Why Activists Fail

 With the Earth under siege, would you sign such a pledge? What would you need to reorganize about your life to make it manageable?
by Robert J. Burrowes

March 26 at 9:58 AM 

Despite enormous ongoing effort over more than a thousand years, during and since the formation and shaping of the modern world, and as the number of issues being contested has steadily increased, activists of many types have made insufficient progress on key issues, particularly in relation to ending violence and war (and the threat of nuclear war), stopping the exploitation of many peoples and halting the endless assaults on Earth’s biosphere.

Why Activists Fail.docx by on Scribd

Greek tragedy prompts 'blackface' racism row at Sorbonne

Protesters force university in Paris to cancel play for which actors were due to wear masks
A photo from the Sorbonne website used to promote the play. The photo has since been changed. Photograph: Sorbonne

Kim Willsher in Paris-Thu 28 Mar 2019

A row over alleged racism and attacks on freedom of expression has erupted in France after students forced the Sorbonne to cancel a performance of a Greek tragedy featuring actors using black masks, claiming it was “Afrophobic, colonialist and racist”.

Protesters picketed the prestigious Paris university, stopping actors from entering the theatre and accusing them of using blackface for the play The Suppliants by Aeschylus.

A photograph on the Sorbonne’s website publicising the event showed one of the cast in dark makeup. Protesters said actors had blacked up in last year’s performances of the work, which features in the university’s annual ancient Greek theatre festival.

Sorbonne administrators and the theatre company director insisted none of the actors would use blackface for this year’s staging, but would be wearing masks in keeping with the tradition of ancient Greek theatre.

With tensions running high, both sides maintained polarised positions: the university insisting the protest was based on a misunderstanding, anti-racism campaigners insisting the university was engaging in “colonialist propaganda”.

Ghyslain Vedeux, the president of the Representative Council of France’s Black Associations (Cran), issued a statement under the title: “Blackface: colonial propaganda at the Sorbonne.”

“The vast majority of students of this establishment refuse to be associated with this Afrophobic, colonialist and racist propaganda,” he wrote. “Blackface is a practice stemming from colonial slavery, a crime against humanity, which consists of a white person making themselves up black.”

The play’s director, Philippe Brunet, responded by insisting the theatre was “a place of metamorphosis, not a refuge of identities”.

The student protest was swiftly condemned by the government and university heads.

The Sorbonne. The play’s director said none of the actors had blacked-up faces. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

In a joint statement Frédérique Vidal, the higher education and research minister, and Franck Riester, the culture minister, expressed their “stupefaction”. They said preventing the performance was “an unprecedented attack on freedom of expression and creation in a university, which is contrary to all academic values and republican principles”.

The Sorbonne said the play recounted the story of the Greek Argives and the Danaids – the 50 daughters of Danaus from Egypt – and was to be performed strictly according to ancient theatre practices “with actors wearing white masks and black masks as was done at the time”.

“Stopping by force and insulting the cast of a piece of theatre is a very serious and totally unjustified attack on artistic freedom,” it wrote in a statement.

It added that accusing the production of “racism or racialism” showed “a complete lack of understanding”. “Liberty, diversity, creativity, the rigour and openness are founding values of the Sorbonne University, which is profoundly humanist and anti-racist,” it wrote.

The play was due to be performed on Monday by the Démodocos theatre company – named after a minstrel mentioned by Homer – which was formed at the Sorbonne in 1995 by a group of professors who organise an annual ancient theatre festival, Les Dionysies.

UNÉF, the national students’ union, said in a statement: “In a context of racism omnipresent at national level in our country, our university campuses remain unhappily permeable to the rest of society, perpetrating the racist schemas at their heart.

“UNÉF denounces the use of blackface in all its forms in society and particularly in our universities. The blackface is essentially a racist practice, from a colonial past.”

The missive demands the cancelling of the play, a public apology by the university, guarantees there will be no more similar plays, and the “organisation of training in the question of systemic oppression for administrative and teaching staff”.

Brunet insisted the actors wore masks on stage, not blackface, and that the row stemmed from a misunderstanding sparked by a photo taken from rehearsals of a white actor with her face covered with “coppery makeup”.

Brunet told Le Monde the protests were a “form of radicalisation that open a breach that is very dangerous for freedom of expression, and for art as a whole. I wanted these people to see the play and to judge afterwards, but the censors decided otherwise.”

Masks were widely used in ancient Greek theatre by actors who put them on to play more than one role and to represent women, who did not perform on stage. They often had exaggerated features in order to be seen by the audience at a distance.

Alain Tallon, a history professor at the Sorbonne’s faculty of letters, said the protest was “absurd” and that the university “firmly condemned the practice of blacking up to mock black people”.

Louis-Georges Tin, the honorary president of Cran, defended the protest. “There is no good or bad blackface in the same way there is no good or bad racism. However, there is a conscious blackface and an unconscious one. Racism isn’t just an ideology reserved for the far right, that would be too simple. And that’s why we fight,” he told Le Monde.

The Sorbonne said it was looking at ways to stage a new version of The Suppliants at the university at a future date.

