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Elizabethton City Schools in Tennessee provided English tutoring this year for 404 elementary and middle school students with the increased funding.
A recent headline from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes a familiar event: “West Bank Palestinian Village Residents Flee Amid Ongoing Settler Violence.” In many respects, this is old news. Settlers have been terrorizing Palestinian residents for decades, and 2023 appears to be a particularly horrific year. In response to these criminal acts, the Israeli army and government have tended to look the other way. The military is often slow to react or a no-show when settlers take to the streets and rampage through Palestinian villages or uproot olive trees. The Israeli government rarely attempts to arrest or punish the offenders, often citing a lack of evidence or persuasive identification of suspected perpetrator, but the dominant reasons range from ideological sympathies with the settlers to the indirect benefits of keeping Palestinians in fear.
The international community has developed a moral register and set of possible responses for such situations: a responsibility to protect. The general claim is that when the state fails in its responsibility to protect its citizens and civilians, then the international community inherits this duty. The original formulation applied to situations of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, but it has expanded over the years to include less severe events and apartheid. These and other state-sponsored or state-enabled actions now sometimes go by the name atrocity crimes. Additionally, the United Nations and other international bodies have a protection of civilian mandate, as do many humanitarian and human rights agencies.
These various protection discourses and mandates were built for situations like the territories. Israel has routinely violated international law, including that related to refugees, human rights, and occupation. In addition, it has demonstrated an unwillingness to provide protections for Palestinians from the growing number of settlers. But the international community—specifically the West—has failed to act for two major reasons. It tolerated these abuses and arbitrary rules in the name of the peace process. The peace process led Western states to hold their tongues, creating something of a human shield for Israel. Relatedly, the US, for reasons owing to the peace process and domestic politics, played the role of protector of last resort in various international bodies and, most visibly, in the UN Security Council, where it reflexively vetoes any resolution that is critical of Israel. Only in the last days of the Obama administration did it find the “courage” to abstain. The US has been Israel’s “get out of jail free” card.
The peace process has been dead for at least a decade and there is now a “one-state reality” from the river to the sea. In this one-state reality, Palestinians have few rights or protections and Jewish privilege is enshrined in various laws and rules that systematically discriminate against Palestinians, providing strong evidence for claims that Israel is now an apartheid state.
The question is: what is the US and the international community prepared to do to stop these mass violations of human rights? The recent history of efforts by the international community and the UN to protect civilians gives little reason for optimism. Where the international community has intervened, it has usually been in cases of active war, which does not currently apply to Israel. There is much less success with lower levels of violence. Without enforcement mechanisms, human rights law has little effect. That said, human rights monitors do have a record of compelling better behavior from those in power. Humanitarian agencies attempt to protect civilians through provision of life-saving resources such as food, water, medical care, and shelter, but have little ability to stop combatants that are determined to harm and terrorize civilians. States, meanwhile, often hide behind sovereignty to deny access to those who want to protect populations at risk. Israel has played this card, even though it has control but not sovereignty over these territories.
The best thing the US and others who have protected Israel can do is change their role from an enabler of the oppression of the Palestinians to an erstwhile guardian. The US should stop reaching for the veto every time a resolution on Israel and its violations of international law comes to the Security Council. Israeli actions should cease being called an “obstacle to peace” and instead be labeled as violations of international law. The US should consider suspending or reducing its aid package, and scrupulously ensure that its financial assistance does benefit Israeli hold over the territories. The international community might consider a role for human rights monitors or using drone and satellite technology to monitor Israeli actions in the territories, and make public their observations and findings. There are many American-born settlers, and if they are involved in violence in the territories they should be prosecuted in a court of law alongside other American-born terrorists. The West might consider placing smart sanctions on Israel and leaders that benefit from Israel’s hold over the territories, or introducing trade restrictions. The European Union and other countries that provide fast-track visas for Israeli citizens should remove this highly desired perk.
Sticks like sanctions often do not work in deterring or compelling action. They often do not hurt enough because the targeted state can often escape them by developing other arrangements and alliances. Alternatively, for states like Israel that might see their cause as integral to the existential identity or security, then they are likely to absorb the pain of the sanctions. But sanctions and other kinds of discursive condemnations can have important symbolic effects. Israel likes to present itself as part of the West and having shared values with the US and other Western countries. Western countries can stop propping up the idea of a “special relationship” built on shared values, now that Israel ceases to share them. It can expel Israel from the Western bloc in the UN and other international bodies.
