Login
Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Web(s) of Life, which opened at London’s Serpentine South Gallery in June, explores how humans relate to spiders. It features installations of spider webs displayed and lit to be viewed as sculptures. There are also films: one made about Saraceno’s work with groups battling lithium mining in Argentina and another about spider diviners from Somié village in Cameroon.
That’s where I came in. Ŋgam dù (the Mambila term for spider divination) is one of many types of oracle or divination used by Mambila people in Cameroon. It is the most trusted form and – unlike other types which are sometimes dismissed as mere games – its results can be used as evidence in the country’s courts. Variants of this form of divination are found throughout southern Cameroon and the long history of the word ŋgam attests to the longevity of the practice.
I work as a social anthropologist in the Mambila village of Somié. I have visited almost every year since 1985, working on a variety of projects. Divination was the focus of a chapter in my PhD in 1990, but I never stopped working on the subject. As well as becoming an initiated diviner, I have continued to think about the wider implications of using divination or oracles.
Ngam dù is a form of divination in which binary (either/or) questions are asked of large spiders that live in holes in the ground. The options are linked to a stick and a stone then, using a set of leaf cards marked with symbols, the spider is left to make its choice.
The hole plus the stick, stone and cards are covered up. The spider emerges and will move the cards so the diviner can then interpret the pattern relative to the stick and stone. If cards are placed on the stick, then the option associated with that has been selected, and vice versa if the cards are placed on the stone.
Things get more interesting (at least to me and other diviners) if both options are selected, or neither. Sometimes a contradictory response is interpreted to mean that the question posed is not a good one. The diviner is thereby told to go and discuss the issue with the client and reframe the problem, posing a different question.
The process is “calibrated” regularly by asking test questions such as “Am I here alone?” or “Will I drink tonight?”. Spiders that fail these tests are discarded as liars and not used for future consultations. It’s also common to ask the same question in parallel to get a consistency check, so more than one spider can be used at the same time. Sometimes the stick and stone option are reversed to ensure that the spider isn’t just moving the cards always in the same direction.
Mambila diviners rely on these tests to justify the system, although they also say (as do many groups in Cameroon) that spiders are a source of wisdom since they live in the ground where the “village of the dead” is found.
As an anthropologist, I avoid questions about whether spider divination is true. For me the important question is: “Does it help?”
Sometimes the results of divination are considered, but rejected, and the advice is not followed. Even in these instances it can be helpful, however, since it enables people decide on a course of action.
People use the results as a tool to help them think through hard decisions such as who to marry, or where to go for treatment when a child is ill. The latter involves weighing up conflicting considerations about expense, the possibility an illness has been caused by witchcraft and the reputations for effective treatment of different traditional healers as well as of rival biomedical health centres.
I met the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno when he had an exhibit at the Venice Bienale in 2018. He was intrigued by the computer simulation of spider divination that my colleague Mike Fischer had made. He invited me to Venice to demonstrate the simulation and talk about spider divination in front of his “sculptures”, which are made in collaboration with spiders. They are patterns of spiderwebs displayed as art.
As we talked, I said that if one day he wanted to visit Cameroon I would be happy to introduce him to the diviners I worked with. In December 2019, he came with his friend, the filmmaker Maxi Laina. We visited Somié, where he worked with the diviner Bollo Pierre Tadios and the Mambila filmmaker Nguea Iréné.
Saraceno and Laina came with some questions to ask from their friends. This included “Who would win the 2020 US election?” This was the Trump v Biden election, the results of which Trump went on to question. The answer was that there would be a new president but it would not be straightforward!
Saraceno liked the idea that spiders could help humans resolve their personal problems. It gave an example of a different way in which human-spider relationships are expressed. Bollo liked the idea of opening the process up to questions from outside the village. He already has some clients from other places in Cameroon who call him, so working internationally is very doable.
He suggested that Saraceno could make his work accessible via the internet, which he has now done through a dedicated website. Some of the first results are included in the Serpentine exhibition along with film made by Nguea Iréné of Bollo in action. The film will also be shown in the village later in the summer.
Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Web(s) of Life is on at London’s Serpentine South Gallery until 10 September.
David Zeitlyn has received funding from AHRC, ESRC, EPSRC
In the evolving relationship between technology and society, humans have shown themselves to be incredibly adaptable. What once left us breathless, soon becomes integrated into our everyday lives.
The astonishing functionalities of large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT were, just a few months ago, the epitome of cutting-edge AI. They are now on course to be mere add-ons and plugins to our text editors and search engines.
We’ll soon find ourselves relying on their capabilities, and seamlessly incorporating them into our routines.
Yet, this rapid acclimatisation leaves us with a lingering question: what’s next? As our expectations shift, we are left wondering about the next innovation that will capture our imagination.
People will try to achieve all kinds of smart – and not-so-smart – things with AI. Many ideas will fail, others will have a lasting impact.
Our crystal ball is not much better than yours, but we can try to think about what’s coming next in a structured way. For AI to have a lasting impact, it needs to be not only technologically feasible, but also economically viable, and normatively acceptable – in other words, it complies with the values that society demands we conform to.
There are some AI technologies waiting on the sidelines right now that hold promise. The four we think are waiting in the wings are next-level GPT, humanoid robots, AI lawyers, and AI-driven science. Our choices appear ready from a technological point of view, but whether they satisfy all three of the criteria we’ve mentioned is another matter. We chose these four because they were the ones that kept coming up in our investigations into progress in AI technologies.
The startup company DoNotPay claims to have built a legal chatbot – built on LLM technology – that can advise defendants in court.
The company recently said it would let its AI system help two defendants fight speeding tickets in real-time. Connected via an earpiece, the AI can listen to proceedings and whisper legal arguments into the ear of the defendant, who then repeats them out loud to the judge.
After criticism and a lawsuit for practising law without a license, the startup postponed the AI’s courtroom debut. The potential for the technology will thus not be decided by technological or economic constraints, but by the authority of the legal system.
Lawyers are well-paid professionals and the costs of litigation are high, so the economic potential for automation is huge. However, the US legal system currently seems to oppose robots representing humans in court.
Scientists are increasingly turning to AI for insights. Machine learning, where an AI system improves at what it does over time, is being employed to identify patterns in data. This enables the systems to propose novel scientific hypotheses – proposed explanations for phenomena in nature. These may even be capable of surpassing human assumptions and biases.
For example, researchers at the University of Liverpool used a machine learning system called a neural network to rank chemical combinations for battery materials, guiding their experiments and saving time.
The complexity of neural networks means that there are gaps in our understanding of how they actually make decisions – the so-called black box problem. Nevertheless, there are techniques that can shed light on the logic behind their answers and this can lead to unexpected discoveries.
While AI cannot currently formulate hypotheses independently, it can inspire scientists to approach problems from new perspectives.
We will soon see more new versions of AI chatbots based on the latest LLM technology, known as GPT-4. We’ll see AI that can handle different types of data, such as images and speech, as well as text. These are called multimodal systems.
But let’s gaze a little further into the future. Auto-GPT, an advanced AI tool released by Significant Gravitas, is already making waves in the tech industry.
Auto-GPT is given a general goal, such as planning a birthday party, and splits it into sub-tasks which it then completes by itself, without human input. This sets it apart from ChatGPT.
Auto-GPT incorporates AI agents, or systems, that make decisions based on predetermined rules and goals. Despite installation limitations, such an functionality problems when used with Windows, Auto-GPT shows great potential in various applications.
Humanoid robots – those that look and move like us – have significantly advanced since the first Darpa Robotics Challenge in 2015, a contest where teams built robots to perform a series of complex tasks set by the organisers. These included getting out of a car, opening a door and drilling a hole in a wall. Many struggled to achieve the objectives.
However, startups are now developing “humanoids” capable of doing tasks like these and being used in warehouses and factories.
Advancements in AI fields such as computer vision, as well as in power-dense batteries which provide short bursts of high current, have enabled robots to navigate complex environments, maintaining balance dynamically – in real time. Figure AI, a company building humanoid robots for warehouse work, has already secured US$70 million (£55 million) in investment funding.
Other companies, including 1X, Apptronik and Tesla, are also investing in humanoid robots, which indicates that the field is maturing. Humanoid robots offer advantages over other robots in tasks requiring navigation, manoeuvrability, and adaptability because in part, they will be operating in environments that have been built around human needs.
The long term success of these four will depend on more than just computation power.
Humanoid robots could fail to gain traction if their production and maintenance costs outweigh their benefits. AI lawyers and chatbot assistants might possess remarkable efficiency. However, their adoption might be halted if their decision making conflicts with society’s “moral compass” or laws don’t agree with their use.
Striking a balance between cost-effectiveness and society’s values is crucial for ensuring these technologies can truly flourish.
Fabian Stephany receives funding as part of this lectureship via the Dieter-Schwarz-Foundation.
Johann Laux receives funding from the “The Emerging Laws of Oversight” project, supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Around 2% of adults worldwide suffer from a condition called non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (Nash), an advanced form of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. This occurs when fat builds up in the liver, causing inflammation and scarring.
Without treatment it can eventually lead to liver cirrhosis – and it can also increase the risk of other serious health conditions, such as heart disease.
There is currently no medication to treat Nash. Since excess fat in the liver is what causes the inflammation and scarring that is characteristic of the condition, the current mainstay treatment for patients is weight loss.
However, the kind of weight loss most people are able to achieve on their own is modest and not enough for significant reductions in liver fat and change inflammation and scarring.
But our recent study has shown that rapid weight loss achieved through the “soups and shakes” diet – which is commonly used to treat obesity and type 2 diabetes – may be able to reduce the severity of Nash.
To conduct our study, we recruited 16 participants with obesity, Nash and moderate to advanced liver scarring. Five of the participants were female and 11 were male. Most participants were white.
All of the participants took part in the “soups and shakes” weight loss programme, replacing their regular meals with specially formulated soups, shakes and bars for 12 weeks. They consumed four products of their choice daily, which provided them with about 880 calories and all the essential vitamins and minerals.
After the initial 12-week period, they gradually began re-introducing regular food to their diet over the next 12 weeks. They were also given regular support from a dietitian to keep them on track and motivated throughout the 24-week study.
At the start of the study, participants were weighed, had their blood pressure taken, blood tests done and two scans that measured the health of their liver. These scans estimated how advanced their liver inflammation and scarring was and the amount of fat in their liver.
These tests were also repeated at 12 and 24 weeks – with an additional blood test done at four weeks.
Fourteen of the participants completed the 24-week study. Participants lost an average of 15% of their body weight, showing they largely adhered to the weight loss programme.
