessons across countries are going to be increasingly valued. The World Bank imprimatur also matters more than we appreciate in the United States. The Doing Business indicators should be a big part of the World Bank’s future. Countries that seek to make improvements in their rankings of Doing Business are countries that seek to have better governance and have reform-minded governments. After 15 years of effort, Doing Business has improved with time and is one of the most valuable assets of the World Bank Group.

“We don’t get instructions from the U.S. government.” He recalled Trump’s announcement, in December, 2017, that the U.S. would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. As the United Nations considered a resolution condemning the move, Nikki Haley, Trump’s envoy to the U.N., circulated a threatening letter, saying that Trump “has requested I report back on those who voted against us.” Feeley heard nothing in advance about the letter. “Do you think we got a heads-up, to prepare?” he said. “Nothing.” Soon afterward, he received outraged telephone calls from Panama’s President and Vice-President, Isabel de Saint Malo. Feeley recalled that when Saint Malo called “she said, ‘John, friends don’t treat friends like this.’ All I could say was ‘I know. I’m sorry.’ We both knew it was going to hurt our personal and institutional relationship. And there was nothing we could do about it.”

Since Trump’s election, “we’ve taken a step back in tone,” Feeley said. “We tried to get Kerry to bury the Monroe Doctrine. But now, all of a sudden, it’s back.”

Early this year, during an appearance in Texas, Tillerson called the Monroe Doctrine “clearly . . . a success.” The rhetoric has had a chilling effect, Feeley said, “Latins believe that Trump and his senior officials have no real interest in the region, beyond baiting Mexico and tightening the screws on Cuba and Venezuela.”

a building in the style of a pagoda: a monument to China’s presence in Panama. “Look how prominent they’ve become,” one of the staffers said. In June, 2016, a major expansion of the canal was completed, and the first ship through was an enormous Chinese freighter, designed to fit the new dimensions. “I got a big American naval ship to park right outside the locks, where the Chinese ship would see it,” Feeley said. “And I threw our annual Embassy July 4th party on it.” He laughed at the memory, but he knew that the gesture was ultimately futile.

As the United States has retreated from Latin America, China’s influence has grown. Since 2005, banks linked to Beijing have provided more than a hundred and fifty billion dollars in loan commitments to the region—some years, more than the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank combined. In less than two decades, trade between China and Latin America has increased twenty-seven-fold.

The Taiwanese government furiously denounced Panama for succumbing to “checkbook diplomacy,” but Panamanian officials denied that the decision was motivated by economics. Then, last November, Varela travelled to Beijing and joined President Xi Jinping in a ceremony to celebrate their new friendship, at which he signed nineteen separate trade deals. At around the same time, the China Harbour Engineering Company began work in Panama on a hundred-and-sixty-five-million-dollar port.

Panama could well become China’s Latin-American hub; the One Belt, One Road initiative, working with Varela’s government, is planning to build a railway from Panama City to near the Costa Rican border. But, Feeley added, “the Panamanians are naïve about the Chinese.” He told me that he had worked to persuade Panama’s security ministry not to sign a communications-technology deal with the Chinese, partly out of concern that they would use the infrastructure for espionage, as they have elsewhere. The Chinese company Huawei, which has headquarters in Panama, lobbied hard “to delay, divert, and get the contract.” In the end, the work was contracted to an American firm, General Dynamics, but the negotiations were difficult.

Varela’s government has quietly leased the Chinese a huge building plot, on the strip of land that juts into the ocean at the mouth of the canal, to use as the site of a new Embassy. Sailors on every ship in the canal will see the proof of China’s rising power, as they enter a waterway that once symbolized the global influence of the United States.

As morale sank in the State Department, veteran diplomats had been leaving, in what some called “the exodus.” David Rank, the senior American diplomat in China, stepped down last June, after Trump withdrew from the Paris accord. “You have decisions that the rest of the world fundamentally disagrees with,” Rank said recently. He recalled that, on September 11, 2001, “I got a call from the Embassy of an allied country seconds after the attack. The person said, ‘Whatever you need, you can count on us.’ Now that we pulled out of Paris and Iran, swept tariffs across the world, I wonder if we’re going to get that call again.”

Feeley pointed out that leftist leaders were in retreat throughout Latin America, and that popular movements were rejecting old habits of corrupt governance. It was, he said, “the greatest opportunity to recoup the moral high ground that we have had in decades.” Instead, we were abandoning the region. “I keep waiting for a Latin leader to paraphrase Angela Merkel and say, ‘We can no longer count on the Americans to provide leadership.’ ”

Some people liken it to an own goal. I’d say it’s more like a self-inflicted Pearl Harbor

“There’s this idea that the States is just like the rest of us. That’s the saddest thing to me.”

Foreign Service officers were willing to work with the Trump Administration. “I don’t know of a single Trump supporter who is an F.S.O.,” he said. “But I also don’t know of a single F.S.O. who hopes for failure, myself included. Far from the Alex Jones caricature of a bunch of pearl-clutching, cookie-pushing effetes, we have an entire corps of people who will do everything they can to successfully implement American foreign policy, as it is determined by the national leaders—to include Mike Pompeo.” But, Feeley suggested, Pompeo would need to moderate his boss’s instincts. “I just do not believe that, with Trump’s rhetoric and a lot of his policy actions, we are going to recoup our leadership position in the world,” he said. “Because the evidence is already in, and we’re not. We’re not just walking off the field. We’re taking the ball and throwing a finger at the rest of the world.”

“Censorship cannot be regarded as a country’s internal matter. Information control in a given country can have consequences all over the planet and we are suffering the effects of this today. The same goes for disinformation and rumours. They make people take bad decisions, they limit free will and they sap intelligence.” 

RSF has taken measures to ensure that it remains as fully operational as possible while guaranteeing the safety of its personnel and partners. The data RSF collects comes from its network of bureaux and correspondents. Tracker-19 offers an interactive world map on the press freedom situation, constant coverage of developments and analyses of key issues. 

OUR is now a celebrated anti-trafficking charity, claiming to have worked in 26 countries, with the stated aim of bringing together "the world's experts in extraction operations and in anti-child trafficking efforts to bring an end to child slavery." It brought in more than $21 million in donations in 2019, the most recent year for which tax filings are available, and has enjoyed the support of high-powered backers

a common pattern for anti-trafficking NGOs working abroad, according to sex worker activists with Thailand’s Empower Foundation.

while OUR often claims to partner with local law enforcement on trafficking investigations and rescues, the extent of that “partnership” is often a modest donation OUR gives the agency, which in return credits it in press releases about any investigation, rescue, bust, or arrest that used the money.

OUR’s overseas operations, and the “jump team” it says conducts them, are the jewel in its crown: the subject of innumerable fundraising emails, interviews with Ballard, two documentaries, and Sound of Freedom, an upcoming feature film starring Jim Caviezel as Tim Ballard. (The casting of an actor most famous for playing Jesus Christ is perhaps not coincidental; while OUR is not an expressly religious organization, it heavily employs the language and imagery of faith, and Ballard, a devout Mormon, has said he was directly called by God to "Find the lost children.") OUR routinely claims that its overseas jump teams are made up of former members of the military, CIA, and law enforcement who undergo rigorous training.

nothing OUR did seemed recognizably informed by professional military or intelligence practice. There was, they said—contrary to the process for operations laid out on OUR's website—no meaningful surveillance or identification of targets; no development of assets; no validating that people they sought to rescue had in fact been trafficked, or that people they were targeting were indeed traffickers; and no meaningful follow-up with people who had been rescued on the missions in which they took part.  