The road to gender reform in Vietnam is long but necessary

  

There is low public awareness and understanding in Vietnam of the importance of women’s and men’s equality in employment and the role that gender equality plays in economic growth. Source: Shutterstock

27 Mar 2019

GLOBALLY, removing sex discrimination from regulatory texts continues to ride a positive wave.This might be a response to a new generation of free trade agreements, which call for regulatory frameworks to be socially and environmentally compliant with international standards.It might also be because domestic laws need to be internally cohesive, meaning that gender equality provisions adopted in one context require corresponding upgrades to other legislation.This has been the case in Vietnam.

The Vietnamese government is discussing ratifying the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP-11), under which it will have to conform to the agreement’s international labour standards.

Similarly, signing the EU–Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) will require Vietnam to comply with references to sustainable development.

SEE ALSO: How to tackle Indonesia’s persistent gender inequality

Article 13.4(2) of the EVFTA specifically lists the parties’ commitment to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, which requires respect, promotion and effective implementation of non-discrimination and gender equality.

Gender equality is a weak spot in Vietnam’s regulatory framework. Despite its strong 2013 Constitution and dedicated Gender Equality Law of 2006, studies in Vietnam and recommendations from international treaty bodies point to a number of issues in the country’s 2012 Labour Code that undermine women’s rights and gender equality.

In 2015 the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women raised concerns over the lower retirement age for women, the extensive list of prohibited occupations, discriminatory practices by employers based on maternity and pregnancy, the persistent gender wage gap, and the concentration of women in low-paid and unprotected jobs in the informal sector.

The ILO raised similar concerns in the context of ratified conventions on non-discrimination.

According to the World Economic Forum’s 2017 gender gap index, Vietnam rates 69 out of 144 countries. The situation is less encouraging on the ratio of economic participation and opportunity, with women in Vietnam having 26 percent less opportunity to earn than their male counterparts.

In early 2017 Vietnam’s Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA) invited the Australian Government through its Investing in Women (IW) initiative to provide technical assistance for gender-sensitive reform of the Labour Code.

Five issues became the target of consultation and technical debate.

These were harmonising retirement ages for women and men (currently 55 versus 60), removing occupational segregation provisions that imply women are physically weaker than men (prohibiting them from certain jobs, 77 in total), strengthening provisions for parental leave and childcare so that men and women can balance work and family responsibilities, improving sexual harassment provisions, and completing the definitions of ‘equal pay for work of equal value’ and ‘remuneration’.

There is low public awareness and understanding in Vietnam of the importance of women’s and men’s equality in employment and the role that gender equality plays in economic growth.

In particular, while expressing a wish for decent work for women alongside men, there remain pervasive stereotypes about what women (the ‘weaker’ sex) can do or what they want to do (look after their children and older family members).

So discussions about new statutory requirements to help achieve work-family balance for all workers needed to draw out the economic and social arguments in favour of change.

SEE ALSO: What university attrition rates tell us about gender inequality in vocational training

Likewise, care was taken during consultations with businesses to frame the removal of barriers to women’s participation in the economy as being part of a government strategy to make workplaces more productive and Vietnam more competitive in Southeast Asian growth.

According to the McKinsey Global Institute’s The Power of Parity 2018 report, including women in economic growth could increase the Asia Pacific’s GDP by 12 percent by 2025, with the Vietnam estimate being 10 percent, or US$40 billion above business-as-usual.

The economic argument for removing regulatory barriers to women’s greater contribution was not lost on business or government.

A policy impact analysis, which examined the economic, legal, administrative, social and gender implications of proposed changes to the Labour Code, made pro-gender recommendations that were endorsed in the multi-stakeholder consultation that brought together more than 200 policymakers, influential individuals, and worker and employer representatives.

The policy options target eight Labour Code provisions (articles 8, 153, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160 and 187), related circulars and a proposed new gender-transformative chapter no longer aimed at ‘protecting women’ but ‘ensuring and promoting gender equality at work’.

The new text of the Code is not yet tabled. Among the last IW inputs will be an assessment of gender mainstreaming in the final Labour Bill and a high-level information session for National Assembly members early this year, as MOLISA completes its submission to the National Assembly’s May 2019 session.

Hopefully this careful analysis of workplace gender discrimination and the process that is put in place for tackling it will bear fruit.

By Jane Aeberhard-Hodges, Gender Equality Director of the Australian Government’s Investing in Women initiative.

This article appeared in the most recent edition of East Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘Investing in Women‘. It was republished from East Asia Forum under a Creative Commons license.

HUD is reviewing Twitter’s and Google’s ad practices as part of housing discrimination probe

The Dept. of Housing and Urban Development charged Facebook March 28 with violating the Fair Housing Act. (Reuters)

By Tracy Jan and

Elizabeth Dwoskin-March 28 at 6:59 PM

The Trump administration delivered its first sanction of a tech giant Thursday, charging Facebook with housing discrimination in a move that could threaten the way the industry makes its profits.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development alleged that Facebook’s targeted advertising platform violates the Fair Housing Act, “encouraging, enabling, and causing” unlawful discrimination by restricting who can view housing ads.

In a sign that more technology companies could be ensnared in the probe, HUD alerted Twitter and Google last year that it is scrutinizing their practices for similar violations, according to three people with direct knowledge of the agency’s actions.

Thursday’s charge against Facebook marked the Trump administration’s most significant action against housing discrimination, and comes at a moment when tech giants are facing growing scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe on data privacy and other issues.