Our study also showed that the rapid weight loss was safe for participants. In the past, this kind of diet programme wasn’t recommended to Nash patients due to concerns over how safe it may be. The most common side effect patients experienced was constipation – but this was temporary and typically only mild.
Scans also showed that most participants had significant improvements in liver fat and in markers of liver inflammation and scarring.
These are some of the largest improvements in liver disease severity reported in research to date, approaching the level of improvement seen with weight loss after bariatric surgery. No trialled medication has shown such a large improvement.
While some weight regain is likely to happen, if participants are able to maintain at least most of their weight loss after the study ends, this could possibly reverse the trajectory of their liver disease.
What’s more, systolic blood pressure and haemoglobin A1C (a marker of blood sugar control) also significantly improved in participants who’d had hypertension and type 2 diabetes at the start of the study. This may suggest that the programme could be used to reduce the risk of heart disease, which is the most common cause of death in people with Nash.
Because our results are only from a small study, further research is needed to test this programme in a larger trial with more diverse participants and a control group. It will also be interesting to see whether this programme could be useful for patients suffering with more advanced forms of liver disease – such as liver cirrhosis.
But it is promising to see from our study that the diet appears to be safe for people with Nash and effective in improving their liver health.
Dimitrios Koutoukidis receives funding from National Institute of Health Research. The intervention was donated to the University of Oxford by Nestle Health Science with dietetic support provided by Oviva. Perspectum donated the MRI analysis. None of these associations led to payments to the author.
Data collected by an observatory in Antarctica has produced our first view of the Milky Way galaxy through the lens of neutrino particles. It’s the first time we have seen our galaxy “painted” with a particle, rather than in different wavelengths of light.
The result, published in Science, provides researchers with a new window on the cosmos. The neutrinos are thought to be produced, in part, by high-energy, charged particles called cosmic rays colliding with other matter. Because of the limits of our detection equipment, there’s much we still don’t know about cosmic rays. Therefore, neutrinos are another way of studying them.
It has been speculated since antiquity that the Milky Way we see arching across the night sky consists of stars like our Sun. In the 18th century, it was recognised to be a flattened slab of stars that we are viewing from within. It is only 100 years since we learnt that the Milky Way is in fact a galaxy, or “island universe”, one among a hundred billion others.
In 1923, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble identified a type of pulsating star called a “Cepheid variable” in what was then known as the Andromeda “nebula” (a giant cloud of dust and gas). Thanks to the prior work of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, this provided a measure of the distance from Earth to Andromeda.
This demonstrated that Andromeda is a far away galaxy like our own, settling a long-running debate and completely transforming our notion of our place in the universe.
Subsequently, as new astronomical windows have opened on to the sky, we have seen our galactic home in many different wavelengths of light –- in radio waves, in various infrared bands, in X-rays and in gamma-rays. Now, we can see our cosmic abode in neutrino particles, which have very low mass and only interact very weakly with other matter – hence their nickname of “ghost particles”.
Neutrinos are emitted from our galaxy when cosmic rays collide with interstellar matter. However, neutrinos are also produced by stars like the Sun, some exploding stars, or supernovas, and probably by most high-energy phenomena that we observe in the universe such as gamma-ray bursts and quasars. Hence, they can provide us an unprecedented view of highly energetic processes in our galaxy – a view that we can’t get from using light alone.
The new breakthrough detection required a rather strange “telescope” that is buried several kilometres deep in the Antarctic ice cap, under the South Pole. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory uses a gigatonne of the ultra-transparent ice under huge pressures to detect a form of energy called Cherenkov radiation.
This faint radiation is emitted by charged particles, which, in ice, can travel faster than light (but not in a vacuum). The particles are created by incoming neutrinos, which come from cosmic ray collisions in the galaxy, hitting the atoms in the ice.
Cosmic rays are mainly proton particles (these make up the atomic nucleus along with neutrons), together with a few heavy nuclei and electrons. About a century ago, these were discovered to be raining down on the Earth uniformly from all directions. We do not yet definitively know all their sources, as their travel directions are scrambled by magnetic fields that exist in the space between stars.
Neutrinos can act as unique tracers of cosmic ray interactions deep in the Milky Way. However, the ghostly particles are also generated when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. So the researchers using the IceCube data needed a way to distinguish between the neutrinos of “astrophysical” origin – those originating from extraterrestrial sources – and those created from cosmic ray collisions within our atmosphere.
The researchers focused on a type of neutrino interaction in the ice called a cascade. These result in roughly spherical showers of light and give the researchers a better level of sensitivity to the astrophysical neutrinos from the Milky Way. This is because a cascade provides a better measurement of a neutrino’s energy than other types of interactions, even though they are harder to reconstruct.
Analysis of ten years of IceCube data using sophisticated machine learning techniques yielded nearly 60,000 neutrino events with an energy above 500 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). Of these, only about 7% were of astrophysical origin, with the rest being due to the “background” source of neutrinos that are generated in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The hypothesis that all the neutrino events could be due to cosmic rays hitting the Earth’s atmosphere was definitively rejected at a level of statistical significance known as 4.5 sigma. Put another way, our result has only about a 1 in 150,000 chance of being a fluke.
This falls a little short of the conventional 5 sigma standard for claiming a discovery in particle physics. However, such emission from the Milky Way is expected on sound astrophysical grounds.
With the upcoming enlargement of the experiment – IceCube-Gen2 will be ten times bigger – we will acquire many more neutrino events and the current blurry picture will turn into a detailed view of our galaxy, one that we have never had before.
Subir Sarkar received funding from the University of Oxford to support his participation in IceCube.
Finland has been the happiest country on earth for the past six years, according to the World Happiness Survey. This survey relies on the Cantril ladder life evaluation question:
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?
Finland comes out top, followed by Denmark and Iceland. Just why Finns are happier than others comes down to a number of factors including lower income inequality (most importantly, the difference between the highest paid and the lowest paid), high social support, freedom to make decisions, and low levels of corruption.
The graph below shows all 44 counties for which there is both happiness data and income inequality data, each as a coloured dot. The vertical scale shows average happiness, the horizontal scale income inequality.
Average levels of happiness and inequality by country
The measure of income inequality used here is the Gini coefficient of income inequality, as reported by the OECD. It is the highest rate recorded in each county in any year after 2010 up to the most recent year for which there is data. The graph shows the close relationship between these two measures. In general, when income inequality is larger, money matters more and people are less happy.
Finland also has other attributes that may help people feel happier. It has a highly decentralised publicly funded healthcare system and only a very small private health sector. This is far more effective and efficient than some alternatives used in other countries. Public transport is reliable and affordable, and Helsinki airport is ranked as the best in northern Europe.
There is a Finnish proverb that seems relevant here: Onnellisuus on se paikka puuttuvaisuuden ja yltäkylläisyyden välillä (Happiness is a place between too little and too much).
Finland, Norway and Hungary report similar levels of income inequality, yet people in Finland are, on average, happier. Why is this?
According to the World Inequality Database, the highest-paid tenth of people in Finland take home a third of all income (33%). That contrasts with the same group taking 36% in the UK and 46% in the US. These differences may not appear great, but they have a huge effect on overall happiness because so much less is left for the rest in the more unequal countries – and the rich become more fearful. When a small number of people become much richer, this is an understandable fear.
Read more: How to ditch 'fomo' and foster 'jomo' – the joy of missing out
In 2021, it was suggested by a sociology professor that simply by having more reasonable expectations, people in Nordic countries appeared to be happier. However, that cannot explain why Finland is so very different from Norway on the happiness scale.
All kinds of explanations are possible, including slight nuances of language as well as culture. There is now even the question of whether this global survey is beginning to introduce its own bias, as Finns now know why they are being asked the question (they moved even further ahead of Denmarkin the most recent survey).
However, it is very likely that Finland having more equitable schools, where you are likely to get a good education whichever you choose, as well as a fairer school policy than Norway (almost all Finns go to their nearest school) might actually matter too. So too, a better housing policy with a wide variety of social housing and lower homelessness, a health service with waiting times that are the envy of the world – sometimes just being a matter of days (even during the worst years of the pandemic) – and numerous other accolades.
Finland ranks first, second or third in over 100 global measures of economic and social success – better than Norway does. And it has less money overall (and hardly any oil). You could excuse the Finns a little smugness (omahyväisyys).
Why does Hungary do so badly despite the income gap between its people being hardly any wider than in Finland and Norway? One could argue that this is to do with its divided politics. In 2022, the European parliament suggested that “Hungary can no longer be considered a full democracy”.
Freedom matters to people greatly, as well as freedom from fear, and that could explain also why Turkey and India have lower levels of happiness than their levels of economic inequality might predict.
In contrast, South Africa and China may be a little happier than their levels of inequality would suggest. South Africa became a democracy in 1994 shortly after Nelson Mandela was freed, and many people will remember the previous period. People in China are not as fearful as they are often portrayed in the west.
Most countries exhibit happiness levels (and much else) that are very predictable from their inequality levels. The UK is spot on in the middle of what you would expect for one of Europe’s most economically unequal countries.
The graph above also shows that (almost as unequal) Israel is a little happier than it ought to be – although it is not clear that the sample taken there included all groups that currently live under that state. Also, that sample was taken in 2022, before the recent widespread protests in Israel.
The other outlier shown in the graph is Costa Rica, where the president said in 2019:
Seventy years ago, Costa Rica did away with the army. This allows for many things. Eight per cent of our GDP is invested in education because we don’t have to spend on the army. So our strength is human talent, human wellbeing.
So what can the people of a country do if they want to be happier? The most important thing is to elect governments that will ensure the country becomes more equal by income. After that, ensuring your social services – school, housing and healthcare – are efficient and equitable matters most. And finally, consider your degree of freedom, whether you are actually including everyone in your surveys, and how fearful your population is.
Danny Dorling does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Many words we use come with hidden baggage. For instance we tend to assume that local, natural and grass-fed foods are good for our health, the environment and animal welfare, while intensive farming is bad for these things. However, the evidence often doesn’t bear this out.
Here are five terms about food which we need to use more precisely.
Every environmentally-damaging activity is local to somewhere. However, many assume lower “food miles” always means “better for the environment”.
When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, what you eat matters much more than where it’s come from. Although transport is a key sector for climate change, transporting food from farms to us (“food miles”) makes up on average only 6% of products’ total carbon footprint.
Very little food is air freighted, which has high emissions and should be avoided. Most travels by boat, rail and lorry, with much lower emissions per km. Of course, all other things being equal, fewer food miles means fewer emissions, and there are other reasons people might wish to purchase local produce.