“They’d go and just push for pimps to show up with girls.” If presented with sex workers of legal age, OUR would insist on younger girls—a method that several experts said could, when combined with a lack of intelligence-gathering and vetting, potentially lead to girls being trafficked who otherwise wouldn't have been.

Typically, after arranging for the women and girls to be brought to them, OUR's operators would call local police, who would make arrests. The operators would then leave the country.“They conflate sex work and trafficking,” said a former military member who has worked with OUR. “They’re making it worse.” 

Much research has been published demonstrating how these types of rescues are severely undermining the agency of trafficked persons and disempowering the individuals the involved organizations are claiming to help.

“There’s so many of these organizations here I don’t know one from the other,” Mai Janta, a sex worker leader of the organization, told VICE World News, laughing. 

it faces an ongoing investigation by Davis County, Utah attorney general Troy Rawlings, as Utah’s Fox 13 reported last October. While Rawlings hasn’t publicly described the contours of the investigation, people familiar with it have told both Fox 13 and VICE World News that his office is looking into whether OUR has made misleading statements in its fundraising appeals

Before the training began, candidates were given a psychological examination. On his way to his, William passed a candidate exiting an exam, who said, “If you mention God, you're a shoo-in.” 

“Before I went to this training,” he said, “I was counting down the days. I was expecting a world-class training, because these are supposed to be the best operatives.” Instead, he didn't feel like he was learning anything, and certainly not like he was being prepared to rescue children from dangerous traffickers. William wasn't taught, among other things, basic self-defense, signs to look for in a trafficker or trafficking survivor, surveillance technique, or secure communication. Topics that were covered included how to compartmentalize your discomfort if you find yourself in a gay bar, and the instructors' many war stories, including one that involved someone being stabbed dozens of times.

real estate brokers seem to have figured heavily in the world of OUR’s operators

Empower says that more than 50,000 sex workers have been a formal part of its operations over the years, and that members include sex workers from Thailand and migrant sex workers from Laos, Myanmar, China, and Cambodia. Its members are often extremely familiar with the various rescue operations that come to the country intent on “saving” trafficked women and girls; many organizations, working with local police, have conducted raids on massage parlors, legal brothels, and other places where they work. Most of these groups hail from the U.S., United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, said Janta, and often have a clear religious focus. 

“They say they’re helping but really want to change your religion and your job,”

Beyond individual organizations, the entire raid-and-rescue model has fallen out of favor with responsible anti-trafficking organizations

“From our point of view, they come into our workplaces and make a relationship with the employer as well as the police. If there are no underage workers they continually ask and ask for the employer to find them some underage workers,” Janta added. “So they create a situation where there are underage workers, where there weren’t before.” 

“Just because they’re Americans or American missionaries, does not mean they’re actually representing the U.S. and U.S. interests,”

OUR's future seems, by all appearances, to be bright. Sound of Freedom, the film about the founding of OUR starring Jim Cavizel and Mira Sorvino as Tim Ballard and his wife Katherine, has been screened in theaters and awaits broad release. Celebrity backers like NFL players Corbin Kaufusi and Josh Allen enthusiastically promote OUR's work. And the public's continued fascination with QAnon and related conspiracy theories about pedophilia and child sex trafficking—from which OUR has publicly distanced itself—has led to huge interest in, and funding for, groups vowing to combat them. 

“We didn’t see them,” said Laovilawanyakul. “But we could’ve used their money for this time. They could have spent some of their money helping people get through COVID.”

“Instead of donating money to anti-trafficking orgs in the hope that it will help after something bad has happened, think about support for us all to be more secure and able to defend ourselves,” she said. “Scholarships, apprenticeships, family payments for mothers, support for teenagers who have left home.” Losing the ability to make a living has dislodged many women and girls from their villages and forced them into journeys as migrant sex workers.“If us and our families are secure,” Janta added, “we can defend ourselves and build our own lives without the need for rescue.”

public officials and leaders of government-aligned militias such as Mohammed and Farhad are forbidden by law to hold mineral rights.

Bush administration Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq invasion, and other U.S. defense officials also joined the SOSi board

Task Force officials remained bullish on strategic mining long after the project was closed down; some even saw it as a possible form of Taliban rehabilitation. “The only way to realistically economically reintegrate the Taliban back into Afghanistan’s economy is with mining,” Emily Scott King, the former director of the Task Force’s natural resource group, said in 2019 at a special operations policy forum in Washington, D.C. “It can work within the hierarchy that the Taliban is used to, with commanders running small processing facilities or becoming the brokers for small miners.”

SOSi’s transition to a military contracting powerhouse came through its connections to the office of retired Army General David Petraeus

“There’s no conceivable way extraction or export could be done without the collusion of insurgent groups,”

Beyond its powerful American connections, SOSi was well positioned for growth because it wasn’t afraid to get dirty. In his thesis, Hartwig recommended offering the Afghan government “some type of benefit” to win support from “key leaders” for future mineral projects. Through its subsidiary, that is exactly what SOSi did, apparently cutting the president’s brother in on the deal.

“The U.S. government cannot directly do business with Afghan companies, so it goes through SOSi, a private entity, to secure deals with all the major Afghan media networks to broadcast Resolute Support and NATO communication material,”

A Southern Development document on file in the Ras al-Khaimah Offshore Free Zone, the secretive United Arab Emirates jurisdiction where its full ownership records are held, confirms that on June 17, 2014 — three days after Ashraf Ghani was elected president — SOSi owned 80 percent of the company, with Hashmat Ghani owning the remainder

Hashmat Ghani’s son, Sultan Ghani, listed a short SOSi internship in 2013 on his resume. Sultan Ghani now runs The Ghani Group, the family’s privately owned conglomerate with interests that include mining and military contracting. He apparently keeps in touch with old friends at SOSi. A photo uploaded to LinkedIn during the summer of 2019 shows him meeting with SOSi Vice President Helmick, and the account features praise for his interpersonal skills posted by another SOSi executive

Buying chromite from unlicensed local mines remains illegal in Afghanistan, but Ashraf Ghani’s election opened a rich new vein of opportunity. While the American Task Force and his own son once urged legalization of artisanal mining, the president has instead redistributed bureaucratic power, enabling extralegal activities.

A document leaked to OCCRP reveals that on December 26, 2019, the High Economic Council, in a process overseen by the president, authorized Southern Development to take on a project far larger than the original task force project in Kunar. The company received a mineral processing permit and permission to purchase artisanal chromite in six Afghan provinces: Khost, Paktia, Paktika, Kunar, Ghazni and Maidan Wardak.