It was a surprise move from an administration seen by advocates as hostile to civil rights.

The case is likely to have ripple effects throughout the tech industry, which considers targeting advertising to be standard practice and has historically enjoyed immunity from prosecution when third parties commit abuses on their platforms.

HUD claimed that Facebook mines users’ extensive personal data and uses characteristics protected by law — race, color, national origin, religion, familial status, sex and disability — to determine who can view housing ads, even when it’s not the advertiser’s intent.

That could allow a landlord, for example, to exclude certain categories of renters including parents, foreigners, non-Christians, or people interested in service animals, Hispanic culture or Hijab fashion.

“Facebook is discriminating against people based upon who they are and where they live,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said in a statement Thursday. “Using a computer to limit a person’s housing choices can be just as discriminatory as slamming a door in someone’s face.”

Thursday’s charges come one week after Facebook agreed in a sweeping settlement with civil rights groups to overhaul its microtargeting ad system for job, housing and loan advertisements after discrimination complaints.

“We’re surprised by HUD’s decision, as we’ve been working with them to address their concerns and have taken significant steps to prevent ads discrimination,” said Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman.

He said a breakdown occurred when the government asked for total and unfettered access to the company’s user base, a request the social media giant denied because it would have set a dangerous precedent.

“While we were eager to find a solution, HUD insisted on access to sensitive information — like user data — without adequate safeguards,” Osborne said. “We’re disappointed by today’s developments, but we’ll continue working with civil rights experts on these issues.”

Dealing with government data requests is complex for Facebook and other technology companies. Complying with such requests, the companies fear, may cause them to violate data privacy laws and could also damage their reputations with the public.

But HUD officials say the settlement with the National Fair Housing Alliance, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Communications Workers of America and others does not go far enough in remedying housing discrimination.

“Unresolved fair housing issues remain with Facebook’s advertising platform,” said HUD spokesman Raffi Williams. “Until HUD can verify that Facebook’s practices are in full compliance with the law, we will continue to use all resources at our disposal to protect Americans from the harmful effects of discrimination.”

Though Facebook offers the most extensive targeting categories to advertisers, Google, Twitter, Amazon, and others all offer the ability to target by zip code -- which is commonly used to indicate race -- interest and demographics, including ethnic categories such as Spanish speakers.

One of the people with direct knowledge of the agency’s actions said the reviews of Twitter and Google practices are ongoing.

"They want to make sure that other companies aren’t getting away with something that one company is investigated for,” said another person with direct knowledge of HUD’s outreach to the tech companies who is not authorized to discuss the communications.

Currently the companies ask advertisers to abide by non-discrimination policies and fair housing laws when selecting their ads, but there is little oversight.

A Twitter spokesman said company policies prohibit targeted advertising when it comes to racial or ethnic origin, religion, negative financial condition and commission of a crime, and declined further comment on HUD’s interest in the company.

A Google spokeswoman said the company prohibits targeting ads based on “sensitive” categories like race, ethnicity, religious beliefs and disability status but would not comment on HUD’s inquiries. The company said last year it removed 2.3 billion problematic ads that violated company policies.

[Facebook agrees to overhaul targeted advertising system for job, housing and loan ads after discrimination complaints]

HUD officials on Thursday said the agency seeks to “address unresolved fair housing issues regarding Facebook’s advertising practices and to obtain appropriate relief for the harm Facebook caused and continues to cause.”

If a U.S. administrative law judge finds that discrimination has occurred, the judge may award damages or impose fines, according to HUD officials. If the matter is decided in federal court, the judge may also award additional punitive damages.

HUD would also like a judge to require Facebook employees to attend training on the Fair Housing Act’s prohibitions against discrimination in advertising.

The agency accuses Facebook of enabling advertisers to exclude people based on where they live, drawing a red line around certain neighborhoods on a map and conjuring decades-old practices when minority neighborhoods were marked “hazardous” in red ink on maps drawn by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corp.

According to the government’s charges, Facebook combines data it collects with information it obtains on other websites and in the non-digital world. The agency alleges that Facebook then uses machine learning and other techniques to group users who have similar interests and predict their likely response to an ad.

“By grouping users who 'like’ similar pages (unrelated to housing) and presuming a shared interest or disinterest in housing-related advertisements, [Facebook’s] mechanisms function just like an advertiser who intentionally targets or excludes users based on their protected class,” the HUD complaint said.

[Ben Carson’s HUD dials back investigations into housing discrimination]

Facebook, in its settlement with fair housing and other civil rights groups last week, said it would withhold a wide array of detailed demographic information — including gender, age and Zip codes — from advertisers when they market housing, credit and job opportunities. The company plans to create a separate ad portal by the end of the year to limit how much these advertisers can microtarget their audience.

Facebook is also building a tool for users to search and view all housing ads across the country, regardless of whether they received the ads in their individual news feeds.

Historically, technology companies have broad immunity from being held liable for illegal activities hosted on their platforms – with exceptions for child pornography and sex trafficking. The immunity stems from a more than two decade old law that has allowed Internet firms to thrive with little oversight.

Thursday’s charges suggest that the Trump administration may be taking a different tack.

The Justice Department last year threw its support behind civil rights groups when it allowing a lawsuit to proceed over Facebook’s objections, arguing that the company can be held liable for ad-targeting tools that deprive people of housing offers.