The international community has developed a range of options for attempting to deter states that trample on the rights of civilians. Few of them have the necessary impact and they often have unintended consequences. But even a serious conversation by the US and the West would be a momentous moment and possibly cause Israel to recognize that its policies have a cost.
The debt ceiling legislation would end the pause on student loan payments on Aug. 30 at the latest.
At institutions like Cornell University, first-year applicants are not required to submit SAT or ACT scores.
Guest post by Alexander Noyes
On May 17, the president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, dissolved the country’s legislature in the midst of impeachment proceedings against him. Did Ecuador just have a self-coup? Opposition leaders say yes. But the answer is no, at least for now. This matters greatly for the country’s democratic trajectory and for the international community’s response.
After a recent lull, coups and coup attempts are front-page news again, from Sudan to Brazil to the United States. This surge in coup activity prompted Antonio Guterres, the United Nations chief, to decry an “epidemic” of coups. Perhaps more troublingly for democracy worldwide, coups-plotters have evolved. Scholars have traditionally defined coups as: “overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting head of state using unconstitutional means.”
But now, these softer, more subtle self-coups—whereby a sitting chief executive uses sudden and irregular (i.e., illegal or unconstitutional) measures to seize power or dismantle checks and balances—have become the new mode of coup. Self-coups, also known as auto-coups, are much more sophisticated than soldiers in fatigues taking television stations by force in order to announce the overthrow of a country’s leader. Self-coups are rarely bloody, but can be just as harmful to democracy as the more traditional military overthrows.
A raft of countries have experienced successful self-coups or coup attempts of late. There have been nine successful or attempted self-coups over the last decade, according to the Cline Center at the University of Illinois, which collects comprehensive information on all types of coups around the world. Self-coup illegal power grabs have occurred across a range of regions and political systems, including in semi-autocracies, such as Pakistan in 2022, as well as semi-democracies, like Tunisia in 2021. Worryingly, full democracies have not been immune to this trend, with the United States suffering a failed self-coup at the hands of President Trump on January 6th, 2021, which the Cline Center labeled an auto-coup.
Ecuador has been lauded as a strong partner of the United States in a region that has experienced democratic backsliding. Yet the country has recently experienced a host of crises on Lasso’s watch, including rising crime, corruption scandals, government crackdowns on the media, and protests that have often turned violent. The current impasse is the opposition’s second attempt at impeachment.
Is Lasso’s dissolution of Ecuador’s National Assembly the latest example of a self-coup? Leonidas Iza Salazar, the head of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities, which has led a series of protests against the president over the last several years, says yes. On May 17, Iza Salazar accused Lasso of launching “a cowardly self-coup with the help of the police and the armed forces, without citizen support.” Viviana Veloz, the opposition lawmaker leading the impeachment, said: “The only way out is the impeachment and exit of the president of the republic, Guillermo Lasso.”
Lasso defended his decision as a chance at a fresh start and a way to resolve recent political turmoil. Lasso proclaimed that the dissolution was “the best decision to find a constitutional way out of the political crisis… and give the people of Ecuador the chance to decide their future at the next elections.” Lasso’s decree calls on the country’s electoral authorities to set a date for fresh elections, now set for August 20, and allows him to govern with limited powers and without the National Assembly until these new elections. The measure is referred to as a “mutual-death” clause, since it leads to new elections for both the sitting president as well as the legislature. Lasso has promised that he will not seek reelection in the coming polls.
There is little question that dissolving the legislature during his embezzlement impeachment trial and slumping political support is an opportunistic move by Lasso. Yet while Lasso’s action was indeed extraordinary—it is the first time this constitutional provision has been used since it was adopted in 2008—it is legal, at least so far. On May 18, the country’s constitutional court upheld the decision, dismissing six cases aimed at blocking the legislature’s dissolution. This means that Lasso’s maneuver does not yet fit the “irregular” provision that must be fulfilled to meet the definition of a coup, including a self-coup.