In the spring of 2018, more than a year before Afghanistan’s High Economic Council signed over the rights to the chromite, Southern Development’s Kabul office had imported new crushing equipment from South Africa for its Afghan operation. In fact, Global Venture and its consultants, according to Scott King, had since 2013 been “advising private sector investors” with mining interests in Afghanistan about how to “quietly” restart initiatives like the Kunar chromite project. At the same 2019 Special Operations forum, she highlighted a mysterious $10 million investment into what she claimed were “legal” Afghan chromite mines.

Until late 2019, the company falsely claimed to have won chromite exploration rights in Kabul province from Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines and Petroleum. The claim disappeared from the website after reporters asked about it.

Mining takes time to generate profits and it’s unclear if SOSi has started to see a return on its investments yet, but the price of chromite ore hovers around $200 per ton and with a worldwide market for stainless steel, Southern Development could become highly profitable. Meanwhile, its success is already spawning copycats.

Another American military contractor, DGCI, which is under federal investigation for its work in Iraq and Afghanistan, hired another former Task Force staffer in 2019, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to mine lithium in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province. Since then, DGCI has also tried to cultivate a relationship with the Ghani family, holding public charity events with Sultan Ghani.

2,427 people last year got the option to go with UNHCR either directly to European countries or to a transit country where their cases can be considered for resettlement to Europe or North America. In contrast, nearly 1,000 refugees and migrants were returned to Libya in the first two weeks of 2020 alone.

Both Niger and Romania have previously been used as transit countries, though the number of people going to Niger have slowed because of problems processing cases. This past September, Rwanda announced it will also begin to take evacuees, following negotiations and a deal signed with the African Union and UNHCR.

UNHCR is still appealing for funding, saying it hopes to evacuate 1,500 people to Rwanda by the end of 2020, with the program expected to cost nearly $27 million by then. So far, according to numbers provided by UNHCR, the EU has pledged 10 million euros, Norway just over 5 million euros, and Malta 50,000.

Though a relatively secure country with much-lauded economic development, Rwanda is also a dictatorship and police state with a tightly controlled media

in a small, bare room in a bar outside the camp that same month, a group of refugees gathered to tell me their stories. For more than a year, they had been sending me evidence of human rights abuses from a network of Libyan detention centers, using a series of phones they kept hidden throughout. Now they say they are grateful to be in Rwanda, but they also resent the time they spent locked up.

They witnessed deaths from medical negligence and suffered through deliberate food deprivation, torture, and forced recruitment.

“Most of our minds are completely spoilt. We’re afraid of motorbikes, of helicopters,”

Sonal Marwah, a humanitarian affairs manager with Doctors Without Borders, said survivors suffer from emotional and psychological problems, such as anxiety and depression.

They feel they can’t trust anyone anymore, convinced everyone around them has tried to profit from them: whether Libyan authorities, smugglers, the U.N., or the Rwandan government.

Some said that it was only when they signed documents on the night before they left Libya that UNHCR staff informed them they might have to stay in Rwanda for longer. There were consequences for backing out at that stage, too. UNHCR confirmed a “very small number” of refugees in Libya refused to go to Rwanda, meaning the agency will not consider them for resettlement or evacuation again.

In November, evacuees got another shock when UNHCR’s special envoy for the Mediterranean, Vincent Cochetel, tweeted that refugees in Rwanda have “wrong” expectations. “We have no obligation to resettle all refugees in/from Libya,” he wrote. “They can locally integrate in Rwanda if they want, [while] learning and mentally accepting that there is not just a ‘Europe option.’”

Others accused UNHCR of using their evacuations as a public relations coup to show the agency is doing something, while promoting the Rwandan government’s charity, instead of prioritizing evacuees’ welfare.

The evacuation program “risks exacerbating a situation where the vast majority of refugees continue to be hosted in developing countries, while richer ones spend their resources on keeping people out at any cost,”

UNHCR said it has received 1,150 resettlement pledges from other countries for refugees in Rwanda, with Norway alone pledging to take in 600 refugees (not all of them from Libya). Some Libya evacuees have already been accepted to go to Sweden. The number of available places is still “far outstripped by the needs,”

At what point does the EU become responsible for refugees it has forced from its borders through externalization policies? How much suffering can they go through before European officials recognize some obligation?

“Africa is Africa,” he has repeated throughout months of contact from both Libya and Rwanda, saying he’s worried about corruption, repression, exploitation, a lack of freedom, and a lack of opportunity in his birth continent. In Europe, Alex believes, refugees “can start a new life, it’s like we [will be] born again. All the suffering and all the torture, this only makes us stronger.”

the growing politicization of the State Department in the Trump era

Top Democrats on committees that oversee the State Department have accused the administration of stonewalling them on the justification for Linick’s firing. On Aug. 3, top Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, House Foreign Affairs Committee, and House Committee on Oversight and Reform issued subpoenas for four senior political appointees at the State Department over Linick’s abrupt firing in May. 

emphasize the overriding importance of some combination of sovereignty, territorial borders, and national identity and culture. They routinely claim that efforts, spearheaded by sinister external forces, to undermine all three constitute an existential threat to the political community

in order to implement their policies, populists need to shield themselves from pressure to, variously, protect human rights, maintain the rule of law, combat corruption, and respect domestic pluralism

populists in Europe rightly see the liberal values that undergird the EU as an obstacle to their political programs

Even as he depends on EU subsidies to maintain his patronage networks, Orban positions himself as defending Hungary against EU efforts to subvert its sovereignty and values.

populists have converged on the idea that a multipolar international system will best serve their interests and is therefore something to both welcome and advance

Leaders argue that, unlike Western donors, China and other new patrons do not demand intrusive conditions such as economic conditionality or respect for individual rights. However, these deals involve opaque schemes and private payoffs, as well as expectations of future support. Beijing, for example, expects recipients to back its foreign-policy priorities and support—or at least not overtly criticize—China on matters such as respect for human rights in general or its current policies toward Uighurs in Xinjiang in particular.

This “goods substitution” is significant on its own terms because the provision of international club and private goods is the main mechanism by which great powers order international politics. But countries such as China and Russia often do not, in fact, provide superior goods and bargains to those offered by the United States and its allies. China’s behavior surrounding the BRI and its preexisting aid programs has led recipients to accuse Beijing of neocolonialism, and growing evidence suggests that Chinese development projects are more problematic than Western ones.

A critical part of the domestic politics of goods substitution is that populists claim that their pragmatic courting of illiberal or authoritarian states affords them a wider range of partnerships and international networks. The fact that new partners like China and Russia are authoritarian becomes a net political positive: a signal that populist leaders are pragmatic and committed to protecting national interests—because they are flexible enough to find new partners who can deliver the goods.

Leaders, and populists especially, now increasingly see partnership with the United States—once viewed as an indispensable pillar of foreign policy—and its Western allies as overly constraining. For example, Duterte, Erdogan, and Orban all came to power in states that were fully integrated members of the U.S.-led security order. All three now point to potential security relations with Russia and China as providing the possibility of greater balance with, if not outright exit from, that order.