“Even as we confront new technologies, the fair housing laws enacted over half a century ago remain clear — discrimination in housing-related advertising is against the law,” said HUD General Counsel Paul Compton in a statement. “Just because a process to deliver advertising is opaque and complex doesn’t mean that it exempts Facebook and others from our scrutiny and the law of the land. 

Fashioning appropriate remedies and the rules of the road for today’s technology as it impacts housing are a priority for HUD.”

Thursday’s charge is also a departure for Carson, who temporarily suspended a preliminary investigation into Facebook that began in late 2016 under the Obama administration. After public pressure, Carson filed his sole secretary-initiated complaint against the platform last August.

“This is a case where career folks were successful in persuading people to move forward on something,” said one HUD staffer. “It’s been unusual to be able to get to this end point because the administration isn’t inclined to do anything all that strong.”

The government in 1973 had filed a civil rights case accusing Trump and his father of discriminating against African Americans and Puerto Ricans seeking housing at Trump properties across Brooklyn and Queens. Trump has repeatedly denied the allegations.

The lawsuits over Facebook’s ad practices followed a 2016 ProPublica investigation that found that the company allowed advertisers to exclude African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans.

India’s new economic vision can transform South Asia in just a decade

India’s rise as one of the six largest economies in the world will offer opportunities as well as challenges, domestically and to the region

 Thursday, 28 March 2019


In South Asia, the India’s Economic Vision of 2022 is an upcoming economic model launched in June 2018, which is to change the social and economic status of the eight South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) nations. South Asia consists of eight countries at various stages of development and diversity. Out of the eight nations, India is the largest with a population surpassing 1.3 billion. Nepal, Bhutan, and Afghanistan are the landlocked economies. Sri Lanka and Maldives are two island nations. Indian influence is growing into all South Asian countries. The South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has been struggling to make an impact for a long period of time. India’s rise as one of the six largest economies in the world will offer opportunities as well as challenges, domestically and to the region.

India with an economy of $ 2.6 trillion is planning to invest in twelve major sectors to achieve its forecasted target of $ 5 trillion in the coming seven years. This economic push by India is said to double the intra-state trade between these neighbouring South Asian countries, and for these economic policies to get successfully implemented, a stable neighbourhood is essential for India and the region.

It has been thirty years since the formation of SAARC, and the improvements seen in the region are marginal. Most of the neighbouring countries of India are either at low or middle income status, and with the economic growth of India at a faster pace of 7% GDP, a 2022 Vision Plan will not only help India but also lift the economic status or standard of living of all other SAARC nations.

Currently India’s bilateral trade with Pakistan is $ 5 billion, with Bangladesh is $ 6.6 billion, with Nepal is $ 6.35 billion, and with Sri Lanka it is $ 5.2 (Modern Diplomacy, 2018). If this Vision plan is implemented and India’s economy is to grow, then India’s bilateral trade with these countries will also majorly increase, and in turn uplift the other member states of South Asia.

India has a strong interest in the maintenance of a more stable balance of power, especially in this region, and on a more fundamental level, the profound changes in the next few years in India’s policy initiatives are likely to impact the seven neighbouring countries. For instance, In Sri Lanka’s Vision of 2025 policy document, Sri Lanka is planning to raise the per capita income to $ 5000 per year, and create a million jobs by doubling the current exports to 12 billion per year. These economic initiatives will push the wellbeing of people to upper income category (Ministry of National Policies and Economic Affairs, October 2017).

It is time for all these neighbouring countries to realise that, if India’s GDP grows at 9% in the next 20 to 30 years, then the per capita income of India will also rise from $ 1500 to $ 7000 per year as per the report by PricewaterHouseCoopers, which will significantly impact them to reach a higher income status.

Also, to already show the significant progress past couple of years, the market capital has gone up from 11.02 lakh crores in 2013 to 17.44 lakh crores in 2017, which has significantly contributed to nearly 3.85 lakh crores to the central exchequer. On the welfare front, this New India Vision 2022 has given liquefied petroleum gas connections to 3.56 crore households and another 1.39 lakh toilets have been built (Department of Public Enterprises, April 2018). India is powerfully positioned among the South Asian countries, and the increase of wealth among Indians will increase purchasing power and will have a positive impact, not only on the mainland, but also on its neighbouring countries. During the last 3 years, sectors such as are power transmission, minerals and metals, heavy and medium engineering, transport and construction consulting have had a net profit of 2000-10,000 crores. Apart from these, sectors such as petroleum, power generation, coal, crude oil and financial services have contributed to the profit which is over 10,000 crores. This push by India is said to bring down rising energy cost in India and between neighbouring countries.

Further on critically examining India’s Vision 2022 strategy, the GDP growth has been seen as one of the main objectives which challenges the implementation of this vision plan. In this plan, the government will have to push the current GDP of 7% to 9% in the coming two decades. Secondly, the invisible hand of the global market will also be dictating the Indian domestic policies, which will in turn influence this new Vision plan. Thirdly, local markets will also be influenced by state level regulations, which will be impacting the domestic and national outputs. Fourthly, the geographical spread of free trade among the 29 states and 7 union territories have also been uneven, and the social struggles between the different parts of India have been some of the growing concerns in the implementation of the Vision. The implementation of this Vision 2022 will require the involvement of shared responsibilities between the various agencies. Further, India will also have to implement cost reduction strategies, enabling value chains in the most appropriate geographical locations by using core competencies that might fast track this process.