This “coup or not a coup” distinction matters greatly for Ecuador’s democratic future, and should guide how the international community responds. If Lasso’s action did indeed fit the worrying rise of self-coups globally, it would be dire for Ecuador’s prospects for democracy, and likely plunge it towards autocracy. International actors would need to condemn the coup, push for regional and global sanctions, and apply strong pressure to reverse Lasso’s illegal power grab.
Since Lasso’s decree is unusual but legal, Ecuador’s shaky democracy—which democracy watchers rate as falling short of a full democracy—is on precarious, but at least constitutional footing, for now.
At this precarious moment, the United States and other like-minded, pro-democracy countries should not sit idly by. While fully recognizing the country’s own struggles with incumbent power grabs, the United States should urge Lasso to strictly keep to the letter and spirit of the law, reign in the security forces—ensuring their political impartiality—and ramp up support to help Ecuador arrange free and fair elections in the coming months.
The role of the military along with unified international pressure has proved crucial to stopping or reversing past self-coups around the world. The current situation in Ecuador fortunately does not yet fit that definition. But the international community would be wise to actively keep it that way, first by strongly and consistently reminding Lasso—and other key regional partners—that the world is watching, and by also increasing democracy support to Ecuador ahead of the coming polls.
Alexander Noyes, PhD, is a political scientist at the non-profit, non-partisan RAND Corporation and former senior advisor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy.
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Amanda Gorman reciting a poem during the inauguration.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at a bill-signing event this month.
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“Fearless progress toward justice often meets ferocious pushback from the oldest and most sinister of forces,” President Biden told Howard University’s graduating class.
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Medical workers treating patients with Covid-19 at the Brooklyn Hospital Center in January 2022, when the Omicron wave was in full force.
Guest post by Patricia L. Sullivan
During her recent trip to Africa, US Vice President Kamala Harris announced a $100 million commitment over ten years to West African Nations to fend off the increasing threat of extremist groups. The announcement followed President Biden’s pledge of $55 billion to the continent for the next three years. While these promises reveal a US commitment to greater engagement with African states, the often-dodged question is whether citizens of these states will benefit. Will US security aid improve human security in fragile and conflict-affected African states? How is US security assistance likely to affect governance and state repression for citizens that often suffer at the hands of both extremist groups and their own security forces?
The empirical record is mixed. Between 2002 and 2019, the US spent almost $300 billion on security assistance and trained at least one million foreign military personnel. In some countries, such as Ukraine, these programs have improved both the capability and professionalism of the state’s armed forces. In others, they escalated human rights abuses and increased the risk of coups d’état. Take the example of Kenya—one of the largest recipients of US military training and equipment in East Africa. The state’s security forces have been found to engage in torture, extrajudicial killings, mass arrests, and forced disappearances. Or the Philippines, where President Duterte employed the country’s military—armed and trained by US aid programs—in a brutal war on drugs that took the lives of thousands of civilians.
Although some studies have found that security assistance can reduce civilian targeting by state security forces, there is mounting evidence that it often fuels human rights violations. Recent research suggests that the risk of civilian harm is greatest when donors transfer weapons to postconflict states or provide aid to states with fragmented, “coup-proofed” security forces. On the other hand, effective institutions to constrain executive power in recipient states, and the provision of some forms of “nonlethal” security assistance—like military education for officers and defense institution building—appear to mitigate the potential for civilian harm.
As the War on Terror spread from Afghanistan to the African continent, the US greatly expanded the use of security assistance—funding, weapons, equipment, and training provided to a state’s security sector by external actors—to build the capacity of weak states to take on the counterterrorism mission without sacrificing American troops in ground combat. According to data collected by the Security Assistance Monitor, funding to train and equip foreign security forces increased more than 300 percent in the ten years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Over the past two decades, the US has provided security sector assistance to more than two-thirds of the sovereign states in the world. Between 2015 and 2020, $4.8 billion in security aid went to sub-Saharan Africa.
While the goal is to reduce the threat posed by violent non-state actors, Kristen Harkness at the University of St. Andrews points out that most aid went to “repressive, heavily coup-proofed authoritarian regimes,” even though boosting military capacity in non-democratic states can fuel grievances that drive recruitment to extremist groups and increase political violence.