The difference now is that elites in multiple, and otherwise very different, countries are actually implementing policies that distance themselves from the U.S.-led security order. In all of these cases, populist leaders are invoking multipolarity as a rhetorical commonplace, taking advantage of the growing shift toward a multipolar order, or both. In doing so, they contribute to a power transition away from the United States by reducing its influence.

invoking multipolarity also makes it easier for populists to reject external, mostly Western, criticism of their domestic governance practices. When the West was dominant, even autocrats had to accept significant incursions on their domestic sovereignty—such as critical election monitors, foreign-sponsored NGOs, and members of the Western press. Now, emulating the practices of China and Russia, populists are much more comfortable with banning or repressing these same actors—and in justifying their actions as ways of protecting their national values and interests

The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, at first glance, strengthens and fuels these dynamics. The closing of borders and the curtailment of international economic exchange increase the appeal of national fortress narratives conjured by populists about the perils of globalism

It’s one thing to use exit options to reduce external liberalizing pressure, but it’s another when new patrons start calling in favors. Despite Beijing’s defense of sovereignty as an international principle, its practices toward clients suggest that, eventually, it will use its leverage in ways no less coercive than other great powers. Moscow has already demonstrated its lack of concern for the sovereignty of clients and partners

the COVID-19 crisis underscores that international goods provision abhors a vacuum

Former President George W. Bush explicitly stated that the United States was not at war with Islam, but nativist voices embraced the clash of civilizations narrative, and the ensuing war on “Islamic terrorism” enabled and perpetuated Islamophobia at home and abroad

while both terrorism and the coronavirus are themselves nonhuman entities, their invocation as foes has fueled dangerous xenophobia with very human consequences

one of the key lessons of the 9/11 period is the ease of viewing the military as the tool of first resort, despite its powerlessness in solving political or humanitarian problems

neither the coronavirus response nor the war on terrorism created xenophobia; rather, they exacerbated existing prejudices and inequities

another pair of post-9/11 measures that are once again on the table: an increase in what the government knows about the public and a decrease in what the public knows about the government.

Data-mining firms like Palantir already have contracts in place with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Some U.S. analysts argue that the coronavirus vindicates the highly surveilled Chinese internet. Others have urged the adoption of tracking methods similar to those used by the government of Singapore, pointing out that U.S. governors can use post-9/11 legislation to force citizens to comply.

the 9/11 era showed that government surveillance—especially when implemented hastily—has the tendency to expand inertially. The Patriot Act’s scope grew in the years after its adoption, resulting in the mass collection of millions of Americans’ metadata (which a government oversight board later deemed not only illegal but also of minimal effectiveness in fighting terrorism). That law has also been applied well beyond its initial counterterrorism intent, including in cases of mortgage and food-stamp fraud.

The post-9/11 era was rife with anti-democratic secrecy, and today, the executive branch is again claiming emergency powers to evade accountability. Trump used the coronavirus as a pretext for suspending immigration—not for health reasons but, he claimed, to prevent competition from immigrant labor. He also decapitated the watchdog panel tasked with overseeing $2.2 trillion in economic relief and named a partisan ally to fill a critical inspector general role. In a haunting echo of the post-9/11 era’s habeas corpus debates, last month the Justice Department requested authorization from Congress to be able to detain Americans indefinitely during a state of emergency such as a pandemic.

Free flows of news and information create political pressure to make smart and life-saving decisions. Policymakers avoid corruption if they know their constituents are watching. By clamping down on hallmarks of democratic accountability, post-9/11 policies curtailed valuable liberties while making the United States less safe

Providing jobs is a good way to curry favor with local populations in places where the United States wants to maintain a military presence. Other foreign policy tools may not reach the right people. The well-known risk with foreign aid, for example, is that recipient regimes will divert it for their own purposes instead of investing in public goods. Contracting directly with local firms might help bypass corrupt governments. Subscribe Receive daily email updates: Subscribe to the Defense One daily. Be the first to receive updates. But there is a big problem with this seemingly sound logic: to date, there is no evidence that it works as promised.

By some estimates, ten percent of defense-related logistics contracts ended up in the hands of insurgents

The law limits the government’s ability to dictate the hiring of firms it does business with. This caused problems in Djibouti, where the United States has its only base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier. In 2013, the American company in charge of base support fired local Djiboutian employees in search of cheaper labor, despite a diplomatic understanding between the United States and Djibouti that the base would provide jobs for Djiboutians. Between the fallout and threat of hosting a Russian base, the Djiboutian government managed to hike Washington’s annual base rent from $30 million to $63 million.

Congress could make preferential procurement authorities conditional upon independently conducted studies of this spending’s effectiveness

First, we need to be able to answer questions such as: who is getting the business and how many jobs are created? That will enable systematic study of questions such as: what are the downstream effects on local markets? Do local jobs actually buy local goodwill?

Despite testing far less than its neighbors, Somalia has the highest death toll in East Africa. On April 17 and 18, 72 people were tested, out of which 55 were confirmed positive, a staggering 76 percent infection rate. Since this revelation, the Somali government has stopped sharing the numbers of people tested with the public.

Anecdotal accounts of COVID-19 symptoms and a spike in burials abound. “There is extraordinary community transmission. Infections and deaths are out of control,” explained a Mogadishu doctor on the condition of anonymity. “And why visit a hospital if they can’t treat you?” Somalia’s health infrastructure is mere scaffolding: scarce public hospitals struggling with a lack of equipment, unaccredited doctors in private facilities offering unaffordable services, and medication that is as low-grade as it is scarce.

Somalia’s best-equipped medical institution, Erdogan Hospital in Mogadishu, was shut down in April after 3 of its doctors were infected. Martini Hospital—kitted with 76 beds—is the only medical facility in the whole country designated to treat the infected

Answers to this acute health crisis lie in part with the government’s 2020 budget, which allocated $9.4 million for health spending, a mere 2 percent of the national budget. A whopping $146.8 million was reserved for security institutions—a telling indication of a cash-strapped state facing widespread security threats.

The group heralded the disease as divine punishment for the treatment of Muslims globally. Weaponizing the disease, al-Shabab ushered in Ramadan with an attempted vehicle-borne explosive attack at a military base on the first full day of the holy month.

Like the virus, al-Shabab transcends national borders and presents risks not only to Somalia but to its pandemic-weakened neighbors, particularly Kenya, which has weathered violent attacks from the group for years. Born out of a power vacuum itself, al-Shabab will capitalize on lapses in states’ security apparatus as governments redirect resources from preempting terror attacks to enforcing curfews

risks reversing critical security gains

Kenya’s northeastern towns lying on its border with Somalia have been particularly vulnerable to devastating al-Shabab attacks. In response to the illegal smuggling of people and goods from both Somalia and Ethiopia, Kenyan security authorities have recently ramped up aerial surveillance along its borders, in part, to curtail cross-border infection. Ethiopia’s health minister announced last week that 13 of its new cases were imported via illegal migration from Djibouti and Somalia

More than 80 percent of global trade passes through the Gulf of Aden

the resurgence of piracy can be expected

For more than a year now, the central government has been embroiled in a rancorous fight with two of its federal states. This being an election year, the fledgling Somali state finds itself at a critical juncture. It remains to be seen whether federal elections will be postponed, following in the footsteps of neighboring Ethiopia.