Shifting how people travel matters much more than food miles. If you want to reduce emissions from transport, helping yourself and others cut out flying or taking the bus instead of driving will make a much bigger difference than not buying ship-freighted bananas.
“Intensive” is rarely used in a positive context for farming. People tend to associate it with low animal welfare, pollution and faceless corporations.
But there are lots of different ways to farm intensively, and it is worth asking what sort of inputs are being referred to. Do we mean lots of human workers? High energy and electricity use? High fuel use? High pesticide use? Are we considering input levels in terms of per hectare, per tonne of produce, per 1,000 calories?
Many fruits, vegetables and other produce, from strawberries to mushrooms to vanilla, rely on manual labour for harvesting. However these types of produce are farmed, they are highly labour-intensive compared to arable crops which can be gathered by fewer people operating combine harvesters and tractors/trailers.
Organic crops are often used as an opposite example to “intensive” farms. They use fewer pesticides and so are less intensive in that respect. However, organic farming tends to have more intensive fuel and machinery use to mechanically break up weeds without herbicides, or extra human labour to control weeds manually.
Intensive farming is often used as shorthand for high-yield farming – that is, farming that produces more food per hectare. Land efficiency in food production is generally viewed positively. High yielding farm systems, with low pollution, soil loss and so on per tonne of produce, are arguably the main way we can feed the world with the least environmental damage.
The alternative to intensive high-yield farming is extensive low-yield farming, which ironically requires much more land. Land which could instead be used for reforestation, wetlands, solar or wind farms, housing or parks.
Similar to “intensive”, this is almost universally used negatively with respect to animal welfare, sustainability and farming. The suggestion is that agriculture prior to the industrial revolution was always sustainable. But this is not the case.
Ancient and modern farming systems can both significantly damage the land and wild ecosystems. Farmers in the Roman empire seriously damaged their soils.
Norse settlers in Iceland deforested the landscape for their crops and livestock, which led to widespread loss of the island’s erosion-prone volcanic soils. These historic farming practices still affect the country’s ecology today.
Grass-fed is generally viewed positively. However, grass-fed beef and lamb has a huge carbon and land footprint compared to pork, chicken and protein rich plants such as peas, beans and lentils.
In many countries most grass-fed livestock are also fed crops. This means the meat they produce can use more cropland – cropland alone, before even considering pasture land – per kilo than peas or beans.
Similar to local, “natural” is a friendly-sounding term which many assume means that food is good for us and for the planet. Natural is good. Unnatural is bad and, well, unnatural.
However, many natural foods are poisonous and dangerous. As the biologist Ottoline Leyser has pointed out, “No one sends their children into the woods saying ‘Eat anything you find. It’s all natural, so it must be good for you.’”
Meat is often viewed as more natural than vegan meat alternatives brewed in vats with a number of different ingredients. But modern livestock farming has involved millennia of artificial selection and is far from what most people would consider natural.
Animals are unable to move and form family and social bonds as they would in the wild. You won’t see a domestic cow or chicken in nature as they’d be eaten by predators in no time. These animals only exist because humans bred them into existence from less tasty and less manageable wild ancestors.
Meat alternatives – unnatural though they may be – generally have much smaller carbon and land footprints compared to meat. Unnatural can be better for nature.
So, the next time someone talks about intensive farming or natural food, ask them exactly what they mean.
Emma Garnett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Seals, sea lions and walruses – a group of animals called pinnipeds – have been heavily exploited throughout much of human history. Many of these species have at some point even been threatened with extinction.
But, in the UK, their decline has largely been reversed. Since the Conservation of Seals Act 1970 prohibited the killing or injuring of grey and harbour seals around the UK, the number of grey seals in the country has doubled to 157,000 – although there seems to be significant regional variation. More than one-third of the world’s grey seals now populate the UK’s waters.
This is excellent news for seal conservation. But it can be problematic for the fishing industry, which now faces an increase in damage to catch and gear inflicted by seals. Understanding how seal populations are changing will help manage their interactions with fisheries and other marine industries.
Grey seals and other pinnipeds are intelligent and highly adaptable creatures, able to switch their prey and foraging habits to suit their environment. But the threats these species face are changing fast. Slow to reproduce and vulnerable to climate change and disease, these now common animals could become threatened in the future should conditions continue to change.
The population expansion of UK grey seals is probably the result of several factors.
In the decade that followed the Conservation of Seals Act, rising populations may have been the result of a lack of hunting or managed culls. Culls were carried out at some grey seal sites in the 1970s, but not as blanket attempts to control the overall population.
But since then, population increases may instead be due to changes in food availability. In the absence of other sources of mortality, food availability often drives population expansion. And grey seals are opportunistic foragers that feed on whichever prey is easiest to catch.
Several studies have looked at how grey seal diets have changed over the past few decades. By examining the hard parts that remain in seal faeces such as bones and shells, it is possible to reconstruct their prey. This technique underreports some food groups such as salmonids, but is currently the only method that allows scientists to quantify a seal’s diet.
In three separate years (1985, 2002 and 2010), seal faeces were collected in coastal areas of Scotland and eastern England. Seal diets consisted of 66 different species, showcasing their ability to exploit whatever prey becomes available.
When large fish are absent, they hunt smaller prey such as sandeels. But, as populations of larger prey species such as herring, cod and whiting increase, they exploit this too.
Grey seals, and other pinnipeds, inhabit a dynamic environment and the threats they face are changing rapidly. Climate change, for example, is affecting local food composition and abundance.
One of the main ways this occurs is through a process called “tropicalisation”, where rising sea temperatures cause warm water species to replace species that live in cooler waters. On average, marine species are shifting polewards at a rate of 72km per decade.
Seals are also vulnerable to population shocks. Pinnipeds have a long lifespan and tend to have small numbers of offspring – usually only one pup per year. Any environmental change that is short-lived can be buffered by seals’ longevity. If they don’t successfully pup one year, then they are likely to do so the next.
But any increase in adult mortality can quickly affect a population. Seal populations are therefore particularly vulnerable to diseases and other sources of adult mortality.
Respiratory diseases have a particularly acute impact on the foraging ability of diving animals such as seals. What could be a relatively minor threat to an animal that lives on land, could be life-threatening to one that dives. For example, more than 3,000 sea lions were found dead or dying on Peru’s coast following an outbreak of influenza in January 2023. Over 1,000 sea lions died on just one island, Isla San Gallan.
Climate change is likely to increase the risk of disease in the future. Research finds that warmer conditions favour pathogen development, survival and spread.
The way that humans use the sea is also changing. Offshore wind, for example, is projected to supply around one-third of the UK’s electricity generation by 2030. But, the construction, operation and maintenance of offshore wind farms causes noise disturbance and may change the behaviour of marine animals.
Research on harbour seals found that they tend to avoid areas where piling activity (the process of driving foundations into the seabed) is ongoing. Where piling is occurring, seals use of the area was found to decrease by 83%.
But offshore wind infrastructure can also lead to the development of artificial reefs. These reefs may result in an increased density of prey in the surrounding area and could improve foraging opportunities. Whether ocean infrastructure such as this will benefit seals depends on if it supports an increase in prey populations across a region – or simply concentrates existing populations in a smaller area.
Grey seals are the top marine predator in UK waters and seem to have become more common since the 1980s. But their situation remains precarious and they have little buffer should conditions change. This vulnerability highlights the importance of understanding the impact of future threats including climate change, more renewable energy infrastructure and disease outbreak.
Katrina Davis receives funding from the John Fell Oxford University Press Research Fund.
Richard Bevan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Many of us have sounds that we find to be annoying. But for some people, certain sounds actually trigger extreme reactions. It’s a disorder known as misophonia, where sounds like chewing, sniffing and pen clicking can cause intense emotional reactions – and sometimes even physical reactions, such as an elevated heart rate and spike in blood pressure.
As it turns out, this condition is more common than many realise, as our recent study showed. We estimate that nearly one in five adults in the UK may have misophonia.
To conduct our study, a survey was completed by 772 people, who were selected to create a sample that represented the UK population in terms of age, gender and ethnicity. The survey included a new questionnaire called the S-Five, a tool which helps us measure a person’s likelihood of having misophonia.
The S-Five includes 25 statements, asking how participants react to various sounds and the effect it has on them. For example, the survey included statements such as, “If I cannot avoid certain sounds, I feel helpless” and “My job opportunities are limited because of my reaction to certain noises”.
Participants were asked to rate how true each statement was for them on a scale from zero to ten (ten being very true). The survey also contained a list of 37 common trigger sounds – such as loud chewing and repetitive sniffing – and participants were asked to select their typical emotional reaction to those sounds (including a “no feeling” option).
They were then asked to rate the intensity of their reaction to each sound on a scale from zero to ten. The survey also asked participants whether they were currently experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety.
In addition to the survey, psychologists interviewed a selection of 29 people from the survey sample, plus a further 26 people who self-identified with having misophonia. The psychologists asked more detailed questions about the person’s reactions to sounds and the impact of these reactions.
At the end of the interviews, the psychologists rated whether they thought the person had misophonia or not, based on the nature of their reactions and how much they avoided things or needed strategies to be able to cope with certain sounds. The information from these interviews was then used to find a cut-off score for misophonia on the S-Five survey, which in turn was used to find the prevalence of misophonia.
For the purposes of our study, we considered someone likely to have misophonia if they consistently reported that hearing certain sounds had a significant burden on them and affected their daily life. We also included people with “sub-clinical” misophonia – which is when sounds cause a significant problem, but do not affect their daily life.
We were able to estimate that around 18% of the participants in our sample were likely to have misophonia. There was no difference between men and women in terms of the prevalence and severity of misophonia. Age had some relationship to a person’s likelihood of experiencing misophonia, with people reporting less severe reactions the older they were.
We also found that just under 14% of participants were familiar with the term misophonia, which means there are likely to be many people who have intense reactions to sounds but do not yet know the term to describe this problem.
These results are similar to what other studies have found. One US study showed that 17.3% of a general population sample had misophonia. They also found that those with misophonia were slightly younger than those without.
The prevalence of misophonia was higher in women than men, unlike our study which found no difference. Another US-based study found that only around 11% of their participants were familiar with the term misophonia.
Finding certain sounds annoying doesn’t necessarily mean you have misophonia. Our study showed that 85% of people find sounds like chewing, sniffing and dogs barking repeatedly (all common misophonia trigger sounds) to be annoying. A further 75% of people had a problem with slurping, loud breathing and coughing.