When “lethal” aid—weapons, military equipment, and combat skills training—reaches countries that lack effective institutional constraints on executive power, as in many autocratic and anocratic regimes, the risk of extrajudicial killings at the hand of security forces spikes, according to data that follows low- and middle-income recipients of US security force assistance between 2002 and 2019.
In the absence of effective legislative or judicial constraints, leaders can use military aid to buy the loyalty of their security forces and incentivize compliance with orders to repress dissent. Of course, lethal aid also directly increases the capacity of state security forces to quell civilian threats to the regime with force. Security assistance signals that a foreign patron is invested in regime survival. While soldiers ordered to use deadly force against the civilian population might experience moral conflict, or fear facing consequences for targeting civilians if the regime is overthrown, foreign security aid increases the odds that repression will succeed, the regime will survive, and soldiers will be rewarded for their loyalty.
One way to avoid the risk that US assistance increases human rights violations is to provide aid only to countries with effective legislative and judicial institutions. But many regions where extremist groups are active would offer a limited menu. An alternative is providing safer forms of aid.
Separating “non-lethal” security aid—a broad category encompassing professional military education, security sector reform, defense institution-building, and a variety of other types of assistance—from “lethal” aid—which includes material aid, direct combat assistance, and combat training—reveals divergent effects on state violence. While increasing lethal aid significantly raises the risk of extrajudicial killing, non-lethal aid appears to have a dampening effect. The exception is authoritarian states in which leaders have created overlapping and competing security institutions to “coup-proof” their regime. In these states, all forms of security assistance are associated with civilian harm. In post-conflict countries, one study shows that while weapons transfers and military aid increase human rights abuses, levels of Official Development Assistance (ODA) are associated with improved human rights protections.
Moving forward, as the US promises a new wave of security assistance to African states, it has a choice. Considering the recipient country’s institutional context, the state of its security forces, and the type of military aid, can decrease the risk that those resources are used to commit human rights violations.
Patricia Lynn Sullivan is an associate professor in the Department of Public Policy and the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies.
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Prison Agriculture Lab directors Carrie Chennault and Josh Sbicca discuss the ubiquity of carceral agriculture in the United States, its structuring logics of racial capitalism, and possibilities for abolitionist food futures.
The post Mapping the Unfree Labor of Prison Agriculture: A Conversation with Carrie Chennault and Josh Sbicca appeared first on Edge Effects.
Guest post by Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Molly Wallace, and Ned Dobos
Ukraine has received tens of billions of dollars worth of military aid since the Russian invasion began one year ago. The international consensus seems to be that supporting Ukraine means financing its war effort. But a few dissenting voices have emerged of late, more ambivalent about the prudence—and ethics—of the current policy. Colonel Douglas MacGregor, a former advisor to the US Secretary of Defence, has warned that the choice of cure could turn out to be worse than the disease.
At least 7,000 Ukrainian civilians have already perished in the war. Thousands more have been injured, and millions have been displaced. MacGregor’s primary concern is that the bleeding will continue for as long as the fighting does. Russian forces advance, Ukrainian forces resist with violence, Russia responds with counter-violence, and the bodies continue to pile up. The Ukrainian state retains its sovereignty, but eventually we get to a point where, to quote MacGregor, “There are no longer any Ukrainians left!” This is hyperbole, of course, but that should not distract from the valid point MacGregor is making. States exist for the sake of their citizens, not the other way around. Therefore, if a given method of defending the state is causing its citizens to be killed or to flee en masse, that is a compelling reason to explore alternatives.
What is often overlooked about armed resistance is that, when it “works,” it does so by producing a mental rather than physical effect. Wars are won by breaking the enemy’s will to fight, not necessarily its ability to fight. Victory usually comes, if it comes, long before there are no enemy soldiers left; it comes when those soldiers who remain and/or their leaders are no longer motivated to fight, or in more extreme cases, when the soldiers are so demoralized that the leaders can no longer mount enough coercive pressure to make them continue fighting. Everything hinges on how the remaining members of the opponent group react to the destruction of their compatriots’ lives and their military or civilian infrastructure, not on the destruction itself.