The disappearance of remittances—a lifeline for millions on the continent and estimated at $1.4 to $2 billion annually in Somalia alone—makes the situation all the more desperate. These critical cash flows have dried up as a global recession sets in and incomes of workers in the diaspora shrink.

harrowing statistics from across Europe show that Somali communities have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. In Sweden, Somalis are dying from the virus at “an astonishing high rate” according to the BMJ despite accounting for only 0.69 percent of the population. The World Bank is calling on governments to designate remittance companies as an essential service, a crucial step to easing restrictions on these financial flows.

The populations most at risk in Somalia are those living in the densely populated camps scattered across the country. More than 2.5 million internally displaced people live in these cramped conditions, already weakened by malnutrition and compromised immune systems, and with limited access to clean water, soap, or bathrooms.

According to the World Food Programme, the number of food-insecure people in East Africa is projected to reach up to 43 million in the next few months—more than double what it is now—sparking fears of conflict over scarce resources.

The specter of drought and famine, alongside the unforgiving plague of locusts that has ravaged crops in recent months

deadly flash floods

will force more people to move, compounding the internal displacement crisis and heightening intercommunal tensions  even as it spreads the disease further

Border closures across the region have throttled migration flows, making it ever harder for people to escape conflict or starvation. This will simply force migration into the shadows, opening up avenues for human trafficking and exploitation. Irregular movement of refugees has already been observed across the Horn of Africa’s highly porous borders.

During  Friday prayers at Mogadishu’s Marwazi mosque on April 10, armed forces tried to forcibly disperse a congregation of worshippers without notice. A massive demonstration broke out, and shoulder-to-shoulder prayers continue across the country today

Riots swept the streets of Mogadishu again on April 24 in response to the fatal shooting of two innocent civilians by police as they tried to enforce a curfew. Ramadan, replete with nightly rounds of public taraweeh prayers, is likely to catalyze disease spread in the absence of clear communication with communities and Islamic leaders.

The virus demands self-sufficiency. Countries are forced to make do with their own systems, however broken.

government’s restrictions on press freedom and access to information about the novel coronavirus to the detriment of its own people

As has often been the case in the disaster-prone country, it will be up to grassroots community groups, the private sector, and members of the diaspora to mobilize en masse to contain the crisis.

Two officials at the Ministry of Health have already been arrested on corruption allegations related to COVID-19 response donations, denting public confidence.

With domestic flights suspended, it is all the more critical to invest in hospital and testing capacity across the country. This cannot be achieved without genuine collaboration between the federal government and its constituent member states.

Sukarno, like many Indonesians, including the PKI, believed the creation of a Malaysian federation was unwarranted regional interference by the British to maintain their colonial dominance.

Like its US and Australian allies, Britain feared a communist Indonesia. The PKI had three million members and was close to Mao’s China. In Washington the fall of the Indonesia “domino” into the communist camp was seen as a greater threat than the potential loss of Vietnam.

Suharto, appointed supreme army commander on 14 October, used the rebellion to undermine and eventually overthrow Sukarno, and as what historian John Roosa has called a “pretext for mass murder”: the elimination of the PKI in a series of massacres across Indonesia that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

British intelligence agencies and propaganda specialists were complicit, carrying out covert operations to undermine Sukarno’s regime and eliminate the PKI by blaming them for the Untung coup.

Reddaway had served in the army during the second world war before joining the Foreign Office and playing a key role in the establishment of IRD. After the failed Untung coup he arrived to take charge of the British operation. His brief was simple. In an interview in 1996 with two of the authors, he said he’d been given a budget of £100,000 by the Foreign Office and was told “to do anything I could do to get rid of Sukarno”. Only now do we know what “anything” fully meant.

“No, we do not cry out for violence,” the IRD propagandists wrote, “but we demand in the name of all patriotic people that this communist cancer be cut out of the body of the state.” The PKI “is now a wounded snake”, they wrote: “Now is the time to kill it before it has a chance to recover.”

Detailed historical research has established that the mass killings of PKI party members and alleged supporters appear to have been triggered by local army commanders or the arrival of army special forces, about three weeks after the botched coup had been put down by Suharto.During that period the media in Indonesia was full of black propaganda against the PKI and its alleged atrocities, as the army whipped up popular anger against communists and legitimised what Roosa has described as its “already-planned moves against the PKI and President Sukarno”.

The newsletters were approved by IRD in London before dispatch. Copies sent to senior Foreign Office officials were destroyed after reading at IRD’s request.

“Anyone who was leftist was picked up. They were very systematic. They targeted all the leftist groups and not just PKI. People kept themselves to themselves and only talked in whispers.”

As the massacres progressed in the autumn of 1965, IRD’s unit in Singapore reassured their readers as to the necessity of the slaughter.In Newsletter 21 they wrote: “Unless we maintain a vigorous campaign to eradicate communism … the red menace will envelop us again.”The stakes were life and death. “We are fighting for our lives and the very existence of Indonesia and we must never forget that. THE CATS ARE WAITING TO POUNCE!”In Newsletter 23 Winchester Road’s propagandists praised “the fighting services and the police” for “doing an excellent job”. Sukarno, then trying to restrain the generals, was wrong: “Communism must be abolished in all its forms. The work started by the army must be carried on and intensified.” The authors finished by equating the PKI to Hitler and Genghis Khan.

What Gilchrist wanted and what became the unit’s mission was the production of black propaganda, apparently produced by patriotic Indonesian émigrés abroad, to stir Indonesian anti-communists into action.The influential targets of a propaganda newsletter, according to a declassified report by Wynne, would eventually include “as many personages in the hierarchy of government, army and civil service as we can find”.To disguise the British origin of the newsletter it was sent into Indonesia via Asian cities including Hong Kong, Tokyo and Manila.

In the 1996 interviews Reddaway boasted of manipulating the British and other global media to take an anti- Sukarno and PKI line but insisted IRD only passed on true facts and did not use black propaganda.As ever with IRD, Reddaway told us a partial truth. According to a memo he had written: “The bludgeon was surprisingly effective because we were able … to supply publicists with information which they could not find from other sources because of Sukarno’s censorship.”

“GCHQ could break and read Indonesian codes without difficulty. The government was among many third world countries using equipment supplied by Swiss-based company Crypto AG. For over 50 years, Crypto AG supplied secretly sabotaged cypher machines, with built-in back doors to which the CIA and GCHQ had keys.”

The newsletters remained the core work of Ed Wynne and his colleagues in Winchester Road. A key theme was to encourage their influential readers to support the army’s campaign against the communists. They urged Indonesian patriots: “The PKI and all it stands for must be eliminated for all time.”We now know that to do that they included sensationalised lies. On 5 November the pro-military Jakarta Daily Mail claimed that on the day of the Untung coup 100 women from PKI’s Gerwani women’s organisation had tortured one of the generals using razor blades and knives to slash his genitals before he was shot.The story of the torture and mutilation of the generals by the Gerwani women became part of the founding myth of Suharto’s regime, used to justify the destruction of the PKI. It was also, according to Roosa, a pretext for murder. A lie propagated by the Indonesian army, regurgitated and repurposed to incite IRD’s influential readers.