It’s the nature of how a person reacts to such sounds that determines if they have misophonia. While the average person might react to sounds such as loud chewing with irritation and disgust, people with misophonia will react with anger or panic to the same sounds, as our previous study showed.
People with misophonia may also feel trapped or helpless when they can’t avoid certain sounds. They might also worry about having aggressive outbursts, feel bad about their reactions and miss out on social events as a result of these triggering sounds.
Misophonia was first recognised in 2001, but was only just acknowledged as a disorder in 2022. It’s no wonder that many people – even those seriously affected by misophonia – are unaware of it. We hope that our study may provide some comfort to people who thought they were alone in their extreme reactions to everyday sounds.
We also hope our study will raise awareness of the condition, so that people with misophonia can get the help they need. While there’s no sign of a cure in sight, cognitive behavioural therapy may help reduce the severity of misophonia.
Jane Gregory receives funding from The Wellcome Trust and is on the scientific advisory board for SoQuiet, a misophonia charity. The research was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre and the Wellcome Trust.
The heirs to two of the most violent revolutions in modern history shook hands and took stock of their “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era”, at a recent meeting in Moscow.
Many in the west have puzzled over this relationship between Chinese Communist Party chairman Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Some have imagined, for example, that Xi would be a neutral party in Putin’s war in Ukraine, or that he could even be a peacemaker.
But rather than imagining a troubling new partnership has emerged unpredictably after decades of peacetime globalisation, we should look to a longer arc of history to understand Russia and China’s shared confrontation with the world.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – backed openly by China’s economic power – is just the first geopolitical product of a restored Russia-China axis and the return of two states whose ambitions were never sated by the post-cold war peace. Once again, the world’s democracies are faced with the challenge of organising their defences against these two dictatorships in both Europe and Asia.
Writing in 1950, as American grand strategy began to cohere around the cold war challenge presented by the Soviet Union, US state department official Paul Nitze explained the period of upheaval that defined his generation’s experience of international affairs:
Within the past thirty-five years the world has experienced two global wars of tremendous violence. It has witnessed two revolutions – the Russian and Chinese – of extreme scope and intensity. It has also seen the collapse of five empires – the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Italian, and Japanese – and the drastic decline of two major imperial systems, the British and the French.
Nitze, the architect of one of the cold war’s primary strategy documents, NSC-68, observed a world in which “the international distribution of power has been fundamentally altered”. Among the reasons for that alteration and upheaval were the two revolutions he wisely acknowledged, the Russian and Chinese. Two revolutions whose consequences, we should now recognise, have not fully ended.
We should remind ourselves that 21st-century Russia and China – and the leaders that run them – are products of the original Russian and Chinese revolutions that Nitze understood would shape the history and geopolitics of his lifetime. Xi and Putin, as products of these revolutions, are also heirs to their anti-western ideas and strategies of confrontation.
As American spymaster Jack Devine points out, Putin’s career took shape in Dresden, East Germany, ensconced in the Warsaw Pact world and he has called the Soviet empire’s collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. Now, as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi is heir to what the party calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, a project of national revival that originated with Mao’s “New China” and has continued on in various forms since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Xi’s China seeks confrontation with the US and the establishment of a new order with China to “take center stage in the world”. In this endeavour, Putin’s Russia is Xi’s chief collaborator and “strategic partner”.
As totalitarian communist states in the 20th century, Russia and China challenged the world’s democracies and sought to establish an order of their own. The decade-long Sino-Soviet alliance spanned the Korean War and multiple Taiwan crises, producing a two-theatre strategic challenge for the US and its allies spanning both Europe and Asia. The US, having just fought the second world war in both the Atlantic and Pacific, was perhaps more prepared to manage a two-theatre strategic contest.
Read more: Putin and the ICC: history shows just how hard it is to bring a head of state to justice
Simultaneous containment of both communist China and the Soviet Union provided a check against their ambitions. The Sino-Soviet alliance eventually became unsustainable and broke apart largely because Mao aspired to return China to a position of power and centrality in world affairs; he would not tolerate a role as junior partner to Moscow.
Today these roles have reversed, and these ambitions have been restored, not in the name of communist ideology, but in light of an aggressive, militarist nationalism that animates both regimes.
Xi and Putin showed the world the philosophical depth and contours of their relationship in their joint declaration of partnership at the Beijing Olympics in 2022 just weeks before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But the strategic partnership goes back even earlier.
Throughout the 2010s, both nations worked to expand their military, economic and diplomatic ties. In the statement at the Beijing Olympics, China and Russia pledged mutual support for the other’s “core interests”. Moscow pledged its support for Beijing’s claims over Taiwan, which it called “an inalienable part of China”, and Beijing pledged that “both sides oppose further enlargement of Nato and call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologised cold war approaches”.
Joint nuclear-capable bomber exercises, land and naval exercises, increasing trade in energy, technology, China’s propaganda support for Moscow, and new reports of Chinese assault rifles and body armour for Russia, are just some elements of what has taken shape since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The shared China-Russia division of Europe and Asia is reminiscent of the original geography of the Sino-Soviet Alliance. As Stalin told his counterparts in communist China: “There should be some division of labour between us … you may take more responsibility in working in the East … and we will take more responsibility in the West.”
Putin’s war in Ukraine is not the only conflict, of course, that this axis may produce. China’s economic engagement with the democracies in the post-cold war supercharged a modern-day People’s Republic of China that now contests the world’s democracies in critical technologies and strategic industries and has built a military of unmatched scope in Asia that is meant to settle scores of its own in the Pacific.
This is the return of 20th-century antagonists whose ambitions never truly went away.
Jonathan D T Ward is the Founder and President of Atlas Organization, a strategy consultancy focused on US-China global competition. He has maintained affiliations with various think tanks and research institutes in Washington DC and London over the years, including Center for Strategic and International Studies, International Institute of Strategic Studies, Center for a New American Security, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
The series of scandals that has hit the UK’s biggest police force suggests longstanding and serious underlying problems. The newly published Casey review details these problems in depth, adding another stain to the Metropolitan police’s reputation.
The report found that institutional misogyny, racism and homophobia are rampant throughout the Met, the organisation’s recruitment and vetting is weak, and internal processes fail to adequately tackle poor performance.
But how different is the Met from the 44 other police forces in England and Wales?
The Met generally deals with more violent offences, such as murder and robbery, than other forces. It also has the highest percentage of firearms operations and the highest number of firearms officers.
Firearms roles are seen as the most prestigious and lucrative jobs in the force. And it is these specialist units where the Casey review identified “some of the worst cultures, behaviours and practices” in terms of bullying, racism and sexism, and found that “normal rules do not seem to apply or be applied”. Newcomers to these groups often have to adapt to these established, toxic cultural norms if they want to succeed.
The review described sexist attitudes towards the (very few) female firearms officers, and reported officers being granted immunity and even encouraged to break rules.
The Casey review suggests that the institutional sexism in the Met doesn’t just affect officers, but also the women who need the Met’s services. As one officer told Casey review investigators, the force’s detection rate for rate is so low “you may as well say it’s legal in London”.
In recent years there has been an explosion in the number of offences being reported that predominantly affect women, including domestic abuse and rape.
Currently, only 30% of the Met’s workforce is female, less than the national average of 34.9% in police forces. Other forces fare a little better in comparison, with West Yorkshire police having 42% of its workforce as female, one of the highest in the country.
At leadership levels there is an even greater discrepancy between genders – 76% of Met chief inspectors are male. This is higher than most other forces, as 70% of Greater Manchester police and 64% West Midlands police chief inspectors are male.
In general, forces are moving in the right direction when it comes to gender representation. In 2021, eight forces hired more women than men. And in senior leadership, 40% of chief constables are now female, a nearly five-fold increase since 2019.
Increased representation on its own doesn’t automatically lead to culture change. Research suggests that women are more likely to use transformational leadership techniques in the workplace, such as cooperation and consultation with the workforce, which can help foster an inclusive environment. But in policing, senior women are still frequently discriminated against and feel that they struggle to have their authority recognised and accepted by the rank-and-file.
Overall, the differences women bring to policing appear to be underappreciated by frontline officers, with leaders also failing to adequately value and reward their contributions.
The Metropolitan police currently has the most ethnically diverse workforce, with 16.7% of officers identifying as originating from an ethnic minority background. However, this is still well below the 46% of Londoners who belong to an ethnic minority.
The national picture is even less promising. In England and Wales, the proportion of ethnic minority police officers currently sits at 8.1%, compared to a general population rate of 18.3%. Under representation is particularly noticeable in the senior positions, compared with the rank-and-file. Of those at chief inspector rank or above, 5.5% belong to a minority ethnic group.
The police are failing to attract a more diverse array of police officers, despite repeated pledges to do so. Central to the drive to diversify policing is the belief that officers belonging to minority groups can help build bridges between police and communities.
However, it should be noted that many ethnic minorities often believe that ethnic minority officers continue to represent an institutionally racist organisation, regardless of background. And research from the US finds inconclusive evidence of the effectiveness of diversity drives in decreasing police violence towards ethnic minorities.
It might be easy for other forces to distance themselves from criticism of the Met, and claim the issues are specific to one organisation. But the Casey report should serve as a warning sign to other forces that they too need to rid themselves of all and any institutional sexism and racism.
Just over half of Londoners perceive the Met as a reliable institution, trust in the police has eroded nationwide. Almost half of the population state they no longer trust police officers.
Trust, once lost, can be hard to restore. The Casey report states that not all forces are fully cognisant of the risks these issues pose to their reputation.
At the core of the policing mandate is a duty to protect the public. Protecting officers who continue to perpetuate a sexist and bigoted culture is an anathema to this. Policing needs to change so that it attracts the right people for the job, and can show the public that they are deserving of their trust.
Kathryn Farrow receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.
“ChatGPT is a natural language generation platform based on the OpenAI GPT-3 language model.”
Why did you believe the above statement? A simple answer is that you trust the author of this article (or perhaps the editor). We cannot verify everything we are told, so we regularly trust the testimony of friends, strangers, “experts” and institutions.
Trusting someone may not always be the primary reason for believing what they say is true. (I might already know what you’ve told me, for example.) But the fact that we trust the speaker gives us extra motivation for believing what they say.
AI chatbots therefore raise interesting issues about trust and testimony. We have to consider whether we trust what natural language generators like ChatGPT tell us. Another matter is whether these AI chatbots are even capable of being trustworthy.
Suppose you tell me it is raining outside. According to one way philosophers view testimony, I am justified in believing you only if I have reasons for thinking your testimony is reliable – for example, you were just outside – and no overriding reasons for thinking it isn’t. This is known as the reductionist theory of testimony.