The changing geopolitical and geo-economics landscape is likely to influence India and other South Asian nations and these shifts are to particularly impact the people-centred policies especially in the South Asian countries, where democracy has an instrumental value in enabling the people to express and support their claims to political attention, including claims of economic needs. All the eight countries are conscious of their responsibilities to contribute towards the economic and political stability of the region. This new 2022 economic vision of India will focus on economic prosperity, well-being for the middle class and the poor and to increase its bilateral and multilateral trade with its neighbouring countries. Therefore, these policies will have a direct effect on the 1.5 billion citizens of South Asia.

This opinion piece gives the views of the author, and not the position of any Governments of SAARC nations.

Srimal Fernando is a Doctoral Fellow at the Jindal School of International Affairs (JSIA), India and Global Editor of Diplomatic Society, South Africa. He won the 2018/2019 Best Journalist of the Year award in South Africa.

De-Colonizing Development: Knowledge & Technology Transfer To Benefit Indian Ocean Communities

By Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake –MARCH 27, 2019

Dr. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake

The ‘politics of distraction’ seemed to achieve new heights as the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ruled in one of the most important and long-awaited cases of its history a month ago on February 25. In what has been termed ‘a block buster judgment’ the United Nation’s highest court rejected the United Kingdom’s claim of sovereignty over the Indian Ocean, Chagos Islands, and determined that Britain should return the islands to its former colony, Mauritius, ‘as rapidly as possible’.  The ICJ ruling deemed UK’s occupation of the Indian Ocean archipelago that houses the secretive United States, Diego Garcia military base, illegal under international law.

The same week, by design or accident, a flurry of international activity in the “Indo Pacific” glossed the landmark ICJ ruling: Global media was attention focused on Donald Trumps’ visit to Vietnam to shake hands with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and fighting flared on the Indo-Pakistan border in Kashmir; while in Sri Lanka, media focused on the visit of former US Ambassador to the United Nations and Harvard Don, Samantha Power, who waxed eloquent about Human Rights to the island’s political elite at the BMICH. Ms. Power’s discourse to felicitate Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera discreetly made no reference to the ICJ ruling that effectively implies on-going human rights violations against Chagossians, who were forcibly displaced from their island home in the 1960s –not too far from the southern coast of Sri Lanka by the United Kingdom.[1]In 2015 the US, UK and allies took the Govt. of Sri Lanka to the UNHRC and are holding it accountable for grave human rights violations during a 30 year armed conflict.

Although the unravelling of European empires was one of the formative moments of the modern world system, including the birth of South Asian States, the ICJ ruling that UK should end control of what it terms ‘British Indian Ocean Territory’ (BIOT) in 2019, underlines the fact that the process of de-colonization is far from complete.

The UK took control of Chagos Islands from Mauritius 50 years ago. The British government then evicted the entire population before leasing one of its largest atolls to the United States to build a large military base– Diego Garcia. Mauritius was in the middle of negotiating its independence from the UK at the time and repeatedly condemned the deal. In February 2017 the UN General Assembly asked the ICJ to offer its opinion in on whether the process had been concluded lawfully. Mauritius argued that it was forced to give up the islands in 1965 in exchange for independence. The ICJ ruled that the islands were not lawfully separated from the former colony of Mauritius. When UK broke off the islands from Mauritius in 1965, it violated UN Resolution 1514 (XV) on Decolonisation that argued against the break-up of colonies. The ruling puts the US naval base Diego Garcia in question and has implications for Sri Lanka and other small island nations in the IO. The Heritage Foundation in its recent report noted a US marine logistics Hub is in the works in Trincomalee, a deep-water natural harbour coveted by competing big powers in the Indian Ocean

For years, the Diego Garcia base has been vital to the military, serving as a landing spot for bombers that fly missions across Asia, including over the South China Sea. The ICJ ruling which is “advisory” raises questions about its future, as UK has a history of following ICJ rulings. CNN quoted Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center, said that the Indian Ocean base was “very important to US operations in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean” and its loss could have a major impact, forcing the US “to change logistics support” in the region. “It wouldn’t weaken (US military strength) necessarily but logistics are everything,” he added. Diego Garcia was used to guide tactical aircraft supporting US military missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and featured remote satellite tracking stations, an Air Force Space Command and Pacific Air Force support and logistics teams.

The United States has faced legal challenges to its Diego Garcia naval base for the past five decades. The bereft Chagossians took their case to British courts, hoping to exert pressure to return the islands to them. Subsequently, the attempt by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the United Nations to constitute the Indian Ocean as a ‘zone of peace’ posed a challenge to US operations on Chagos Islands.  In 1970, the Non-Aligned summit in Lusaka, Zambia, declared that the Indian Ocean must be a ‘zone of peace from which Great Power rivalries and competition, as well as bases’ must be excluded. The United States attacked this idea. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt told the US Congress in 1974 that the USSR stood atop the ‘central part of the West’s energy jugular down to the Persian Gulf.’ For that reason, the Indian Ocean – and Diego Garcia – has ‘become a focal point of US foreign and economic policies and has a growing impact on our security.’