The IRD was deliberately silent on the massacres. One document from December 1965 says they should “do nothing to embarrass the generals” and the newsletter carefully itemises accounts of isolated incidents of PKI brutality but makes no explicit mention of the army’s killings.

By early 1966 the mass murders in Indonesia, if not their scale, were well known.In January Robert F Kennedy compared the massacres to “inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the communists” and asked when people would “speak out … against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged communists have not been perpetrators, but victims?”

Wynne regarded the operation as a success. In his 1966 annual report he proudly says his operation was “fairly successful” because all his enemies (Konfrontasi, Sukarno, Subandrio and the PKI) were “destroyed”.

According to Prof Scott Lucas of the University of Birmingham, the declassified documents show that: “Britain was prepared to engage in dirty deeds which ran contrary to its purported values.” They reveal, he says, “how important black propaganda was to give the illusion that Britain could wield global power – even if many people might be killed for that illusion”.

Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

Today, we are told, the world economy functions as a meritocracy: countries that have strong institutions, good markets, and a steadfast work ethic become rich and successful, while countries that lack these things, or which are hobbled by corruption and bad governance, remain poor. This assumption underpins dominant perspectives in the field of international development (Sachs, 2005, Collier, 2007, Rostow, 1990, Moyo, 2010, Calderisi, 2007, Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012), and is reinforced by the rhetoric, common among neoclassical economists, that free-trade globalization has created an “even playing field”.

Emmanuel and Amin argued that unequal exchange enables a “hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage. Prices are naturalized on the grounds that they represent “utility”, or “value”, or the outcome of “market mechanisms” such as supply and demand, obscuring the extent to which they are determined by power imbalances in the global political economy. Price differentials in international trade therefore function as an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims.

Historians have demonstrated that the rise of Western Europe depended in large part on natural resources and labour forcibly appropriated from the global South during the colonial period, on a vast scale. Spain extracted gold and silver from the Andes, Portugal extracted sugar from Brazil, France extracted fossil fuels, minerals and agricultural products from West Africa, Belgium extracted rubber from the Congo; and Britain extracted cotton, opium, grain, timber, tea and countless other commodities from its colonies around the world – all of which entailed the exploitation of Southern labour on coercive terms, including through mass enslavement and indenture. This pattern of appropriation was central to Europe’s industrial growth, and to financing the expansion and industrialization of European settler colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which went on to develop similarly imperialist orientations toward the South (e.g., Naoroji, 1902, Pomeranz, 2000, Beckert, 2015, Moore, 2015, Bhambra, 2017, Patnaik, 2018, Davis, 2002).

for every unit of embodied resources and labour that the South imports from the North they have to export many more units to pay for it, enabling the North to achieve a net appropriation through trade. This dynamic was theorized by Emmanuel (1972) and Amin (1978) as a process of “unequal exchange”.Emmanuel and Amin argued that unequal exchange enables a “hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage. Prices are naturalized on the grounds that they represent “utility”, or “value”, or the outcome of “market mechanisms” such as supply and demand, obscuring the extent to which they are determined by power imbalances in the global political economy. Price differentials in international trade therefore function as an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims.

Following Dorninger et al. (2021), we use a “footprint” analysis of input–output data to quantify the physical scale of raw materials, land, energy and labour embodied in trade between the North and South, looking not only at traded goods themselves but also the upstream resources and labour that go into producing and transporting those goods, including the machines, factories, infrastructure, etc.

Grounding our analysis in the physical dimensions of unequal exchange is important for several reasons. First, these resources – raw materials, land, labour and energy – embody the productive potential that is required for meeting human needs (use-value) and for generating economic growth (exchange-value). Physical drain is therefore ultimately what drives global inequalities in terms of access to provisions, as well as in terms of GDP or income (see Hornborg, 2020). Second, this approach allows us to maintain sight of the ecological impacts of unequal exchange. We know that excess energy and material consumption in high-income nations, facilitated by appropriation from the rest of the world, is causing ecological breakdown on a global scale. Tracing flows of resources embodied in trade allows us to determine the extent to which Northern appropriation is responsible for ecological impacts in the South; i.e., ecological debt (Roberts and Parks, 2009, Warlenius et al., 2015, Hornborg and Martinez-Alier, 2016).

Due to the growing fragmentation of international commodity chains, monetary databases on bilateral gross trade flows have been criticised for not accurately depicting the monetary interdependencies between national economies (Johnson and Noguera, 2012), i.e., the amount of a countries’ value added that is induced by foreign final demand and international trade relations. Trade in Value Added (TiVA) indicators Johnson and Noguera, 2012, Timmer et al., 2014 are designed to take into account the complexity of the global economy. The TiVA concept is motivated by the fact that, in monetary terms, trade in intermediates accounts for approximately two-thirds of international trade. Imports (of intermediates) are used to produce exports and hence bilateral gross exports may include inputs (i.e., value added) from third party countries (Stehrer, 2012). TiVA reveals where (e.g., in which country or industry) and how (e.g. by capital or labour) value is added or captured in global commodity chains (Timmer et al., 2014).

TiVA, which is sometimes referred to as the “value footprint”, is the monetary counterpart of the MRIO-based environmental footprint because both indicators follow the same system boundaries, i.e., all supply chains between production and final consumption of two countries including all direct and indirect interlinkages. Moreover, in contrast to global bilateral monetary trade flows, TiVA is globally balanced, meaning that national exports and imports globally sum up to zero. This is an important feature of the TiVA indicator that facilitates more consistent and unambiguous assessments.

for every unit of embodied raw material equivalent that the South imports from the North, they have to export on average five units to “pay” for it

For land the average ratio is also 5:1, for energy it is 3:1, and for labour it is 13:1

Table 1. Resource drain from the South.ResourceNorth → South flows 2015South → North flows 2015Drain from South in 2015Cumulative drain from South 1990–2015Raw material equivalents [Gt]3.3715.3912.02254.40Embodied land [mn ha]527.421,349.01821.5932,987.23Embodied energy [EJ]21.5543.5121.06650.34Embodied labour [mn py-eq]31.11219.22188.125,956.62

in the year 2015 the North’s net appropriation from the South totalled 12 billion tons of raw materials, 822 million hectares of land, 21 exajoules of energy (equivalent to 3.4 billion barrels of oil), and 188 million person-years equivalents of labour (equivalent to 392 billion hours of work). By net appropriation we mean that these resources are not compensated in equivalent terms through trade; they are effectively transferred gratis. And this appropriation is not insignificant in scale; on the contrary, it comprises a large share (on average about a quarter) of the North’s total consumption.

significant consequences for the global South, in terms of lost use-value. This quantity of Southern raw materials, land, energy and labour could be used to provision for human needs and develop sovereign industrial capacity in the South, but instead it is mobilized around servicing consumption in the global North.