This view makes justified beliefs – assumptions that we feel entitled to hold – difficult to acquire.
But according to another view of testimony, I would be justified in believing it’s raining outside as long as I have no reason to think this statement is false. This makes justified beliefs through testimony much easier to acquire. This is called the non-reductionist theory of testimony.
Note that neither of these theories involves trust in the speaker. My relationship to them is one of reliance, not trust.
When I rely on someone or something, I make a prediction that it will do what I expect it to. For example, I rely on my alarm clock to sound at the time I set it, and I rely on other drivers to obey the rules of the road.
Trust, however, is more than mere reliance. To illustrate this, let’s examine our reactions to misplaced trust compared with misplaced reliance.
If I trusted Roxy to water my prizewinning tulips while I was on vacation and she carelessly let them die, I might rightly feel betrayed. Whereas if I relied on my automatic sprinkler to water the tulips and it failed to come on, I might be disappointed but would be wrong to feel betrayed.
In other words, trust makes us vulnerable to betrayal, so being trustworthy is morally significant in a way that being reliable is not.
The difference between trust and reliance highlights some important points about testimony. When a person tells someone it is raining, they are not just sharing information; they are taking responsibility for the veracity of what they say.
In philosophy, this is called the assurance theory of testimony. A speaker offers the listener a kind of guarantee that what they are saying is true, and in doing so gives the listener a reason to believe them. We trust the speaker, rather than rely on them, to tell the truth.
If I found out you were guessing about the rain but luckily got it right, I would still feel my trust had been let down because your “guarantee” was empty. The assurance aspect also helps capture why lies seem to us morally worse than false statements. While in both cases you invite me to trust and then let down my trust, lies attempt to use my trust against me to facilitate the betrayal.
If the assurance view is right, then ChatGPT needs to be capable of taking responsibility for what it says in order to be a trustworthy speaker, rather than merely reliable. While it seems we can sensibly attribute agency to AI to perform tasks as required, whether an AI could be a morally responsible agent is another question entirely.
Some philosophers argue that moral agency is not restricted to human beings. Others argue that AI cannot be held morally responsible because, to quote a few examples, they are incapable of mental states, lack autonomy, or lack the capacity for moral reasoning.
Nevertheless, ChatGPT is not a moral agent; it cannot take responsibility for what it says. When it tells us something, it offers no assurances as to its truth. This is why it can give false statements, but not lie. On its website, OpenAI – which built ChatGPT – says that because the AI is trained on data from the internet, it “may be inaccurate, untruthful, and otherwise misleading at times”.
At best, it is a “truth-ometer” or fact-checker – and by many accounts, not a particularly accurate one. While we might sometimes be justified in relying on what it says, we shouldn’t trust it.
In case you are wondering, the opening quote of this article was an excerpt of ChatGPT’s response when I asked it: “What is ChatGPT?” So you should not have trusted that the statement was true. However, I can assure you that it is.
Mackenzie Graham receives funding from the Wellcome Trust.
In its new illegal migration bill, the UK government has introduced some surprisingly radical proposals designed to discourage people from crossing the Channel in small boats to claim asylum.
Chiefly, it targets people who arrive in Britain through irregular routes, barring them from seeking asylum. And the UK does not offer many legal routes, with exceptions such as the schemes for Ukrainian and Afghan refugees.
Immigration lawyers are still picking over the details of the bill – initial debate is focused on whether it violates the UK’s legal obligations under international human rights or refugee law. While these questions are important, the practical and operational constraints are arguably the biggest obstacle to implementing it.
On paper, the bill effectively opts the UK out of the global asylum system as we know it, by preventing people from claiming asylum if they have arrived through irregular routes. That global system is, after all, based on the principle that people must usually reach a country’s territory in order to claim asylum. And this often involves irregular entry, because people fleeing threatening or otherwise dire circumstances may not have proper documents.
Read more: Illegal immigration bill does more than 'push the boundaries' of international law
The UN has said the new UK bill represents a “clear breach” of the refugee convention, “which explicitly recognises that refugees may be compelled to enter a country of asylum irregularly”.
Instead of hearing asylum claims, the bill stipulates that people entering through irregular routes should be “detained and removed” from the UK. This applies regardless of nationality, including people from countries such as Afghanistan and Eritrea who would be very likely to be granted asylum in the UK under the current system.
But making something law does not mean it can be implemented. One of the biggest questions the bill raises is where people would be removed to.
If people do not come from countries deemed “safe” by the UK, they cannot be sent back to their country of origin without a decision on their asylum claim. If this is the case, the bill says they should be sent to “safe third countries”. There is currently just one third country, Rwanda, that is willing to take asylum seekers from the UK.
But even if the Rwanda scheme gets up and running, it is only expected to have capacity for around 200 people at first, though more could perhaps be processed per year. Without other safe third countries to remove people to, it is not obvious that many people could be removed in practice.
Past data illustrates this. Since January 1 2021, the UK government has already had a policy in place to remove asylum seekers it believes could have applied for asylum in another country. This would presumably include most people arriving by small boat from France. As of September 30 2022, the government had assessed around 18,000 people for removal – but had removed just 21.
Oddly, one strange quirk of the new bill is that it appears to make it harder, not easier, for the government to remove people who are not considered refugees. By preventing the government from considering asylum claims at all, it means that claims cannot be refused. People from “unsafe” countries who would have been refused cannot, under the new bill, be sent back to their countries of origin – instead, the UK will have to detain them (a costly endeavour) until a third country is willing to take them.
In 2022, the UK’s detention facilities were estimated to have a total capacity of no more than 2,500, while in the month of August last year, small boat arrivals exceeded 8,000. To accommodate more people, there would need to be a major increase in the use of detention. This is a reversal of previous government policy, which over the last ten years has aimed to minimise the use of immigration detention.
If people continue to arrive in the UK in substantial numbers, not being able to process and resolve their asylum claims could create considerable operational difficulties and financial costs – aside from the obvious human cost.
At the heart of the proposal is a gamble: that the UK will not actually need to impose this penalty on many people, because the deterrent effect will be so strong.
While this may seem like a sort of policy catch-22 – “introduce a policy to deter arrivals so that you don’t need to implement the policy to deter arrivals” – it is the argument made by some government ministers.
It’s hard to predict how much of a deterrent effect the provisions in the bill will have. They are more extreme than polices adopted in most other high-income countries, which is where most of the evidence on policy deterrence comes from.
With that said, to date there is surprisingly little evidence that asylum deterrence policies put people off in large numbers, for the simple reason that asylum seekers often have little understanding of what policies they will face when they arrive. Indeed, this has been the finding of the Home Office’s own internal research, which was released to an NGO working on migration after a Freedom of Information request and shared with our team.
There’s certainly a risk, therefore, that the UK would end up detaining (or otherwise housing and supporting) quite large numbers of people for indefinite periods if this bill is enacted.
Peter William Walsh receives funding from Trust for London and Oak Foundation. He is Senior Researcher at The Migration Observatory, University of Oxford.
The backlash to Puffin Books’ decision to update Roald Dahl’s children’s books has been swift and largely derisive. The publisher has been accused of “absurd censorship”, “corporate safetyism” and “cultural vandalism.”
At its core, however, updating Roald Dahl’s children’s books is really about the rights and control copyright grants to authors and copyright holders. Those rights are exercised to update children’s books more frequently than many of these critics may realise.
Over the past decades, authors, copyright owners and publishers have edited and updated children’s books. They have removed racial stereotypes, reflected changing gender and cultural norms and in doing so, maintained their books’ relevance and appeal to the modern reader.
Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920), Dr. Seuss’s And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street (1937), Helen Bannerman’s The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and classic children’s books series such as Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew have all changed to keep up with increasing sensitivities to racial, gender and other social stereotypes.
In 1973, Roald Dahl edited Charlie and the Chocolate Factory himself after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) criticised the Oompa Loompas, who were originally portrayed as African “pygmies”.
Classic children’s books occupy a special cultural place and evoke sentiments of tradition and nostalgia. They are venerated as works of art, making their preservation feel vital to a shared heritage.
As such, any suggestion of changing them can feel like an attack on culture itself. Of course, whose heritage and whose culture these “classic” books represent is up for debate, especially when original versions included portrayals of certain groups in hurtful or stereotypical ways.
Read more: From pygmies to puppets: what to do with Roald Dahl's enslaved Oompa-Loompas in modern adaptations?
Some argue that books for children should be held to a higher standard of sensitivity, given that children learn about their society, identity and group membership from books. Through their books, authors and copyright holders wield the power to shape the attitudes and minds of children, teaching them notions of good, bad, ugly, pretty, who is accepted and who is excluded.
Copyright law grants its holder the exclusive right to edit a copyrighted children’s book and the right to limit publication of a work. This means that during a book’s copyright term, the copyright holder has the right to make edits that maintain the book’s popularity and commercial viability.
This is true even when an author no longer owns the copyright to their work. In those situations, the copyright holder generally has the right to make edits to the work even without the author’s consent, as Goosebumps author R.L. Stine recently discovered.
These rights aren’t absolute and – most importantly – aren’t forever. Once the copyright term expires, anyone can reproduce, edit and sell new copies of an original book in any medium or format.
Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920), for example, entered the US public domain in the 1990s. Today, both the updated and the original versions (including its racial caricatures and story line about a black prince dreaming of becoming white) are available to purchase.
Dr. Seuss’s first children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street (1937), will enter the US public domain in 2033. At that time, regardless of Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ efforts to retire that book, anyone will be able to reproduce and sell new copies, complete with its original bright yellow faced “Chinaman who eats with sticks”.
Roald Dahl’s original Charlie and The Chocolate Factory will enter the US public domain in 2060. Children will once more have the opportunity to read about the African “pygmies” that Willy Wonka “discovered” and shipped to work in his factory, “fat” children like Augustus Goop and “ugly” girls who chew gum.
In the meantime, copyright holders can update and revitalise their books to broaden their readerships, protect authors’ legacies and maintain the works’ relevance. In exchange, teachers and guardians can access various versions of classic books and decide for themselves which versions their children should read.
Cathay Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Suicide is an act so shocking and violent that it undoes not only sensation, memory and feeling, but meaning. Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong describes how it unpicks even the connective tissue of language.
The death of my best friend by suicide last summer completely undid me. The experience has changed the way I experience the world, my relationship to myself, friends, loved ones, but it has also changed my relationship to my work. It has forced me to think differently about suicide’s frequent appearances in what we know of ancient Greek and Roman tragedies.