Zone of Peace? IO Coastal Communities, poverty and military bases

Like the Chagossians who were forcibly displaced to Mauritius and Seychelles, Sri Lankan and other Indian Ocean Rim coastal communities tend to experience high rates of poverty, debt and socio-economic hardship. Fisheries are one of the most significant renewable resources that Indian Ocean countries possess to secure food supplies, maintain livelihoods and assist economic growth, in addition to the IO’s non-living resources that include hydrocarbon, LNG, and valuable minerals. The ICJ ruling that Britain needs to vacate Chagos Islands may shine a light and facilitate a long overdue process of de-colonization of the IO, and enable education, knowledge, and technology transfer to ensure policy and legal frameworks that enable Indian Ocean rim countries and their often impoverished and debt-trapped, coastal communities to benefit from their rich marine resources, both living and non-living.

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India says space debris from anti-satellite test to 'vanish' in 45 days

A Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) Interceptor takes off to hit one of India's satellites in the first such test, from the Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Island, in the eastern state of Odisha, India, March 27, 2019. Picture taken March 27, 2019. India's Press Information Bureau/Handout via REUTERS

Sanjeev Miglani-MARCH 28, 2019

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India expects space debris from its anti-satellite weapons launch to burn out in less than 45 days, its top defense scientist said on Thursday, seeking to allay global concern about fragments hitting objects.

The comments came a day after India said it used an indigenously developed ballistic missile interceptor to destroy one of its own satellites at a height of 300 km (186 miles), in a test aimed at boosting its defenses in space.

Critics say such technology, known to be possessed only by the United States, Russia and China, raises the prospect of an arms race in outer space, besides posing a hazard by creating a cloud of fragments that could persist for years.

G. Satheesh Reddy, the chief of India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation, said a low-altitude military satellite was picked for the test, to reduce the risk of debris left in space.

“That’s why we did it at lower altitude, it will vanish in no time,” he told Reuters in an interview. “The debris is moving right now. How much debris, we are trying to work out, but our calculations are it should be dying down within 45 days.”

Few satellites operate at the altitude of 300 km, from which experts say the collision debris will fall back to earth, burning up in the atmosphere in a matter of weeks, instead of posing a threat to other satellites.

In 2007, China destroyed a satellite in a polar orbit, creating the largest orbital debris cloud in history, with more than 3,000 objects, according to the Secure World Foundation.

Because the impact altitude exceeded 800 km (500 miles), many of the resulting scraps stayed in orbit. “Some of it could still be there,” Reddy said, adding that India had been much more careful in conducting its test.

In Florida, on a visit to the U.S. military’s Southern Command, acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan warned any nations contemplating similar anti-satellite weapons tests that they risked making a “mess” in space from debris.

The U.S. military’s Strategic Command was tracking more than 250 pieces of debris from India’s missile test and would issue “close-approach notifications as required until the debris enters the Earth’s atmosphere,” Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Dave Eastburn said.

Reddy identified the military satellite shot down as Microsat R, weighing about 750 kg (1,653 lb) and launched on Jan. 24. by the Indian Space Research Organisation for the purpose of the test.
A week after launch, it was moved into a different orbit in preparation for the test.

“The technology has been completely proven, we hit it with centimeters of accuracy, probably less than 10 cm,” Reddy said.

 

India’s test of the anti-satellite weapon from an island off its eastern coast broke a lull since the United States used a ship-launched SM-3 missile to destroy a defunct spy satellite in Operation Burnt Frost in 2008.

The Union of Concerned Scientists said nearly 2,000 orbiting satellites provide key benefits to people around the world, and India’s launch showed more countries were seeking the capabilities that put satellites at risk.

“Destroying satellites...can have ripple effects, producing dangerous clouds of debris that could stay in orbit for decades or centuries, disabling or destroying any satellites they collide with,” one of its scientists, Laura Grego, said in a statement.

Reporting by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Clarence Fernandez

National security and the resilience paradigm

Education in an age of the securitisation of everything



27 MARCH 2019

As the list of topics being covered in national security education grows longer, teaching despair is becoming an increasing problem. A new focus on resilience is much needed, Sandra Bourke writes.

As Australia’s Federal election looms, national security is aptly front and centre on both Liberal and Labor political agendas with the number of national security threats expanding.

In Australia, since 11 September 2001, the threats on the ‘new global security agenda’ were war, weapon proliferation, non-state threats – including organised crime and terrorism – and the adverse impact of poverty, disease, and environmental breakdown.

Issues added incrementally to the national security agenda include cybercrime, child sex predators, illegal drugs, national criminal gangs, biosecurity hazards, natural disasters, and climate change – to name a few. It’s also concerned with ‘grey warfare’ – perpetrated by both state and non-state actors – and risks to the rules-based order arising from fast and slow shifts in geopolitics.

While the securitisation of these additional issues has both positive and negative implications for democracy, these developments also have an impact on how national security education is shaped in Australia and on the future resilience of the country’s liberal democratic values.

National security education emerged as an explicit higher and professional multi-disciplinary offering following 9/11, aligned to, but generally separate from, the disciplines of International Relations and military studies.

Courses are currently offered by at least 12 Australian universities at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. There are 19 national security courses listed with the Australian Department of Education and Training.