Eight hundred and twenty-two million hectares of land, which is twice the size of India, would in theory be enough to provide nutritious food for up to 6 billion people, depending on land productivity and diet composition

material use is tightly linked to environmental pressures. It accounts for more than 90% of variation in environmental damage indicators (Steinmann et al., 2017), and more than 90% of biodiversity loss and water stress (International Resource Panel, 2019). Moreover, as Van der Voet et al. (2004) demonstrate, while impacts vary by material, and vary as technologies change, there is a coupling between aggregate mass flows and ecological impact. Net flows of material resources from South to North mean that much of the impact of material consumption in the North (43% of it, net of trade) is suffered in the South. The damage is offshored.

Industrial ecologists hold that global extraction and use of materials should not exceed 50 billion tons per year (Bringezu, 2015). In 2015, the global economy was using 87 billion tons per year, overshooting the boundary by 74% and driving ecological breakdown. This overshoot is due almost entirely to excess resource consumption in global North countries. The North consumed 26.71 tons of materials per capita in 2015, which is roughly four times over the sustainable threshold (6.80 tons per capita in 2015). Our results indicate that most of the North’s excess consumption (58% of it) is sustained by net appropriation from the global South; without this appropriation, material use in high-income nations would be much closer to the sustainable level.

In consumption-based terms, the North is responsible for 92% of carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary (350 ppm atmospheric concentration of CO2) (Hickel, 2020), while the consequences harm the South disproportionately, inflicting dramatic social and economic costs (Kikstra et al., 2021b, Srinivasan et al., 2008). The South suffers 82–92% of the costs of climate change, and 98–99% of the deaths associated with climate change (DARA, 2012)

Net appropriation of land means soil depletion, water depletion, and chemical runoff are offshored; net appropriation of energy means that the health impacts of particulate pollution are offshored; net appropriation of labour means that the negative social impacts of exploitation are offshored, etc (Wiedmann and Lenzen, 2018). In the case of non-renewable resources there is also a problem of depletion: resources appropriated from the South are no longer available for future generations to use (Costanza and Daly, 1992, World Bank, 2018), which is particularly problematic given that under conditions of net appropriation economic losses are not offset by investments in capital stock (cf. Hartwick, 1977). Finally, the extractivism that underpins resource appropriation generates social dislocations and conflicts at resource frontiers (Martinez-Alier, 2021).

the value of resources and labour cannot be quantified in dollars, and there is no such thing as a “correct” price.

Prices under capitalism do not reflect value or utility in any objective way. Rather, they reflect, among other things, the (im)balance of power between market agents (capital and labour, core and periphery, lead firms and their suppliers, etc); in other words, they are a political artefact

While prices by definition do not reflect value, they do allow us to compare the scale of drain to prevailing monetary representations of production and income in the world economy.

Fig. 2 shows that drain from the South in 2015 amounted to $14.1 trillion when measured in terms of raw material equivalents, $5.1 trillion when measured in terms of land, $3.6 trillion when measured in terms of energy and $20.3 trillion when measured in terms of labour.

Over the period 1990–2015, the drain sums to $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This represents a significant “windfall” for the North, similar to the windfall that was derived from colonial forms of appropriation; i.e., goods that did not have to be produced on the domestic landmass or with domestic labour, and did not have to be bought on the domestic market, or paid for with exports (see Pomeranz, 2000, Patnaik, 2018). While previous studies have shown that the price distortion factor increased dramatically during the structural adjustment period in the 1980’s (Hickel et al., 2021), our data confirms that since the early- to mid-1990’s it has tended to decline slightly. This means that the increase in drain during the period 1990–2007, prior to the global financial crisis, was driven primarily by an increase in the volume of international trade rather than by an increase in price distortion.

Table 3 shows that, over the 1990–2015 period, resources appropriated from the South have been worth on average roughly a quarter of Northern GDP.

the North’s reliance on appropriation from the South has generally increased over the period (despite a significant drop after the global financial crisis), whereas the South’s losses as a share of total economic activity have generally decreased, particularly since 2003, due to an increase in South-South trading and higher domestic GDP creation or capture within the South, both driven largely by China

Aid flows create the powerful impression that rich countries give benevolently to poorer countries. But the data on drain through unequal exchange raises significant questions about this narrative.

net appropriation by DAC countries through unequal exchange from 1990 to 2015 outstripped their aid disbursements over the same period by a factor of almost 80

for every dollar of aid that donors give, they appropriate resources worth 80 dollars through unequal exchange. From the perspective of aid recipients, for every dollar they receive in aid they lose resources worth 30 dollars through drain

The dominant narrative of international development holds that poor countries are poor because of their own internal failings and are therefore in need of assistance. But the empirical evidence on unequal exchange demonstrates that poor countries are poor in large part because they are exploited within the global economy and are therefore in need of justice. These results indicate that combating the deleterious effects of unequal exchange by making the global economy fairer and more equitable would be much more effective, in terms of development, than charity.

In an equitable world, the resource trade deficit that the North sustains in relation to the South would be financed with a parallel monetary trade deficit. But in reality, the monetary trade deficit is very small, equivalent to only about 1% of global trade revenues, and fluctuates between North and South. In effect, this means that the North achieves its large net appropriation of resources and labour from the South gratis.

The question of sectoral disparities has been moot since the 1980s, however, as industrial production has shifted overwhelmingly to the South. The majority of Southern exports (70%) consist of manufactured goods (data from UNCTAD; see Smith, 2016). Of all the manufactured goods that the USA imports, 60% are produced in developing countries. For Japan it is 70%. We can see this pattern reflected also in the industrial workforce. As of 2010, at least 79% of the world’s industrial workers live in the South (data from the ILO; see Smith, 2016). This shift is due in large part to the rise of global commodity chains, which now constitute 70% of international trade. Between 1995 and 2013, there has been an increase of 157 million jobs related to global commodity chains, and an estimated 116 million of them are concentrated in the South, predominantly in the export manufacturing sector (ILO, 2015). In other words, during the period we analyse in this paper (1990–2015), the South has contributed the majority of the world’s industrial production, including high-technology production such as computers and cars. And yet price inequalities remain entrenched.

if Northern states or firms leverage monopoly power within global commodity chains to depress the prices of imports and increase the prices of final products, their labour “productivity” appears to improve, and that of their counterparts declines, even if the underlying production process remains unchanged. Indeed, empirical evidence indicates that real productivity differences between workers are minimal, and cannot explain wage inequalities (Hunter et al., 1990).

wage inequalities exist not because Southern workers are less productive but because they are more intensively exploited, and often subject to rigid systems of labour control and discipline designed to maximize extraction (Suwandi et al., 2019). Indeed, this is a major reason why Northern firms offshore production to the South in the first place: because labour is cheaper per unit of physical output (Goldman, 2012).

the terminology of “value-added” is a misnomer. In international trade, TiVA does not tell us who adds more value but rather who has more power to command prices. And in the case of global commodity chains, TiVA does not indicate where value is produced but rather where it is captured (Smith, 2016).

our analysis reveals that value in global commodity chains is disproportionately produced by the South, but disproportionately captured by the North (as GDP). Value captured in this manner is misleadingly attributed to Northern economic activities

rich countries are able to maintain price inequalities simply by virtue of being rich. This finding supports longstanding claims by political economists that, all else being equal, price inequalities are an artefact of power. Just as in a national economy wage rates are an artefact of the relative bargaining power of labour vis-à-vis capital, so too in international trade prices are an artefact of the relative bargaining power of national economies and corporate actors vis-à-vis their trading partners and suppliers. Countries that grew rich during the colonial period are now able to leverage their economic dominance to depress the costs of labour and resources extracted from the South. In other words, the North “finances” net appropriation from the South not with money, but rather by maintaining the prices of Southern resources and labour below the global average level.