Once we realize that the condition of surrender is not physical but psychological, it is only natural to wonder: Is there no way to change minds except through violence against bodies?
Nonviolent resistance is an alternative strategy for breaking the will of the aggressor. Protests and fraternization can engage the moral sentiments of the aggressor’s functionaries and citizenry, leading to a loss of popular support. Boycotts and blockades can alter the material cost-benefit equation of the aggression, so that it is no longer worth it. And nonviolent sabotage can directly diminish the aggressor’s capabilities by physically disabling military, transportation, or communications infrastructure.
Ukrainians have been engaged in various forms of such nonviolent resistance since the Russian invasion began. It took more visible forms at first—ordinary civilians demonstrating in Ukrainian colors or standing between Russian tanks and their towns—and has since shifted to less visible, more dispersed methods in response to Russian occupation and repression—graffiti, non-cooperation with Russian authorities, alternative communication, and governance institutions. There were even overtures to the Russian public and soldiers, eliciting responses from significant scientists, clerics, and journalists.
Unlike the militarized resistance, however, the nonviolent resistance has received no significant material support from the international community. Consider for example the Ukrainian government’s early offer of money and amnesty to Russian deserters, which circulated via SMS messages containing instructions on how and where to surrender and collect payment. According to The Times (UK), there was some initial uptake—a Russian soldier was photographed surrendering himself and his tank to Ukrainian forces in March, in exchange for cash and an offer of permanent resettlement in Ukraine. But consider what might have been.
Suppose the international community were to double the Ukrainian government’s offer of $50k per deserting soldier, as economist Bryan Caplan suggested. Desertion is a risky proposition, but for twice the payoff perhaps many more Russian soldiers might have considered the risk worth taking. Additionally, countries besides Ukraine could have offered Russian deserters amnesty and even citizenship within their own borders. This way deserters would need not worry about Russia eventually winning the war, occupying Ukraine, ousting its government, and taking its vengeance against them. The recent involvement of Wagner Group mercenaries on the Russian side only underscores the utility of economic incentives to alter the motivation of soldiers.
Of course, we cannot say for certain that a nonviolent approach will work. But we cannot say for certain that violence will work, either. So far it hasn’t.
If there are nonviolent ways to break Russia’s will to fight, why the reluctance to exploit them?
One possible reason is the widespread belief that nonviolence, although it can be effective, is not nearly as effective as military force. But this belief is more an a priori assumption than a rational conclusion based on an impartial appraisal of the evidence. Scientific research suggests that, during 1900–2006, nonviolent resistance outperformed violent resistance by a ratio of almost 2:1.
Maybe our desire to see wrongdoers not simply thwarted but punished explains the preference for violence here. Perhaps our sense of justice recoils at the thought of paying Russian combatants to desert, instead of making them suffer for what they have done—though this stance ignores the coercion and manipulation that Putin’s government has used against its own armed forces.
In any case, surely what matters most in all this is the welfare of the Ukrainian people. The reality is that massively financing the war effort has produced a state of attrition with no end in sight. Persisting with the current policy regardless, expecting things to change while the casualties mount, is a combination of delusion and depravity. We should now turn the spotlight onto those Ukrainians who—despite the loud calls for military weaponry—have been steadily engaged in various forms of nonviolent resistance and defense since the invasion. Their actions deserve more support—both moral and material—than the international community has so far provided.
Alexandre Christoyannopoulos is a reader (associate professor) in politics and international relations at Loughborough University, and his publications are listed on his website. Ned Dobos is a senior lecturer in international and political studies at UNSW Canberra, and author of Ethics, Security, and the War Machine: The True Cost of the Military. Molly Wallace is adjunct assistant professor in conflict resolution at Portland State University, senior contributing editor at the Peace Science Digest, and author of Security without Weapons: Rethinking Violence, Nonviolent Action, and Civilian Protection. The three of them are the editors of the new Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence.
Two elephants came to live in Miami Beach with resort guests in the 1920s, troubling the divides between humans and animals, work and play. Anna Vemer Andrzejewski examines the ambiguous role these elephants occupied in Florida's leisure landscape.
The post Work, Play, and Elephants in South Florida’s Leisure Landscape appeared first on Edge Effects.
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