National security education arguably ‘looks out from a national capital’, and is concerned with the well-being of the state. However, as with the political agenda, the teaching of national security is becoming increasingly complex and broad.

Since 9/11, the range of subject content taught under the national security rubric has expanded to include climate change, criminology, biosecurity, law, demographics, and emergency management.
Subjects also cover energy, space, cyber and technology, critical infrastructure, intelligence, history, and ethics. A number of these are themselves emerging academic disciplines, also contested and challenging to teach.

While this challenge of continuous expansion is not new, it is ongoing. National security education ‘risks dilution and diversion to the point that every critical national and international problem comes to be defined as a security issue’. The rationale for including subjects is not always clear, perhaps more a result of ‘muddling through’ reactions, confluence and convenience rather than reflective design.

As a result, many students express that they are often overwhelmed by the range of generally negative subjects. This raises the question, are current national security offerings ‘teaching despair’?

Teaching despair is not a new risk for educators. It is perhaps more readily realised in this era of global threats where climate change, pollution, and energy risks amass with threats ranging from terrorism to total war, and the allure of the fourth industrial age is fragmenting and highlighting the increasing inequity and ideological tribalism in the world.

However, teaching despair will not instill the resilience required to sustain liberal democratic values. Resilience is defined by David Chandler as ‘the capacity to positively or successfully cope with, adapt to, and recover from security crises, and is widely employed as a framework for addressing a broad range of interrelated security threats’. Resilience is persistence – the ability to ‘bounce back’ from shocks, to adapt, adjust and minimise vulnerabilities.

Resilience, at both individual and collective levels, enables agency and empowerment. Adding skills such as policy-design and facilitation, risk and causal analysis, and critical thinking, including complex systems and adaptive approaches, is therefore essential.

Learning how to apply ethics, including knowing when the securitisation of an issue is justified as well as its effects, is also critical. Borrowing ideas such as ‘pragmatic optimism’ with its emphasis on creative yet evidence-based problem solving, and shared capability is one way of countering fear and despair.

The resilience paradigm is encouraging a rethink of national security education. It is a pivot from passive incrementalism to an interdisciplinary curriculum that builds agency, examines cause and capability, applies ethics, and perhaps even fosters pragmatic optimism across a broad range of coherent yet interconnected security threats.

Moving forward, educators must actively accommodate this new chapter in national security education. The ever-evolving nature of the world’s security environment calls for the next wave of policymakers to be prepared for the complex and unpredictable. Future national security education must, therefore, focus on producing knowledgeable public servants who also understand resilience as both an individual and social strategy that can strengthen the state.

How humans derailed the Earth’s climate in just 160 years

Smoke rises from the chimneys of a waste incineration plant in Saint-Ouen on the outskirts of the French capital Paris, on December 12, 2018. Source: Philippe Lopez/AFP

March 26 at 11:26 PM 

CLIMATE change might be the most urgent issue of our day, both politically and in terms of life on Earth. There is mounting awareness that the global climate is a matter for public action.

For 11,500 years, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations hovered around 280 ppm (the preindustrial “normal”), with an average surface temperature around 15°C. Since the Industrial Revolution, this level has been rising continuously, reaching 410 ppm in 2018. The geosciences, with their focus on timescales up to billions of years, are uniquely equipped to make extremely clear how abruptly industrial societies have changed and are changing the Earth’s climate.

Climate, greenhouse gases and CO2

The main engine of Earth’s climate is the sun. Our star delivers an average surface power of 342 W/m2 per year (roughly that of a hairdryer for each square meter of the planet). Earth absorbs about 70% of this and reflects the rest. If this were the only climate mechanism, the average temperature would be -15°C (below the freezing point of water, 0°C). Life would likely be impossible.

Fortunately, some of the absorbed energy is re-emitted as infrared radiation, which, unlike visible light, interacts with the greenhouse gases (GHGs) present in the atmosphere to radiate heat back toward Earth’s surface. This greenhouse effect currently maintains our average temperature around 15°C.

The primary GHGs are water vapour and the much-debated CO2. Carbon dioxide contributes up to 30 percentof the total greenhouse effect, water vapour provides about 70 percent. CO2, though, has overall warming power that water vapour doesn’t. Water vapour in the atmosphere has a very short residence time (from hours to days) and its concentration can increase only if temperature increases. CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for 100 years and its concentration is not solely controlled by temperature. CO2 is thus able to trigger warming: if CO2 concentration increases, the average temperature, regardless of its own trend, will increase.

Carbon sinks

It is thus crucial to understand how atmospheric CO2 is regulated. Over geologic timescales (100,000+ years), volcanic gasses are the primary source of CO2, averaging 0.4 billion of tons of CO2 per year (0.4 GtCO2/y). But CO2 doesn’t just endlessly accumulate in the atmosphere. It fluxes in and out thanks to other environmental processes, and is stored in reservoirs known as carbon sinks.

The ocean, for one, contains 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere. However, CO2 dissolved in the ocean can easily be released toward the atmosphere, while only geological sinks keep CO2 away from the atmosphere on geological timescales.