Patents play a key role here: 97% of all patents are held by corporations in high-income countries (Chang, 2008:141)

In some cases, patents involve forcing people in the South to pay for access to resources they might otherwise have obtained much more affordably, or even for free (Shiva, 2001, Shiva, 2016).

In the World Bank and the IMF, Northern states hold a majority of votes (and the US holds a veto), thus giving them control over key economic policy decisions. In the World Trade Organization (which controls tariffs, subsidies, and patents), bargaining power is determined by market size, enabling high-income nations to set trade rules in their own interests.

ubsidized agricultural exports from the North undermine subsistence economies in the South and contribute to dispossession and unemployment, placing downward pressure on wages. Militarized borders preclude easy migration from South to North, thus preventing wage convergence. Moreover, structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and IMF since the 1980s have cut public sector salaries and employment, rolled back labour rights, curtailed unions, and gutted environmental regulations (Khor, 1995, Petras and Veltmeyer, 2002).

SAPs, bilateral free trade agreements, and the World Trade Organization have forced global South governments to remove tariffs, subsidies and other protections for infant industries. This prevents governments from attempting import substitution, which would improve their export prices and drive Northern prices down. Tax evasion and illicit financial flows out of the South (which total more than $1 trillion per year) drain resources that might otherwise be reinvested domestically, or which governments might otherwise use to build national industries. This problem is compounded by external debt service obligations, which drain government revenue and require obeisance to economic policies dictated by creditors (Hickel, 2017). In addition, structural dependence on foreign investors and access to Northern markets forces Southern governments and firms to compete with one another by cutting wages and resource prices in a race to the bottom.

structural power imbalances in the world economy ensure that labour and resources in the South remain cheap and accessible to international capital, while Northern exports enjoy comparatively higher prices

Cheap labour and raw materials in the global South are not “naturally” cheap, as if their cheapness was written in the stars. They are actively cheapened

the analysis obscures class and geographic inequalities within countries and regions, which are significant when it comes to labour prices as well as resource consumption. The high levels of resource consumption that characterize Northern economies are driven disproportionately by rich individuals and affluent areas, as well as by corporations that control supply chains, and enabled by internal patterns of exploitation and unequal exchange in addition to drain through trade (Harvey, 2005). For example, there are marginalized regions of the United States that serve as an “internal periphery” (Wishart, 2014). It would also be useful to explore the gender dynamics of unequal exchange within countries. These questions cannot be answered with our data, however.

This research confirms that the “advanced economies” of the global North rely on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through induced price differentials in international trade. By combining insights from the classical literature on unequal exchange with contemporary insights about global commodity chains and new methods for quantifying the physical scale of embodied resource transfers, we are able to develop a novel approach to estimating the scale and value of resource drain from the global South. Our results show that, when measured in Northern prices, the drain amounted to $10.8 trillion in 2015, and $242 trillion over the period from 1990 to 2015 – a significant windfall for the North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. Meanwhile, the South’s losses through unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30.

support contemporary demands for reparations for ecological debt, as articulated by environmental justice movements and by the G77

True repair requires permanently ending the unequal distribution of environmental goods and burdens between the global North and global South, restoring damaged ecosystems, and shifting to a regenerative economic system.

It is clear that official development assistance is not a meaningful solution to global poverty and inequality; nor is the claim that global South countries need more economic liberalisation and export-oriented market integration. The core problem is that low- and middle-income countries are integrated into the global economy on fundamentally unequal terms. Rectifying this problem is critical to ensuring that global South countries have the financial, physical and human resources they need to improve social outcomes.

democratize the institutions of global economic governance, such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, so that global South countries have more control over trade and finance policy.

end the North’s use of unfair subsidies for agricultural exports, and remove structural adjustment conditions on international finance, which would help mitigate downward pressure on wages and resource prices in the South while at the same time enabling Southern countries to build sovereign industrial capacity

a global living wage system, and a global system of environmental regulations, would effectively put a floor on labour and resource prices

Reducing North-South price differentials would in turn reduce the scale of the North’s net resource appropriation from the South (in other words, it would reduce ecologically unequal exchange), thus reducing excess consumption in the North and the ecological impacts that it inflicts on the South.

Structural transformation will only be achieved through political struggle from below, including by the anti-colonial and environmental justice movements that continue to fight against imperialism today

indicative either of lax security procedures or an especially dangerous environment close to a sensitive U.S. facility — or both

rampant and increasing insecurity, including rapes, assaults, and robberies. They expressed disbelief that American technology could not provide more safety and said the U.S. was doing little to help those living just beyond the base’s borders.

Few in Agadez understand the purpose of the drone base or what Americans do there. They know only what they see, smell, and hear: the towers, walls, and fences; clouds of dust from speeding military vehicles; smoke from the burn pit; and the buzz of drones above their heads. The rest is a mystery.

“The Americans have drones, they have planes, they have sophisticated equipment,” Liman Ahar Fidjaji, the president of an Agadez-based religious center for the prevention of conflict in Niger, told The Intercept. “But it’s not helping.”

A day after the attack, local law enforcement arrested the man who shot the video, Ibrahim said. “I have no idea who told them, but they knew who he was and they said they were arresting him because he posted the footage on social media,”

while the road to “Base Americaine” was well lit, Tadress lacked electricity. “It’s really dark, so you can’t see and can be robbed or even shot. Trucks loaded with migrants to Libya drive very fast through the neighborhood. They can’t see and they hit children,”

wild rumors, including long-running speculation that Americans are surreptitiously mining gold at the base

Following the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military embraced a governmentwide trend toward privatization, including an increasing reliance on contractors. Since 2001, Pentagon spending has totaled more than $14 trillion, one-third to one-half of which went to defense contractors, according to a 2021 report by Hartung and Brown University’s Costs of War project. More contractors than U.S. service members, according to a separate Costs of War report, have died in post-9/11 military operations.

“We can’t know exactly who is getting paid and who is profiting because we don’t know where the money is going. It comes down to subcontracting that is not transparent and having very little oversight,” said Heidi Peltier, a senior researcher at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and the director of programs at the Costs of War project. Government reports, lawsuits, and investigations by inspectors general have found that 30 to 40 percent of contract spending through the Defense Department is generally wasted or lost to fraud, corruption, or other abuses, Peltier noted.

an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general found that the “Air Force did not construct Air Base 201 infrastructure to meet safety, security, and other technical requirements established in DoD, Air Force, and USAFRICOM directives.”

“If the bandits had an RPG and aimed it at the base, then I’m sure the Americans would have seen it and reacted,” he explained, using the shorthand for a rocket-propelled grenade. “The Americans have sophisticated tools. Drones are flying overhead every day and every night. But there are guys circulating in the streets around here with weapons. Why is that?”