Phaedra is one such suicide tragedy. Director Simon Stone is at the helm of a new adaptation for the National Theatre, having previously directed Yerma (2016) with Billie Piper, at the Young Vic and then Medea (2014), which came to London’s Barbican in 2019. In both previous productions, Stone has the female lead take her own life at the end of the performance and his Phaedra is no different.
Stone is working from multiple sources: Hippolytus by the ancient Greek tragedian Euripides, Phaedra by the Roman poet Seneca, Phèdre by the 17th century French dramatist Jean-Baptiste Racine and Phaedra’s Love (1996) by British playwright Sarah Kane.
As classics professor Edith Hall explains in the National Theatre’s programme, each version portrays Phaedra’s suicide differently in her plot to love and then discredit her stepson Hippolytus by falsely accusing him of rape following his rejection. A second death occurs when Hippolytus’ father kills him, for what he believes Hippolytus has done to his wife.
In all these versions – but especially Kane’s – suicide is an avoidable but seemingly inevitable horror. It is a corrosive agent for the drama, that leaves the characters on their knees, making sounds “like an animal that just learned the word for God”.
The National Theatre’s Phaedra is quick witted, acerbic and does some light decolonial thinking, but it cannot fathom the ways in which suicide undoes people and their relationships to one another.
Stone changes much of the Phaedra story. Phaedra’s part is distributed among a couple of characters. Firstly, Helen (Janet McTeer), a shadow environment minister who, while studying at Oxford, went abroad to Morocco. There she fell in love with a man and took him away from his family so that he could drink, consume drugs and dream of being a rock star.
Hippolytus is no longer Phaedra’s stepson but Helen’s lover’s son, Sofiane (Assaad Bouab). Sofiane looks just like his father, who died tragically in a car wreck. We hear his voice recordings to his son which play in the long blackouts between scenes, variously morose, loving, macabre and suicidal.
Helen is complicit in this infidelity and her former lover’s eventual death. The play blames her almost entirely, with a long, hateful monologue delivered in French by Sofiane’s mother Reba (Sirine Saba) and translated live into English by Helen’s diplomat husband Hugo (Paul Chahidi) in the final scene.
The part of Phaedra is also shared with Helen’s daughter, Isolde (Mackenzie Davis) – a millennial who would be a good fit in White Lotus. Isolde is wracked by white guilt and very upper- middle- class privilege consciousness. Her marriage and NGO are failing. She shares Phaedra’s desire to be out in the wilderness, have scraped knees and hoist a bow over her shoulders.
Both Helen and Isolde sleep with Sofiane, producing much of the play’s farcical energy. The scene in a London restaurant that opens the second act is excellent – the audience gasped, feared, pitied and wondered at every revelation, expertly delivered by the ensemble. But it is Helen alone who shares Phaedra’s death.
Excruciatingly, she takes her own life on stage, creating the final image of the play. Sofiane disappears into a heavenly white haze, while Helen sinks into the ground alone, traces of her blood and sweat staining the “glass” box in which the production unfolds.
In Euripides and Seneca’s versions, Phaedra is undone by a god. But Stone’s Helen is a villain driven mad by the guilt of her own actions. “At least”, a Telegraph interviewer reports McTeer saying, “Phaedra has the ‘redeeming’ grace to kill herself.”
Instead of implicating us in Helen’s choices and their aftermath, Stone asks us to project our shame onto this “post-menopausal woman” and make her the scapegoat.
I marvelled at the set design and excellent performances. And I enjoyed the skill of the lighting, costume and sound designers, the work of the intimacy director, the speed and determination of the stage managers and backstage team. In minutes, they turned an upscale London living room into a Suffolk field.
However, I found the choice to stage Helen’s suicide as a redeeming act – and the invitation to cheer in the curtain call, just seconds after her death – dreadfully misplaced.
Instead of railing against Helen, I’d like to see a version of Phaedra where the desires of a postmenopausal woman aren’t played for shock and laughs. One that looks at why suicides like this take place and advocates for a world where mental health services are funded and people don’t die in their thousands.
Phaedra is on now at the The National Theatre, London, until April 8.
If you’re struggling with suicidal thoughts, the following services can provide you with support:
In the UK and Ireland – call Samaritans UK at 116 123.
In the US – call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or IMAlive at 1-800-784-2433.
In Australia – call Lifeline Australia at 13 11 14.
In other countries – visit IASP or Suicide.org to find a helpline in your country.
Marcus Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Large carnivores are critical to the balance of an ecosystem. In Yellowstone National Park in the western US, grey wolves keep elk populations at a healthy level. This prevents vegetation from being overgrazed and leads to taller woody plants which allow other species, such as beavers, to flourish.
But habitat loss and persecution have eliminated many large carnivores from their historical environment. The Eurasian lynx could be found in the UK over a thousand years ago and wolves roamed the country until the mid-18th century.
However, our attitudes towards these animals are gradually changing and large carnivores are now viewed by many as the victims of human expansion. Many areas are seeing these animals return as a result. Yellowstone’s grey wolves were reintroduced in 1995 after 70 years, and in 2020, voters approved the species’ reintroduction to the state of Colorado.
Like these wolves, many other species require human intervention to reach their former habitats. But this is costly, controversial and often ends in failure. The relocation of a single animal can cost thousands and once released, these animals can prey on local livestock.
But since 2007, we’ve seen technological advances in wildlife monitoring, improved guidelines for carrying out reintroductions and the global rewilding movement gathering pace.
These factors make now the perfect moment to determine whether carnivore reintroductions are becoming more effective. In a new study, my colleagues and I studied the success of almost 300 carnivore reintroductions worldwide involving 18 different species between 2007 and 2021.
Between 2007 and 2021, 66% of all the reintroduced carnivores studied were still alive six months later. Survival at the six month mark was our measure of success.
Success rates for wild-born carnivores increased from 53% to 70%, while twice the number of captive-born animals (64%) now survive reintroduction than did so in 2007.
The most successful species in our study were maned wolves, pumas and ocelots. In contrast, lions, brown hyenas, cheetahs, Iberian lynx and grey wolves were least able to survive their new environment.
We tested various factors, all of which were under the project manager’s control, that influence the success of animal reintroductions – practical changes that could improve the outcome of future rewilding efforts.
So-called “soft releases”, where animals are allowed an acclimation period at the release site anywhere between 10 days and 5 months long, had a clear influence on survival. These releases had an 82% success rate compared to just 60% for releases with no period of adjustment.
Younger animals and those born in the wild were also more likely to survive reintroduction. Wild-born animals had a 72% survival rate compared to 64% for animals born in captivity. This is good news for rehabilitated and orphaned carnivores which are taken from the wild for their survival. These animals represent a sizeable proportion of all reintroduced carnivores and made up 22% of the animals in our study.
We found higher success rates when carnivores were released into unfenced areas. This is surprising as research finds that fenced nature reserves tend to support higher densities of carnivores and reduce conflict with humans.
But greater competition for resources and direct conflict with other carnivores in these reserves may have a negative impact on the survival of reintroduced animals. Research on the range and movement patterns of African wild dogs in South Africa’s fenced Pilanesberg National Park found that the dogs actively avoid interaction with lions.
Large carnivore reintroductions are becoming more effective, prompting countries to consider reintroducing large predators. In the UK, debates are ongoing surrounding the possible reintroduction of the Eurasian lynx. Our findings could help inform their release.
But our research also highlights the alarming fact that one-third of all large carnivore reintroductions fail. And even when successful, the establishment of a population has proved a challenge. Just 37% of the animals that survived reintroduction successfully reproduced and the number of animals who will have raised young to adulthood is likely even lower. It seems that many rewilded animals take far longer than six months to establish themselves in an ecosystem and find a potential mate.
Preventing species loss in their current ranges should thus always take priority. This will involve measures to tackle urbanisation and climate change, which are at present two leading causes of global habitat loss.
Despite their increasing success, the reintroduction of large carnivores still leads to the death of many of the animals involved and often fails to establish a population. The risky nature of these interventions makes it even more important that they have local support or they are likely doomed to fail from the start.
Seth Thomas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Beta blockers are medications commonly used for treating cardiac problems such as high blood pressure, chest pain, irregular heartbeat and heart failure. In the US, for example, one in five adults aged 60–79 is prescribed a beta blocker.
In a new study, we’ve found the use of beta blockers is associated with lower rates of violence. To explore why this might be, let’s start with some background.
Beta blockers work by blocking the stress hormones and neurotransmitters adrenaline and noradrenaline. These play an important role in our “fight or flight” response. In a stressful situation, adrenaline and noradrenaline mobilise the brain and body for action by increasing the amount of blood the heart pumps out.
Beta blockers prevent the effect of these hormones. This slows the heart rate down, lowers blood pressure, and also decreases tension. For this reason, beta blockers are sometimes used as treatment for common mental health and behavioural problems, like anxiety, depression and aggression.
In recent years, there has been a rise in beta blocker prescriptions for anxiety. They’re also occasionally used in psychiatric clinics and hospitals to manage aggression and violence in patients.
At the same time, there have been concerns that people who use beta blockers could have a higher risk of depression and suicide. But studies have contradicted each other. Some have found that beta blockers reduce mental health and behavioural problems, others have found that they increase them, and some have found no relationship.
The conflicting evidence leaves doctors with difficult treatment decisions. Are beta blockers effective for treating mental health and behavioural problems? Or could they instead increase the risk of serious mental health problems?
Read more: 5 drugs that changed the world (and what went wrong)
To answer this, we studied 1.4 million people in Sweden who had been treated with beta blockers. We followed them over eight years, from 2006 to 2013. We wanted to know whether beta blocker use was associated with mental health problems, violence, suicide attempts and suicide deaths.
We identified beta blocker users by analysing data from Swedish pharmacies and followed people through different healthcare, crime and death registers. This was an observational study, meaning we observed patterns of mental health and behavioural problems by examining these outcomes in the registers.
Typically, in an observational study like this, beta blocker users would be compared to non-users. But the two groups may differ on important features, like psychiatric history. This makes the interpretation of results difficult. Are any differences seen due to the beta blockers? Or do the two groups just have different background risks?
So instead, we used a study design where we compared each person to themselves by contrasting periods when they were taking beta blockers with periods when they were not. This way we could account for the influence of factors that are unique for each person, like family and childhood background or psychiatric history.
We found that when people were taking beta blockers, they had a 13% lower risk of being charged with a violent crime by the police. They also had an 8% lower risk of being hospitalised for mental health problems. There was however an 8% higher risk of being treated for suicide attempts or dying from suicide.