Simplified geological carbon cycle. The sinks (black) show the sedimentation of organic matter and the alteration-synthesis coupling of carbonate. They oppose (grey) sources: volcanoes for more than 4 billion years and thermo-industrial human activities for 150 years. Source: G. Paris

The first geological sink is sedimentary organic matter. Living organisms contain organic carbon built from atmospheric CO2 through photosynthesis, and dead organisms are often sent to the bottom of the ocean, lakes, and swamps. Immense amounts of organic carbon thus accumulate over time in marine and continental sediments, some of which are eventually transformed into fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal).

Calcareous rocks are the second geological carbon sink. Rocks such as granites or basalts are weathered by surface waters, washing calcium and bicarbonate ions away to the ocean. Marine organisms use these to build hard parts made of calcium carbonate. When deposited at the bottom of the ocean, calcium carbonate is eventually sequestered as limestone.

Depending on the estimates, these two sinks combined contain 50,000 to 100,000 times more carbon than the present atmosphere.

The Earth’s atmosphere over time

The amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere has varied widely. Decades of research allow us to draw the main lines of the history beginning after the Earth was fully formed 4.4 billion years ago.

Earth’s early atmosphere was extremely rich in CO2 (up to 10,000 times modern levels), while oxygen (O2) was scarce. During the Archean (3.8 to 2.5 billion years ago), life first flourished, the first continents built up. Weathering started pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. The development of photosynthesis contributed to decrease atmospheric CO2, while elevating O2 levels during the Great Oxygenation Event, about 2.3 billion years ago. CO2 concentration fell to “only” 20 to 100 times the preindustrial level, never to return to the concentration of Earth’s earliest eons.

Two billion years later, the carbon cycle changed. Toward the late Devonian-early Carboniferous (approximately 350 million years ago), CO2 concentration was around 1,000 ppm. Mammals didn’t exist. Vascular plants able to synthesise lignin appeared during the Devonian and spread. Lignin is a molecule resistant to microbial degradation that allowed massive organic carbon stocks to build up as coal over millions of years.

Combined with the weathering of the Hercynian range (the vestiges of which can be found in France’s Massif Central or the Appalachians in the United States), organic carbon burial pulled atmospheric CO2 down to levels similar to (or lower than) today’s and generated a major glacial era between 320 and 280 million years ago.

Eruption of Bromo volcano on the island of Java (2011). On a geological time scale, volcanoes play a role in the CO₂ cycle. Source: Marc Szeglat/Unsplash

By the end of the Jurassic (145 million years ago), however, the pendulum had swung. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth, mammals evolved, tectonic activity increased and Pangea (the last super-continent) ripped apart. CO2 increased, to 500 to 2,000 ppm, and remained at high levels, maintaining a warm greenhouse climate for 100 million years.

From 55 million years, Earth cooled as CO2 decreased, notably following the Himalayan uplift and a subsequent increase in weathering and organic carbon sedimentation. Evolution continues with Hominids appearing 7 million years ago. At 2.6 million years, Earth entered a new state characterised by an alternation of glacial and interglacial periods at a regular pace led by Earth’s orbital parameters and amplified by the shorter-term carbon cycle. CO2reached its preindustrial level 11,500 years ago as Earth entered the latest interglacial stage.

A new story: the Industrial Revolution

Until the 19th century, the story of atmospheric carbon and Earth’s climate was a story of geology, biology and evolution. That story changed sharply following the Industrial Revolution, when modern humans (Homo sapiens), who probably appeared 300,000 years ago, began extracting and burning fossil fuels on a massive scale.

By 1950, the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere through fossil-fuel combustion was already proven, via the carbon isotopic signature of CO2 molecules (known as the “Suess” effect). By the late 1970’s, climate scientists observed a rapid drift toward warmer overall temperatures. The IPCC, created in 1988, showed in 2012 that the average temperature had increased by 0.9°C since 1901. That change might seem modest compared to the last deglaciation, when average temperature increased by about 6°C in 7,000 years, but it’s at least 10 times faster.

The average temperature continues to climb, and natural parameters such as solar activity or volcanism can’t explain such a fast warming. The cause is unambiguously human addition of GHGs to the atmosphere, and high-income countries emit the most CO2 per inhabitant.

How will our story end?

Industrial societies burnt about 25 percent of Earth’s fossil fuels within 160 years and abruptly inverted a natural flux storing carbon away from the atmosphere. This new human-generated flux is instead adding 28 Gt of CO₂ per year, 50 times more than volcanoes. Natural geological sequestration cannot compensate and atmospheric CO2 keeps rising.

The consequences are imminent, numerous and dire: extreme weather events, sea-level rise, glacier retreat, ocean acidification, ecosystem disruptions and extinctions. Earth itself has survived other catastrophes. Although current warming will outpace many species’ ability to adapt, life will continue. It is not the planet that is at stake. Instead, it is the future of human societies and the preservation of current ecosystems.

While the Earth sciences cannot provide solutions to think about the necessary changes in our behaviour and consumption of fossil fuels, they can and must contribute to knowledge and collective awareness of the current global warming.

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We thank Morgan Fahey for her invaluable help with the English text.

Guillaume Paris, Géochimiste, chargé de recherche CNRS au Centre de recherches pétrographiques et géochimiques de Nancy, Université de Lorraine and Pierre-Henri Blard, Géochronologue et paléoclimatologue, chargé de recherches CNRS – Centre de recherches pétrographiques et géochimiques (Nancy) et Laboratoire de glaciologie (Bruxelles), Université de Lorraine

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.