We then carried out secondary analyses where we examined subgroups of beta blocker users, for example those with a history of violence or psychiatric problems. The lower risk of being charged with a violent crime when using beta blockers was consistent across the board.
When we broke down hospitalisations for mental health problems into those for depressive or anxiety disorders, we found a lower risk for hospitalisations for major depressive disorders, but not for anxiety disorders.
We also found the higher risk of suicide attempts and suicide deaths was specific to people with serious heart conditions or a history of psychiatric problems.
We know from previous research that there’s a greater risk of suicide following serious heart problems. People may have pessimistic thoughts, be unsure about the future or concerned about their health. So psychological distress associated with heart problems, rather than the beta blocker treatment, could be the main explanation behind the increased suicide attempts and suicide deaths seen in our study.
Our results on violence align with evidence from small trials on beta blocker treatment. However, we increased the study sample, examined the total general population, and also broadened the outcome to crime.
A possible explanation for our results is that beta blockers help control the body’s fight or flight response to stressful situations, so there is a decrease in the agitation and tension that could lead to violent behaviour.
Read more: Heart disease risk and depression: a new study explores whether the two may be linked
Since this is an observational study, it cannot show that beta blockers cause reductions in violence, only that there is a link between them. To understand the role of beta blockers in aggression and violence, studies that use other designs (such as randomised controlled trials and experimental laboratory studies) are needed.
If these studies confirm our results, beta blockers could be used more widely to manage violence in certain people, particularly those with background risk factors such as serious psychiatric problems. Since evidence-based treatments for violence are limited, this is potentially an important finding.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
More than 1,000km southwest of Mahé, the main inhabited island in Seychelles, lies a ring of coral islands called the Aldabra Atoll. The islands are a Unesco world heritage site and support a huge diversity of marine species including manta rays and tiger sharks. The atoll is also a breeding site for endangered green turtles.
Aldabra has long been protected from threats to its biodiversity by its remoteness. But now plastic debris is strewn across Aldabra’s coastlines, threatening nearby marine ecosystems. Research finds the likelihood of coral disease increases from 4% to 89% when coral are in contact with plastic.
The Seychelles Islands Foundation, who are responsible for managing Aldabra, conducted a plastic clean-up operation in partnership with Oxford University in 2019. Roughly 25 tonnes of plastic waste were removed from the islands.
A new study that we co-authored modelled the flow of plastic debris in the Indian Ocean between 1993 and 2019 and traced it to its source. We found that none of the plastic that washes up on Aldabra comes from the islands themselves.
Using data on plastic waste generation and fishing activity, we generated hundreds of billions of virtual plastic particles entering the Indian ocean. We then simulated their movement based on ocean currents, waves and winds.
Bottle caps and other low-buoyancy items sink fast and plastic loses buoyancy as it fragments or becomes covered in waterborne organisms. Items that remain buoyant for longer are transported further distances. To reach Aldabra from the eastern Indian Ocean, our model estimates that debris must be floating for at least six months.
We determined the likelihood that this debris would wash up on the coast by analysing the rate at which scientific “drifters” (instruments that record ocean currents) and GPS-tracked floating fishing devices become “beached”. Free-floating instruments such as these behave well as proxies for floating plastic. These observations indicate that around 3% of the debris that is within 10km of a coast beaches each day.
Our model predicts that Indonesia is responsible for most of the plastic debris, including as flip-flops and plastic packaging, that beaches across Seychelles. Various other countries including India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines are also major sources.
But Seychelles is also contaminated with plastic waste from other places.
Almost half of the plastic bottles found on Aldabra during the initial clean-up had been manufactured in China. But ocean currents do not flow directly between China and the western Indian Ocean. It is thus unlikely that a large number of bottles could float from China to Seychelles.
But Seychelles is close to a major shipping lane that connects southeast Asia to the Atlantic. If bottles were discarded from ships crossing the Indian Ocean then they would likely beach across Seychelles.
Research that we conducted in 2020 estimated that the fishing industry was responsible for 83% of the plastic waste on Aldabra. Most of the fishing gear abandoned by “purse seine” fisheries (a method of fishing that employs large nets to catch tuna) likely relates to regional fishing activity around Seychelles. But abandoned gear from longline fisheries may have drifted in from as far afield as western Australia.
Perhaps most importantly, our modelling also suggests that the rates at which plastic debris will beach in the Indian Ocean will follow strong seasonal cycles.
Winds tend to have a southerly (northward) component during the Indian Ocean’s summer monsoon season. But major debris sources such as Indonesia and India share similar, or more northerly, latitudes with Seychelles. During this period, debris from these sources tends to miss Seychelles and is transported further north.
By contrast, the winds reverse during the winter monsoons and transport debris directly towards Seychelles. We expect plastic debris accumulation to peak in Seychelles shortly after the winter monsoons (February to April). In the southernmost islands, almost all of the debris that beaches will do so at this point.
Seychelles is not responsible for generating this waste but face mounting environmental and economic costs. For example, 500 tonnes of litter remained following the initial clean-up of Aldabra’s coasts, which may cost up to US$5 million (£4 million) to remove.
The United Nations last year agreed to establish a global plastic treaty that will tackle plastic pollution at its roots. But negotiations only began recently and it may be a long time before the treaty has any meaningful impact.
Until then our modelling may help to establish other strategies to reduce the accumulation of plastic debris in Seychelles.
We identified fishing gear and shipping as being responsible for the majority of plastic pollution on Seychelles. Better enforcement of existing laws such as the 1983 ban on the disposal of plastic into the sea under the Marpol Convention should reduce the amount of plastic entering the Indian Ocean.
Predicting the peak of plastic accumulation in Seychelles will also maximise the effectiveness of beach clean-ups. Removing litter shortly after its arrival will minimise the time debris spends being broken down into unmanageable fragments.
Remote Indian Ocean islands are increasingly affected by plastic waste generated overseas. But by modelling the flow of plastic debris, we now have the chance to develop more effective strategies to reduce plastic accumulation and strengthen demands for stronger commitments under the global plastic treaty.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 10,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.
Noam Vogt-Vincent receives funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
April Burt works with Seychelles Islands Foundation, who manage Aldabra Atoll
Two years on from the latest military coup that deposed Myanmar’s democratically elected government, what began as a wave of national protest against the army’s power grab has descended into outright civil war.
Myanmar’s military have gone beyond repression or terrorising ethnic minority groups – it is making war on society as a whole. There is little prospect of the violence ending, let alone the prosecution of the perpetrators for a litany of crimes against their people.
Meanwhile the junta continues to steal what wealth there is in Myanmar. This UN-designated “least developed country” is vastly endowed with natural resources which are being misappropriated. There is a major humanitarian and growing environmental crisis. Yet outside of the country, the situation’s complexities are barely grasped.
Myanmar’s 2020 election delivered a crushing defeat to the Union Solidarity and Development Party – the proxy political party of the Tatmadaw (Myanmar’s military) – and a huge mandate to Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy and allied parties.
Yet on the morning of February 1 2021, army general Min Aung Hlaing blocked access to parliament, arrested Aung San Suu Kyi and many senior colleagues. He declared a “state of emergency” and installed himself as head of a ruling state administration council.
Millions took to the streets. A civil disobedience movement formed, led mainly by young people who saw their bright futures being stolen. The military reaction was swift and brutal: demonstrators shot by snipers, bombed indiscriminately, arrested, tortured and executed.
Two years on, Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as most of her top party colleagues, remain in custody – she was recently sentenced to 33 years jail for “corruption”. But several democratically elected leaders managed to escape to form a “national unity government” in exile. This government now represents Myanmar at the United Nations and has representatives in a range of countries.
Meanwhile, across Myanmar ordinary people have taken up arms. Many have received basic training from one or another of the ethnic armed organisations which formed over decades of regional conflicts, and have returned to fight as the People’s Defence Force.
The whole of Myanmar is now a conflict zone. The Tatmadaw routinely attacks or bombs villages resisting or suspected of harbouring People’s Defence Force members. Thousands have died and many more have been injured.
Thanks to significant revenues from oil and gas, the Tatmadaw has the military advantage, particularly in air power, yet it is struggling in the face of unified opposition. It lacks numerical superiority compared to the democrats, and many soldiers and police have defected – over 8,000 so far.
Meanwhile it is finding it hard to recruit or even conscript new troops, risking becoming in the long term an “army without soldiers”. It is also struggling to pay wages and is resorting to printing money, which is fuelling inflation that feeds into public discontent.
But two years of fighting has left Myanmar’s resistance outgunned, with dwindling supplies, particularly ammunition, and little defence against air attacks. Conflict fatigue is affecting some.
It is a major humanitarian crisis. Over half the country is in poverty after the previous decade of rapid improvements under a civilian quasi-democracy. The UN has identified 4.5 million people needing emergency support, with millions displaced, the economy and international trade disrupted, and basic foodstuffs and essential drugs scarce.
But the conflict is delivering plenty of business opportunities for the Tatmadaw and its political cronies. Numerous large-scale projects previously blocked for environmental reasons have been reactivated: new dams and mines are of particular concern.
Logging appears to be on the increase and a new wave of “crony” land grabbing by the army and its business partners has been taking over farmland for agricultural commodity production, often adding to deforestation.
Unregulated mining, taking advantage of Myanmar’s significant share of gold, gems, jade and rare earth elements, is poisoning Myanmar’s waterways. Oxford University-led research in 2017 into water quality found arsenic and lead concentrations above safe levels. And today, mining projects are proliferating,, undoubtedly increasing pollution.
Meanwhile in many cities, electricity outages is forcing people to burn coal and wood for fuel, affecting air quality.
Aside from the solidarity in the resistance movement and the increasingly fragile position of the military, there are grounds for optimism in the robust response of many foreign governments. The UN security council issued a resolution in December 2022 calling for an immediate cessation to all forms of violence (Russia, China and India abstained).
The US has imposed escalating sanctions targeting generals, arms suppliers and cronies. In December 2022, the National Defense Authorization Act provided support for democratic groups in Myanmar, including training and non-lethal assistance.
The EU passed its fifth package of sanctions against the junta in November 2022, targeting arms exports. This international pressure has increased to the extent where it appears even China is becoming embarrassed by its association with the junta.
The civil war will undoubtedly continue for some time, and when it eventually ends the scars will take even longer to heal. What would make the pain bearable for many would be a just peace in which the menace of the Tatmadaw, after more than 60 years of violence, is removed, and the wealth of the generals, their cronies and the military companies used to alleviate poverty.
In the absence of direct military assistance, foreign governments and organisations should consider supporting the national unity government to help alleviate the suffering of Myanmar’s people. Key to this will be the coordination of health, education and financial services – now widely absent – as well as the groundwork to help civil society to restore democracy when the time comes.
Dr. Oliver Springate-Baginski has received funding from a range of research and advocacy groups in relation to work in Myanmar/Burma including Pyoe Pin Program (Rangoon/Uk Govt), ALARM (Rangoon), Swiss Agency for Development & Cooperation (Rangoon), TransNational Institute (Amsterdam); International Union for Conservation of Nature, (Gland), Forest Trends (Washington), World Bank Group (Washington), CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (Vientiane), London School of Economic and Political Science (London).
Win Myo Thu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
On the afternoon of October 16 last year a brawl erupted between two groups of gangsters in a restaurant on the 58th floor of the Sunshine 60 high-rise building in Ikebukuro, a central neighbourhood of Tokyo. A group of around 70 people crashed a private party and fighting broke out, resulting in one person bleeding from the head and sustaining minor injuries.
The Tokyo police subsequently revealed that the party had been held by members of a criminal group known as the Chinese Dragons. The Dragons were celebrating the release from prison of one of their leaders and were attacked by a rival Chinese gang.
There is increasing concern in Japan that the Chinese Dragons – or other criminal groups that have moved from China in the past 30 years – are infiltrating the Japanese criminal underworld that used to be controlled by the indigenous mafia, the yakuza.
The Chinese Dragons originated in the 1980s in Kasai (Tokyo). One of the founders recounted that it started to protect himself and his friends from the rampant discrimination against people of Chinese descent. Indeed, many of the members are “Chūgoku zanryū koji”, children and grandchildren of Japanese nationals who had been left behind in China at the end of the war, and returned to Japan as adults after the normalisation of the relationship between China and Japan. Their influence and activities remain local.
Contrarily, the yakuza are a confederation of criminal syndicates active throughout Japan. According to Japanese law, their status is not illegal: they have offices and a yakuza presence is still noticeable in many cities.
The yakuza have been described as a “necessary evil” – while their involvement in criminal activities has always been recognised, their ability to monopolise and control the underworld, curbing the excesses of less-organised gangs and foreign groups, was seen as reassuring. Their relatively irregular use of violence and the stress they put on following a traditional chivalrous moral code meant that for a long time they have been, if not accepted, somehow tolerated.
Until the 1990s, they also had a favourable relationship with the police, which was able to make direct requests to the heads of the groups. The most famous example is the visit of US president Dwight Eisenhower, during which yakuza and other paramilitary forces were enlisted by political fixer Kodama Yoshio to support the police.
But things changed. New severe anti-yakuza laws were introduced in 1992: (Bōtaihō) and 2011 (Bōhaijōrei) – which effectively forced the yakuza underground – and a prolonged period of economic stagnation in Japan led to a decline of the yakuza. Membership has reduced from more than 80,000 in 2009 to less than 23,000. They also seem less able to maintain a monopoly of Japan’s criminal underworld – allowing gangs like the Chinese Dragons to step in.
The public perceives non-yakuza groups to be more violent and lacking a moral code. Gangs based on ethnic kinship (notably Iranian, Nigerian and Chinese) have been active in Japan since the 1980s. But the yakuza has always managed to keep them under control.
There have been exceptions to this which have resulted in violent clashes between the yakuza and Chinese gangs from time to time. In 2002, Chinese gang members shot two yakuza in a busy night-club called Parisienne in the Kabukicho area of Tokyo, which is famous for its nightlife. The yakuza were asking the Chinese gang for a fee to allow them to operate in the area. According to Hirosue Noboru, one of the few experts on organised crime in Japan, some yakuza groups subsequently issued a warning to their members not to get involved with the Chinese mafia, because of their penchant for violence.
An internal feud in the 1980s – the Yama-ichi kōsō – which broke out between two yakuza gangs, the Yamaguchi-gumi and the Ichiwa-kai, resulted in 29 deaths and hundreds of violent confrontations. It was brought to a close by a peace deal brokered by another large yakuza clan, the Tokyo-based Inagawa-kai. But the severity of the violence led to the introduction of more severe anti-yakuza laws in 1992.
In comparison, the methods of Chinese mafia groups have always been more violent and have been more likely to involve civilians, often via extortion of shopkeepers and bar owners.
It is not possible for two competing groups to operate in the same territory without bumping heads. “There are occasions in which dealing with them is just inevitable” the boss of an influential yakuza group in Tokyo told me recently. Non-yakuza groups can pay a fee to gain the right to operate in the underworld, showing that the yakuza is still able to regulate the illegal market.
But given their reduced strength in terms of member numbers and streams of income, the yakuza’s need for money is increasing. And some yakuza groups might be forced to accept the activity of an unreliable external group, such as one of the Chinese gangs, to get the protection money.
As yakuza membership declines and those remaining grow older, they might have to accept more disadvantageous deals when negotiating with competition, since their ability to intimidate through violence is diminished.
The name of the Chinese Dragons is becoming more notorious, due to news coverage of incidents such as the Sunshine 60 brawl. But, according to a Tokyo yakuza boss I spoke to recently, the increase in popularity does not mean they are growing more influential. Chinese groups are a long way from taking over the Japanese underworld, which remains controlled by the yakuza.
The Japanese media has tended to exaggerate the threat posed by the Chinese Dragons – and the Chinese mafia in general. It’s a fear that plays on broader social anxieties in Japan concerned with the rise of China taking over. Anti-Chinese discrimination (also directed at Koreans) is common and goes back before the second world war. But it should not mask the reality that, for the foreseeable future at least, the yakuza still runs Japan’s criminal underworld.
Martina Baradel is a Marie Curie fellow at Oxford and her fellowship is funded by the European Commission.
Peru is in flames. Since early December, massive, often violent, protests have engulfed the South American nation. Demonstrators concentrated in the country’s southern Andean regions took to the streets after the then president, Pedro Castillo, was deposed for attempting to mount a coup by dismissing the parliament and ruling by decree.
But he attempted his coup without the support of the armed forces and was rapidly arrested. The appointment of his vice-president, Dina Boluarte, as the new leader sparked riots that have resulted in the deaths of at least 55 people.
Despite leading a mediocre government swamped with accusations of corruption, the fact that Castillo – an indigenous former schoolteacher from an Andean region – was elected at all had significant symbolic value in a country where indigenous people feel excluded. After decades of economic crisis, liberal reforms enacted in the 1990s stabilised the country’s economy, reduced poverty and kept GDP growing.
But these numbers have not been enough to facilitate upward social mobility. Peruvians who cannot afford to go private for their basic needs (healthcare, security, education and housing) are on their own, left to battle underfunded, corrupt and low-quality public services.
Despite his many shortcomings, polling suggested that many voters thought Castillo represented change. They felt that someone who really knows how hard life is for indigenous Peruvians would finally sit in the presidential palace. So his removal from office, however justified, was the last straw, driving people into the streets in protest.
Peru’s (urban, white and westernised) elites remain unwilling to accept the root causes of this social discontent. Boluarte has already agreed to hold the next elections in 2024 – two years earlier than scheduled.
Beyond that, if disgruntled Andeans wish to improve their situation, the elites say, they should vote for better regional governors that are better at taking advantage of the wealth created by the 1990s reforms. Regional poverty, they say, is their fault – not Lima’s or the system’s. Instead, they see the protesters as terrorists that want to impose a communist dictatorship and need to be defeated.
This narrative of “us” and “them”, between a “modern Lima” and a “backwards Andes” is popular among Peru’s elites. Take, for example, Nobel prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa.
In 1992, he infamously said that the goal of establishing “modern societies, where social and economic differences are reduced to reasonable proportions” was incompatible with the utopia of “preserving the primitive cultures of the Americas”.
Chillingly, he suggests cultural genocide might be the only way to secure Peru’s integration: Indigenous people should, he wrote in a 1990 essay in Harper’s magazine “renounce their culture – their language, their beliefs, their traditions and usages – and adopt that of their old masters” in the name of modernity.
Similarly, in 2007, the then president, Alan García, spoke of the economic potential of Peru’s vast “idle lands”, where “the owner” (the indigenous people) “has no education or economic resources” and therefore “their ownership is only apparent”.
The similarities between these modern Peruvian narratives and those of 19th-century European imperialists talking about the occupation of so-called “terra nullius” in Australia or the white man’s burden in Africa are not coincidental.
Since the 1960s, Aníbal Quijano and other decolonial sociologists have explored how colonial relations of power have survived Spanish colonialism in the Americas, where a racist and Eurocentric social order is seen as superior to indigenous culture. In essence, the Andes is seen as Lima’s colony: a land rich in natural resources, but inhabited by “native savages” that need to be “civilised” in order for Peru to progress.
It is this problem of enduring colonialism that needs to be addressed – and it cannot be addressed by early elections, by accusing indigenous people of “voting wrong” – and certainly not by murdering them.
And yet the main proposal on the negotiation table – a constituent assembly much like the one that recently failed in Chile, but in a country with much less stable political parties – seems unlikely to resolve things. In Chile, proposals to empower Indigenous people by establishing a “plurinational state” with reserved Indigenous seats in congress and a more decentralised structure, led voters to overwhelmingly reject the proposed constitution in defence of “national unity”.
Starting an even more ambitious discussion in a country with a much larger Indigenous population, without putting in the work of letting the population know what the actual plan is, is a recipe for disaster.
Also, opening the Pandora’s box of a complete overhaul of Peru’s social contract without any guidance as to what the problems are, risks a more authoritarian and conservative constitution. According to recent polling, 72% of Peruvians would support reinstating the death penalty, despite the country’s enormous issues with corruption in the judicial branch.
A constituent assembly would probably also bring about increased restrictions for abortion rights, same-sex marriage and trans rights.
There is a third option – a process of “cabildos abiertos”, which loosely translates to “open assemblies”. These are a longstanding tradition in Latin America, as a kind of local forum for citizens to voice their concerns.
These would enable indigenous people, who amount to about 25% of the population, to voice their grievances and proposals at length and with nuance, in a public, national, forum. Since this is not a blank slate, but rather builds upon the current constitutional framework, there would be no chance of human rights backsliding.
All voices need to be heard if Peru is going to solve this crisis. A consensus will be needed to create a framework setting out a clear and legitimate mandate for structural and decolonising change. Now is the time for that change.
Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg is an associate of AC Transparencia, a democracy watchdog in Peru, and occasionally consults on human rights issues in Peru for Human Rights Watch.
FreshRSS